“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.

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.

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.

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.

The Palestinian Flag Is Back

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
Tamir Sorek
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Cycles ◽  
Soccer Fans ◽  
Palestinian Nationalism ◽  
The Arab Spring

This article reexamines my argument published in 2007 regarding the apolitical character of Arab soccer fans in Israel. Until recently, explicit political protest and expressions of Palestinian national identity have remained outside the stadium. For most Arab fans, soccer was an opportunity to display common ground with Jewish citizens. Displaying Palestinian nationalism was considered to be endangering the potential for rapprochement. However, over the past decade the barriers that blocked political protest from entering the stadium have been ruptured. Several interrelated factors are suggested as explanations for this shift: multiple cycles of escalated violence in the region, a wave of anti-Arab legislation, the globalization of fan culture, the model of a politicized soccer fan provided during the Arab Spring, and the emergence of social media.

scholarly journals Of dragons and dinosaurs: How children’s toys and games create ideas of the past, of history and of fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kühberger
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
Fictional Representations

This article outlines a trend in popular historical culture which has seen the increasing replacement of a concept of history that rests on some form of evidence base by visions of fictional pasts, or – to put it more precisely – by an ambiguous blend of the past and fictional pasts. Drawing on ethnographic research focused on the contents of Austrian children’s rooms, this paper explores traceable manifestations of history and historical fiction, particularly toy dragons and dinosaurs, in their properties as objects and as focuses of their owners’ interpretations as ascertained in interviews. The research finds little clear demarcation in the minds of the children interviewed (all between 8 and 12 years old) between imaginings and cognitive attempts to reconstruct the past. The article examines the influence of these factual–fictional representations on historical thinking from a history education perspective.

Ghost Meat

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Catherine Belling
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linear Topology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
The Devil

Abstract The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain some paradoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder’s 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror’s appeal and also—by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response—opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption.

From Poaching to Pinning

2019 ◽  
pp. 184-220
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
Convergence Culture ◽  
Curatorial Practice ◽  
Modes Of Engagement

If the prior four chapters survey the ways in which female fans and their creative practices have been marginalized or contained, then this one contemplates the ways in which geek girls are hailed within the convergence culture industry through fashion and beauty culture. Centrally, this chapter examines the political possibilities of conceptually moving from poaching (as a mode of feminist intervention) to pinning (as a feminine curatorial practice on sites like Pinterest) alongside efforts to route female fans towards postfeminist or neoliberal modes of engagement. The second half of this chapter addresses the growing intersections between fan fashion and cosplay as a fan practice (e.g., constructing costumes inspired by fictional characters and embodying those characters in real-world spaces such as fan conventions) by historicizing and contextualizing “everyday” or “casual” cosplay merchandising trends offered by fancentric retailers (Her Universe, Hot Topic, etc.) and considering these items as a form of fannish “drag.”

One Fanboy to Rule Them All

2019 ◽  
pp. 144-183
Author(s):  
Suzanne Scott
Keyword(s):  
Culture Industry ◽  
Perceived Ability ◽  
Convergence Culture

Chapter 5 discusses how professionalization runs apace differently for fanboys and fangirls within the convergence culture industry. Through an analysis of emergent authorial archetypes like the “fanboy auteur” and the “fantrepreneur” and how they model fannish consumption, this chapter considers who can more or less easily trade on their fan identities for professional gain. Specifically, this chapter theorizes the industrial and fannish appeal of these figures as “moderators” for the evolving relationship between industry and audience, and their perceived ability to speak fans’ “language.”

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