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A Fangirlâs Place Is in the Resistance
Feminism and Fan Studies
On January 21, 2017, an estimated four million people took to the streets to participate in the Womenâs March on Washington and in various sister marches across the United States and around the globe. Responding to both the divisive election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States and the growing political and cultural influence of the alt-right, the Womenâs March featured an array of protest signs that wielded pop-culture iconography to offer political commentary. Like many fans still mourning the untimely death of actress Carrie Fisher, I composed a protest sign rooted in both my own identity as a lifelong Star Wars fan and the tradition of transformative criticism within female fan communities. Invoking Fisherâs most iconic role, Princess Leia, and bearing the slogan âA Womanâs Place Is in the Resistance,â the poster appropriated the nostalgically sexist refrain that is routinely used to silence any woman who dares express an opinion on the Internet: âA womanâs place is in the kitchen.â A pink-tinged version of this Princess Leia poster created by graphic designer Hayley Gilmore was widely disseminated on social media and displayed at the Womenâs March alongside handmade iterations like my own, with the âResistanceâ symbiotically referencing Star Warsâ fictional Rebel Alliance and calls to âResistâ Trumpâs political agenda and rising antifeminist sentiment.
Commenting in Wired on Hayleyâs design and the ubiquity of Leia protest posters at the Womenâs March, Angela Watercutter made a point of acknowledging both Fisherâs and the characterâs feminist legacy, citing the place of prominence of female protagonists in the most recent entries of the Star Wars film franchise as clear marks of progress.1 Missing from this celebratory narrative was any mention of fan backlash to the Star Wars franchiseâs evolving (if still not sufficiently multifaceted) commitment to representational diversity, ranging from outcry that âhaving two Star Wars movies in a row with female protagonists is taking things too far, and is a clear sign of political correctness taking over Hollywoodâ2 to a fan edit of Star Wars: Episode VIIIâThe Last Jedi (2017) labeled âThe Chauvinist Cutâ that attempted to excise female characters from the film. Nor does this narrative of progress account for the thinly veiled sexism in some critical responses to these female protagonists. For example, Todd McCarthy complained in his review for the Hollywood Reporter that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) lacked âa strong and vigorous male lead (such as Han Solo or John Boyegaâs Finn in âThe Force Awakensâ),â3 erasing the significance and centrality of the franchiseâs first female protagonist, Rey, to The Force Awakensâ artistic and commercial success. Thus, just as fandom is often characterized by the interplay between fascination and frustration with media objects, Leia protest posters at the Womenâs March were polysemic: they expressed solidarity with a female-led resistance movement and mourned the passing of a popular feminist icon, but they also bore the marks of fannish frustration with both a media object and surrounding (fan) culture that has historically privileged and empowered white men at all levels of its production, textuality, and consumption.
I preface this chapterâs exploration of the evolving place of feminism within fan studies with an anecdote of how a fictional feminist icon was mobilized as an expression of real-world feminist anxiety and resistance for a number of reasons. The first is to emphasize that fandom and feminist politics have long been intertwined, with the âresistanceâ of female fans often placed at the center of scholarly accounts of what makes fandom a distinct mode of media consumption. The brief list of broader fannish, critical, and industrial biases obscured in this narrative of the Princess Leia posterâs place of prominence at the Womenâs March brings us to another key point: namely, that any discussion of the feminist capacity of fan culture or scholarship requires that we grapple with industrial efforts to contain and circumvent female fan engagement. To do this, we must recognize that the same transformative and critical qualities that make female fan communities distinctive for researchers also render them disruptive and undesirable for media producers. A related third point is that it is the feminist dimensions of fan culture (however problematically assumed or inferred) that have frequently rendered female fans en masse as âthreateningâ to the status quo, and have provoked fanboysâ desire to police the boundaries of âauthenticâ fan identity along gender lines. Finally, just as many cultural critics justly accused the Womenâs March of being an exclusionary exercise in white feminism (performatively obfuscating the fact that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump), it is essential that we cast a similar critical eye on the intersectional failings of feminist work within fan studies. I take up this issue in more detail in the bookâs conclusion, but it bears stating clearly at the outset that any call to tactically reinvest in fan studiesâ feminist roots requires that we confront the fieldâs propensity to focus on white, straight, Western female fans.
This chapter unpacks the long, and occasionally fraught, relationship between feminism and fan studies, and contemplates why gender remains the primary axis of fan identity engaged by scholars. Fan studies has experienced rapid growth and diversification over the past decade alongside fan culture, and has similarly confronted anxieties around how this perceived âmainstreamingâ would impact the disciplineâs original emphases on pleasure and power. âMainstreamingâ has long been a dirty word within subcultural communities, evoking crass commercialization of grassroots community practices and a loss of authenticity, all of which are encapsulated in the ultimate critique of âselling out.â To sell out is to become popular, and to have that success provoke resentment within the subcultural communities that used to be able to claim ownership over a cultural object. Mainstreaming is also importantly marked by diversification, and it is in this tension that we can begin to interrogate the interrelated, yet ultimately divergent, anxieties around the mainstreaming of fan culture and fan studies.
Below, I will briefly survey fan studiesâ feminist roots, before moving on to two of the fieldâs structuring dichotomies: the framing of fansâ relationship to media industries, producers, and texts through the incorporation/resistance paradigm, and the delineation between âaffirmationalâ and âtransformativeâ modes of fan engagement. These oft-deployed theoretical binaries, while not sufficiently flexible, remain significant in large part because they allow us to interrogate the centrality of gendered fan cultures and industrial power to the field. Next, I will consider how the specter of a postfeminist fan studies haunts debates over the scope of âfanâ identities and the future of the field. To conclude, I will address a common critique of first wave fan studies, described as the âFandom Is Beautifulâ phase, in order to call for a renewed investment of the feminist valences of the field in this cultural moment of growing antifeminist sentiment and escalating performances of toxic masculinity within fan culture.
Shipping Feminism and Fan Studies
Media fan studies emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was informed by multiple strains of media studies, including television studies, subculture studies, feminist media studies, and queer theory. Focused predominantly on female fans and the texts produced and circulated within the communities they formed, fan studies immediately differentiated itself from the male-dominated studies of music subcultures that had emerged out of the Birmingham School in the 1970s, and prior cultural studies work focused on class and race. By homing in on female media fans and their negotiated reading practices, first wave fan scholars built on existing ethnographic work focused on derided âfeminineâ genres such as romance and soap opera.4 Contemporaneous work by queer theorists like Alexander Doty also foundationally shaped early fan studiesâ theorizations of the textual production and consumption of slash fanfiction, fanart, and fanvids by predominantly straight female fans. The place of prominence of slash (a term that encompasses an array of homoerotic reception and production practices exploring the emotional and physical relationships between characters of the same sex that are canonically platonic) within fan culture offers compelling evidence of Dotyâs claim that âbasically heterocentrist texts can contain queer elements, and basically heterosexual, straight-identifying people can experience queer moments.â5 Though work on this topic within fan studies has evolved to engage queer audiences more explicitly, early work on slash tended to characterize its creators and consumers as mainly âheterosexual, cisgender, white, middle class American Women,â an assumption that âled to skewed conclusions about fan motivations for participating in certain types of transformative fanworks,â6 and perhaps unintentionally had a chilling effect on more robust considerations of intersectional fan identities.
From the fieldâs inception, though, fannish pleasures and feminist politics were conceptually intertwined. Constance Penley was one of the earliest fan scholars to suggest that, even though many female fans might not openly embrace the label of âfeminist,â their reading and writing practices offered âan indirect (and sometimes not so indirect) commentary on issues usually seen as feminist, such as womenâs lack of social and economic equality, their having to manage a double-duty work and domestic life, and their being held to much greater standards of physical beauty than men.â7 Penley speculated that female fansâ reticence to âspeak from a feminist position,â despite their declarations of left-leaning politics, might be due in part to much of second wave feminismâs âmoralistically anti-pornographyâ stance8 and the centrality of erotica to female fan culture. Class was also positioned as a factor, with feminist identities being aligned with middle-class professional status, which many of Penleyâs interview subjects did not identify with.9 Penley makes it clear that female fansâ âaffiliation is to fandom,â rather than feminist politics, but her emphasis on the âfeminist sentimentsâ10 voiced by fans and undergirding fansâ transformative textual production helped shape the fieldâs frequent equation of âfandomâ and âfeminism.â
In reality, much like Penleyâs interview subjects, scholarly work describing fandom as a politically charged, progressive, and female-driven space has its own tendency to avoid the dreaded âF-word,â and rarely situates fans within the feminist movementâs various waves, factions, or discontents. There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as Louisa Steinâs 2015 book Millennial Fandom, which makes an explicit connection between âthird waveâ (circa 2000 onwards) fan studies âlocating fandom within the fabric of the everydayâ and third wave feminismâs âunsettling of divides between the personal and the political.â11 Even when one accounts for multiple feminisms, it is impossible to paint fan culture as a universally âfeministâ space, but it is precisely this politicized conception of the âfanâ that initially made fan culture an appealing topic of study. What makes Penleyâs early work especially significant is that it explicitly locates fan culture and fan studies within feminist media studies, while acknowledging that fans themselves might not embrace that label or consciously embody its politics. Applying Michel de Certeauâs notion of âBrownian movements,â or tactical interventions of the powerless into various systems of power,12 Penley chose to view this tension between âthe feminist concerns of the fans and their unwillingness to be seen as feministsâ as an opportunity to move beyond conceptions of âauthenticâ feminist thought,13 and to interrogate trends within feminist media studies, as well as feminist research ethics.14
Other influential fan studies essays from the 1980s were essential to centering themes of gendered pleasure and power within the field, linking female fan culture with a rejection of patriarchal and binaristic conceptions of gender that are damaging to men and women alike. Joanna Russâs âPornography by Women for Women, with Loveâ and Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diane L. Veithâs âRomantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,â for instance, both established concepts that continue to resonate within contemporary fan studies: fan texts being conceptualized as a âlabor of love,â15 presumption of a female writership and readership for fanfiction,16 discussions of how thinly drawn female television characters lead to the âcodingâ of male characters as âfemaleâ in slash stories,17 and so on. Importantly, both of these essays frame slash fanfiction as reflecting the âdesire for true equality with men and reciprocity in their intimate relationships,â18 affording âa situation in which questions about who is the man and who is the woman, whoâs active and whoâs passive, even whoâs who, cannot even be asked.â19 The communal cultural production of female fans was thus theorized as an inherently feminist âproject of working against the patriarchal grain and imagining a utopian, truly equal world.â20
The year 1992 presented a watershed moment for the nascent field, marked by the publication of Camille Bacon-Smithâs Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Henry Jenkinsâs Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and Lisa A. Lewisâs edited collection, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Lewisâs anthology devoted an entire section to essays exploring the intersection of âFandom and Gender,â and female fan communities and practices dominated both Jenkinsâs and Bacon-Smithâs conception of fan culture as a distinct (and distinctly gendered) mode of media consumption. Bacon-Smith grappled most actively with sexism within science fiction fan culture, citing the 1960s as the period in which women became visible within science fiction fan communities. Bacon-Smith was mindful to interrogate claims from male interview subjects and prior academic work suggesting that âbefore Star Trek, the only w...