Cult Media, Fandom, and Textiles

Handicrafting as Fan Art

Brigid Cherry

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474215176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

This book is the first to explore handicrafting practiced by media fans, their online fan communities and the multiple meanings they create. Based on in-depth ethnographic research into fans on the online social network for knitters, crocheters and crafters, Ravelry, Brigid Cherry explores textile craft by fans as both an artistic practice and transformative fan work. Including case studies of projects inspired by Doctor Who, True Blood, Firefly, Harry Potter, Sherlock and steampunk, the book engages with many forms of fan production, including fan art, fan fiction and cosplay. Fans of popular films and TV shows are increasingly engaging with textile crafts as a way of reworking, reimagining and engaging with cult media texts. Proving a global phenomenon amongst fan cultures in the digital media sphere, traditional film and TV audiences are forging their fan identities and participating in wider fan communities in innovative ways through online craft forums and blogs that showcase their knitting, crochet, spinning and dyeing projects. Exploring key debates from textile and media theory, surrounding gender, domesticity, the culture industries, audiences and fan culture, this book is essential reading for students of textiles, media studies, fashion, cultural and gender studies.

1

FANDOM, TEXTILES, GENDER

As the examples given in the Introduction suggest, characters, costumes, props, settings, and other elements of film, TV, and novel series, as well as quotes, logos, and other identifiable images, can all be reproduced in knitted or crocheted fabric. This includes, but is in no way limited to, costume elements and props or set dressing made using the fiber arts. Handicrafters who self-identify as fans and incorporate their fan interests into their projects are on the alert for anything that can inspire them in their crafting when watching the films and television series or reading the novels and comics that they love. For example, when True Blood fans are watching the episode “Shake and Fingerpop” (2009), they enjoy the anticipation and excitement (if not arousal) of the vampire Eric Northman giving Lafayette Reynolds his blood in order to cure the infected gunshot wound Lafayette received when escaping captivity in Eric’s bar Fangtasia (vampire blood has healing power when drunk by humans). However, the fan handicrafters are also interested in an incidental element of the scene, one that has very little to do with the events in the narrative or the plot, an element that many viewers may well overlook. Their attention is drawn to the granny square blanket Lafayette is huddling under in his fever. This blanket does have signifying meaning—as a “comfort blanket” it reinforces the fact that Lafayette is ill and suffering after his ordeal in the dungeon at Fangtasia. But after watching the episode, these fans do not go online (only) to discuss the affective moments and how this makes them feel toward Lafayette (a favorite character of many True Blood fans whom they might themselves want to comfort) or the excitement and arousal they feel when Eric (another hugely popular and sexually appealing character for these viewers) offers Lafayette his blood (the erotic nature of the vampire itself being a strong appeal for female viewers especially). They (also) talk with other handicrafters about how they might make a copy of the blanket for themselves.

These fans thus form a distinct fan community that draws on texts as inspiration in their handicrafting, thus integrating the text into their everyday lives as an activity taking place alongside their viewing of the program and resulting in a material object. Handicrafting related to fandom in this way can thus be considered fan production. These fan handicrafters reproduce costumes and props, but they also draw inspiration from the characters and narratives in the fan text in producing a very wide range of fan art using yarn, needles, and hooks. How can this form of fan production—fiber fan art, if you will—be understood within the contexts of fan culture and in relation to the textile arts? While there are overlaps with costuming and cosplay which also involve handicrafting practices and the production or use of textiles, fan handicrafting deserves to be considered in its own right, not least because it illustrates the way in which fans draw on popular culture texts and show their love of films, television, and fictional characters and storyworlds in their practice of common pastimes which slot into everyday life and are traditionally considered a part of feminine domesticity. It is also quite distinct in some ways from more specialized and dedicated spaces of fan production, the fan forums and archives in which fan fictions and fan videos are circulated, for example. While there are fans who showcase their fan handicrafting in their blogs and podcasts, and there are groups on social media (such as the “I Made a Thing Multifandom, Multicraft Festival” on DreamWidth¹), there is no major archive for fan handicrafting in its own right.

In addition, knitting and crochet are accepted as “normal” hobbies and widely practiced for relaxation or to relieve tension, for filling in spare or boring moments in the day, for practical purposes such as making one’s own knitwear or baby clothing for children and grandchildren, for making gifts for family members and loved ones, and even for charity or acts of craftivism (yarn bombing either to create street art or political protest). In the majority of circumstances, fan handicrafting can be framed within this everyday practice of the fiber arts, as opposed to a specialized area of fan culture (although, of course, it is that too). Fan handicrafting cannot therefore be seen as straightforwardly related to fan culture. It is also embedded in social and domestic contexts, as well as the creative, artistic, feminist, and political practices of the textile arts. Furthermore, it is discussed, shared, and practiced (by and large) not within fan communities, but within online handicrafting communities. It cannot then be seen solely or specifically in the context of fan studies.

How then can fan handicrafting be framed theoretically? The objectives of this chapter are to contextualize the empirical study of fan handicrafting presented in this book with respect to key theoretical approaches and research not only in the area of fan studies, but also within textile studies. This necessitates an interdisciplinary approach to the work which, additionally, demands consideration of fan handicrafting in the context of gender studies and material culture. This chapter therefore draws together in its discussion of contexts and approaches questions surrounding how we can interpret the material artifacts produced by fans on the one hand and how we might understand them in relation to the practices of handicrafting and the fiber arts on the other. Since the primary focus here is a form of fan production, however, it is a necessary task to first untangle some of the complex interplays between popular culture and handicrafting within fan culture. In this respect, it is useful to briefly consider other forms of fan production and how they stand with respect to handicrafting, before going on to consider how fan handicrafting relates to textiles and material culture. This enables negotiation of the various theoretical approaches to fan production specifically and fan culture theory in general, before weaving in the relevant approaches of textile theory and material culture.

Fan production and participatory culture

It is already well established in the work of Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and others that fans make their own contributions to popular culture texts. They remediate narratives by writing stories (fan fiction), making films (fan films) and music videos (fanvids²), making costumes, dressing up and role-playing (cosplay) and building props (sometimes for cosplay, other times for fan films or for display in their own right), painting, drawing, and digitally manipulating images (fan art), and writing critiques of the text or debating interpretations and responses to it. As Jenkins (2007: 358) puts it, these audience members take “a more active role than others in shaping media flows and creating new values.” In this respect, fans are an interpretive community, and they undertake imaginative play with the text, rereading it, extending it, and reworking it to suit their own desires and interests, all while building communities around the fan object and/or various forms of fan production they undertake. In this way, fandom is both participatory and performative. In terms of fan culture being participatory, fans do not only behave as consumers of popular culture texts but also participate in communities organized around the texts, making their own contributions to the storyworld and thus becoming producers of those texts.

The concept of “prosumption” (Toffler 1980) can be applied to these additions or adaptations to a text. As Christina Olin-Scheller (2011: 159) points out, “Fans are actors in a media landscape where the production of culture and ‘user generated content’ are interchangeable terms and […] people are vital participants as ‘prosumers.’” For example, Eckart Voigts-Virchow (2012; 34) discusses the “rich and varied Austenite fan-fiction universe” that has been produced by Jane Austen fans in the “affinity spaces” of “participatory culture” in the context of “prosumption.” Fans not only create, publish, and consume their own fan works, “thus expanding the borders of the source text” (Olin-Scheller 2011: 159), but, as Voigts-Virchow (2012: 39) sees it, the acts of fans that turn cultural (in this case, literary) texts into “components of lived world experience” are performative. The use of Alvin Toffler’s term “prosumers” indicates the fans’ dual roles as consumers who also produce and circulate media in online communities and social networks. Not all fan activities fit neatly into Toffler’s prosumer model of course (fans are still often inveterate consumers of merchandise and collectibles produced by the culture industries), but taking handicrafting as an example of prosumption illustrates the significance of fans undertaking producerly activities using fiber, yarn, needles, and hooks, and the skills they have acquired as knitters, crocheters, weavers, spinners, and dyers. Although fans who produce as well as consume have also been referred to by other sometimes more convenient terms, “prosumer” is a particularly apt one in the context of discussing fan handicrafting practices since Toffler did not coin the word specifically with regard to fan’s producing their own texts but in terms of the changes from the pre-industrial age to the post-industrial in human history. In Toffler’s terms, prosumers in the Third Wave³ cook their own food from scratch, repair, maintain, and decorate their own homes and household equipment, and—most relevant for this account—make their own clothes and their own entertainment. For example, a right of passage for many of the Doctor Who fan handicrafters is to make their own scarf, an example of which made by Andrea (female, Germany) is shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 The Doctor Who scarf © Andrea Dengler. (Acknowledgment Doctor Who—™ & © BBC.)

Accounts of fan cultures have already established the importance of understanding producerly activities undertaken by fans—see Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse’s (2006 and 2014) collections on fan fiction, for example. Fans write and consume their own stories and make their own films in order to entertain themselves and for the entertainment of their fellow fans; in the context of the textile arts, they also make their own costumes, props, and merchandise. Fan handicrafters thus fit Toffler’s model of the prosumer, as handicrafters they are already making their own clothing and furnishing their homes—knitting and crocheting garments, accessories, and home decorations, sometimes weaving their own fabric and in some instances spinning and dyeing their own yarn.

In the context of discourses around the production–consumption model of late capitalism, one of the comments that sock knitters report on the Ravelry forums of getting from non-handicrafters is that machine-made, mass-produced socks can be bought cheaply from high street shops and why would someone bother to make their own. Such comments reflect Toffler’s Second Wave where industrialization and marketization have devalued people’s own work. In Toffler’s model, in the First Wave of human history, socks and hose were made by hand, as was the collection and spinning of fiber, and the weaving and fulling of cloth: “self-production” was the norm. In the Second Wave, the spinning jenny, cotton gin, and the power loom moved the production of socks and hosiery out of the home and into the factory; in Women’s Work, Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1994) sets out the effect of these inventions of the Industrial Revolution on women’s lives and the production of textiles. Representative of Toffler’s Third Wave (the post-industrial), hobbyist sock knitters value personal pleasure, superior quality, and individuality, but also, as Barber suggests, the social nexus of the home, the family, the community—and the latter can certainly be extended into fan communities of individuals sharing the same tastes even though they might be widely dispersed geographically.

Fan handicrafters, like fans in general, also share their handicrafting and make their own entertainment around it (undertaking communal craft-alongs, taking part in crafting events, participating in swaps, as well as many activities that can be observed in dedicated fan communities—group viewings of the television series, sharing news and information, discussing episodes, etc.). At the same time as they are creating fan art through their crafting, these active participants are also, to varying degrees, defining themselves by their fan interests and performing their fandom within the fan handicrafting community and in their wider social spheres. Their projects form the material objects around which this activity is structured, and approaches to material culture are thus a key context for this research.

The material culture of fandom

While the fan practices mentioned earlier often involve media content creation—fan fiction, fan music videos and films, or digital art—fans also produce material artifacts. These forms of fan production can include the making of props, costumes, and other paraphernalia linked to the fan object. Some Doctor Who or Star Wars fans make their own Dalek or R2D2, for example, and fans of a very wide range of popular culture texts make costumes so they can dress as favorite characters at fan conventions and cosplay events. Steampunks “mod” technological devices with wood and brass cases—phones, laptop and desktop computers, television, vehicles—to look as if they were made using the technology of the Victorian era or create jewelry and other accessories out of old analogue watch parts. This kind of fan production can be considered a part of maker culture (itself illustrative of Toffler’s Third Wave prosumption) specifically organized around a fan object. Material fan production can range from badges, t-shirts, bags, and other accessories incorporating logos, quotes, images, and other identifiable elements of the fan object, to toys, models, and other objects depicting characters, scenes, or events from the text, to accurate reproductions of costumes, props, or other items from the sets or art design. Knitted scarves or hats from Doctor Who or Firefly and crocheted stuffed My Little Pony fall into this category of material fan production. In this respect, it is important to contextualize fan handicrafting as part of the material culture of fandom.

As Matt Hills has already discussed (2014), material fandom is a somewhat neglected area of fan studies. But as Benjamin Woo (2014: 1.3) points out: “Things are the sine qua non of fandom, that without which it remains only potentiality and not a realized capability.” Material culture is thus integral to fandom, and while this includes licensed and official merchandise and spin-offs, including action figures, models, toys, games, comics and novels, as well as DVD or Blu-ray releases of films and programs, it also includes many examples of prosumption activities, not least handicrafting. Bob Rehak (2014: 1.4) notes that:

The “things” of fandom are more prominent than ever, offering a window into our present while revisiting the past with a freshly object-oriented historicist eye. Exploring these relationships has too often been discouraged within fan studies that privilege textual over tactile engagement.

He goes on to suggest that “the changed role of objects in fandom, new modes of both fan and professional industry, the display and record constituted by the objects of fandom hiding in plain sight” are factors that should be borne in mind. There has been a tendency in the development of fan studies, however, to see material culture as separate (and also often subordinate) to textual culture. Jenkins and Hills both note that the norms and assumptions of fandom stand against the large bulk of work in the field of fan studies which has highlighted and explored the transformative works of (female) fandom in great depth. In recent years, Hills (2014) and Rehak (2014) have sought to explore the practices of (male) fandom that have been largely ignored by this body of work. In particular, Hills (2010, para 1) has called for a reappraisal of fan creators who “apply their skills base to materialising SF’s narrative worlds.” It is thus only recently that attention has been turned (back) onto the material culture of fandom with any depth of scrutiny. In Rehak’s (2014) definition, the material practices of fandom include objects created through craft, commodity, collection, and curation. It is really only the first of these that is of concern here (the remaining three are organized more specifically around the accepted practices of production and consumption of products from the culture industries, rather than prosumption). One of the issues raised by this intervention in fan studies is a largely gendered assumption of material fan production as masculine. Clearly, the largely female community of fan handicrafting works against this assumption, though Hills (2014) does note my earlier work on fan handicrafting. It is therefore pertinent to reconsider some general points about material culture, and especially gendered approaches to crafts.

Material culture, while often applied in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and museum conservation, relates to all objects with physical form or presence made or altered by human beings. It can be usefully applied to various forms of fan production (and not only mimetic crafting such as that described by Hills). Sandra M. Falero (2008), for example, discusses the fanzine (fan-made publications dedicated to the fan object) as a self-published, often handmade, form of material production (and women have long been producing fanzines). The study of material culture focuses on the material in an endeavor to “explore and understand the invisible systems of meaning that humans share” (Sheumaker and Wadja 2008: xii). Within fan culture, then, there is a material culture that creates meaning for the fans involved in that community. While much of this may take the form of clothing, costumes, accessories, house decorations, reproduction props, toys, action figures, and other merchandise that display the object of fan interest, the material culture of fandom also encompasses the fanzines which were—and in some cases still are⁴—material objects in the physical world. The fan art, fiction, articles, letters (or LOC—letters of comment), and news that occupied the pages of fanzines are now largely found on the online sites that have replaced the print ‘zine, but it remains the case that the textual is contingent on the material. This is the case too with fan handicrafting, in which the textual is often encoded in the material object. And since material objects can, in many instances, be a form of material-semiotic production as well as an overt physical display of the fan’s love for the particular text at the center of their fandom, it is clear that “forms of embodied and technical craftsmanship” and “fan labour” (Hills 2010: para 4) are important (and as Hills points out, somewhat neglected) areas of study. This draws attention to the very particular circumstances of fan handicrafting and how we might understand it. In this respect, what can fan handicrafting tell us about fan culture and also about handicrafting culture?

As Jules David Prown (1982) posited, the subject matter of study, material, can provide understanding of culture. The relationships between objects and people are the key to this understanding. A fan wearing a mass-produced Doctor Who or Star Wars t-shirt can tell us much about both the desire for a popular culture text and the commodification of culture by the culture industries. The Star Wars fan wearing a Star Wars Celebration t-shirt is proclaiming not just that they self-identify as a fan, but that they have been to the fan convention (or want to suggest they have), that they are part of the participatory fan community. A hand-knitted Doctor Who scarf or a fan-made crochet lightsaber on the other hand is also imbued with potential meanings that, like the fanzine, can tell us about the personal thoughts, desires, and imaginative play with the text of the fan who made them. If instead of a Celebration t-shirt the fan is wearing the hand-knitt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cult Media and Handicrafting
• 1. Fandom, Textiles, Gender
• 2. The Fan Handicrafting Experience
• 3. Narratives of the Self and Fan Identity
• 4. Handicrafting as Fan Art
• 5. Text and Textiles
• 6. Cultural Capital and the Micro-Economy of Fan Handicrafting
• Conclusion: Casting Off
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint