Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race - Brossura

Pande, Rukmini

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1609386183 ISBN 13: 9781609386184

Casa editrice: Univ of Iowa Pr, 2018

Riassunto

Rukmini Pande's examination of race in fan studies is sure to make an immediate contribution to the growing field. Until now, virtually no sustained examination of race and racism in transnational fan cultures has taken place, a lack that is especially concerning given that current fan spaces have never been more vocal about debating issues of privilege and discrimination. 

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Informazioni sull'autore

Rukmini Pande is an assistant professor at O. P. Jindal Global University, New Delhi. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections, including The Wiley Companion to Fan Studies, Seeing Fans, and Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, as well as the journals Transformative Works and Cultures and the Journal of Feminist Scholarship. 

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Squee From The Margins

Fandom And Race

By Rukmini Pande

University of Iowa Press

Copyright © 2018 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60938-618-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
1. Dial Me Up, Scotty: Fandoms as Platforms for Women's Online Identity, 
2. Can You Stop the Signal? Online Media Fandom as Postcolonial Cyberspace, 
3. Aang Still Ain't White: Postcolonial Praxis, 
4. Recalibration Necessary, Mr. Spock: Race and the Dynamics of Media Fandom, 
5. But, How Is That Sexy? The Fan Fiction Kink Meme, 
Conclusion: Toward Decolonizing Fan Studies, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Dial Me Up, Scotty

FANDOMS AS PLATFORMS FOR WOMEN'S ONLINE IDENTITY

Ideas of what constitutes community continue to change as technological innovations mold the ways individuals choose to communicate, build and destroy networks, and find points of resonance and affinity along differential lines of interests and identities. Broadly, however, theorists have argued that when a group forms around a common symbolic structure, it comes to constitute a culture area of its own, which is not limited by anything other than the limits of communication (Strauss 1986; Sahlins 1976; Weber 1947; Lacan 1977; Derrida 1978). Influential cyberfeminist theorist Allucquére Rosanne Stone (1996) draws on Anslem Strauss's formulation of group membership as "a symbolic, not a physical matter," deeming it to apply particularly well to virtual systems (Strauss quoted in Stone 1996, 87). Stone extends and underlines the significance of this argument when characterizing cyberspace as a structure of community that could "validly be based upon symbolic exchanges of which proximity is merely a secondary effect" (87).

Media fandom has been seen as an example of a cybercultural community based around symbolic exchange, as members are bound by a certain central interest but adopt different signifiers to concentrate their creative and fannish energies around. This is not to say that it does not encompass off-line elements of interaction; however, the primary enabling mechanism remains cybercultural. It is also important to pay attention to the points of disjuncture and difference in such communities. Although the histories of media fandom remain largely anecdotal, it is vital to make their frameworks as broad and inclusive as possible. As I note in the Introduction, to elevate one particular narrative about the establishment and development of these communities is to make invisible the experiences of participants who have taken varying entry pathways but have nonetheless contributed to their present forms. It is often maintained that media fandom is nothing but the stories that fans tell each other, but as these communities continue to gain mainstream attention, it is necessary to supplement and interrupt well-established narratives of their activities so as not to promote a monochromatic view of these spaces. This is one such effort.

Fandom's move from off-line to online modes of interaction has been the subject of significant scholarship within the field, and this informs my own analysis. My aim is not to recap this scholarship but rather to interrogate the gaps and silences in these histories. Default assumptions about the makeup of early online media fandom communities have had specific effects that actively work to make invisible the role of racial identity in these spaces, rather than this being a matter of oversight. My rehistoricization of these narratives foregrounds the ways in which fandom communities also incorporate the overlapping identities and activities of nonwhite fans within them. This in turn leads me to position their contemporary forms as an example of postcolonial cyberspaces in Chapter 2, where I analyze the ramifications of that theorization in terms of global media fandom considering issues of media, demographics, and changes in platform use.

Tracking Online Media Fandom

Susan Clerc (1996) traces the beginnings of the phenomenon of fandom by charting its move from off-line activities — letterzines, newsletters, fanzines — to its current online form. Clerc also identifies this move as driven by the labor of women in particular: "Media fandom wouldn't exist without women because more women than men do the communication work necessary to forge and sustain community" (218). Clerc presents a snapshot of the transition from smaller communities, necessarily limited by issues of distance and logistics, concerning the exchange of physical materials like fanzines, to fandom's current form. Clerc points out:

Fan women, though mechanically proficient and technologically savvy compared to the mainstream population, suffer from the same societal attitudes about gender and technology as everyone else. Women are also at an economic disadvantage: with less disposable income, they are not as likely as men to experiment with modems and software they aren't familiar with. [For] Fan women there is very little benefit to Net access unless their friends have it. When that critical mass is reached and it becomes beneficial to go online, fan women will likely turn to other female fans as an informal support network. (219)

Clerc's analysis therefore points to an early gendering of media fandom spaces in particular, and the ways in which these community affiliations were crucial mediating factors in women using internet- enabled spaces. This presence has existed in various forms and is documented in studies such as Nancy Baym's (2000) influential exploration of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps (abbreviated as r.a.t.s.), which records the activities of soap opera fans who are mostly women. Baym observes that this group is one of the oldest on the Usenet network and enjoys a high level of engagement. This is in opposition to more mainstream internet studies, which maintain that women are linguistically disadvantaged on forums like newsgroups (Wakeford 1997). Baym divides her respondents into heavy and light users, including lurkers (individuals who read posts but do not participate directly), but interestingly, those who participate structure their online identities with close correlation to their off-line ones. Again, this contrasts with other studies that stress the possibilities of identity play facilitated by anonymity. Baym speculates that this trend was due to both structural and communitarian reasons:

The use of real names in r.a.t.s. is partially attributable to the systems used by these participants to read and write to the group. Most people access r.a.t.s. through work-related accounts that identify them using their real names. The preference for real names is normative as well as structural. Participants on r.a.t.s. actively discourage anonymity. Although some take on nicknames, most who use nicknames also promulgate their real names within the same messages. ... In general, then, r.a.t.s. has an aversion to anonymity in identity construction, an aversion likely rooted in the demands of soap opera discussion. The use of real names helps to create a trusting environment in which the type of personal disclosure so important to collaborative soap interpretation can be voiced. (2000, 148)

This linkage of trust to personal disclosure is thought provoking, as it is evident in the context of the discussion of soap operas more generally being met with certain degree of scorn. Although the stigma of overinvestment in something perceived as trivial is common in most fan communities, it also leads to a greater degree of anonymity, or at least pseudonymized identity, especially in media fandom spaces concerned with the creation of fan works. It can be further hypothesized that the discouragement of anonymity in the soap opera forum also buttresses its homogenous — white, American, financially secure — nature. That is to say, the disclosure of personal identifying information would be much more highly fraught for those users who might think that this information would other them further in a demonstrably homogenous space. As I detail in the Introduction, for similar reasons, the ability to pass in online spaces has long been leveraged by both me and my respondents at various times within media fandom spaces.

Baym's (2000) analysis mostly considers data collected in 1992, but she revisits the newsgroup six years later, in 1998, after greater access to these spaces is granted thanks to the advent of multiple internet service providers (ISPs). The tensions in the group that arise with this broadening are documented as generational, with newer, younger users being seen as not attentive enough to community norms and established etiquette, and older users being accused of gatekeeping and cliquish behavior. Although not reflected in Baym's analysis (the whiteness of these spaces is acknowledged at one point but is not explored further as constitutive of them), the mechanisms that work to maintain the status quo of such spaces, expressed in yearning for a better, more civilized time, are often coded as discomfort with the disruptive effect of racialized difference. I will explore the ramifications of this further in Chapter 2. For now, I direct my attention to how the default whiteness of cybercultural spaces has been perpetuated by the structuring of such academic analyses.

In contrast to Baym (2000), Clerc (1996) maintains that media fandom activity in the same time period has a bias toward mailing lists as opposed to "high-profile Usenet newsgroups," where interaction is less oriented toward generating status and more oriented toward communication. She notes, "Although some newsgroups manage to gain to attain a sense of community, mailing lists are more likely to do so because of the way they are set up. ... Perhaps more importantly you have to come out of the fan closet to join a mailing list: you can't pretend you are only casually interested in The X Files when there are fifty messages in your mailbox every morning" (221). When I interviewed one of my respondents about her move to online modes of fandom activity, she talked about first using Usenet newsgroups organized into hierarchies by subject — for example, sci.biology and sci.physcis are grouped under the same broad heading, sci. She recalls,

I dated a computer programmer starting in 1989 (married him in 1991). By '93, I accessed them through various "gateways." And by the end of that year, I was accessing them directly. Fandom groups were EVERYWHERE, in both the rec.arts hierarchy, and the alt. hierarchy. Some were for discussion of the media (rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.startrek and spin-offs) some were for community — rec.arts.sf.fandom, for example. Others, usually in the alt.hierarchy, were for fanfiction — alt.startrek.creative, alt.startrek.creative.adult, among others. (Respondent 18, interview with author, 2014)

She also recollects the shift from newsgroups to mailing lists, and when queried about the reason, she cites both convenience and security. She notes, "Mailing lists were more direct, and posting was easier, especially with the moderated groups. USENETs were vulnerable to trolls." This experience mirrors Clerc's (2015) analysis. When asked about her personal motivation to seek online modes of interaction, the respondent simply states, "I was not very tech savvy at first, but husband helped. Fandom was always on Usenet, you understand." This last statement is crucial because it expresses the idea that the move and adaptation of media fandom to online modes of communication was a step taken with alacrity (at least its initial move) and that women, after getting over their hesitation with new technology, participated in newsgroups and then in mailing lists in large numbers.

Similar trends can be seen in Rhiannon Bury's A Cyberspace of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (2005), a study of two fandoms active the 1990s based around the television shows The X-Files (1993–2002) and Due South (1994–99). She also notes the use of mailing lists for fandom activity, drawing on Michel Foucault (1986) to posit that these spaces function as heterotopias. For Bury, these spaces are potentially radical in "their reworking of normative spatial practices and relations" (18), functioning as they do in uneasy negotiations with ideas of public/private divides in an online context. Bury does pay attention to axes of identity beyond gender, registering the operations of class, sexuality, and nationality within these communities, but she stops short of considering the role of racial identity. Finally, Francesca Coppa's (2006a) history of media fandom also charts a whistle-stop tour across these narratives (as it has a lot of ground to cover), underlining the technical proficiency that fans exhibit in creating the infrastructure of media fandom spaces.

This scholarship stresses that it is the labor performed by women fans to create and maintain these spaces within collaborative communitarian norms that promotes a sense of belonging. Particularly valued as a result are qualities that promote getting along, including politeness and non-confrontational styles of communication around potential controversies. Early spaces certainly had their share of discord, but official histories have tended to gloss them over, perhaps in an effort to showcase successful woman-centric alternatives to a cyberspace otherwise dominated by male narratives. To return to Coppa's (2006a) overview — a chronicle that has become a frequently cited resource — it must be noted that it (as has my analysis so far) focuses primarily on fandoms that formed around US and UK television shows. It is also a particularly intimate portrait of early online fandom activities, listing particularly important archive sites, mailing lists, and prominent fans that influenced these communities through the 1990s and early 2000s.

These documentations of early media fandom activity are important because these contributions are often erased or forgotten. However, such documentation inevitably leads to some erasure of its own. For instance, although Coppa (2006a) registers the presence of fandoms that formed around Japanese anime and manga media texts, these are not given the same weight, possibly as a result of her unfamiliarity with them. Also, crucially, a differentiation is made between Western English-speaking fans and Japanese fans, completely eliding the presence of those participants who are diasporic, immigrants, or otherwise placed in between such identifications. The specific activities of fans past the point of the splintering of fan activity from large Western media–centric archives is also not examined in detail, possibly because such activities are perceived as less indicative of technical skill as interfaces became easier to navigate. Indeed, all considerations of specific fan labor in establishing these communities and facilitating their growth is not given any attention.

It is these histories that I now attempt to (re)insert into the dominant narratives that I have detailed so far. My discussion draws on the various entry pathways recalled by my interviewees, highlighting the importance of manga and anime fandoms within the development of contemporary global media fandom rather than as the somewhat othered space they occupy in official histories. I also stress the importance of the fact that my interviews indicate that these fans have engaged in technical activities such as building fan sites themselves, as well as creating fan works at various times.

It is not my intention to elevate this kind of activity over other types of fandom participation like lurking. Rather, I wish to point to the material ways in which nonwhite fans have contributed to these spaces. This tracing contributes to my overarching argument throughout this book: that non-white fans have been part of the infrastructure of fandom spaces from their inception. The erasure of this historical presence contributes to the idea that critiques of these spaces around axes of racial identity in particular (as evident in the The Force Awakens meta commentary referenced in the Introduction) are a new phenomenon. In the course of this book I also outline the reasons why these critiques are now gaining more visibility. Now, however, I wish to highlight the diversity that has always been present within fandom's origin stories.

The consistent trend in theorization that positions the fangirl as a marginal identity leads to some problematic assumptions about the operations of privilege within media fan spaces. Stemming from Henry Jenkins's (1992) foundational idea of the fan as poacher, this line of thought continues to make invisible the specific hierarchies at play within them to concentrate on their potential as spaces of subversive reclamations of texts by (largely undifferentiated) women fans. That is not to say conflict among them has not been a subject of discussion, but this has mainly been framed in terms of fans seeking legitimacy or in terms of a kind of respectability politics (Alters 2007; Zubernis and Larsen 2012; Stanfill 2013).

These analytical frames have left the marginal positioning of the fangirl largely undisturbed. I am not arguing against the idea that female fans have historically been seen as hysterical, irrational, and unimportant to producers of popular cultural texts; nor am I arguing against the idea that media fandom spaces have functioned as alternative networks within male-dominated geek cultures. However, this line of theorization is increasingly leading to arguments that maintain that the very act of identifying as a fan somehow makes white cisgender women participants in these spaces less privileged on an institutional level, or less culpable for holding and perpetuating ideas rooted in racism. In light of these troubling narratives, I argue that it is necessary to reevaluate and expand historical documentations of these spaces.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Iowa Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1609386183
• ISBN 13: 9781609386184
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 233
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile