Alexis Lothian

Alexis Lothian is an interdisciplinary scholar of queer and feminist media and cultural studies. Her research centers on speculative fiction, digital media, and online fandom and their relationships to gender, race, and disability justice.

Lothian's first book, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility, was published in 2018 by NYU Press. The book explores alternative futures dreamed up by feminists, queers, and people of color in 20th- and 21st-century Britain and America––from feminist utopians to video remixers––in order to inquire into historical and political narratives that the seemingly transparent terminology of “the future” has obscured. As part of this work, she creates video remixes of her own, including “This is a Low: Old Futures in the Age of Brexit,” published in Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational in 2019. She is currently working on two book projects: a co-authored book on slash fan fiction and the politics of fantasy with Kristina Busse, and a monograph on the formation of critical and social justice-oriented fan cultures in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Lothian has published extensively on the interconnections between feminist and queer knowledge production and media fans' creative practices, including "An Archive of Whose Own? White Feminism and Racial Justice in Fan Fiction's Digital Infrastructure" (with Mel Stanfill, Transformative Works and Cultures, 2021); “From Transformative Works to #transformDH: Digital Humanities as (Critical) Fandom" (American Quarterly, 2018); “Choose Not To Warn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy" (Feminist Studies, 2016); “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera” (International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2013), and “Living in a Den of Thieves: Fan Video and Digital Challenges to Ownership” (Cinema Journal, 2009).

A long-time participant in the feminist science fiction fan community, Lothian chairs the Motherboard of the Otherwise Award, which recognizes speculative fiction that explores and expands understandings of gender. She was a founding member of the #transformDH collective and the editorial team for Transformative Works and Cultures.