Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Convergence Culture

This introduction briefly introduces the book’s topic and historical scope and establishes “the convergence culture industry” as an analytical framework. This portmanteau of Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “the culture industry” is positioned as a polemic, but nonetheless one that can help us understand the gendered mainstreaming of fan culture and attempts to standardize fan identities and practices in the digital age. As the title of the introduction suggests, it also situates this moment within fan and geek culture (and the privilege of white, straight, cis-gendered men in it) within a broader array of antifeminist pushbacks against “political correctness” and “social justice warriors.” Accordingly, the introduction concludes with a consideration of whether systemic attempts to remarginalize female fans within both fan culture and fan studies might be productively, if allegorically, framed through the GOP’s “War on Women,” emergent “Men’s Rights” and alt-right movements, and nostalgia for a lost status quo.

Fake Geek Girls

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Media Industries ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Media ◽  
Meaningful Connections ◽  
Fan Identity

Fake Geek Girls offers a timely survey of the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as tastemakers and promotional partners over the past decade as fan culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Through an exploration of the subtle and interconnected ways in which media industries, journalists, and other fans have cultivated an androcentric vision of fan identity and participation, Fake Geek Girls surveys the politics of participation within contemporary fan cultures and reasserts the importance of feminism to fan studies. Fake Geek Girls additionally contends that there are meaningful connections to be made between the recent influx of gendered boundary-policing practices within fan and geek culture and broader cultural pushback against “political correctness” and “social justice warriors” within the growing alt-right and “Men’s Rights” movements.

A Fangirl’s Place Is in the Resistance

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Culture Industry ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Convergence Culture ◽  
Do So

This chapter historicizes the foundational relationship between feminism and the field of fan studies and considers the ways in which this relationship has been threatened by the mainstreaming of the field alongside the mainstreaming of fan culture. To do so, this chapter returns to two of the field’s structuring theoretical binaries (incorporation/resistance and affirmational/transformative) to argue that while these categories are essentialist, they are also essential to understanding which fans (and by extension, fan studies) are embraced within the convergence culture industry. Finally, this chapter explores anxieties among some feminist fan scholars that the rapid expansion of the field and the mainstreaming of fan culture might create a “postfeminist turn,” in which the interests of industry are centered.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-234
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Culture Industry ◽  
Fan Studies ◽  
Convergence Culture ◽  
Fan Identity

The conclusion explores the ongoing place of feminism within contemporary fan studies, reasserting it as the field’s “OTP” or “one true pairing” in fannish terms. It also brings together the various strains of reactionary “fan fragility” (a play on the concept of “white fragility”) that has been cultivated within the convergence culture industry and explored throughout the book. Centrally, the conclusion foregrounds emergent work from an array of fan scholars addressing other axes of identity (race, age, ability, and so on), ultimately calling for more intersectional considerations of fan identity moving forward.

“Get a life, will you people?!”

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-75
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Convergence Culture ◽  
Fictional Representations

This chapter considers how the reframing of fans as a power demographic over the past decade recuperates the figure of the fanboy into hegemonic masculinity. Drawing on both journalistic and fictional representations, this chapter suggests that fangirls have been systematically erased from this narrative of the “empowered” fan within the convergence culture industry. In tracing how this narrative of “fan empowerment” has devolved into concerns about “fan entitlement” in recent years, this chapter contends that these discourses still benefit the most privileged fans within the convergence culture industry (white, straight men), while offloading critiques of fan culture onto the most disempowered within this decade, marginalized fans.

Terms and Conditions

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Media Industries ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Convergence Culture ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Participatory Practices

This chapter investigates how media industries’ partial and conditional embrace of fan culture and participatory practices subtly colors perceptions of which fans are (in many cases, quite literally) valuable within a post–Web 2.0 media landscape driven by user-generated content. In order to interrogate both the legal and ideological “terms and conditions” that govern sanctioned modes of fan participation within the convergence culture industry, this chapter focuses on two key issues. First, it considers how fan labor has been industrially co-opted, contained, and commercialized through a series of test cases. Second, it addresses the growing prominence and industrial reliance on enunciative fan production through an analysis of AMC’s fan aftershow The Talking Dead, considering how the show temporally (rather than legally) censures fan production, stressing “correct” interpretations that economically and ideologically reinforce industrial interests.

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

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