From Poaching to Pinning

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

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.”

Conclusion

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?!”

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

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.

Interrogating the Fake Geek Girl

This chapter focuses on how intra-fannish policing practices do not merely work to position some fans as “good” or “bad,” but work to deny access to the identity of “fan” writ large on the grounds of gender. Addressing how longstanding gender biases within geek culture have set the stage for an entrenched understanding of digital culture as an inherently masculine space in which women are always already “interlopers,” this chapter homes in on one example of spreadable misogyny, the “idiot nerd girl” meme that emerged in 2011, and contextualizes it within broader “fake geek girl” discourses that grew in volume and scale in 2012.

Terms and Conditions

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

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.