The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Tisha Turk & Mark Duffett (Pt. 2)

Tisha Turk

Can you say more about why you describe "issues of performance, personal identity, ideology and subjectivity" as being "out of fashion"?

Mark Duffett

I know there’s a danger in generalizing, and I think fan studies has its own diverse range of scholars and activities. Nevertheless, participatory culture remains, to me, still perhaps the dominant theory in our academic field. It focuses primarily on individual creativity and mentoring, and how such things are established in communities where contributors feel valued. Case studies actualize all that in terms of high ideals - education, democracy, activism - but, ultimately, the focus is on a social process within a technological environment. It is case of tools, skills, communities and feel good results. Fine on the surface, but I think that’s a partial picture of fandom. I don’t see much interest in fans as individuals there, as people beyond their community contributions, as people who operate in the complexity of the social and ethical environments they perpetually negotiate, and their own complexity - not as nodes in communities, but as individuals with complex, multiple identities who constantly make tricky decisions in daily life and the public sphere. I’m not saying nobody has talked about fandom as performance - that would be nonsense: Lucy Bennett’s editorial in the 2015 edition of Transformative Works springs to mind. However, there’s much more to be said about how people publically performance their fandom: understanding when and they they have labelled themselves as fans in specific historical circumstances, for example, because I think that in itself can be conceived of as a kind of individual ethical and political act.

I would go further, as well: I think in some senses the ideas I mention are ‘out of fashion’ across academia, not just in fan studies, as they are a bit out of step with a neoliberal environment where ‘the human’ (and perhaps we should read ‘labour’ there) is gradually being reformulated within a rapid process of social and technology change. In this environment, appreciation of individuals as moral agents now seems to be secondary to processes of public participation which can include collective policing. I’m just thinking of the avalanche of fury on social media unleashed against our colleague Melissa Click; in some ways, you could say that was a ‘participatory culture’ of the worst sort!

Tisha

 I certainly agree that focusing on fandom as culture or social network leaves out other forms of fannishness; any choice to put something in the foreground puts something else in the background. When we treat fannish creativity as social or communal, we risk downplaying or even erasing the artistic achievements of individual creators, and some of those achievements are pretty spectacular by just about any standard I can think of. Or, if we focus on individual creators of artworks (fic, vids, art, gifsets, costumes, etc.), we may miss the fans who are creating not art but infrastructure—hugely important for many fans’ experience of fandom! And then there’s all the fan activity that isn’t creative in the sense of making-something-new but is still, I would argue, participatory in the sense of engaging with fan-made creations: reading fic, watching vids, commenting on and reblogging fan works of all kinds, and so on.

I’m surprised, though, by your claim that there’s not much interest in fans as individuals. Back in 2007, the editors of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World argued in their introduction that the third wave of fan studies was about, among other things, “the intrapersonal pleasures and motivations among fans”—that the field was “refocusing on the relationship between fans’ selves and their fan objects” (8). In the second edition of the book (2017), they reiterate this characterization of the third wave and even double down on it by calling attention to fan studies research that “has examined the individual psychology of fandom within its wider social context” (8). Do you think this is a mischaracterization of what’s going on in the field?

Personally, I appreciate that Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington acknowledge in the second edition that “the intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions [of fannishness] appear to be complementary” (8). I still think the most sensible statement of this position is Katherine Morrissey’s “Fan/dom: People, practices, and networks” (2013): “Only by studying fans and fandom at multiple levels—looking at fans as individuals, at their collective practices, and at the networks they create—can we more fully understand their positions within today's shifting media environment” [1.4]. It’s a both/and, not an either/or.

Mark

 I guess when we are talking about individuals, we are also inevitably talking about them socially, but I think the frames we use to do that - studies of transformative works, participatory culture, community or event case studies, studies of paratexts or spaces, heritage, perhaps psychoanalysis or discourse analysis - could be augmented a bit by more attention to the ethical approaches of actual fans as individuals situated historically and the ideological worlds in which they operate. Of course, yes, understanding fandom is a both/and thing already, and given that is the case, we are always, to some extent, looking at the one thing within the other: the collective in the individual, the public in the private. If we generalize, we miss the actuality of history, and if we examine things that are too personal, there is a danger that we get lost in individual idiosyncrasy (worst of all, our own!). However, there is something stopping that potentially myopic disappearance into the personal. A while ago I was in Moscow, and I began thinking about all those stories of fan interest in western music artists ‘liberating’ those behind the iron curtain. I am sure for many of those citizens, individually for some and in communities for others, enjoying the music of western artists did feel like a liberating experience, a freedom that began in the mind. Such moments suggest that finding a fannish connection can be political, but I would go further: what they indicate is that it is always political, that it applies when we in the west are drawn to more accessible objects.

Even though such objects are easily accessible to us, they are still associated with specific values, and finding ourselves connected to them is always, in that sense, a political act (albeit one that might not be conscious). My claim about fans as individuals was more about therefore understanding them as specific people with values who have participated in public activity in ongoing, living cultures, not necessarily addressing their psychology or community roles. While there is work on fan community leaders, often in relation to specific political issues, there’s less research on celebrities, for example, as prominent individuals with the public sphere who have professed their fandom, sometimes independently of working within a particular fan community. I’ll give a quick example: a while back I did a conference paper on Cornel West’s love of Curtis Mayfield and how he used that to mobilize black college audiences in advance of his protest at Ferguson. To me, that was about him using his personal fan interest in public to make an ethical move, which was not the same as seeing him as someone directly linked to a particular fan community.

I will try and explain the difference:

In the sort of fan cultures I first analysed, Elvis fans in the 1990s, what unified people was not being part of community. The thing that was primary for them was being part of a ‘fan base’ - an imagined collectivity like a notional army, almost: not necessarily an imagined or real community, though it could manifest like that at particular junctures. What located anyone in a music fan base was recognition that they had reached a degree of conviction about the greatness of a particular performer, and they also knew that other individuals had, too. Individuals would have a notional awareness that they were therefore part of a fan base, and for some that would be it. When others entered fan communities, using knowledge that they were part of the same fan base as their ticket, they could have a kind of shock in terms of encountering the specificity of other fans. Some individuals made the leap from fan base to fan community, while others pursued their fan interests alone, or were marginalized by those communities. The communities came with additional ethical tenets too. Due to our methodologies, something we have often missed as fan scholars, I think, is attention to the fans who decide not to be part of such communities, and we have therefore missed something about what being a fan can be about.

When I was younger, I was a huge fan of the post-punk group Magazine, and that was about a decade after they split, and my fandom consisted mostly of collecting records, not talking to other fans or making things. I was pursuing an interest with no strong idea that there were any other fans out there at that point, and I am not sure I would have been especially interested in talking with them either; it was about exploring a personal connection with a group’s artistic work for me. The Elvis fans that I encountered were much more sociable as fans than I had been, but my methodology was orientated to finding fans through existing communities (fan clubs). These fan communities were not necessarily based on their creative contributions either, though such contributions were sometimes apparent.

Tisha

Yeah, I recognize what you’re talking about here—both the experience of being a music fan and the methodology problem. I’m not a particularly social music fan; I am sometimes a visible fan in that I wear t-shirts and go to concerts when I can, but, as I suggested earlier, my ways of being a music fan are mostly private; they have to do with my personal connections to what I love, not my connections to other people who love the same thing. I’ve never been in an official fan club; I can’t even be bothered to follow most of the musicians I like on Twitter. This type of fan is harder to see and to study; how would a researcher even find us?

When I’ve taught classes on fandom, I’ve learned a lot about what “being a fan” means to my students. Some of them are very much integrated into online fandom and enjoy interacting with other fans whom they would not have met without fandom; others don’t feel a need for those social connections. Many of them are somewhere in the middle: their expressions of fannishness about things they share with friends get integrated into those existing social relationships: going to Marvel movies in a group, making up Percy Jackson stories together, baking and decorating a Harry Potter-themed cake for a friend’s birthday.

Mark

The internet has changed that world quite a lot, I think. The word “fandom” has come to stand for a community of fans (“the fandom”) rather than a personal interest (“my fandom”). People talk of participating in “Taylor Swift fandom” rather than being part of “Taylor Swift’s fan base,” but it’s more complicated insofar that fans retain collective nicknames (here “Swifties”) which, in effect, reference a kind of shared identity through collective difference. You could argue that net users are already participants anyway in some sense, even as observers. Such people are always already part of an in general community online, say on Twitter, so that entering that fan community means something less qualitatively distinct than before. Aya Esther Hayashi’s recent thesis on musicking in participatory fandom is also interesting here, in suggesting that community participation is itself a kind of ethical or rhetoric frame from which particular fans online now may depart.

Tisha

The terminology that scholars use for fans—and that fans use about ourselves—interests me too. I do use “fandom” to mean a group of people sharing a set of interests or occupying a shared affinity space. (I know many people use the term “community,” and I’ve certainly experienced fandom as a community at times, but I tend to agree with James Gee that “the word ‘community’ carries a rather romantic connotation” that isn’t always appropriate for fandom or other affinity spaces.) For me, the terms “fannish” and “fannishness”—which I’ve used several times in this conversation already!—are important precisely because they don’t imply anything about groups, networks, or participation.

Fan studies scholars sometimes talk past each other on this point, I think. I was quite surprised, when I read Gray et al’s introduction to the new edition of Fandom, to see them describing Francesca Coppa’s “Fuck Yeah, Fandom is Beautiful” as “seeking to enforce a narrow definition of fandom and opposing broader sets of questions about

a wider set of fans” (8). To me—I can’t speak for Coppa—those are very different things, and the writers misrepresented her argument by conflating them. I’m not interested in policing the definition of “fan” or the legitimacy of any fannish practice; anyone who wants to self-define as a fan is a fan, as far as I’m concerned, which means that there are lots of ways of being a fan, or being fannish, or performing fannishness, or however one wants to describe it—and I’m all for scholars finding ways to study those fans and their many forms of fannishness! At the same time, I think it makes sense to acknowledge that one of those forms of fannishness is the social form—the set of practices—called fandom, and that’s what the scholars of the first wave set out to study. 

So maybe that is “enforcing a narrow definition of fandom,” but to me that only makes sense; it is a narrower term. Everyone in fandom is a fan, but not all fans are, or want to be, in fandom. Studying fans who aren’t “in fandom” is a totally legitimate thing to do, but it is a different thing than studying fandom—which was, I thought, Coppa’s point. (I continue to think that the Fandom anthology should be titled Fans, which would make much more sense.) My perspective on this issue is informed by my own experience: As someone whose fannishness has taken many different forms, I prefer terminology that acknowledges those differences to terminology that erases them.

Mark

Your chosen ‘sensible statement’ mentions “today’s shifting media environment.” To what extent do you think it would be fair to say we have a kind of presentist bias in fan studies, that it fixes us on a kind of ‘now time’ of fandom? What duties do we have to the present?

Tisha

I suppose there might be a presentist bias, though I admit I haven’t thought about it in those terms before. If as a field we do have that bias, then perhaps one of our duties to the present is to keep records of past fannish interests, identities, experiences, practices, and communities—to not only record what’s going on now but preserve what we know about where we came from. Certainly the field has scholars who have done and are doing historical and archival work. I’m not a historian myself, either by temperament or by training, so I’m very grateful to those who are—including the people who contribute historical material to Fanlore.

My own research interests have to do with processes—how do fans, and specifically vidders and vidwatchers, do the things we do?—and part of what I’m interested in is how those processes are affected by shifts in the media environment, including technological changes; but I’m also interested in which processes aren’t affected, or are less affected, by those shifts. What’s contingent on the environment, and what seems to be more durable?

Mark

Those are complex questions. When I’ve been to the Fan Studies Network UK conferences, the field, with some exceptions, seems to be largely composed of young, female scholars analysing their online fandoms. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, and I agree that part of what fan studies can do is to create its own historical record by reporting from the present on an ongoing basis. However, I find myself a bit tangential to that for a couple of reasons.

The first is that as you get older and the fandom or community you focused upon recedes into the rear view mirror of history, then, for some scholars curating something that’s past becomes part of what they do. Perhaps you reach a point where the past becomes more accessible than the present, because the present is a young person’s game and you are no longer as immersed in it.

The second is that in recent years the past has never been quite over and done with. I began by studying a living culture of fandom that thrived by sharing a deceased icon as its focus. It was not exactly, to borrow Rebecca William’s term, a post-object fandom. Elvis had been dead for two decades, but his record release schedule and fan following were very much alive. I was always looking at something that was in some ways nostalgic, but also a living culture, something that was perpetually still developing. I think anyone studying, say, Star Wars fandom would be in a similar predicament.

I also think there is a degree of tail-chasing and unnecessary repetition involved when it comes to the urge to keep reporting contemporary things, especially in an era which uses technological novelty to close down vital resources and possibilities that could be used to create stronger understandings. To put it another way, if you understand that a situation is unprecedented, then you do not look to the past to help explain it, but that seems to be the very time you should look to the past, precisely to ask how we got here, how we might understand it, and what might be done about it. If we are always seeking to keep on top of the new, our expertise becomes based on having lived through and thought about a series of experiences, but that is quite narrow. I suppose the issue for me is that in cultural studies in general, theory is basically a persuasive constituent of political storytelling. As we mature as scholars, I think we have a duty to bring a wider and wider focus to what we are examining, to tell more ambitious stories. That means understanding contexts and make connections that were not as visible as when we first started studying the subject. There are some big, big questions out there, particularly around the implication of fandom in much larger social and cultural processes. I’ll give you an example: How was music fandom for specific acts implicated in the changing geopolitics of the Cold War period? Were there connections during the period between fan cultures and wider contexts? What about the way that race became such a defining domestic issue in American popular music? How did such things related to humanism, and perhaps therefore to America’s global role at the time? Such questions can be hard, at first, to even see, let alone address. Disciplinary boundaries can sometimes obfuscate them. Maybe they can only be partially addressed, through case studies, but I think they lead to greater insights.

I’m interested in your distinction between environmentally contingent and more durable elements. Isn’t that a case of positting something almost transcendent? If so, is that transcendence in the empirical environment or in the space of theory? In other words something durable about how fandom has worked or about how we perceive it?

Tisha

 I do think that some fannish interests and behaviors transcend this historical moment. Humans have a long history of commenting on things that interest them and creating stories and art about things that are important to them—including other stories and art!—and that impulse to comment and create shows up in many, many different contexts, including fannish contexts. But how that impulse gets expressed by a particular person or group of people depends on a great many social, cultural, historical, economic, geographic, legal, and technological factors, not to mention individual priorities and aesthetic tastes. So I don’t presume going in that “how fandom has worked,” or how fans do what we do, is what’s durable; I think some parts of the how are likely to be quite mutable! But the why, and even in some cases the what—we do have some evidence that those things persist over time.

Mark

Yes - I am often struck by the way that fan objects can be different, but fannish motivations or behaviours can be similar.

Tisha

If we’re talking about fiction, we can go back a pretty long way: Shannon Farley’s scholarship on the history of rewriting provides some interesting insights into the ways in which, for example, rewritings of Homer—starting with Vergil’s Aeneid—both are and aren’t like fan fiction. If we’re talking about vidding, we’ve got a much shorter history to work with and a different set of technological factors; the process of making vids on a computer doesn’t look much like the process of vidding on two VCRs, let alone making a slideshow. The technical elements of the process have changed, to say the least. It’s less obvious what has or hasn’t changed about why fans make and watch vids, how we learn to make and watch vids, how we choose and evaluate the music used in vids, and so on. But I do see continuities.

Those how and why questions are complicated, because there’s never going to be a single monolithic answer to any of them; the short answer is always “it depends”! At the same time, it’s neither accurate nor useful to say “Well, it’s just completely personal and idiosyncratic.” So the point of the research is to look for patterns and then interpret them—which is arguably the definition of research in a nutshell, really.

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The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Tisha Turk & Mark Duffett (Pt. 1)

Tisha Turk

Henry asked us to start by talking about our backgrounds in fandom and fan studies, so I’ll start by saying: I’ve been fannish my whole life, but until my mid-twenties I was fannish in essentially private ways. I re-read The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings until my copies fell apart, wallpapered my college dorm rooms with R.E.M. posters, and clipped magazine photos of and feature stories about other favorite musicians. Because I was a pretentious English major, I actively avoided watching TV until my final year of college, when I started watching with housemates while we practiced knitting.

It wasn’t until early 2000, when I was halfway through grad school, that I found online media fandom. I got serious about X-Files and started lurking on online forums; shortly after that I started watching other shows as well, and within a couple of years I was not only reading episode recaps and fan analysis but also writing my own posts, watching vids, and, eventually, making my own vids.

I originally started vidding because it seemed so similar to the textual analysis and close reading that were my favorite parts of being a grad student, and yet at the same time it was so different because of the different medium. Text was my day job; expressing myself with video and music instead of words felt like a breath of fresh air.

I kept vidding because of the people I met. I became close friends with a group of women who had begun watching and making vids around the same time that I did: we posted on the same mailing lists, read each other’s LiveJournals, watched each others’ vids and, eventually, drafts of vids. These women thought about vids in some of the same ways I did, but many of them approached vidding in ways that would never have occurred to me. I loved learning from them; I loved the discussions we had about our aesthetic values and creative processes. That mutual support and sense of community, which ended up extending way beyond fandom, were and are hugely important to me. It’s largely because of those women that vids and vidding and vidders, as much as any particular show, became my fandom. I’m a fan of us—our talent, our creativity, our artworld.

Almost ten years after I started vidding, I started writing about vids and vidding for academic audiences. That academic work grew out of an impulse that’s central to transformational fandom, the same kind of impulse that gave us the AO3, the Organization for Transformative Works, the journal Transformative Works and Cultures: if we want a thing that doesn’t exist, we make it ourselves. I looked at what was being written about vids, and it seemed to me that there were some important ideas and experiences missing from the conversation. So I started to think about what I might be able to bring to the party.

Most recently, I’ve contributed to two fan studies anthologies. For the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, Francesca Coppa and Alexis Lothian and I had a conversation about vidding in relation to the film industry, feminism, whiteness, creativity, fair use, queerness, cultural critique, and female pleasure. And for the Companion to Fandom and Fan Studies that Paul Booth edited, I branched out a bit and wrote about interdisciplinarity in fan studies—or, really, the lack of interdisciplinarity in fan studies. As someone with a PhD in English literature, a lasting affection for narrative theory, and a job that draws mostly on my background in composition studies, I get tired of approaches to fan studies that treat the field as a subset of media studies. I mean, obviously media studies has a lot to offer fan studies, but—spoiler alert—there are other approaches to thinking about fans, fannishness, fandom, and fan works.

So, as I think about what I want for fan studies going forward, disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity—including what interdisciplinarity might look like in our classrooms—are very much on my mind; my own thinking about the topic is a work in progress, and I’d love to learn more about how other fan studies folks are grappling with this issue. I also take seriously the arguments of Rukmini Pande and Rebecca Wanzo that fan studies scholars need to do more thinking about race and especially about whiteness (what a contrast to all the attention we’ve given to gender!); their work has encouraged me to think about how whiteness structures fandom and fan studies and helped me start examining how investments in whiteness play out in ‘ship vids and fan responses to them.

The other thing I find myself thinking about is how fast fandom is changing. This is an ongoing phenomenon for fans and researchers alike—one that presents both opportunities and potential difficulties. I suspect it’s not coincidental that the great flowering of fan studies scholarship about the corner of fandom that I know best happened during the LiveJournal era: a great many fans were more or less in one place and more or less in public for a significant chunk of time. Fannish activity is much more scattered now. (That in itself isn’t new, obviously; before widespread broadband access, fandom was often a weekend-only world, as Henry and others have described.) There are so many points of access, so many platforms, so many ways to engage. That’s not a criticism; I think it’s good that more people have more ways to do fandom and express fannishness, and I think it’s exciting that annotation and recirculation are easier than ever. But it does create challenges for scholars. There’s so much fannish activity out there that it can be hard for us (and academic publishing timelines) to keep up!

Mark Duffett

My personal voyage into the study of fandom began in 1995, when I embarked on a PhD on at the University of Wales. I wanted to understand the mysteries of music fandom and chose to explore the Elvis fan culture. At that point, my knowledge of popular music research and cultural studies was still emerging. Coming from a basically pre-internet background in human geography, I had no idea that fan studies existed. So in my own work I started by thinking about gender. When I realized that Elvis’s popularity was so central to his fans’ perceptions, I knew I also had to consider power. Partially influenced by Fred Vermorel’s book Starlust (1985), I began to ask why fans with diverse connections to the same icon behaved in similar ways. I thought about stardom, the fans’ sense of collectivity, and the way that they shared a kind of mythology about Elvis (particularly that he was exploited by the music industry). My early research was very empirical. I struggled to match it to theory, until 2009, when I found a close fit to Durkheim’s notion of totemism. That was quite embarrassing, as I had previously argued that fandom was not a religion, and I would still maintain that. Durkheim’s work applies to totems in a wider sense, and I maintain it can offer significant insights into celebrity fandom as a shared, ideological, psychosocial process. In 1999, I began teaching at the University of Chester. Matt Hills suggested that I write a textbook of fan studies, which Bloomsbury released in 2013 as Understanding Fandom. This critical survey summarized some areas of fan studies, sold over 1000 copies in its first year, and was adopted by Henry Jenkins and others in the field. In a sense, it made my name in the fan studies, when previously my work was positioned more like a minor adjunct to popular music studies. Career highlights since then have included being invited to speak at a conference in Moscow on participatory culture, and giving the keynote, later this year at the UK Fan Studies Network conference. In a friendly sense, however, I remain a bit critical of the transformative work and participatory culture paradigm; I greet it with “fascination and frustration” not least because I think it offers a kind of partial picture when fan studies could and should be so much more. In my own work, that has meant an interest in media representations of fandom, and more recently celebrity professions of fandom in the public sphere. What has it meant historically for a particular person to get up and identify as a fan in public? Obviously the question has different resonances in different eras and contexts, but it opens up on to issues of performance, personal identity, ideology and subjectivity—issues that can be marginalized, in some ways, I think, when one looks primarily at communities of practice. So I guess I am proudly out of fashion, in both an academic and fannish sense.

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The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Jillian Baez & Kristen Warner (Pt. 2)

Kristen

 Jillian, you were talking earlier about the hardships of locating Latina/o media fandoms and that when you do, the conversations are often expressing negative affect about being continually rendered invisible. How for you does that intensify or complicate your work to what is already established in fan studies?

Jillian

 Part of the issue stems from there being little research on Latina/o audiences, let alone studies of Latinx fandom. Up until recently there have been few dynamic representations of the Latinx community in mainstream media. As such, earlier studies of Latina/o audiences were not locating Latina/os as fans. However, what was overlooked is that Latina/os do find some media extremely pleasurable. In particular, many Latina/os are fans of Spanish-language and alternative forms of media. For example, in my essay in Melissa A. Click’s and Suzanne’s Scott’s edited volume The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, I talk about how Latinx fandoms are understudied in fan studies, partly because the pleasurable media texts are in Spanish and/or they are part of specific Latinx subcultures (e.g., Chicana/o Morrissey fans, telenovela viewers, Selena drag queens, or salsa dancing fans). Latinx fandoms are also overlooked because of the medium and genre. For example, there is quite a bit of literature on Latinx music listeners and dancers. However, these scholars do not necessarily identify their work as fan studies, largely because most of fan studies focuses on television and film and not music.

Kristen

 I’m intrigued by this idea of “self-tropicalization” and think an analogy is how Black women navigate the notion of ratchetness as one of the pleasures of watching reality television. What do you find Latina fan communities do with those texts?

Jillian

 That’s a great analogy. I think it’s a way of reconciling stereotypes and also a move away from a politics of respectability. For example, in my chapter in Elana Levine’s edited volume From Cupcakes to Ladyporn, I found that Latina fans of Lifetime’s Devious Maids series (2013-16) enjoyed the show’s Latina cast despite the backlash it received from Latina/o media advocacy organizations and scholars. Critics of the show viewed the series as merely reproducing the Latina archetypes of the spitfire and the maid. On the other hand, Latina fans were excited about the first-ever cast of five Latina leads on television. Fans also found immense pleasure in the maids talking back to their employers (something they felt they could not do in real life) and being cast as morally superior to the white characters.

What aspects of black women’s fandom would you like to explore next? Also, are you noticing differences between fans of reality television and scripted television (not that reality TV isn’t somewhat scripted)?

Kristen

That’s a good question. Honestly after completing the Iris West article for The Routledge Companion of Media Fandom, I think I’ve said my peace on Black women’s fandom for now. What I think I’m interested in thinking about are more macro questions about how fandom has evolved over the years splintering into what I see as at least two different versions of itself: a more traditional kind of closed fandom and what I call the transparent labor economy whereby being a fan is a means to some sort of clear (and sometimes not so clear) cut way to a neoliberal end. I think the transparent labor economy cuts across all kinds of fandom race, gender, and sexuality demographics and impacts the way we understand how participatory cultures function.

Then again, I witnessed some true fan girling at Essence Festival last year in New Orleans when a crowd of Black women squeed for their lives when Queen Sugar’s Ralph Angel appeared on stage so...maybe they’ll be a return, lol.

But to your second question, it’s interesting to me that there isn’t that much of a distinction between how fans talk about reality television and how they talk about scripted. The routes that are used to discuss issues that each format puts on the table regarding community topics like relationships, friendship, finances, and respectability, feel similar in both modes.

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The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Jillian Baez & Kristen Warner (Pt. 1)

Jillian

It is such a delight to be in conversation with Kristen Warner after crossing paths with her various intersections in our career. We were introduced to each other and our work at the Race and Media Conference in Madison, Wisconsin in 2014. Since then both us have contributed to several of the same anthologies.

I enter into fan studies through a background in feminist audience studies and Latina/o media studies. I am not formally trained as a fandom scholar, and although when  I did learn about fan studies in graduate school it was solely through the pathbreaking work of Henry Jenkins. While I certainly was trained in the “active” camp of the passive/active audience debate, in my graduate training in the mid 2000 aughts, fan studies was presented as on the margins of audience studies, and field of media studies as a whole. was largely viewed as a less rigorous field largely because the scholars that studied fandom tended to be fans themselves. While feminist audience studies has included germinal studies of fandom (here I am thinking of the work of Angela McRobbie, Janice Radway, and Constance Penley, for example), formal fandom studies are only beginning to emerge in Latina/o Studies.

One of the major reasons why fan studies of Latina/os or Latina/o media are so rare is that Latina/o audiences tend to have an ambivalent relationship to mainstream English-language media and transnational Spanish-language media. Instead of experiencing pleasure in the form of escapism or fantasy, scholars like Viviana Rojas and Angharad Valdivia argue that Latina/o audiences more often feel anger, disappointment, and frustration due to in/visibility in media. Rebecca Wanzo also noted that African American audiences have a similar relationship to media, making it difficult to identify African American fans. Like other marginalized groups, Latina/os encounter what Gaye Tuchman coined 'symbolic annihilation' which includes underrepresentation and misrepresentation in media. What complicates this further is that Latina/os not only experience symbolic annihilation in English-language, mainstream media, but also in Spanish-language media. Although Latina/os are the target audience, Spanish-language media tends to privilege whiteness and neutral Spanish and in doing so marginalizes most of its audience in the U.S.

In order for Latina/os to enjoy a media text they have to deploy what Stuart Hall calls a negotiated reading—an interpretation that understands its dominant reading, but also reads it somewhat against the grain. bell hooks argues that this is primary way that Black audiences engage with mainstream media. Otherwise, there would be no pleasure in media consumption since it is not produced by or for Blacks and supports white patriarchal capitalism. In my book, In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship I build on this idea and argue that Latina audiences deploy a distinct “Latina gaze” when encountering images of Latinas. This gaze is a negotiated reading that understands how they are situated in the eyes of mainstream media and audiences, but also seeks pleasure wherever possible in a text. It also takes into account how they interpret Spanish-language media; texts which the Spanish-language industries claim is for them, but does not capture the dynamic reality of their identities and daily lives. For example, some Latinas audiences might engage in “self-tropicalization” where they embody and play with stereotypes of Latinas, such as the spitfire.

Kristen

I am glad to be talking with you as well, Jillian! It’s really just been a matter of time that we talk about fandom together because we always end up in the same sections of fandom anthologies! So it was bound to happen because part of the reason that we often end up in trailing one another is because our work connects fandom to explicit questions of marginalized groups--an area of fan studies that has been overlooked since its very inception. But I didn’t realize the dearth of work on race and fandom until I began researching for the article I wrote on Scandal and Black women fans. It surprised me as a researcher but not necessarily as a member of a fandom. Having participated in online fandoms since the glory days of General Hospital’s Sonny and Brenda ship sailed in 1997 I was accustomed to feeling that the spaces I obsessed about my love objects were populated with people who did not look like me. In those days it was something you navigated and managed. I loved my ships and didn’t think about my own identity in relation to them. But then came graduate school and coursework on race and identity and the space to actually consider how such a defining area of my life like fandom that taught me so much about ethics and gender and affect could also be so tone deaf on conversations about how those markers intersect with race.

Fast forward to the article I wrote for Elana Levine’s Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century. I had so many assumptions about the field of identity being covered in the research that I was stunned to see it had not. And that is why the first half of my article is pretty much trying to establish that race and fandom, and more specifically, Black women and fandom, is deserving of being made visible and understood. Fan studies had done itself a great disservice in its haste to run past identity in its search to flatten fandom to the space where everyone could be a fan. That the last extensive project on Black women as fans was Jacqueline Bobo’s 1995 classic Black Women as Cultural Readers indicated So I’m extremely proud of the Scandal article because I was given an opportunity to showcase the beauty and complexity and specificity of Black lady fandom and explore how savvily obsessed these women, who may have often been fans in normative fan spaces like me were able to find a text imperfect as it was, latch on to it with all their might, and transform it into something that felt recognizable and resonant.

That quest to make Black women unknowingly shaped the core of my research to this point. Writing about The Flash’s Iris West and The Vampire Diaries’ Bonnie Bennett’s defense squads  as well as Black women fan communities around reality television Love and Hip Hop and Real Housewives of Atlanta opens fan studies back up to consider that there is still much to be understood and explored about race and identity in these consumptive areas. Black women being seen as agents who desire, who discipline, who obsess, and who angst over their love objects is still so new in fan studies so I look forward to seeing how it will progress--assuming that it will progress. Of course, the work done contemporarily in fan studies around participatory cultures and fan economies is excellent and so important. Tethering that research with the a reconsideration of how raced fan communities negotiate those spaces can serve as really insightful case studies on the ways these concepts impact groups and sub-groups.

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The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Edmond Ernest Dit Alban & Hilde Van Den Bluck (Pt. 2)

Joint Statement

Discussing our respective work, it appears that similar questions are articulated and comparable issues are raised that are worth exploring and could be productive research paths for fan studies to go down in the coming years. 

The first common issue is that of “locality” and how it is manufactured by industries or emerges from certain practices -and sometimes a bit of both.

In the case of “recycling practices” (both remix cultures like fanzine and actual media second hand economies),we can look at the places of such practices to map “locality” as an ensemble of routes of fan circulation and media production. This can range from local venues where fans come together, over online communities to physical or virtual trade places. In part, this taps into existing work on fandom. However, the work of Ôtsuka Eiji also points in another direction, emphasizing how, in the case of otaku culture, publishing companies in the 90s became aware of urban space and pedestrian mobility. Manufacturing and controlling fan mobility therefore becomes an important part of the production of media, evolving from the merely creation of products to the very environment selling them. As a result, particular expressions of local/locality-based fandom can be the result both of fan initiatives and of marketing practices. It appears there is a need for a sound historical framework to understand this, and for an understanding of how both fan practices and their history may vary in different location while also responding to the development of Fan Cultures in more general terms as the assimilation of minor lifestyles. There are certainly indications that local celebrity fandom at the same time takes inspiration from and goes against general Fan Culture.

Second, there is a long way to go to better understand local fandom as it relates to local celebrity cultures and local media ecologies.

At some level it can be studied in opposition to globalized fandom, ranging from actively resisting to ignoring and even not being aware of global tendencies. Several cases of local Flemish celebrity fandom, for instance, are not so much about ‘fighting’ global fan culture but simply existing next to it, creating its own meanings. Situating it in the global-local nexus, therefore, is not necessarily a productive inroad into understanding the local nature of these fan activities. The stakes involved in “projects of space” (Lefebvre, 1974) to support the need for a locally specific cultural production are not necessarily to be understood against the background of the global. For instance, Japan’s fan sanctuaries feel as a different problematic inscribing fans in (trans)local circulation and everyday life consumption on a large network of small interconnected places. It is more of an invasion of certain urban spaces through the circulation of subcultures/fan cultures that is not necessarily related with a so-called “national” project or the expression of pre-constructed communities. Otaku “local” communities tend to rapidly evolve, transform and reinvent themselves. Because of the immanence and perpetual re-composition of these pedestrian social bodies the stable elements become similar routes of pilgrimage forming the territories of sanctuaries, rather than a spectrum of specific fan identities. This plasticity of otaku spaces allows multiple groups to fluctuate while keeping a certain visible environment. This points to the relevance of mapping the territories of fan cultures, as can be found in the work of Marta Boni from the University of Montréal geolocalizing the fandom of TV series.

The local seems to give its own slant on the physical and the materiality of fandom. In the case of Flemish local celebrity fandom, this is related to the actual physical presence of the object of fandom (the celebrity) in the lives of fans, as they can see them regularly at gigs (in the case of musicians) or events (in the case of sports starts), meet and greats and even “in the street”. Objects related to this (from having their picture taken with them to collecting water bottles cyclists throw away while competing), therefore, feature centrally, in their fandom, as well as the location of these events in their own right. In Japan the media mix strategies (Steinberg, 2012 of both fans and niche industries, 2015) imply a large variety inside of the media commodities’ network. As such, manga, novels, animé, video games, straps, badges, towels, cards, plush toys (and other) form the core material environment that enables a para-sociality through the exchanges of second economy (aka as Latour might put it the objects themselves have a certain importance in the coherence of social groups). Once more, the material circulation of media and its specific techniques of expression make sense of certain territories; all these media use specific techniques of moving images and animation (Lamarre, 2009).

Lastly, There is the urgent question of fan agency/citizenship -even activism. There is a need to unravel the efficiency of the (in)visibility of fan action on local ecosystems. Becoming a pedestrian (obvious and mobile) is a way to become one with the local landscape. The “obvious” penetration of fan cultures into the everyday life consumption is however unequal around the world and within particular cultures.This can be interpreted and elaborated on in various ways. One aspect relates to fans claiming their position in the field of cultural experiences. Despite authors (Lash, 1999) heralding the arrival and acceptance of the cultural omnivore (Peterson &Kern 1996), cultural hierarchiesappear more persistent (if changing) thanassumed, as communitiesdevelop new hierarchieswithin the field of popular culture (Gans 1999), with certain fandomsbecoming more readilyacceptedthanothers. In thiscontext, fan activismrevolvesaroundrecognition and aspace to experiencea particularfandom.Anotherway of looking at itis by understanding how this tells us something about a potential accountability and agency of fans over their local environment. Agency, here, would be understood within the work of Karen Barad asking how specific media, texts, or practices might “matter” (make real) a certain experience emerging from fan cultures. In Japanese otaku sanctuaries, the mere presence of local communities has been given more social agency. This brings about a range of questions. Can fan groups move from a simple state of being there to a certain citizenship-like level of accountability? What makes the negotiation between cultural consumption and political representation possible? An important point here revolves around the dialectics in between exploitation of fans by the local industry and the relative freedom and agency fans demonstrate by building a place for their own, as is illustrated by women/girls’ communities in Ikebukuro.

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How Do You Like It So Far? Podcast: Define American's Julian Gomez on fan activism around Black Panther

This week, How Do You Like It So Far? continues our examination of the Black Panther phenomenon, with a look at the fan activism the film has already inspired. Julian Gomez is a young activist who my research team met when we were working on By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism.

He was then making videos for the Harry Potter Alliance and generated a lot of discussion when he came out as undocumented in a confessional video, Why I Can't Go to Leakycon.  

A second video discusses the fan response and how Leakycon became an opportunity to educate Harry Potter fans about the debates around immigration reform and in particular, the Dreamer movement.

Today, Gomez is part of the core team at Define American, a organization focused on activist storytelling around immigration rights. Partnering with Fandom Forward (an off-shoot of the Harry Potter Alliance) and UnDocuBlack Network, Define American has been developing a study guide and tool kit around Black Panther which uses the film as a resource to reflect on borders, refuges, immigrants, and environmental justice. You can find the study guide here. 

In this podcast, Colin and I talk with Julian about his experiences and about the new project, and then Colin and I have an intense conversation about how fan activism works and what it offers as a model for political mobilization.  Much of what I have to say there draws on insights from my collaborators on By Any Media Necessary: Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely Zimmerman. 

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Edmond Ernest Dit Alban & Hilde Van Den Bluck (Pt. 1)

Edmond Ernest Dit Alban

Hi Hilde! My name is Edmond, last name Ernest dit Alban. I am a PhD candidate at Concordia University and Paris Saint-Denis University where I am currently working on fan sanctuaries in Japan (otaku no seichi). I have no particular background in Fan Studies — I graduated in Japanese studies and entered a Film and Moving Images program afterward. My approach is therefore centered on the observation of “otaku” (let’s say manga, anime and video-game-based) media in Tokyo. I mostly worked on girl’s media circulation, such as Yaoi fanzine, Boy’s Love manga (“Slash” or “shipping” would be adequate translations) and Otome Games (reading video games for girls) in East Ikebukuro. My attempt is to retrieve the spatial practices, imaginaries and structures (a method inspired by Lefebvre’s the production of space) of current otaku culture through the mapping of its urban territories. My advisor Marc Steinberg helped me editing and polishing a first chapter on the subject (forthcoming in A Companion to Fandom and Fan Studies volume edited by Paul Booth) where we try to present both the specificities and history of urban otaku sanctuaries. I do tend to differentiate rural sanctuaries because of their resemblance with Northern American fan sites such as locations figured in shows and movies, a phenomenon resembling fan pilgrimage (Brooker, 2004) (also see Okamoto Takeshi’s work on otaku tourism [2013]). My interest therefore lies in the everyday consumption and dispersion of otaku media and the emergence of pedestrian ecosystems.

But what is a “pedestrian ecosystem” and why should we care about such a thing when looking at fan cultures? I believe that urban otaku sanctuaries possess specific local entanglements in cities because of specific recycling practices. What I call recycling practices is a conjunction of reusing mobile images and content as in “media mix,” the Japanese equivalent to transmedia (see Steinberg, 2012), remix and fanzine cultures with actual media recycling in second-hand shops. On the one hand, Ikebukuro’s space highlights various zones of used shops and barter trade, while on the other hand, the local media amateur and official production is recycling famous character images to build new media commodities. As such, the urban ecosystem of otaku cultures is maintained by a complex ecology sustained by both fan and industrial recycling practices that communicate with one another in the construction of sanctuaries.

However, “moving images” and recycled commodities do not move by themselves. They are transported by consumers through exchanges, or they are altered or sometimes thrown away. In order to make sense of the media circulation of otaku’s feminine culture, I try to historically tie the convergence of fan and official otaku tendencies in sanctuaries through a pedestrian approach by retracing consumer routes and geographies of stores. Insisting on the pedestrian (walking in cities and being utterly be noticeable) aspect of otaku culture both highlights the question of the penetration of fan cultures into our lives, but also the potential communal power it can take over urban space. How can we occupy, shape or redesign cities from fan consumption? How does the industry and the consumer agency collide, negotiate or confront in spatial terms?

As a film scholar, my approach tend to be focused on moving images as techniques of animation that synchronizes images, commodities and bodies into a specific production of space. I interrogate otaku agency (simply put, it is a complex term used by Karen Barad [2007] to describe how objects and subjects can produce new “measurements” and orderings of the world) through its capacity to create new social rhythms. As with most fan cultures, otaku culture has been labeled as a bunch of sick weirdoes since at least the eighties. However, the forces of recycling practices have maintained certain routes of consumption and pilgrimage, resulting in the perpetuation of the temporary occupation of urban infrastructures during conventions, events and festivals. Although it is debatable if the otaku had a political background (I prefer infra-political as it had no clear leader or party affiliated), many native “Acafans” tend to highlight the generational proximity of post-1968 student movements with the emergence of anime and manga subcultures. Therefore, I believe that the agency provided by the techniques of moving images might have helped to build both imaginaries and “real” spaces for these communities. The remaining question then lies in the potential social accountability of such an agency is sociopolitical terms.

Because of this research, I would say that one potential urgent area for the future of Fan Studies could be a comparison of various urban entanglements of fan practices and their political (or infra-political?) stakes. As fan activism becomes a more evident theme for the field, I tend to be uneasy with the lack of spatial occupation of fan cultures in certain regions of the world. After living in Paris and Montreal it has become clear that consumer/fan cultures have rather different infrastructures and spatial entanglements: if most fan experiences are driven by the consumption of series across multiple platforms, none of the cities I have been to tend to have one, or multiple, fan mecca. Japan’s case is obviously not reducible to Tokyo; even in smaller cities the conjoined forces of the industry, fans and local authorities are starting to build sanctuaries and subvention fan performances. Can we turn fan cultures into urban planning? What would that even mean as a social construction? A last example can enlighten these questions. As the public space and social space of fan cultures tend to be more and more eaten alive by digital technologies, where is the space and weight of Netflix’s communities? What agency do they have on their local environment ? The recycling practices of otaku cultures show a deep entanglement within local, trans-local, regional and national routes of fan, images and media circulation. In conclusion, I wonder at the dialectics (tensions in between different agendas) of fan circulation in general and how we could influence the production of social space and cities from fan cultures.

Hilde Van Den Bluck

Hi Edmond. My name is Hilde and I am a professor of communication studies at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. My interest in fan studies developed out of my work on local celebrity cultures. In this, I start from the notion of celebrity as a construct that results from ongoing, negotiated relationships between the person wanting to be/remaining famous, as well as media and audiences. As it is impossible to understand one without understanding other actors in the celebrity apparatus, I started to research fans. I define fans broadly, following the idea that fandom is part of everybody’s life. In my work, I try to build bridges between Social Science and Humanities-based approaches, combining empirical rigour with critical interpretation. To pay due respect to the peculiarities involved in fandom, depending on the type of fan-text it is geared to, I focus mostly on celebrity fandom rather than fans of other types of cultural texts, such as games, sport teams, TV shows or, indeed, manga. However, I believe our respective bodies of research can inspire each other.

Following Ferris’ and de Kloet, and van Zoonen’s appeal to pay more attention to local dimensions of fan and celebrity studies, my focus is on local fandom. Indeed, people worldwide use mediated communication to follow and engage with global celebrities’ lives almost in real time, while local communities create their own celebrities. They tend to be of local fame and adored by local fans but unknown internationally. While not highly visible in the global popular culture arena, local fandom has considerable significance and relevance in the lives of millions. I aim at a better understanding of local fandom and how it may differ from fandom in the global celebrity arena.

So far, I have identified three areas that help me in this endeavour. For one, the specifics of local celebrity fandom are related to the characteristics of the local media ecology. In Flanders (the Northern, Dutch speaking part of Belgium I focus on) and in many other places, the local media landscapes tend to lack the peculiarities of tabloid cultures, such as those found in the media ecologies of the US and UK (that produce the majority of global celebrities), presenting local fans with different inroads into the lives of their object of fandom. Closely related is the observation that local fandom is deeply rooted in the cultural specificity of local popular cultures, including the appreciation of various types of celebrities and their fans, reflective of wider held values and norms in the local community.

A final aspect of local fandom – that brings our work closer together – is related to the notion of proximity and geographical locality. A key factor in the relationship between fans and celebrities is the notion of ‘near yet so far’, a distance that the fan is fascinated by yet tries to overcome through mediated communication. The one-sidedness of the para-social relationship, in essence, is built on this: the fan knows ‘everything’ about the celebrity who, from a distance, knows the fan only as part of a statistic (record sales, Instagram followers…). However, my own research suggests that local (more than global) fandom is affected by various forms of (physical) proximity. Local fandom allows for more direct access to other fans and the fan community, using e.g. concerts as a means to maintain social relationships and a social life. Concerts provide a space to meet people, to chat and gossip, about the celebrity and each other, affecting the fandom as well as the dynamics of, and hierarchies in, the fan community. Beyond that, local fandom allows fans to have more (regular) physical proximity to the celebrity who, in turn, often takes time to talk to the fans, sometimes on a monthly or even weekly basis. In these moments, the mediated, para-social, virtual relationship meets the real, unmediated, physical world of the fan, affecting the fan-celebrity relationship. If anything, it allows for the validation of the para-social relationship and of the image that fans have of the celebrity. The para-social relationship in local cases is less virtual and one-sided than in the case of global celebrity and fandom.

While this may seem far removed from your work, it centrally revolves around the situated nature of a local celebrity, allowing for exchanges with the fan text that venture between the para-social and the social, and between the virtual-mediated and the real, creating additional meanings for fans. This, I believe, is a point where our work connects. I certainly found inspiration in the budding research (which you also refer to) that looks at the growing trend of ‘fan tourism’, seen as the result of intensifying fandom, location marketing efforts and the growth in paid or bartered ‘location placement’ in fictional production, as Beeton explains. While I think you move beyond this work by focusing on the dynamics in an urban/pedestrian context and on the potential of fan activism, their approach of thinking of these situated encounters as both a multi-million business and a key example of cultural (activist) encounters, to me, is very productive. Furthermore, some of the work in this field, especially by Reijnders, elaborates on the concept of lieux d’imagination: the assumption that every person develops and maintains a cohesive but constantly adjusted mental concept of places. This includes the natural geography as well as ideas of the material and ideational culture, of values, beliefs, narratives, people and identities projected on the space. As such it takes account of the physical/geographical as well as the ideational, of the double force of economic interest and cultural roles, of the fan as consumer and cultural creator. I think fan studies can further explore this. 

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The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Bertha Chin & Aswin Punathambekar (Pt. 2)

Bertha

 I see a lot of overlap in both our opening statements, even if we may be approaching it from very different perspectives. The first thing that occurred to me reading through your statement, Aswin, is how the institution frames our research and our role as scholars is to diversify our approaches. Whether this is done through citational practices via the inclusion of scholars who are working outside the North American/Western academe or studies that focus on non-Western/American contexts; or situating fan studies frameworks beyond higher education institutional constraints into the everyday.

In a sense, I can see the way forward is to incorporate the study of alternative systems beyond that of the US (and along with it, UK, Europe and Australia/New Zealand). Through this, I believe, we can go back to the question of how a fan is constructed (by the media industry, fandom as well as academia), by deeming who is on the inside or outside, or whether one is being an appropriate fan. But beyond that, we can also look at how fandom and fan practices are conceptualised across transcultural and transnational borders – for instance, one of the things I'm always struck by is the ways in which the term 'fan service' is conceptualised. Conversations with K-pop fans suggest this is viewed as actions by K-pop celebrities that reward fans for their loyalty (through physical hugs, conversations with fans during meet-and-greets, playing to fans' shipping ideals with another band member in K-pop). In the Western context, 'fan service' often leads to discussions of fan pandering, and is often seen as a calculating move to ensure high viewership ratings or to attract a particular group of fans and reading.  

In your statement, you talk of how the development of telecommunications may have signalled a corporatisation of fannish practices, but it also gave way to political activism utilising gifs, memes and pop cultural references. Indeed, we only need to look at the creative ways Chinese netizens are participating in the #MeToo campaign to circumvent state censorship, and the viral spread of the social media campaign to the Korean film industry despite East Asian's predilection to a culture of silence.  

Aswin

I couldn’t agree more. The account you provide here of how your move into a different institutional context shaped the way you approach fan studies is illuminating. I’m eager to hear more about “creative ways of engaging with fan studies’ theoretical frameworks.” The cultural and political contexts of fan participation in some East Asian contexts does seem to call for an understanding of fan labor that isn’t just a straightforward application of ideas of “free labor,” for instance. To be sure, there is wholesale commoditization of fan and audience practices in powerful media ecologies and China, for example, is no exception. But that is only a small part of the story. And here, trans-cultural fandom becomes a particularly interesting point of entry.

I had a chance to spend about ten days in China last year (Hangzhou and Shanghai), and virtually every conversation I had with students and scholars there would turn at some point to the topic of Chinese fandom surrounding Bollywood. A couple of Aamir Khan films (Dangal and 3 Idiots), I was told, had resonated deeply with audiences in China and there was clearly a vibrant fan community as well. I was introduced to karaoke shows on which young Chinese fans were singing the songs (in Hindi, no less!) and radio programs that routinely featured various Bollywood songs. Not surprisingly, Bollywood producers are viewing all this with great interest and as a wonderful addition to their imagination of lucrative overseas territories. But as one young fan told me, her affection for these films and attempts to learn the songs had opened a conversation with her grandmother who knew Hindi film songs from the 1950s! Of course, these are the sorts of stories and anecdotes that media scholars are always on the lookout for, and I was thrilled to hear about this inter-generational link - one that connected 1950s socialist-themed Hindi films and songs (see this compilation) to the current moment. Your stress on working out more carefully the trans-cultural aspects of fandom is a key one and given our current multi-polar media world, fan studies would do well to pay more attention to this area.

Bertha

 Indeed, your experience in China, and Chinese fans’ interest in Bollywood is utterly fascinating! It certainly speaks to the complexity of transcultural fandom, and I think you mentioned it in your opening statement, of the importance of looking beyond logics of cultural affinity, but also paying attention to those that may defy them (and concepts of cultural proximity). I can’t help but wonder if there was a particular trajectory with how these texts are circulated?

It also makes me think about how fandom, certainly in the Malaysian (or perhaps even Southeast Asian context, but I’m hesitant to generalise here) context is very much ‘performed’ along racial and class logics. I do remember spending afternoons watching Bollywood films on the terrestial television when I was younger, and how my parents would speak fondly about sneaking into the cinema to watch classic Bollywood films as they could not afford to pay for cinema tickets. But as media fragmentation became the norm with the introduction of satellite television in the 1990s in Malaysia, media content from the Indian subcontinent faded from the mainstream, relegated to specialised channels that require extra subscription (as opposed to Korean and Japanese language channels, which are offered as part of the main subscription package). In cinema advertisements too, trailers for Hindi and Tamil films are glaringly absent even as Korean and Chinese film trailers are commonly shown prior to Hollywood film screenings. Certainly, I think the market itself creates a division along racial and class lines that warrants more investigation, and how access and distribution may influence the ways fandom is identified and performed. This is why I think Rukmini Pande’s work is important in pointing out the postcolonial nature of fandom.

You also asked about whether I can speak a bit more on how I have found creative ways to engage with fan studies’ theoretical frameworks. Here, I was thinking more along the lines of my identity as a fan studies early career researcher who was -- is -- essentially culturally displaced in Borneo (despite having grown up here). I find that there was a tension between my openness in embracing the fan studies scholar and the institution’s needs for both a social scientist and English language expert (the latter, I am not formally trained in) so there was this constant tension and negotiation over the expectations of the kinds of value I can bring to the university. As such, there is constant gatekeeping over what is and isn’t acceptable scholarship to publicise, and what to keep private (clearly, the expectations were that the fan studies part was to be kept private). But this privacy, this silence, only applies to some media texts and issues. Commercially successful media franchises like Star Wars, Game of Thrones and the Marvel supherhero films are acceptable as they provide ample information about audience engagement and fan loyalty that are translatable to consumer loyalty and engagement -- insights that a fan studies scholar will no doubt have abundant understanding. But issues on gender and racial representations, on how fan culture inspires political and social activism are best kept private.

This institutional gatekeeping and identity negotiation is what I meant when I speak of finding creative ways to resist the expectations to conform. For instance, I have recently become fascinated with specialty coffee culture, as I observe the goings-on at my local coffee shop where I write. Conversations with the owners and some of the baristas revealed that some of them accrue fans through the ritualised performance of brewing coffee, where information and conversation are often exchanged. This interaction between barista and coffee drinker, for some, incur what we in fan and celebrity studies have observed as parasocial interaction. I visited a specialty coffee shop in Kyoto once, where the barista’s brewing station is bathed in stage-like lights, specially designed to afford him a stage within the coffee shop space to perform for his fans (mostly young ladies who cheered like they were attending a private concert). While there is no special lighting staged to bath the baristas in a celebrified glow at my local coffee shop, there is certainly some producer/fan exchanges to be observed, whereby access to the more popular baristas potentially means access to the equally popular owners or an opportunity to accumulate (fan or perhaps this could be reframed as coffee connoisseur) social and cultural capitals.

Aswin: Thank you for the detailed response, Bertha. And your points about institutional gatekeeping as well as the perils of embracing an aca-fan identity are well taken. It is surprising that we are still fighting for legitimacy when it comes to the kinds of ‘texts’ that are deemed worthy of careful scrutiny and it is deeply frustrating that commercial success remains the benchmark across the world. That said, there is also a lot of ambivalence on display. Even as media spaces have opened up for fan expression surrounding popular culture, major industries like Bollywood have recently begun reflecting on the figure of the ‘fan’. There has been quite a robust discussion amongst film scholars about the implications of a global star like Shahrukh Khan plays both star and fan in a recent film (Fan, 2016), and the pitfalls of trying to shore up stardom by playing on the anxieties of being a fan.

I also want to say that I admire the courage with which you have navigated your move into a different academic context, and the creative ways in which you are now bringing fan studies scholarship to bear on coffee culture! Perhaps we are at a moment when we can and should take the insights from fan studies into other domains of culture (especially when it involves connoisseurship) and see how social rituals and of course, powerful norms of class, gender, and other identity categories get reworked. With so many scholars having done the hard work of bring a wealth of social and cultural theory to bear on fandom, perhaps it is time for more ambitious work that takes fan studies insights seriously as a theoretical starting point for understanding other sites of fannish consumption.

Bertha

Agreed wholeheartedly, Aswin! Fan studies has a lot to offer, and even as we continue to explore how we define fans, as well as the boundaries of the field itself, I think it is time to acknowledge that we can use fan studies as a theoretical starting point for understanding other modes of consumption which may translate into fannishness. The idea of transcultural fandom was to provide an alternative insight and perspective from the largely white, middle class and Western engagement of fan practices, and I believe we can take this further — already seen through the works of scholars like Lori Morimoto, Rebecca Wanzo and others I have mentioned before in this conversation, but also through works on theatre fandom by Kirsty Sedgman and theme park fandom by Rebecca Williams, for example — to expand the reach

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Bertha Chin & Aswin Punathambekar (Pt. 1)

Aswin

My current interest in fan studies relates to two broader topics in media and cultural studies: first, how fan activities connect with and at times remake political culture, and second, fan communities that cohere around cultural productions that are spatially and culturally distant (think K-Pop fan communities in Chile or Bollywood fans in Nigeria). It’s wonderful to see more academic work on these topics, but we still have a long way to go.

Let me begin with the fandom, popular culture, and politics issue. When I first wrote about film music fans in south India (2001), I wanted to steer clear of situating fandom solely in relation to the political domain. Indeed, when one raises the topic of participatory culture in the Indian context, the standard response is to point to Tamil and Telugu film cultures where fan associations continue to play pivotal roles in many film stars’ political careers. This narrative of cine-politics has been so dominant that other sites, modes, and dimensions of participation have not been considered, leave alone studied in systematic fashion, for no apparent reason other than their seemingly “non-political” character. We have had precious little to say about fan practices in the vast and diverse South Asian diaspora, for instance, or transcultural fandom (Rukmini Pande and Lori Morimoto’s work, among others, is crucial in this regard).

My move away from the film-fan-politics framework also coincided with my interest in mapping industry practices and specifically, exploring how Mumbai-based industry professionals had begun courting fans and co-opting fandom into marketing logics that fit neatly with the ongoing remaking of Bollywood as a global cultural industry. However, while there is no denying the thoroughgoing corporatization of fandom that marked the 2000s, there were signs that something else was afoot. Fannish modes of engaging with media - not just popular cultural forms but crucially, the news as well - began shaping political culture across Asia and the Middle East-North Africa regions. Reality TV, as scholars including Marwan Kraidy (link), Sean Jacobs, and Fabienne Darling-Wolf have shown, often sparked contentious debates around religion, gender, and sexuality in fraught political contexts. This phase of media convergence marked by blogging and SMS cultures transforming TV fandom was, we now know, just the beginning. Since the mid-2000s, as states and telecom providers across the postcolonial world have invested in and transformed communications infrastructures, we have seen how media practices honed through everyday engagement with popular culture - parodies, remixes, humorous memes and gifs, and so on - have become the cultural foundations for protest, resistance, and at times, insurgency.

I’m eager to see more fan studies scholars contribute to this broader debate on everyday life, popular culture, sentiment/affect, and politics - we have a lot to say about these issues, and we should make our voices heard well beyond academic spaces. And even as we hone our arguments about fandom and progressive political imaginaries, it would be good to see more engagement from fan studies scholars on the reactionary end of the political spectrum as well.

The second topic - what we could gloss as transcultural fandom - is the other area that I think fan studies ought to engage with much more in the next decade or two. As Melissa Click and Suzanne Scott put it in their recent book, The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, race and transcultural fandom remain an underdeveloped area of study.

In addition to the question of language and performativity that Bertha Chin and Sangita Shresthova among others have written about, I would point to citational practices as a major problem for fan studies even in 2018. To this day, those of us in the north Atlantic and Anglophone academic worlds simply do not take up theoretical insights developed from studies of fans (and more generally, audiences) in non-Western contexts. Consider, for instance, S. V. Srinivas’ pathbreaking work on fan cultures, performance, and political culture(s) in south India. There is much we can learn about links between stardom and the mediatization of politics from Srinivas’ work that would help make sense of, for instance, populist figures like Trump, Putin, and Erdogan. The only way to push for change on this front is by reflecting on our reading and writing practices, by making a concerted effort to seek scholarship from well outside the immediate context(s) we live and operate in, and incorporating scholarly voices that are too often relegated to the margins.

Moreover, given the multi-polar media world we inhabit today, it is crucial to learn more about new circuits of media production and circulation that by-pass and de-center the U.S. There are two cases I would point to here: the circulation of Hindi-language Bollywood films and film music in, for example, Nigeria; and the trans-national circulation of Korean popular culture over the past decade. The Bollywood case is fascinating, as Brian Larkin has so richly detailed, because it defies any ideas about “cultural proximity” that we might, retrospectively, read into the Nigerian social context. For what is far more interesting is the ways in which films and film music from a particular era seemed to offer a “parallel modernity” – one that wasn’t defined by the ‘West’ – that was both alluring and meaningful for Nigerian audiences. In a similar vein, the K-Pop case makes it clear that a global phenomenon does not have to go through Western media capitals anymore. Moving forward, paying attention to the formation of fan communities that are Inter-Asian (Korea-India or Korea-Japan), for instance, is critical if we are to move out of the ‘methodological nationalism’ that has h aunted fan studies (and certainly media studies writ large).

Bertha

Like many in fan studies, my introduction to the field came with being handed a copy of Textual Poachers – in my case, it was my MA supervisor, which prompted my entry into fan studies. Suddenly, all the things I was doing while growing up in Borneo: dressing up as my favourite characters, the stories I had written based on these characters started to make sense. Those practices had a name, and it was fandom. More importantly, I discovered I wasn’t alone in being fascinated by fictional characters and plotlines on TV shows to write stories about them, to inhabit their universes.

But I had a different experience of fandom from the academic accounts I was reading. Instead of the absence of a concrete hierarchical structure that impinges on a lot of early fan scholarly works, I was witnessing clear division of roles, access (including who is on the inside and outside of the fandom and the community), and voice, which affected the formation of fan community structures. Those who had access and specific skills (such as technical skills, language, cultural knowledge) would be celebrated, and would often be elected (or elect themselves) to community leadership roles. These fan community leaders would deem what are appropriate and inappropriate topics of discussions in fandom, at times extending to who is and isn’t welcomed in their communities.

This observation would go on to influence the majority of my academic work, which continues to look at how the accumulation of fan social and cultural capitals determine the fan’s position and ‘celebrity’ status in the online community. As fans move from closed and moderated platforms like Yahoo Groups and LiveJournal to open, rhizomatic social media platforms, the accumulation of social and cultural capitals shift too, often to include attention capital (van Krieken, 2012; Rojek, 2016). At the same time, the relationship between fans and media producers continues to be negotiated, as social media now facilitates this interaction to occur on public platforms such as Twitter. As such, we’re seeing fans raise their concerns over social issues like representations of minorities on screen, pay equality for female actors and treatment of female characters, as well as echoing calls with celebrities to call out and expose sexual harassment in Hollywood directly to media producers active on social media (for example, fans’ pressure on Warner Bros. Television in 2017 to fire Andrew Kreisberg, a producer on DC Comics’ Arrowverse, when multiple claims of sexual harassment were filed by crew members).

Social media not only continues to change the ways in which media producers and fans interact, it is also giving rise to attention on participation from fans who don’t hail from geographical areas traditionally observed in fan studies, namely the US, UK and Europe. This is enabling more engagement with fans and fan practices on a global scale, but at the same time, heightening different complexities. Fan scholars now have to consider fandom from, among others, transcultural (Morimoto and Chin, 2013; 2017) and postcolonial (Pande, 2016; forthcoming) perspectives. As Aswin Punathambekar, Sangita Shrestova and myself (2017) recently reflected, as fan and media scholars, we similarly need to re-consider the ways we engage with academic literature ourselves despite potential language and cultural barriers in order to widen the scope of our understanding, particularly of fan practices that adhere to different cultural understandings.

Social media platforms aren’t merely making fan practices more accessible or visible to the general public; the ways in which fans are utilising Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr and Facebook are making the media industry more aware that these platforms offer easy and immediate access to niche, loyal audiences and consumers -- another avenue for creating the ‘perfect’ fan-consumer that may conform to industry standards. Indeed, we can witness not only the media industry trying to create the perfect fan-consumer, but fans similarly policing other fans in deeming what is and isn’t appropriate fan behaviour and practice in order to accumulate the proper attention capital from media producers and celebrities on social media – work that Mark Stewart and myself are currently doing.

The focus on the media industry, particularly the fan-media producer interaction on social media and in offline spaces like San Diego Comic Con and other commercial-focused fan conventions has led some scholars in fan studies to voice concerns that this mainstreaming of fans is diluting the resistant and activist origins of fandom. While I am not denying the importance of critically engaging with the media industry’s increasing infringement on fan space, I would also like to offer another view beyond the ‘either…or’ arguments: the role and expectations of the institution the fan studies scholar might be working in. This is particularly crucial given the increasing global interest in fan studies, and instability in institutionalized academia means that fan scholars may be working in institutions where fan – or media and cultural – studies is not only necessarily accepted or recognised, but the network and support of fellow scholars are also absent or geographically distant.

Here, I’m thinking of my own experience when two years ago, I uprooted my life from the UK and accepted a position in a branch campus of an Australian university in Southeast Asia. In comparison, the research culture along with the student body was more conservative than the home campus, and the branch campus’s focus on engineering, business and the teaching of English as a Second Language meant that there was little space for what is considered to be more frivolous research, but also research that may be too political. This meant having to position and frame fan studies along more ‘acceptable’ lines within the branch campus’s constraints; in my case, it was to create value around the notion of “audience / market engagement” rather than blatantly fan studies. In doing so, the research – and the field – becomes more acceptable for those in the business school, but it leads to questions of integrity; and whether in creating value around “audience engagement research” meant that I was also depoliticising my own identity as a fan studies scholar.

However, I also begin to see alternative ways in which I can apply fan studies concepts and frameworks into my everyday existence: students’ reluctance to admit to being fans for fear of being othered, ridiculed and infantilized; the ways in which the barista at my favourite coffee shop has attracted fans, and access to him (and fellow baristas) meant accumulation of social, cultural and attention capitals within the microcosm of the coffee shop space; the local cinema industry’s gifting of movie collectibles via competitions that encourage fans of superhero films to consume more tickets and themed cinema snacks; the acceptance of Funko Pop figures as a declaration of one’s fandom while transformational fan practices are still derided as “abnormal” fan engagement. Even right down to the ways in which university management guides and fosters research interests are deemed along appropriate and inappropriate research fields in order to mould into being, the ideal, neoliberal researcher.

My point being, as much as we need to acknowledge fan studies along transcultural and postcolonial frameworks, to read and introduce literature beyond the specific go-to pieces that inform and reaffirm Western conceptualisation of fan practices, we also need to move beyond the either/or argument of what fan studies is or isn’t. In my case, the need to frame my research within institutional constraints and to remain valuable to the institution lead to creative ways of engaging with fan studies’ theoretical frameworks. I’m not sure if this is indeed the future of fan studies, but in light of the crisis in higher education and academia in the UK and the US, perhaps this is but one way fan studies can continue to grow, adapt and develop while we equally acknowledge the growing importance of examining fandom along transcultural and postcolonial frameworks.

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How Do You Like It So Far? Podcast: Comics, Race, and Black Panther

Ramzi Fawaz, assistant professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Rebecca Wanzo, associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, represent two important and emerging voices in comic studies. I have been lucky to work with both of them as part of the Postmillenial Pop book series that Karen Tongson and I co-dit for New York University Press. Fawaz's book, The New Mutants, represents a rich account of popular fantasy and progressive politics primarily focused on Marvel comics of the 1960s and 1970s, and Wanzo is completing a groundbreaking book on race and caricature which ranges across American comics in all of their various permutations. We wanted to hear their thoughts on the Black Panther phenomenon. Colin and i sat back as flies on the wall this week and listened to their perspectives, which move back and forth between the film and its comics roots.

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Benjamin Woo and Katie Wilson (Pt. 2)

Katie:

What fields of study, specific pieces of scholarship, or even case studies do you think fan scholars should look into to help us better address the issues of Bad Fans?

Benjamin:

Although ostensibly defined by its object of analysis, fan studies has always been a little ambiguous about just what it’s really studying. When we say we study fandom, are we referring to individual fans’ subjective feelings of attachment for media goods, to the expressions those feelings take in fan works, or to the sociocultural practices and institutions that unite these people and things together into an intelligible (if not necessarily coherent) whole. All of them have been and remain in the mix.

But, if I haven’t tipped my hand too much already, I think that the version of fan studies that will enable us to tackle the problems you’ve identified – of bad actors within fandoms and of toxic or vicious fandoms – will plant its flag as a broadly social-scientific field, the core questions of which will be about people rather than texts. I’m not calling for naïve empiricism, but for a critically engaged, interpretive and reflexive engagement with the social worlds in which Bad Fans are operating.

For me, Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most productive thinkers to bring to bear here – not for his sociology of taste, which is how he often enters into discussions in fan studies, but for his insights into how every field of social practice is defined by a struggle over its definition and its boundaries. When I look at ComicsGate or the Rabid Puppies, what I see is white men losing the power of definition to the activism and growing market power of other fans, and that seems like textbook Bourdieu to me.

What conceptual resources have you found helpful in trying to think through these cases?

Katie:

Like many fan scholars out there, I find that I spend a lot of time trying to justify my research field to peers and colleges who work outside of fan and/or media studies.  Because of this, I really try to look outside of fan studies to help support the concepts and theories that are already accepted across our field. I believe being truly interdisciplinary not only allows fan theorists to back up our research to people outside of the field, it also provides new entry points for analyzing fan communities and fan work.  I've tend to approach fan studies, and in particular the study of bad fans, through a feminist theory and psychological perspective.  The rise of the "fake geek girl" phenomenon of the 2010's really pushed me towards looking at how gender politics play out in fan spaces.  I started, however, by focusing on trying to understand who fans are, at their core, relying on psychological research to help to understand how humans form their concepts of identity. 

One piece of research that really stuck with me was a study by Patricia Obst, Lucy Zinkiewicz, and Sandy G. Smith titled "Sense of Community in Science Fiction Fandom."  In the 1990's, Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith conducted research on young men with interest in science fiction and found that, unlike the general population who created their strongest community bonds based on their geographic proximity to others, these young men were creating their strongest community bonds with people who shared their interests, regardless of their geographic location.  While this news isn't surprising for fans or fan scholars, it provides the empirical evidence of the importance of fandom in community and identity building.  From there, I look at why some fan identities are more privileged than others, not only within fan communities, but also in our society as a whole.  Here I find I read Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, Herman Gray, Teresa De Lauretis, and other gender, race, and ability theorists. But understanding the fans and the culture they come from is only part of the field of fan studies.  I do believe in the importance of understanding and defining fan practices, and while I value the research out there about why and how fans interact with their work, I also believe we haven't, as a field, defined fan work in a way that shows the true impact it can have on society. As passionately as we shout our evidence based and theoretically sound research up to the ivory tower, many in the academy fail to see how slash fiction or meme sharing has any real impact on our greater culture. Enter translation theory.  The field of translation studies is just about as old as the field of fan studies, and like fan studies it is an interdisciplinary field that attracts many different types of scholars.  The trend in translation studies is towards an examination of how culture plays into the act of translation, and how cultures in turn are shaped through translations.  And while some work in the field of translation studies does define translation as the literal act of word for word linguistic interpretation, the field also acknowledges the ideas of adaptation or interpretation as acts of translation.  I'm finding this line of research to be very helpful in understanding the human need to interpret and share texts across cultural divides, which I believe is at the heart of why fans create fan work.  What is most appealing about translation studies is that it leans towards the high arts, something that brings with it an air of prestige or importance.  As someone who is writing a dissertation as part of a rather traditional Humanities PhD program, this high art affiliation is helpful in expressing just how important and impactful research on fans can be. (I can recommend The Translation Studies Reader edited by Larence Venuti and a good primer into the field).  I guess to sum things up, I think it is in our best interest, as fan scholars, to continue to be both interdisciplinary and intersectional to try to understand our field from every angle and to prepare ourselves in the event that we need to defend the importance of our field to the academy. 

Benjamin:

This is a bit of a pained segue, but your comment about how translation studies helps to understand how and why people are motivated to bridge cultural and community divides reminds me of the “aca-fan” identity that has been so central to scholarly practice in fan studies. Since the 1990s, it’s been more or less axiomatic that there’s at least practical advantages and quite likely a kind of epistemic privilege that comes from sharing the fandom of the subjects you study. When particular fan activities seem to be grounded in avowed misogyny, white nationalist sentiments, or other deplorable value sets, we as scholars can no longer lean on our insider status. Many of us—women, people of colour, queer or transgender—might not even be safe approaching them.

I conducted my fieldwork on geek culture in one Canadian city in 2010 and 2011, and while it obviously did not pre-date sexism, homophobia and racism in fan communities, it was before the various major flash points of recent years made these issues inescapable. I could still, at times anyway, take comfort in that rosy, utopian picture of fandom—indeed, I call geek culture a “real utopia” (Wright 2010) in my book! My observations and conversations gave some insight into the struggles over sexism in some fandoms since then, but I wonder if they would have been that candid even a year later. Not that anyone I spoke with was a raving sexist, but how much more guarded would people have been when a PhD student came snooping around asking questions about their community’s demographic make-up at, for instance, the height of GamerGate?

Katie:

That is an excellent point, and I wish I could answer it with my own research, however I know of some upcoming work that might address this gap.  I've sat on a number of panels on fan harassment both in academic circles, as well as at fan conventions with Carrie Lynn Reinhardt of Dominican University and she conducted conversations with Twitter users who were known bullies, particularly those who were involved in GamerGate, in order to come to conclusions about how problems in communication contribute to harassment and what she calls "fractured fandom".  She is currently working on a book on the topic that I think would be a very interesting companion to your book.

To your comment about the dangers of being in a demographic group that faces increased harassment in fan spaces, It is a concern that we as fan scholars need to do better about addressing.  Fan conventions and websites have stepped up, enacting strict anti-harassment policies, but we know that much of the harassment comes online in one-to-one, avatar-to-avatar situations.  These singular stories are not being told.  Much of the research coming out about fan harassment (my own work included) tends to look at the high-profile cases, such as Anita Sarkeesian, but we should be attempting to raise the concerns of the everyday fans who are being marginalized from their own fandom due to their identity.  Again, I think academic and community outreach are the solution to this issue.  Academic outreach in the form of interdisciplinary forums with psychologists, elementary and secondary educators, and coders.  I've engaged in a few of these events and found that sociologists, psychologists, and education scholars are particularly intrigued by our field. They see the trend in harassment and even violence in fan circles and are looking for solutions.

But community outreach should also be conducted, to help provide safer spaces for the public to talk about their own experiences.  Three years ago at C2E2, Chicago's popular culture convention, I was on a panel talking about fan harassment and while the event began like an academic roundtable, it quickly turned into a cathartic experience for members of the crowd to share their own stories of discrimination.  This type of open communication allowed myself and my fellow presenters to establish ourselves as aca-fans in a space that produced case studies and contacts that might otherwise be difficult to acquire because of inability to find that audience or fear as to the motivations behind gathering the information.  Sure, the barrier of a IRB still looms, but I do think it helps to break down some of the issues we face in this brave new fan frontier.  Moreover, it gave the fans a voice and permission to speak on things that many people are too afraid or too ashamed to share.  However, I do think there is a lot that can be gathered from analyzing fan comments, fan work, and fan activities.  We can look for trends in the type of fan materials being made to give us insights into experiences that fans are facing.  Whether that be protest signs that also display objects of their fandom, morphing fan works to activate political interest, or even the increased media attention around fan reactions to controversial content.

References

Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage, 1998. Print.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1992. Print.

Bernstein, Joseph. “Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.” BuzzFeed, 5 Oct. 2017, www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.phloKjDKVb#.ij04wl6wvY.

Booth, Paul. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Univ. of California Press, 2013.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2015.

Lauretis, Teresa De. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Indiana University Press, 2017.

Duffett, Mark. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. N.p.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Print.

Gitlin, Todd. The Intellectuals and the Flag. Columbia University Press, 2007.

Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Hall, Stuart. 1983. “For a Marxism Without Guarantees.” Australian Left Review 1, no. 84: 38–43, http://ro.uow.edu.au/alr/vol1/iss84/11.

Hamilton, Heather Elise, and John Michael Sefel. “WE ARE BOOK EIGHT: Secrets to the Success of the Harry Potter Alliance.” Playing Harry Potter: Essays and Interviews on Fandom and Performance, edited by Lisa S. Brenner, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015, pp. 207–219.

Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Print.

Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji. Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Lewis, Lisa A. The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Obst, Patricia, et al. “Sense of Community in Science Fiction Fandom, Part 1: Understanding Sense of Community in an International Community of Interest.” Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2001, pp. 87–103., doi:10.1002/jcop.1052.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn. “Fractured Fandom.” It's Playing, Just With Research, 15 May 2017, playingwithresearch.com/current-projects/fandom-is-everything/fractured-fandom/.

Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Oxford: Polity, 2005. Print.

Simon, Sherry. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.

Snider, Mike. “Steve Bannon Learned to Harness Troll Army from 'World of Warcraft'.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 18 July 2017, www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/.

Wilson, Katie. 2018. “Red Pillers, Sad Puppies, and Gamergaters: The State of Male Privilege in Internet Fan Communities.” In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, edited by Paul Booth, 431–45. Oxford: Wiley.

Woo, Benjamin. 2018. Getting a Life: The Social World of Geek Culture. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Benjamin Woo & Katie Wilson (Pt. 1)

The following is a conversation between Benjamin Woo, Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism at Carleton University and author of the book Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) and Katie Wilson, Adjunct Professor of film at Harry S. Truman College, PhD Candidate from University of Louisville, and author of “Red Pillers, Sad Puppies, and Gamergaters: The State of Male Privilege in Internet Fan Communities” from A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies.  Benjamin and Katie both have an interest in what they call “bad fans,” particularly fans who are bullies, conduct harassment, and partake in violent activities.  After reading selections of each other’s works they exchanged the following.

Benjamin Woo:

For those of us raised on a previous generation’s fandom studies, the last few years have been a rude awakening. We were promised utopian communities that create and sustain alternative values and practices that evade and subvert the power of dominant social groups. Instead, as Katie argues in her chapter from the recent Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wilson 2018), online fan communities have become breeding grounds for a particularly virulent anti-feminist backlash and, more recently, for the white supremacist and neo-fascist movements associated with the so-called alt-right.

Although these problems have been clearest in stereotypically male “geek” communities of gamers, comic book fans, and readers of sci-fi literature (rather than viewers of sci-fi television), it would be a mistake to retreat into the comfort of the No True Scotsman fallacy, using normative definitions of fandom to disavow these angry white men as something other than fans or safely quarantine them in the category of merely “affirmational” fandom. This is the kind of hand-waving that got us into trouble in the first place.

I stumbled into fandom studies when I wanted to explore the social contexts of comic-book consumption, which eventually led me to the larger geek media ecosystem. It often feels as though my work falls in between the two fields – too focused on people for comics studies, but interested in the wrong people for fandom studies. Indeed, one of the anonymous readers who reviewed my latest book, Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture, commented that its focus on principally “in real life” spaces like comic book and game stores that are conventionally associated with male fandoms was unusual and novel. The review was, I hasten to add, constructive, and the book benefited from it immensely. Yet the idea that we should be surprised that fan studies theory had something to say about geek culture – or vice versa – is itself surprising.

Suffice it to say that a great deal of fan activity sits uncomfortably with what Cornell Sandvoss (2005) has called fan studies’ “dominant discourse of resistance” and the presumptions it has tended to make about who fans are. For example, my students often find the theoretically derived conceptions of fan and fandom bewildering and alienating because they seem so distant from the universe of media-oriented practices that those words name in ordinary language. Similarly, we can see in Gamergate and Comicsgate, in the “fake geek girl” debacle, and in the packs of Sad and Rabid Puppies hounding the Hugo Awards, other forms of community-making around media, if ones with which many of us are personally uncomfortable for obvious reasons.

Understanding these cases of “bad fans” seems to me the most pressing and immediate task for our community. They represent both a productive challenge to received theories and paradigms and an opportunity to conclusively answer the “so what?” questions that have dogged the field by speaking into a genuine societal crisis. A quarter century of fandom studies have taught us important lessons about people’s relationships with media, but the slippage between certain fan communities and practices and fandom writ large has produced significant exclusions. For instance, as media companies increasingly adopt the surface appearance of progressive politics and celebrities court fan artists’ attention, the reactionary and regressive fans that produced a “de-feminized” cut of The Last Jedi are arguably the ones taking up a transformative posture. So, as Sandvoss (2005, 15) argues, there is a pressing “need to explore under which circumstances, and against whom, fandom constitutes a form of resistance,” a need for – to paraphrase Stuart Hall (1983) – a fandom studies without guarantees.

Katie Wilson:

As fan scholars, we have fought hard over the past decades to make the case that fan activity and fan work is an important field of study.  In the 1990’s scholars helped to define the activities and motivations of fan communities (Bacon-Smith, 1992; Jenkins, 1992; Lewis, 1992; Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998).  In the 2000’s, the rise of participatory media allowed fan scholars to examine the effect that fan work can have on the media industry and popular culture as a whole (Hills, 2002; Sandvoss, 2005; Booth, 2010; Ito et al., 2012; Hellekson and Busse, 2014).  Now, as fan studies enters into adulthood, we look to see how fandom transcends the media it revolves around.  Harry Potter fans are famous for taking inspiration from the Harry Potter story and raising money and awareness for charities and causes in line with the ethics of the series (Hamilton and Sefel, 2015).  Political demonstrations like the Woman’s March on Washington in 2017 and 2018 are flooded with images of Princess Leia, Hermione Granger, and Wonder Woman linking these fictional characters to larger issues of equality and progress.  And while many, many fans are translating the objects of their fandom and fan communities into the real world in order to make the world a better place, there are others who are using the objects of the fandom and their fan communities to bring about discord and hate. As Benjamin said in his opening statement, we can no longer ignore this trend in fan studies.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve noticed that more and more fan scholars are turning their research to the topic of “bad fans.” There is infighting within fan communities that leads to harassment and abuse (see CarrieLynn Reinhard’s work on Fractured Fandom), most notably in the form of the GamerGate controversy and the Sad Puppies of the Hugo Awards.  But I believe that fan scholars also need to look outside of fan communities, looking for the places in which fans are being commodified for social or political purposes. 

We are familiar with the idea that fans are turned into commodities; Mark Duffett gives examples of that in Understanding Fans:

In an internet age, businesses rely on fans’ social exchanges and amateur production to create the content that attracts audiences for the advertisers who sponsor Websites.  Fans also make attempts – sometimes welcome or invited – to directly intervene in the production process of broadcast media. Personally and collectively, they are used as part of many cultural events, for example, as crowds at rock concerts or film premiers, so they have become an essential part of the show” (22).

We’ve tended to look at how fans are being used as commodities to sell a product like a film, video game, television show, sports team, music group, or work of fiction. I believe it is time to look at how fan communities, organized around media products, are now being used as commodities to sell something else: ideology. 

By now it is widely reported that right wing talking heads like Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos specifically targeted video game fans in order to gain momentum for their political agendas (Bernstein 2017; Snider, 2017).  Monopolizing on the connection and comradery of online fan communities allowed Bannon and Yiannopoulos to spread their ideology quickly and effectively through certain communities, playing on the trust and shared identity of these fans.  As a discipline, we celebrate the fact that fans can have an impact on world, that their activities help to create added meaning or interpretation of media texts.  Both Benjamin and I seem to share the same belief when it comes to fan works, that they are not necessarily secondary or lesser than the source material that inspires them. As Benjamin said, “it is a relatively short move from imaginatively re-writing to just plain writing” (182). 

There is a theory in the field of translation studies that elevates the act of translation from an afterthought to an important and transformative step in the initial production of written text (Simon, 1996). It is my belief that fan activities are a form of translation, a way of interpreting and expressing a text so that it is culturally and linguistically relevant to a specific audience.  I believe it is time for fan scholars to start looking at fan works not as their own insular piece of media, but rather as the final step of the writing process, the translation of the original text.  Through this translation, fans are able to imbue new meaning into the source material, sometimes changing the original meaning of that material.  Take, for instance, the meme Pepe The Frog, once used as a benign reaction meme, shared and repurposed across the internet. However, the image is now listed as a symbol of hate by the Anti-Defamation League thanks to the prolonged use of the image by Alt-Right internet groups.  The creator of Pepe, Matt Furie, did not intend for this new meaning to be placed upon his work, and is even suing media companies that help sell this new translated meaning of Pepe.  Whatever the outcome, Pepe will never be what it once was, and all because it was translated by a community. To paraphrase Benjamin, it is a relatively short move from Matt Furie’s Pepe to Alex Jones’s Pepe. As fan scholars, we must always remember that as much as fans can use their powers for good, fans also have the power to permanently change the meanings of source material to reflect an unintended ideology of hate. 

And just as I believe that we need to start looking at how fans and fan work are being commodified outside of the media field, I also believe we as fan scholars need to move outside of the academic field.  I take inspiration from academics like Todd Gitlin and his call in The Intellectuals and the Flag when I say that we as fan scholars need to move beyond just studying “bad fans” and work towards addressing their actions in the real world using our research and our creative brains to attempt to create positive change.

———

The State of Fandom Studies: Lori Morimoto and Sanghita Shresthova (Part 2)

Lori

This issue of the politics of transnational (and transcultural) fandom is one that I keep coming back to, particularly for how little it tends to figure in what we might call normative fan studies. The example you give of the uncomfortable clash of fannish and state interests and imperatives in popular culture consumption seems analogous to, in the case of my own experience, the mass media discourse of an almost utopian East Asian regionalism that first arose around Hong Kong film fandom, then continued with the first wave of Korean popular culture fandom in Japan; particularly when the latter dovetailed with the Asian Economic Crisis and growing regional political tensions, provoking a harsh and unequivocally nationalistic backlash towards both South Korean media and its Japanese fans.

Your observation of the complex power dynamics of transnational fandom also puts me in mind of the ways that state and corporate-sponsored nation branding and soft power imperatives intersect with fandom. This is something I’ve been trying to suss out through two theoretical frameworks: Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of ‘contact zones’ and Anthony Giddens’s work on ontological security. Put simply, if we start from the assumption that present-day online fandoms (and, increasingly, offline fandoms as well) are emblematic of contact zones, defined by Pratt as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (1991: 34), and that our fandoms are one way in which we create and sustain a sense of stability and meaning in our lives through “a shared - but unproven and unprovable - framework of reality, the question of what happens to one’s sense of ontological security when it’s destabilized within the contact zones of transnational and transcultural fandoms is, I think, a potent point from which to both interrogate those ‘highly asymmetrical relations of power’ and - critically - imagine how such clashes might be resolved. (As an aside, I have an essay in Paul Booth’s forthcoming A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies that looks at this in more detail.)

I’ve been frustrated in the past with work on transnational fandoms that identifies power asymmetries but does little to address them beyond warning against complicity with institutional imperatives. Not only does it replicate the moral binary of resistance/complicity we’ve seen in fan studies of the past, but it makes it too easy to overlook where changes - however incremental and incomplete - do take place. This is where I see the value of looking at micro-clashes within transcultural and transnational fandoms with an eye to theories of contact zones and ontological security. If we can recognize a transcultural conflict for what it is - a clash of different and sometimes asymmetrical cultural norms and expectations - it’s easier, I think, to imagine a way out, if we choose to do so.  

To give a brief example of what I’m talking about, there was a recent cultural clash in one of my own fandoms over a Japanese fan’s drawing of a popular character in a Nazi uniform that was posted to Twitter. This fan’s general awareness that Twitter knows no national boundaries was implicit in her note that the drawing was not intended as a realistic depiction of Nazis, but was simply focused on the aesthetics of the uniform. However, this note was posted in Japanese, making it only partly effective at best. Moreover, the European fans who objected to the artwork were clear that they understood both that Nazi uniforms are something of a common trope in some East Asian fan art (there’s a new article out about just this thing in the context of cosplay, in fact), and that Japanese fans undoubtedly had a different understanding of Naziism than Europeans. Ultimately, the tweet was taken down by the poster, presumably in response to voiced complaints.

As much as the transcultural politics of the clash, it’s this response that I’m interested in as an example of how we might imagine moving through and beyond such clashes. The calculus here is fairly generalizable: cultural norm A clashes with cultural experience B, in which the ‘norm’ often (but not always) has the upper hand in terms of power over the more specific experience that goes against it. From there, certain choices are possible: ignore the clash and continue as if the norm holds (keep the art posted); withdraw altogether from contact zone (leave the fandom; retreat to a walled community of the like-minded); rationalize the norm (as something ‘we’ do in our culture); argue against the complaint through the norm; and discuss and rethink the norm. In the case of this fan art, the poster publicly performed the last option in heeding criticism and removing the tweet (although it’s difficult to know how strongly complaints were worded, on a spectrum from vehemence to vitriol, which would further shift the power dynamics of this clash). In so doing, she recognized and acquiesced to a cultural claim that she deemed more important or valid than the naturalized cultural context within which she produced the piece - an option not only within the clash of transcultural and transnational fandoms, but in asymmetrical political and cultural clashes writ large.

Returning to the beginning of this round, I wonder what this kind of perspective on transcultural fandoms might tell us about fan studies - where it is now, and where it’s going? If there’s something we might call ‘normative’ fan studies - English language, centered on Anglo-American media and/or fan cultures, overwhelmingly white - what happens when it bumps up against non-normative scholarship in the contact zones of academic conferences and journals? My own experience is that we’ve been far too easy to overlook and ignore, on the (perceived) basis that such work isn’t relevant to the mainstream of fan studies; so I wonder what might happen if fan studies, as an ostensible community, engaged more openly and directly in discussing (and addressing) our own assumptions?

Sangita

Wow, you gave me  a lot to think about. Your use of Giddens’s “ontological zones” and Pratt’s theory of "contact zones” is extremely helpful in peeling back the layers of transnational fandom to reveal how structures of power collide with the affective and interpersonal experiences of being a fan. Given my focus on Bollywood, I have also found applying the work of post-colonial scholars (Edward Said, Partha Chatterjea, Stuart Hall, Franz Fanon in particular) to be also extremely helpful in understanding how the pleasures of content worlds can map onto, but also up end, transnational media flows and how these dynamics yield complicated remappings of power distribution.

In the past, I looked at how Bollywood dance, a dance genre that emerged out a fannish engagement with song-and-dance sequences in Hindi films, became a globally recognizable dance form. I was particularly interested in how dancers used the films as source material in localized contexts and how the meanings created through their performances shifted from site to site.

More recently, I have started to pursue two interconnected strands of research that focus on transnational “clashes” (borrowing your phrasing here) more explicitly. The first strand grapples with how Bollywood flashmobs (created locally for online/transnational circulation) expand my earlier understanding of Bollywood as a localized practice and complicate the meanings and communities supported through such performances. In particular, I am interested in whether the creation performance for circulation through social media supports imagining Bollywood dance communities and if so how this imagination is negotiated.

The second strand engages with, what has long been the “elephant in the room” in my work on transnational Bollywood dance, namely: how the content world of Hindi cinema affect contestation around Bollywood inspired performances as normative and resistant interpretations of song-and-dance sequences collide, particularly as these performances move towards more explicit engagement with civic and political issues.

A case in point was Jennifer Davis’s Bollywood themed performance at the 2018 Miss America Contest. Though she is not ethnically Indian (or South Asian), Davis chose to perform a Bollywood dance during the competition because she saw it as symbolic of her commitment to diversity (an understanding that would be consistent with how Bollywood dance is often performed in spaces celebrating American multiculturalism). Her performance was immediately criticized by viewers who felt her performance was “cultural appropriation” and insulting to Indian traditions. To me the debate that ensued, and the limits it sought to place on what is or isn’t appropriate when it comes to Bollywood dance in performance, drove home how contested Bollywood dance has become in the United States in the current political moment. I feel the discussion we have been having here will actually be very helpful to me as I continue to unpack this, and other similar, instances in Bollywood dance fandom.

In a roundabout way, this brings me back to the questions you raise about fan studies, as an evolving field. As someone who focuses on a fannish practice that is largely performative and rooted in an Indian (through very transnational) content worlds, I have generally felt marginalized within the mainstream of this field, where the conversations always felt relevant, but not fully connected to the work I do. This has been compounded by the fact that the (largely) young people I study do not self identify as fans, they often identify first and foremost as dancers. As such my analysis necessarily has to draw heavily on dance scholarship to understand how meaning is created through inter-cultural choreography and performance. I actually think that performance and dance analysis has a lot to offer when it comes to understanding transnational fandom that is not text based and is not premised on a particular verbal literacy.

I also feel that the questions we have discussed here in the context of transnational fandom have a lot to offer to the mainstream of fan studies, and it is my hope that there will be a broader recognition of this as the field continues to expand and grow.

Lori

Reading this, I feel like the questions you're working through intersect with mine in really productive ways; that is, we're circling around certain ideas that might be constitutive of transnational and transcultural fan studies as a sub (sub?) discipline. Your interest the localization (and associated politics) of Bollywood dance overlaps in some ways with the role of what Bertha Chin and I (borrowing from Matt Hills) have talked about as "transcultural homology" (99) in the formation and localization of border-crossing fandoms. It's interesting to me that both our approaches to localization and the various tensions it sometimes provokes or gets implicated in seem almost like a counter-current to long-standing (if evolving) fan studies explorations of fandoms as coherent, discrete, and communal phenomena.

Similarly, I feel like the transdisciplinary approach you take towards Bollywood dance is emblematic of the methodological concerns specific to transnational and transcultural fan studies - one that I'd be interested to see taken up in 'normative' fan studies. When you're talking about practices that don't map neatly onto existing theoretical and methodological paradigms, the researcher herself must assume what we might (probably painfully) call a trans-scholarly perspective. I would tentatively argue that such a perspective eschews linear progression and associations for the more lateral work of seeking out affinities across academic disciplines and practices, as a means of stepping outside existing paradigms and frameworks in trying to make visible what's often relegated to the periphery of fan studies.

I really appreciate being able to read about your experiences as someone who has both lived and conducts research in the liminal cultural spaces of nation and ethnicity, scholarship, and fandom. And thanks so much to Henry for this opportunity to talk about stuff that spends most of its time just rattling around in my head!

Sangita

I agree. This has been great. I really learned a lot and look forward to continuing to think through this material. I am happy to have met you, Lori!

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Lori Morimoto & Sanghita Shrestova (Part 1)

Lori Morimoto

I’ve been a media fan since I was 11, when – like so many others of my generation – I fell in love with Star Wars (1977 aka “A New Hope”) and gobbled up as much movie merchandise as I could get my hands on. As it happens, that was comparatively little since I saw Star Wars in Hong Kong, where my family had moved six months earlier, and only some goods were available in local toy stores and bookshops (although we had greater access to some wonderful Japanese Star Wars stuff). Looking back on it now, it seems safe to say that this was arguably the formative moment in my evolution as both a fan and, ultimately, a fan studies scholar, as much because of the conditions of being a Star Wars fan in Hong Kong as the film itself.

My PhD dissertation was a study of Japanese women fans of Hong Kong stars in the 1980s and 1990s – a fandom that I participated in, albeit peripherally, throughout this period. The only other person to have written on it at the time was Koichi Iwabuchi, in his book Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism and a related essay in the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, and he once said to me in passing that the one question he never answered to his satisfaction was ‘why women?’; thus was my own project born. It’s a great question, given the overwhelmingly male makeup of (non-diasporic) overseas fans of Hong Kong movies, but the then-existing framework for interrogating it was essentially the media globalization studies version of ‘resistance’ discourse in cultural studies, a ‘moral binary’ (to borrow from Matt Hills) intended to answer the question of whether or not cross-cultural fandom fosters greater understanding across cultural borders.

Given my own experiences of media fandom generally, and Hong Kong star fandom in Japan specifically, this question proved to be an insurmountable hurdle for the first few years of the dissertation process. I could answer it both affirmatively and negatively, depending on the case in question, and at the same time it seemed unrelated to the whys of the fandom as revealed both in my data and my own experiences.

At about the time I was considering throwing in the towel altogether over this conundrum, I was also being daily defeated by a toddler and an infant. All of this contributed to an extended dissertation hiatus, during which I happened to be watching The Silence of the Lambs one night and took bleary-eyed notice of the ‘First Principles’ scene:

Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice: simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius, "Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?" What does he do, this man you seek?

Clarice Starling: He kills women.

Hannibal Lecter: No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does, what needs does he serve by killing?

Clarice Starling: Anger, social acceptance, and, uh, sexual frustration …

Hannibal Lecter: No, he covets. That's his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer, now.

Clarice Starling: No. We just …

Hannibal Lecter: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?

I’m in a kind of sleep-deprived fugue state listening to this, and perhaps because of that something clicked for me. Everything Clarice says here – anger, social acceptance, sexual frustration – sounded eerily similar to how the motivations for becoming fans were sometimes discussed, both popularly and in some scholarship. But that answer – we covet what we see everyday – effectively helped me to step out of the paradigm I was stuck in and got me thinking in another direction.

As it turns out, one key thing that was different in the Japanese women’s fandom from all other overseas fans of Hong Kong films was that Japanese women (for a variety of reasons, detailed here) came into contact with Hong Kong films in their everyday lives in ways that people simply didn’t in other countries. In other words, I ended up arguing that women became fans because 1) they came into contact with Hong Kong stars and movies, and 2) they liked what they saw. And that anything that came from those two conditions, be it a better (or worse) understanding of Hong Kong, fetishizing Hong Kong men, intensified identification as East Asian, or whatever, was incidental to the fundamental condition of fandom – loving something.

I’ve gone on to argue at greater length about what the conditions for cross-cultural love of a thing might be, and from there the politics of that love, but underpinning all of my work is a conviction that all fandom is transcultural. This requires a somewhat expansive understanding of ‘transcultural’ as something that we’re as likely to find in the intersection of cultures of races, classes, genders, and so on as between people from different national cultures. Historically, fan studies research has focused on the definition and discussion of discrete phenomena and objects - MCU fandom, or a kind of monolithic ‘fanfiction’, or ‘fandom’. Today, I find myself arguing a lot, that kind of discreteness is a rapidly vanishing thing. Online women’s fandom, for example, has evolved from closeable communities of mostly monolingual and monocultural fans to a global mélange of interests and the myriad cultural experiences that inflect them. As such, our understanding of what we think we know increasingly is predicated on being able to consider it in its transcultural contexts. Is ‘fandom’ a safe space for affective play? It depends on one’s cultural relationship to the norms of that fandom.

Put simply, I believe we can no longer adequately account for the diversity of fan experiences and expressions – even of seemingly ‘known’ objects – without taking into account the transcultural contexts in which they are performed.

Sangita Shresthova

Like you, my journey into being a fan begins early - probably when I was 9 during a particularly dark and lonely moment in my life. At that time, I had been living in Kathmandu for 2 years after our third move between Nepal and what was then Czechoslovakia (and later became the Czech Republic). We didn’t have a TV at home and the only radio available was run by the state. Though I wasn’t aware of it as such, my life at that time was marked a profound sense of isolation, a sense that I didn’t fit in anywhere given my Czech and Nepalese backgrounds. Before leaving for Nepal, I had been ostracized by my Czech classmates for being the daughter of a foreigner (not a good thing under communism). My new classmates at the international school in Kathmandu refused to eat lunch with me because I was from the eastern block (I didn’t even know what that meant at the time). My Nepalese family constantly reminded me that they did not accept my mother, and that though her, I also did not belong. I felt disjointed, disconnected, torn, split between cultures.

I discovered Bollywood (or Hindi films as they were called then) through my (older) cousin who ran an illegal video rental shop. Through the hours and hours of films I encountered as he duplicated VHS tapes on multiple VCRs hooked up in the family living room, I entered the world of Bollywood dance. In the remorseless mixing of dance genres, the diverse costumes, and culturally blended music, I saw hope for my own shattered existence. I saw that there could, maybe someday, be a way for me to reconcile the cultural conflicts that defined my life at that time. I thought that, perhaps, I too could find a way to mix, remix, and blend my, by definition, transnational identity. I felt like I had finally found my home.

I became a dancer, because of this experience with Bollywood dance.

As time went on, Bollywood, in particular an understanding of Bollywood as an uncomfortable blending of cultures, helped me find my people, so to speak, as I connected with other fans, who were drawn to the films (and dances) for the same reasons. In 2001, a small group of us started a Bollywood Film Festival in Prague - a festival that aimed to use Hindi films to support the creation of a space that celebrated diversity. Our initial impulse was very much about celebrating our fandom of Bollywood films and using the festival as a mechanism to invite others to join in. We soon established a strong community of people who were drawn to Bollywood. The initial, unfunded, years were really about that community. We would barely scrape together money to rent a space and cover screening fees and made things happen through broad based volunteer participation. One person brought the projector, another brought a stove so we could cook Indian tea.  As we revelled in the shared space created through the films screens, I felt I finally belonged.

While I still recognize the importance of the participatory culture that was supported through the early years of the Bollywood festival, I am now also very cognizant of the ways in which nationalism, politics, corporate interests were also very much part of this nascent transnational community, and how I chose to temporarily ignore these realities.  Over time, the pressures created by the Indian Embassy regarding how India was represented, increasingly untenable financial demands placed on us by film distribution companies, and my growing sense of a disturbingly enduring Orientalism (Said) permeating public perceptions of our event (despite our best efforts) became more and more apparent. As the festival organizer (and Director of Programming), I tried to negotiate these challenges with the hope that we could still protect (what I saw) as a thriving fandom based in an understanding of Bollywood as a diverse and truly transnational content world.

After 11 years, I gave up and left the festival frustrated, hurt and disillusioned with how our effort had been stifled by the ideological and institutional powers that sought to moderate, and ultimately control, our fannish experience of Bollywood films. As I look back at it now, I feel that my experience with the Prague Bollywood Festival has much to teach us (and me) about transnational fandom and how its experience is necessarily imbricated in complex power dynamics and am left with the question of how we can begin to productively unpack the experiences of fans given these realities.

Though our experiences of transnational fandom are clearly different, I feel they connect in surprisingly productive ways as we are both grappling with these pervasive questions in our own ways.

How Do You Like It So Far? Podcast, Episode 4

This week, Colin and I sat down to talk together about why we were making this podcast, what we hope to accomplish, how we understand the current media environment, and yes, how we like it so far. Check it out. Next week, we begin a series of interviews around Black Panther. 

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Dayna Chatman & Lori Kido Lopez (Pt 2).

Lori

It’s great to hear about your work, Dayna!  It’s been about 6 years since we were students together at Annenberg, and when I left I think you were still in coursework so it’s been awesome to see what cool research you’ve taken up since then.  I also appreciate that Henry paired us up because our work has so much productive overlap!

The questions you’re asking about how fan communities coalesce on Twitter are so important, particularly since we have seen so many people of color have taken to this platform.  There’s been a great deal of conversation about Black Twitter, but I’ve been interested to see how Asian Americans are also using Twitter to engage in all sorts of antiracist fan activism.  Some of my most recent research has examined the deployment of hashtags such as #OnlyOnePercent, #MakeMulanRight, #StarringJohnCho, #AAironfist and #WhitewashedOUT and the way that journalists have engaged with Twitter users about these issues.  In some ways Twitter provides a boon to research because the community is right there, sharing this really public platform and inviting participation to some degree.  But I’d love to hear more from you about what you see as the challenges of studying Twitter.  Do you feel like you’ve been able to develop productive ways of accessing and analyzing fan communities on Twitter, and could you explain what are some of the specific challenges of studying marginalized communities on Twitter?

Dayna

Thanks for your question, Lori. And let me say that I too am glad to have this opportunity to discuss my work with you after some many years away from USC. We both have taken different trajectories in our work, but there is still significant overlap.

Online research of fan communities is always tricky. Individuals don’t post to Twitter with the assumption that it will be seen by anyone other than a targeted audience. In marginalized communities there has always been a distrust of any type of research whether it’s conducted for academic purposes or financial gain by corporations. Twitter is a space where groups of users  intersect and companies take that opportunity to conduct market research. Additionally, scholars like myself who are “acafans” who both disseminate research and participate in fan communities on Twitter. Essentially, we navigate between two poles within the space of Twitter, and even if we are well meaning and see ourselves as insiders, not everyone will see us that way. The reality of being an “outsider within” once I stepped into research on Scandal fandom, hit me in an unexpected way when questions about my intent were raised by Black American Twitter users during the process of my study. I learned that even though IRB offices classify most online research as exempt from specific protocols of notification and consent, it’s very important to be forthcoming with your intentions and the process of collecting the artifacts (data) that will be examined. Thus, the biggest challenge for me was grapplying with how best to collect and analyze the “data”—tweets, images, interactions, etc.—in a manner that would not be viewed as taking advantage of the fan community I was attempting to shed light on and make visible in the field of fan/fandom studies. I cannot say that I have completely found the answer that would alleviate the possible concerns of the community I’m focused on in my work, but it is something that remains at the forefront of my thoughts as I consider how to continue my research.  

Another challenge relates to analyzing tweets. Identifying specific hashtags, phrases, etc. beforehand helps a lot. Another element that was central to the work I did around Scandal fandom was time. Because my team and I collected tweets while fans live-tweeted during  the original broadcast, we were able to locate tweets during specific moments and narrow those down through filtering. When I examined tweets it was for the purpose of constructing a narrative about Black American fans’ engagement and participatory practices online. I did this by organizing data thematically; identifying shared sentiment, interpretations, and word usage; and, assessing the ways blackness and Black cultural experiences are signified during the process of television viewing.

I’m interested to know what your experience has been like exploring Asian American fan communities on Twitter, Lori. Also, in my work so far I haven’t discussed media activism, but I, of course, know it has been central to Black American politics for decades. My question for you is what do you see as the pros and cons to Asian American fan communities’ activism online? I ask this question because there is a frequent dismissal of activism enacted online; “hashtag activism” for instance, is thrown around like a dirty word and often viewed as political noise that has little to no societal impact. In your work, you must have encountered moments where Asian American fans’ activism succeeded and failed. Would you share a few examples?

Lori

It is definitely the case that some Asian American fan activism has had serious traction, while others have been less effective.  Let me give an example of both.  One incident that led to actual change was the casting of the Hellboy reboot.  In August 2017, white actor Ed Skrein started tweeting about how excited he was to be cast in a Japanese American role for the film.  Fans immediately responded with frustration about the whitewashing, particularly in a year that had been rife with white actors taking roles from Asian Americans.  Many used the hashtag #whitewashedOUT, which had been a coordinated hashtag campaign from May 2017 to start a conversation on Twitter about the range of problems facing Asian Americans in Hollywood.  In a stunning turn of events, Ed Skrein announced days later that he was dropping out of the project so it could be cast more appropriately, and Daniel Dae Kim later was given the role.  This seemed like a clear case where a politicized collective of fans were able to use the affordances of Twitter to directly address the source of a problem (even if the problem centers on a celebrity figure), communicate their concern in an effective way, and help make the argument that change is necessary.

But let’s look at another incident that was far more organized and multifaceted, and had no influence on the media text in question -- the casting of the Netflix series Iron Fist.  In this case, fans were once again outraged to find out that white actor Finn Jones had been cast to play Kung Fu master Danny Rand.  A fan collective called Nerds of Color immediately set to work organizing around this issue using a wide variety of well-trodden tactics.  They wrote long-form news articles explaining their position, allied with the digital activism collective at 18 Million Rising to collect signatures on a petition, hosted a podcast with ComicsAlliance to discuss the issue, shared dozens of pieces of fan art depicting an Asian American Danny Rand, set up interviews with Asian American actors and other professionals about siding with their cause, and provoked a Twitter conversation with over 11,000 tweets using the hashtag #AAironfist.

Despite these efforts, the casting remained unchanged -- an outcome that unfortunately is far more common than what happened with Hellboy.  Yet you didn’t ask about representational change, you asked about societal impact.  And I think that despite the fact that conversations around Hellboy resulted in the desired casting changes, the conversations around Iron Fist could be said to have a much more profound social resonance.  I strive to avoid being overly idealistic about the vague notion that “changing the conversation” or “raising awareness” are acceptable outcomes for activist campaigns, because it is certainly the case that horrific social problems like racist policing and gun violence seem to remain unaffected no matter how much we talk about them.  But in the arena of Asian American representation we actually have seen the dial move quite a bit in recent years -- including the successful rise of Asian American sitcoms, Netflix series, films, directors, showrunners, writers, comedians, and more.  It’s my contention that we can never look at these incidents in isolation from one another, but we have to consider the way that a “failed” Twitter campaign and the eventual possibilities for the greenlighting Master of None or Crazy Rich Asians are interconnected.  Hashtag activism does play a role in contributing to the larger argument that Asian Americans are an important audience and consumer base whose desires should be addressed, regardless of whether or not individual properties end up making the right casting decision.

I would also say that it’s been interesting to see the differences between Black Twitter and what we might call Asian American Twitter.  While many participants in Black Twitter have become wary of being exploited because there has been so much scrutiny of their discourse, Asian Americans are so hungry to be noticed that I rarely hear complaints about the particular ways in which they’re being observed.  That’s another reason why I think it’s helpful for us to talk to each other about how we are studying Twitter communities and what we are finding, because there are some serious differences across differently racialized fan communities.  On that note, I would love to hear more about your future research on hybrid Black-Asian fan communities.  Do you think this kind of cross-racial investigations can reshape fan studies of race in necessary ways?  What might be productive about expanding beyond these more US-centric conversations to include global perspectives?

Dayna

I think one of the best ways to have a deeper conversation about fan communities and practices and race is to move beyond US-centric conversations--where appropriate. I recognize that there may be constraints to conducting such research in terms of access and resources, but in some instances it seems necessary. This is particularly the case with my interest in issues that arise globally within K-pop music and fandom, including anti-Black racism, cultural misappropriation, isolation of Black fans.

I first encountered K-pop music in a cafe in Daegu, South Korea in October 2014. The song that played was “Bounce”  by Bobby--a South Korean rapper who had won first place on the third season of the hip-hop competition show Show Me the Money. Of course it was no real surprise to hear a rap song in another country; hip-hop has traveled globally for decades. But what did strike me was just how familiar the song felt despite being in another language. I asked a friend and colleague from USC--Kelly Song--about the music scene in South Korea and was introduced to a whole new world of music and, subsequently, fandom.

What resonated with me, first in my encounter with Bobby, and later with Rain’s “30 Sexy” music video, was that sense of familiarity that I could only describe as blackness--significations of Black American aesthetics, music and dance style. With that came a feeling of nostalgia; I was brought back to my days as a fangirl in middle and high school in the late 1990s and 2000s when I loved male bands like Jodeci and Dru Hill. Eventually, while watching fan videos made by Black women and reading comments on social media platforms, I discovered that I wasn’t the only person drawn in by the similarities between contemporary K-pop music and R&B and pop music in American in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. My interest in understanding both the global flow of Black American culture into Korea, and Black American fans’ relationship to K-pop grew from these observations.

Besides the nostalgia and joy that permeated from Black women fans’ discussions of K-pop music is frustration and, sometimes, feelings of anger. As I mentioned earlier, K-pop music has been heavily influenced by Black popular culture. However, South Korea is a country that is currently working through conceptions of race and racial difference as it encounters migrants from non-Asian countries. Moreover, South Korea has a history anti-Black prejudice--in the form of blackface performances--that continues to this day. There have been many instances that have given Black fans’ pause when it comes to their enjoyment of the music including K-pop idols’ demonstrating how to “talk Black” (a.k.a. use African American Vernacular English) on radio shows, wearing dreads, afros and cornrows, using the “N-word” when performing American songs, featuring the Confederate flag in music videos, and occasionally donning blackface. Black fans’ reservations about K-pop music and fandom are often exacerbated by the fact that non-Black fans tend to downplay the significance of these mishaps by presuming that idols have a lack of knowledge about race relations in the U.S. and therefore Black fans shouldn’t be “too sensitive” or offended when idols engaged in racially insensitive behavior.

There is much to be gained within fandom studies in the examination of both race and fandom within the U.S. as well as trans-nationally. I think that sometimes the impetus within fan/fandom studies is to focus on shared practices and enjoyment rather than conflict within fadom and negotiations made by individual fans. While prior scholarship has been keen to focus on gender differences in fandom, issues of racial differences within fadom have not be addressed in meaningful ways. I see this changing, especially as I look at the contributions you, Lori, have made to the field, and those of other scholars such as Kristin Warner, Rukmini Pande, Miranda Larsen, to name a few.

Lori, I’m interested to know what the future you envision for your own research. What new aspects or issues do you plan on exploring or hope that others will explore in this area?

Lori

Your work on Black fans of K-Pop is super intriguing to me, because I do think that we often neglect these kinds of complex cross-racial affinities, both in their potential for appropriation and the ways they can produce meaningful hybridities.  My current research centers on Hmong Americans and their culturally-specific media cultures, and I noticed that Hmong in the diaspora are also quite active within K-Pop and other Korean-centric fandoms.  There are a lot of Facebook groups for Hmong fans who love and celebrate Korean cultural products, but I have also seen some discussion from Hmong Americans who are concerned about the sublimation of Hmong culture to Hallyu. This made me wonder how we can make sense of one culture in diaspora encountering another culture in diaspora, and how those power differences are negotiated in digital spaces.  

I would love to see scholars continue to tackle these issues, and have been very happy to see work coming out of some of my graduate students at UW-Madison in this arena.  Camilo Diaz Pino has been researching anime fandoms in Mexico City and the way they have been taken up within political protest, while Wan-Jun Lu is studying the way that Taiwanese fans of the online streaming platform Viki become cultural intermediaries who are both consumers and producers of cosmopolitan discourses.  These particular projects can add richness and specificity to our understanding of these larger global movements and new cultural formations.

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Dayna Chatman & Lori Kido Lopez (Pt 1).

Lori

My primary interest in fan studies is its connection to media activism.  As a scholar of race/ethnicity and media, my research has centered around the question of how communities of color have used media in the fight for social justice, as well as how entertainment media has been a site of injustice that needs to be remedied.  This intersects with studies of race/ethnicity when communities of color are able to deploy their passionate engagement with media or the strength of their fan communities as a mechanism for improving the way they are represented or addressing other manifestations of racism in media.

When I was a doctoral student at USC, Henry was just starting up the Civic Paths research group that developed a research project on fan activism.  At that point I was primarily studying Asian American media activists in the Los Angeles area who were fighting to improve their treatment in Hollywood.  This included a group of Asian Americans who were fans of The Last Airbender, and were angry that the live action film was set to star white actors even though the source material seemed to clearly depict Asian peoples and cultures.  I studied them as they developed into the organization Racebending.com, which took on all sorts of casting issues where people of color were being denied roles in major motion pictures.

I have followed this topic with interest in the years since then, as the intertwined practices of whitewashing and yellowface have continued unabated even amongst a growing chorus of opposition.  Indeed, we have seen what Foucault might call a “veritable discursive explosion” surrounding the racist casting practices of movies like Ghost in the Shell (2017), Aloha (2015), Doctor Strange(2016), Dragonball Evolution (2009), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), and the Netflix show Iron Fist.  These are the kinds of issues that traditional grassroots media advocacy organizations and watchdog groups for Asian Americans in media have worked to address since the early 1970s, using the same language and tactics.  Yet we have seen a move away from the centrality of these kinds of organizations to the surfacing of ad hoc fan collectives that use Twitter to coordinate hashtag campaigns in order to make their outrage and their demands visible.  

Another aspect of fan studies that has intersected with racial politics has been the engagement of sports fans in the fight to change the mascot of the Washington professional football team, which remains a painfully racist slur to this day.  Although there has not been a particularly robust contingent of Washington’s own football fans who have taken up this cause, I noticed that sports fans were still being engaged by name-change activists—specifically, that Native American activist groups had been strategically targeting Washington’s opponents.  Deploying what I call “oppositional fandom,” name-change activists were able to gain support for their cause through using the positioning of football fans in opposition to their opponents.  That is, those who were already emotionally invested in seeing Washington lose could more easily be convinced that they were also engaged in practices that were harmful to Native Americans.  The sports arena may not necessarily be the most productive space for engaging in the kind of political education and building of racial empathy that might actually engender sympathy for changing the team’s name.  But I continue to be interested in the way the different strategies and tactics that activists identify and utilize in order to call attention to their cause and work to change hearts and minds.  The heightened emotions surrounding fan cultures, objects, and communities can provide a potent opportunity for such work.

Moving forward, I think it will be important for scholars of race and fan studies to continue to interrogate the ethical dimensions of these kinds of thorny issues.  Fans of all kinds have always needed to negotiate their fandom alongside their political inclinations, but some of these issues are coming to the foreground in ways that are even more difficult to ignore.  For instance, how are fans of football negotiating their endorsement of a sport that is known to cause irreparable physical damage, and where the majority of players are Black men?  In the midst of the #MeToo movement, how should Asian American fans of Aziz Ansari respond to stories about his shady behavior?  Rather than merely feeling uncomfortable cognitive dissonance about the confluence of these issues, fans must negotiate their affective responses and consumer choices in the face of broad activist movements.  I would be excited to see how fan studies scholars would position themselves amidst these debates, and how scholars of media activism are assessing the deployment of fans in these emerging conversations.

Dayna

My primary areas of interest within fan studies are Black American fans' practices, meaning making, and methods for navigating conflict within fandoms. I did not initially set out to study fans or fandom; instead, my research trajectory grew organically from frustration with conventional approaches used by Black feminist media scholars to explore Black women's representation in media. I found myself limited by interrogating media images from the lens of stereotypes and archetypes, which left little room to speak of the interpretive "gray area"— a space in which meanings are not concrete, are myriad and continuously negotiated. I decided that it was time to shift from my own interpretive readings s to exploration of fans’ grappling with the gray areas of media artifacts.

I immediately discovered that, historically, traditional audience reception research and fandom scholarship has failed to address the diversity of media consumers, thus taking for granted the unique ways non-white audiences and fans make sense of and engage with various media. Inspired by works by Black women scholars, including Jacqueline Bobo (1995), Robin Means Coleman (2000), and Rebecca Wanzo, I embarked on new research for my dissertation project at the University of Southern California.

My dissertation explored the production of and fan engagement around television series with Black women protagonists in the post-broadcasting era, and the drama Scandal, created by Shonda Rhimes, was the central case study. As a fan of the program--who often live-tweeted during broadcasts--I was invested in examining Black American fans' conversation around the show. Consequently, I proposed a study of live-tweeting Scandal for the University of Southern California's Norman Lear Center's Social Media Impact Project. Through the data collected during the third season of Scandal, I contributed a chapter to the second edition of Fandom: Identities and communities in a mediated world (2017). My essay, titled “Black Twitter and the politics of viewing Scandal,” focuses on fan and anti-fans’ discussion of the program.

One of the aspects I flesh out in my essay is the concept of "politics of viewing," which I pose as a theoretical model for thinking about Black fans' engagement with, reception and discussion of contemporary television in the age of digital and social media. I argue that social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook afford Black fans' spaces they can transform into Black counter-publics. Black counter-publics have been historically constituted within Black institutions such as Black churches, activist organizations, and press and their purpose has been to provide spaces in which to engage in everyday discussion of Black experience outside the purview of out-group members and serves as the foundation for the formation of Black political thought and collective identities. The critical difference between traditional Black counter-publics and the new ones that are facilitated by new media is that they are not hidden from view of non-Blacks. In the context of new media, I contend, Black fans carve out a Black counter-public in which they utilize the written word, images, and audio-visuals to express and make visible their pleasures and to engage in debates about and critiques of specific media texts and their consumers. It is a process whereby Black fans are cognizant of and attempt to negotiate their relationship to a given media text and reconcile that with perceptions of how others can potentially view the media text. The politics of viewing manifests as what Stuart Hall calls a "critical politics" that goes beyond an evaluation of whether a particular image is "positive" or "negative" and therefore either "good" or "bad" for Blacks.

It is my view that because media travels globally, and fans experience and participate in fandom not just locally, fan/fandom studies must emphasize not only race but also cross-cultural/racial encounters. In forthcoming projects, I examine Black women fans' participatory engagement online with fan communities around Korean popular music (K-pop). K-pop music has grown in popularity in the United States over the last decade due to YouTube and social media platforms. K-pop draws influence from Western pop, R&B and hip-hop music, dance, and aesthetics. Founders of the three major K-pop companies--SM Entertainment, JYP Entertainment, and YG Entertainment--have explicitly stated that "Black music" during the 1980s and '90s influenced the type of music they wanted to manufacture in South Korea. As a K-pop fan, I have personally observed the popularity of the genre amongst other Black women both at concerts and in various online spaces. My work will address topics such as the global flow of signs of blackness, confrontation and struggle within fandoms, and Black women fans' strategies of resistance in digital spaces.

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Rukmini Pande and Rebecca Wanzo (Part 2)

Rukmini

As you've also gestured to in your opening statement, I find that institutional demands/disciplinary divides (as well as timezones, geographical location etc), often make it impossible to interact/build networks within the field so I was particularly excited for the opportunity of having this exchange. I was nodding along to a most of your observations in the introductory notes but to kick this off the conversation I want to pick out two aspects that I found most intriguing and I hope to bring up some others as we go along.

1) Your thoughts on proper/improper fans and modes of fandom struck me as something very relevant to the current and future conversations in the field. The "female" fan has been consistently theorized as unruly and their consumption practices are largely seen as disruptive to how media corporations wish them to behave in terms of interacting with a text. However, this theorization has concerned mostly white women fans. You've also said in your other work that "African Americans are always already improper subjects; part of their pleasure in a text can thus be about resisting the normativity of whiteness even as they claim their own normativity." How would you see these threads interacting, especially when we look at how pleasure, desire, queerness, etc also interface with these categorizations of proper/improper fandom?

2) The second aspect I was thinking about is the concept of alienation. In my experience, non-white fans often express their experiences of loneliness and alienation from networks of squee and I've talked a little bit about the notion of being a "fandom killjoy" (in line with Sara Ahmed's formulation of feminist killjoys) in that context. I don't think anti-fandom quite covers the complexities of that position so I wondered if you had any further thoughts on that as well.

Rebecca

I think the place of women fans from the corporate perspective is complicated. On the one hand, the fact that women consume is something that corporations know. So they are always selling to them. But they don't consume the same things and at the same price point in some highly valued areas of popular culture. The infamous cancellation of the cartoon Young Justice was because the show had too many girl viewers and girls allegedly did not buy toys (the gender normative societal structures should also be acknowledged here—that one issue is that parents may also not buy these toys for girls). Girls and women play the most computer games, but they buy a smaller percentage of expensive FPS games or other high profile genre games. But then, women have consistently been the backbone of consumer for the publishing industry. In most recent years, Twilight and the most profitable fan fiction in history—Fifty Shades—are appealing to fans of the series. But of course, part of what I object to in some of fan studies is that a lot of people would not read "fandom" in the Fifty Shades consumer.

I think you're completely right to point to the fact that the "fandom killjoy" is completely different from anti-fandom. Part of what Ahmed argues is that the feminist and anti-racist killjoy does is disrupt spaces of pleasure and interactions in places that should be home for them (like the allegedly progressive university). By calling attention to racist or sexist representation in a representation or fan space, they can be isolated from it.

Of course, a huge irony is that people opposed to diversity in traditional fandom spaces like science fiction and superhero comics want to refuse the possibility that any pleasure can be had when people of color and feminism and queerness are at the center of any story. The sad and rabid puppies revolted against narratives about people of color and queerness finally getting mainstream attention. There is irony is in their rage at Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice win, which for all its interesting treatment of gender is a strong space opera in a classic science fiction tradition. But their decision to lock out diversity from the awards ballot arguably produced a commitment in science fiction and fantasy fans to truly look beyond the usual suspects and actually award a radically different kind of epic fantasy in NK Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, a brilliant contribution to the field and so far from Tolkien that it opens up ideas of what people want and can count as epic fantasy.

And I feel this way about some Star Trek fans too, who are determined to hate Sonequa Martin-Green and be angry at "Social Justice Warriors" invading Trek. But as many people have noted, have these people ever watched Trek? Social justice is in its DNA. That aside, "SJW" is also just code for the idea that a show let a brown or queer person be something non-peripheral.

Rukmini

I'm glad that you see what I mean about the difference between anti-fandom and fandom killjoys because I struggle to articulate it sometimes! Anti-fandom still has an element of community I think—or at least a shared hate for a text...

It's also interesting that there are these conversations happening at multiple levels between different people so that you have the sad puppies et al who are very clearly anti-ALL diversity and against whom "female fandom" or "transformative fandom" is positioned explicitly. But you also have echoes of the same rhetoric very much present in those ‘liberal fandom’ spaces as well. This is especially glaring when it comes to discussions on issues like why characters of color don't get the same amount of creative fan output (fanfiction etc) around them.

Rebecca

I want to follow up on some of your discussion in your opening statement about your use of postcolonial theory in your work. I'm interested in how that overlaps and diverges from histories of black cultural criticism in the U.S., some of which have a relationship to the work done by Hall and Gilroy in the UK but not exclusively. How do you think colonization is being framed in relationship to fan attachments?

Rukmini

I'd say my use of postcolonial theory is mainly in terms of looking at how online fandom is functioning as a transnational/transcultural space where exchanges about representation, authenticity, and identity with regard to popular cultural texts that are often informed by neo-colonial narratives and power dynamics. These dynamics then structure how fans talk about ideas like heroism, queerness, etc. The MCU is one example that comes to mind where, as a fan scholar from the Global South, I am aware that one of the projects of the movies (at least the ones we've seen so far) is to naturalize US-centered imperialist ideas of who has the power to walk into other countries and engage in covert warfare etc. These narratives work alongside how fandom works with individual characters and story arcs and how "SJW" issues are discussed with respect to US white feminism, homonationalism etc. For example, in my work I've found a lot of differing opinions around terms like "fan of color" because of the US-centricity.

I think postcolonial frameworks, particularly those that tackle cyberculture, give a useful tool to talk about these multiple issues and also ask scholars to foreground issues of racial/cultural/ethnic/religious identity along with gender and sexuality when talking about how fan attachments are formed and sometimes come into conflict.

Also of course with practices like racebending I've found Said's work on contrapuntal reading to be very useful when trying to talk about both the possibilities and the limitations of such fan practice.

Rebecca

I totally see how discussions of fandoms can be very U.S.-centric, and also see the how the framing of fans of color can be problematic in that context. The discussion of imperialism is so essential (both content and in terms of understanding media industries). But I am also interested in intra-group framing or regulation or treatment of fandom. In other words, because of varied kinds of limited representations in the Global South and minority populations in non-western nations, do you see a call for certain groups to be fans of something because of the political stakes of doing so?

Rukmini

Yes, I do actually! I was thinking about your work on that aspect where you've talked about instances where identity groups are called on to become fans or support a text as an act of politics. That can be very powerful of course but it also leads to some interesting conflicts around differing intersections of identity. I see this reflected in a lot of conversations around queer ships in fandom where it is often white queerness that is elevated above all other considerations which can lead to feelings of alienation amongst queer fans of color. Do you think that these faultlines also run within the models of interpretation that you've talked about?

Rebecca

As a number of people have argued, one challenge in fan studies and cultural studies criticism as it stands more broadly is the way in which recuperation and recognition can cross the line into uncritical celebration. Thus problematic treatments of identity are acknowledged in a pro forma way but it may not explore how the erasure of race or queer or non-western subjects can be part of what makes the text pleasurable. Scholarship on Twilight fandom is an interesting example of this. On the one hand, it is important to understand why Twilight is so popular with adolescent girls (and many women) in ways that speak to the Janice Radway-inflected discussion of women's consumption as a negotiation with patriarchy and traditional roles while also acknowledging the problematic nature of the texts. At the same time, people understandably will reject a psychoanalytic approach that slightly pathologizes women fans. However, the desire to recuperate fans can slide into lack of critique, and the ways in which a text like Twilight totally depends on whiteness to construct romantic ideals can be elided in the recuperation of the (white) fan girl. This is certainly not the case with all scholarship, but there is an interesting divide, for example, between people who make a case for the books as anti-racist and others who see racism within it. One of the challenges is trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that some of the fans take pleasure in the racial logic of the texts, which might serve to indict some of the fans who are particularly invested in Edward as white Byronic ideal and contrast to literally animalistic Indigenous rival. One of the things the rise in paranormal romance has increased is the frequency that "racism" is discussed in romance fiction, but it is by allowing species to serve as a proxy-for-race. I think we still struggle with how to deal with the non-idealized fan in ways that don't fall into false consciousness arguments. I've been thinking about that recently with the Black Panther debates as well.

 Rukmini

I've been reading so much around the movie as well. I think it, along with Thor: Ragnarok, makes for a really interesting intervention into the possibilities and limitations of "representation" within franchises like the MCU. Especially since the burden of being all things AND interrupting the larger neo-colonial/colonizing structures of these franchises is put on individual projects.

I also struggle with the tendency of fan studies to be simultaneously very careful about not pathologizing or infantilizing female-identified fandom but not extending that same care to issues outside of gender and sometimes sexuality. There are, of course, continual media framings of (mainly white) female fans as irrational etc but I feel like we need to do more than continue to combat that cycle because it isn't moving the field forward. I remember I attended a talk once where the presenter stressed that due to their background in anthropology they wanted to be careful about not treating fandom as a terrain to be colonized by researchers. I understood the impulse but I also had to put my hand up and point out that you can't just map out the same logics of colonial exploitation onto spaces that have been dominated by white fans!

I also want to add on to your comment that it is important to recognize that some fans "take pleasure in the racial logic of the texts" because I think that's really key too. The term "pleasure" is thrown around in fandom studies as if it is a neutral descriptor but that's quite misleading. The idea of a "fandom killjoy" also ties into that because when issues of race are raised they are often framed as "ruining the fun" for white fans who "just want to enjoy themselves." This then puts non-white fans in an uncomfortable position of being anti-pleasure, even when they are in many cases pointing out that fandom's insistence on elevating white characters is driven by structural racism. I think that bringing specificity to our descriptions of pleasure and how it functions (taking into account multiple aspects of fan identity) could help with producing better analyses of these negotiations.

Rebecca

I think it is fair to say that people from lots of perspectives feel like people who talk about popular culture kill their joy. I have noted many suggestions that people should stop talking about politics in Black Panther because it is just a movie. At the same time, part of what is so pleasurable for some people is that the articulated politics are so overt that to avoid talking about them is to reduce the film to black people looking beautiful (and admittedly, that’s a huge pleasure of the film)! I think those of us who work on the popular still have so much work to do to convince other scholars and the broader public that the popular is a place where “real world” issues are articulated and fought over.  The nature of genre, form, medium, and reception should make us think long and hard over claims about what the work does, but one of the reasons I think fan studies is so interesting as a field is that it helps unpack what gives people joy and why. That joy can’t be mapped simplistically and transparently onto a subject’s desire for anything is a given, but it is a still an interesting site for understanding love in the public sphere.

Bibliography

Busse, Kristina. 2013. “Geek Hierarchies, Boundary Policing, and the Gendering of the Good Fan.” Participations 10 (1): 73–91.

Fernández, María. 1999. “Postcolonial Media Theory.” Art Journal 58 (3): 59–73.

https://doi.org/10.2307/777861.

Fiske, John. 1992. “The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media.” In The Cultural Economy of Fandom, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 30–49. London: Routledge.

Nayar, Pramod. 2008. “New Media, Digitexuality, and Public Space: Reading “Cybermohalla.”

Postcolonial Text 4 (1). http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/786.

Scott, Suzanne. 2009. “Repackaging Fan Culture: The Regifting Economy of Ancillary Content Models.” Transformative Works and Cultures 3.

http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/150/122.

Stanfill, Mel. 2013. “‘They’re Losers, but I Know Better’: Intra-Fandom Stereotyping and the

Normalization of the Fan Subject.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30 (2): 117–34.

https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2012.755053.

Wanzo, Rebecca. 2015. “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 19. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0699.

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Rukmini Pande and Rebecca Wanzo (Part 1)

Rukmini Pande

I’m currently an Assistant Professor at O.P. Jindal University in New Delhi, India. In terms of fandom I’ve been a participant since around 2003 and I’ve moved through a lot of different fannish spaces. I’ve been in fandoms for Bollywood, Anime and Manga and USA/UK-based texts and also been fairly active in RPF (Real Person Fiction). I’ve also seen fandom move in terms of medium from platforms like Yahoo groups and Livejournal to Tumblr and Twitter.  I’ve been studying fandom as a scholar since 2010 and recently completed my PhD at the University of Western Australia (Perth) on the intersections of racial/cultural/ethnic identity within these spaces. Excitingly, my thesis is being published as a monograph for the University of Iowa Press and I hope that it will be out in late 2018.

My academic work is concerned with the ways in which race/racism structures fandom and fan studies’ architecture itself. As pointed out by scholars such as Rebecca Wanzo and Kirsten Warner, this gap in the field was noted early on in John Fiske’s (1992) highly influential study of fans and their affective economies, and continues to be registered as troubling in overviews, anthologies, and keynotes. However, this acknowledgement often performs the rhetorical gesture of naming the problem only to, once again, set it aside. This strategy is enabled by the continuing conceptualization of racial identity as an additional lens to be applied to the operations of fandom rather than something that structures those operations in a fundamental and foundational manner.

Part of the way forward is for fan scholars to acknowledge that the ‘go-to’ theoretical frameworks of the field when conceptualizing fan identity and its operations actively encourage the erasure of non-white fans while highlighting issues of gender and sexuality. This is, of course, a fallacious division because these categories are never not constituted in relation to race. I argue that because fan studies does not consider whiteness as a racialized identity with specific effects, its operations on fandom structures can be presented as normative.

It is also crucial to note that this footnoting of racial/cultural/ethnic identity must not be seen as an oversight but as a consistent pattern of erasure. Rebecca Wanzo’s (2015) significant intervention into the genealogy of fan studies as a field points to the glaring whiteness of its bibliographies and the excision of the theoretical apparatuses and academic histories that do take into account the influence of race on the experience and interpretation of popular culture. Crucially, she also maintains that that the field remains silent on race/ racism because it disturbs some of its most dearly held truisms.

I want to push back against this practice while also encompassing the complex and shifting identity positions and power relations at work within media fandom’s platforms as well its individual transnational/transcultural exchanges. To accomplish this, my chosen framework is that of postcolonial cybercultural theory. To expand on this approach briefly, postcolonial cybercultural theorists examine the circulation of representational power between the Global North and South—encompassing both resistance and co-optation—within digital networks (Fernández 1999; Nayar 2008).

Looking at media fandom as an example of a postcolonial cyberspace reframes its operations as a transnational/cultural dialogic networked space that interfaces with USA and UK-centric popular cultural texts influenced by neo-liberal capitalism and neo-imperialism. At the same time, this positioning also allows a more nuanced examination of how diverse interstices of identity­—racial/cultural/ethnic identity, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, etc.—impact the way transformative practices are popularized within these communities.

My use of this theoretical approach has several effects. Firstly, it forces a (re)examination of these communities in terms of their relationship to media objects (that are produced under the conditions that can be termed neo/colonial). Secondly, it foregrounds the importance of their demographic makeup. And thirdly, it puts a spotlight on the unevenness of internet-mediated platforms themselves as related to geopolitical issues.

By using postcolonial theory in my work I am able to talk about the complex and often ‘messy’ interactions that non-white fans have with both popular cultural texts and the fandoms that flourish around them. Such a theoretical framework not only centers race/ethnicity/national identity in considerations of gender and sexuality but also offers a whole new set of tools to consider the operations of meaning-making within fan communities. My deployment of postcolonial cyberculture has enabled me to engage with not just individual incidents of racism in fan spaces but rather theorize their underlying enabling mechanisms. It also allows me to talk about the complexity of terms such as “fans of color” or “non-white fans” and how they are often unwieldy and enmeshed in extremely fraught conversations about authenticity and representation, yet at the same time can offer points of solidarity and coalition building within a digital space still structured by whiteness.

That is not to say there is no work being done on the area at all. Indeed, some of the most interesting recent scholarship has emerged in the field of transnational/transcultural fandoms where the source text is non-Western and often in languages other than English. This is very valuable work, especially as it destabilizes the Anglophone focus of the field. However, fan studies scholars should be cautious of this impulse that seeks to displace the workings of racial identity as most relevant and ‘obvious’ to something other than traditional media fandom studies, which is then free to tread largely familiar theoretical pathways.

In my opinion, fandom studies is currently at a crossroads where it must adopt more inclusive theoretical paradigms in order to successfully reflect on the changing nature of fandom communities. Far from being irrelevant or niche audiences, media fandom spaces are more diverse, more mainstream, more vocal, more conflicted, and more articulate about these issues than ever before. While the challenge of encapsulating the complexity of these exchanges is a daunting one, it is far from insurmountable

Along these lines I believe that the most vital issue for emerging research in the field is the insistence on decolonizing our bibliographies and our theoretical frameworks. This is hard work, especially as the burden of it often falls on younger and marginalized scholars in increasingly precarious academic systems. However, I also think that it will result in much more nuanced and valuable research going forward.

To give a concrete example of where such work is particularly necessary, I would cite the need to complicate the simplistic fangirl/boy binary that is currently a common theme in many conceptualizations of fan activity. The view that male fans participate in more easily monetized and acceptable modes of fannishness, whereas female fans are more likely to be seen as transgressive and unmanageable from a producer/marketer point of view, has gained a fair amount of currency within the discipline in recent years (Scott 2009; Stanfill 2013; Busse 2013). While it certainly holds some truth, this binary division also completely elides the differential experience of non-white male fans within these shared spaces whether online or in physical spaces like conventions. Currently, there is almost no research on this area, which I hope will be remedied soon.

Finally, I also want to underline the need to bring specificity into our descriptors when we talk about concepts such as fan ‘pleasure.’ Again, to continually defer a consideration of the ways in which whiteness structures modes of fan pleasure is—at this stage of our knowledge about fan communities—to actively participate in furthering the operations of white privilege. Relatedly, it is vital to stop the practice of using universalizing labels such as ‘transgressive’ or ‘transformative’ pleasure without explicitly naming exactly who these definitions exclude. As I have argued in my work, the meanings of descriptors like heteronormative, heteropatriarchal, escapism, and even sexual fantasy are all extremely context specific and inflected by different historical considerations. As I look forward to more scholarship in these areas, I am eager to see what other theoretical frameworks that can be brought into the conversation about contemporary fan cultures, including those of Afro-futurism, Critical Race Studies, and of course Postcolonialism.

Rebecca Wanzo

 History/Apologia/Obligato

The obligatory biographical narrative about one’s own fandom in fan studies can be made without shame (allegedly), but now may not even be obligatory. Fandom coming of age as a field may now mean that the conventions of  “confession” have been eliminated, even as one’s credentials as a fan scholar require fandom. But perhaps I am overstating the disciplining characteristic of fan studies as a field?

Of course, fan studies scholars are not gatekeepers in the way of, for example, quantitative political scientists. But as someone who is at the periphery of every field I am in I recognize that the field does discipline its participants. In the end, that may be the nature of all intellectual work. My marginalization is mostly self-produced by my intellectual promiscuity—as is the case in many sites of life, interpersonal inconstancy can make building and feeling at home a complicated enterprise. But because I am peripheral I recognize how my biographical “confession” could still make me out of place, but not because I am alone in my attachments.

Some of the first fan attachments I can remember were “ships”—I longed for Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman to get together with Lyle Waggoner’s bland Steve Trevor (what now seems proof mass media’s ability to push people to desire inexplicable heteronormative couplings).  I still resist the idea that Maddie and David having sex killed Moonlighting. I loved Remington Steele and Laura. And above all, I wanted Scarecrow and Mrs. King to be spies together forever.

I begin with the obligatory/non-obligatory statement of these attachments because of the ways in which I think my identity as a little black girl who loved these shows remains undertheorized in the field of fan studies, but that such attachments are also undertheorized in black cultural studies. I loved and watched The Cosby Show and was attached to what I term “proper black love objects,” and black cultural studies wants to account for that. But the fact that my relationship to popular love objects as a black person is undertheorized  in fan studies and the idea of fan was rarely engaged in black cultural studies outside of studies of hip hop plays a large role in why my work developed as it did.

Fan Studies’ Proper Objects

As someone who began my career as a literary scholar but discovered in graduate school that popular culture could be my object of study, I came at “fan studies” through non-traditional objects. My first book had a chapter that looked at Oprah Winfrey’s book club and her reading practices, and while Oprah has many “fans” she certainly was not a figure well-integrated into fan studies. I have always taught works in fan studies—not only Henry’s work, Penleys’NASA/Trek, and texts traditionally understood as part of the field, but have wanted to think about the trajectory from Charlotte Temple to Vampire Diaries. The long history of our pleasures and the relationship between genres over time is one of my major sites of intellectual interest and pedagogy.

It wasn’t until Kristen Warner invited me to be part of a panel for SCMS on fan studies that I wrote what has been considered a work properly situated in the field of fan studies. But it was also what made realize that I had been writing and not just teaching about the fan for years. My work on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, responses to The Princess and the Frog, and anger at white illustrator Mary Engelbreit for her pro-BLM piece of art are all about fan’s textual poaching, desires, and resistance. But the questions and ideas that emerged from this work are not the kinds of ideas traditionally addressed in fan studies as a field.

If I had had a chance earlier in my education to take classes in media studies, perhaps I would have had a different intellectual trajectory. But I don’t regret it, as I think sitting outside of the field has allowed me to see how people are often talking about the same things but not talking to each other. Moreover, part of what has shaped fan studies is imagining fans as having particular objects—scholars such as Jonathan Gray have addressed this. If only certain kinds of people are fans because of the kinds of texts they like and the kinds of activities they participate in, then we miss having a thicker analysis about what attachments to popular texts actually mean in people’s lives.

I am also now working in a field that very few people pursue if they did not grow up as fans—comics studies. A few years ago Bart Beaty asked an audience at the International Comics Art Forum how many people in the audience did not grow up reading comics. I was one of two people who raised a hand.  I often write about things I love, but more often I write about work that fills me with rage or ambivalence. Anti-fandom may get at a some percentage of that kind of affective, critical work as a scholar—but there is also something interesting to be said about doing work when you are alienated from a tradition or even other people in your field. It is something people who work in feminist theory, race or ethnic studies, or popular culture often understand. The question of what such alienation can produce in terms of the questions we ask of a work, fans, or a field is worth exploring as we continue to move beyond a binary of political celebration or condemnation and struggle with rich diversity of what popular attachments look like.

The State of Fandom Studies 2018: Introduction

I have signaled throughout the past year that I think the field of fandom studies is at a crossroads as three major anthologies appear which are mapping major new directions and introducing a new generation of scholars. These books are:

Paul Booth (ed.) A Companion to Fandom and Fan Studies

Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom

Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington (eds.) Fandom: Identities and Communities in the Mediated World, Second Edition

In addition, we want to acknowledge Kristina Busse’s Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities, which assembles the essays of one of the key figures in the field in recent years.

In recognition of the transformative moment, I have assembled a series of exchanges with contributors to the three collections which will run for almost two months. I have hosted two large scale conversations here in the past -- one in 2007  focused around gender and fan studies, a second in 2011 focused on the aca-fan identity, and now, this one. Contributors to the three books were asked to contribute, with priority given to those who have not participated in the two previous exchanges.  I created pairs of writers whose work explores similar themes to both offer overviews of their visions for the field and to engage with dialogue with each other. I will be showcasing two such exchanges per week. (See the schedule below).

I hope that this will offer a chance for all of us to get to know these (mostly) young scholars and their works better and to take some soundings of the state of fandom studies as a field. I believe doing so will provide a rich resource both for students around the world seeking to better understand fandom, as well as future generations, to identify work that speaks to their own needs and interests.

Week Beginning March 5th

Group 1

Rukmini Pande

Rebecca Wanzo

Group 2

Dayna Chatman

Lori Kido Lopez

Week Beginning March 12

Group 3

Benjamin Woo

Katie Wilson

Group 4

Kristen Warner  

Jillian Baez

W/B March 19

Group 5

Hilde Van Den Bluck

Edmond Ernest Dit Alban

Group 6

Lori Morimoto

Sangita Shresthova

W/B March 26

Group 7

Aswin Punathambaker

Bertha Chin

Group 8

Mel Stanfill

Anne Jamison

W/B April 2

Group 9

Tisha Turk

Mark Duffett

Group 10

Katherine Morrissey

Katarina Freund

W/B April 9

Group 11

Rebecca Williams

Anne Gilbert

Group 12

Lincoln Geraghty

Nicole Lamerichs   

W/B April  16

Group  13

Ross Garner

Whitney Phillips

Group 14

Bethan Jones

Melanie Kohnen

W/B April 23

Group  15

Lucy Bennett

Ruth Dellar

Group 16

Alisa Perrin

Casey McCormick

W/B April 30

Group 17  

Elizabeth Ellcessor  

Tom Phillips

Group 18

Matthew Cicci

Alexandra Edwards

W/B May 7

Group 19  

Melanie Bourdaa

Jessica Seymour