Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

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.”

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One Fanboy to Rule Them All

Fake Geek Girls ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479838608.003.0006 ◽

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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Conclusion

Fake Geek Girls ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479838608.003.0008 ◽

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.

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“Get a life, will you people?!”

Fake Geek Girls ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479838608.003.0003 ◽

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.

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Introduction

Fake Geek Girls ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479838608.003.0001 ◽

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.

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