Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

I wanted to explore more fully some of the aspects of gender in American culture and taste in American culture that contribute to a distinction between male and female fans on the fan level. 

In using the word “prestige,” I am referencing Bordieu’s Distinction, in which the author divides media products according to their “cultural capital,” a quantity that confers on the fan the same societal position as their text enjoys. George W. Bush was able to reveal that he enjoys country music and classic rock, for example, because these two genres of music give a certain impression of Bush based on their cultural capital. Classic Rock, being a prestigious genre of music in America, associated with educated middle-class white men, confers on Bush a certain cultural capital, making him seem, in a way, more educated and upper-class. Country music is a less prestigious genre, associated with lower-middle and working-class white men in America. Thus, Bush does not seem so prestigious that he is distant from “the people.” Had Bush been more drawn to ABBA, he would not have publicized this fact, as ABBA is not associated in America with an idea of cultural prestige or of populism.

To organize my (long-winded) argument, I have written a list of bullet-points, numbered for your convenience:

I. As the intro to Fandom points out, not all fan materials have the same level of prestige (Football > People Magazine > Star Trek, ex.). As such, not all FAN PRACTICES have the same level of prestige. But which fan practices are “high prestige?” and which are “low prestige?”

II. One prestigious fan practice is the memorization and repetition of factual knowledge. Stereotypical examples of this include:

- Someone who has a reference or quote from a text (the works of Shakespeare,   The Bible, Napoleon Dynamite) for every occasion.

- A group of fan friends who spend their time trading references, factual tidbits, etc. or quizzing each other to determine who has the greatest mastery of their chosen material (The movie-quote people I referenced in class, or the Trekkies from Ch. 1 of Textual Poachers who know every episode my number and name, or the hipsters who can name every year of every album of every obscure band…ever).

I call this fan practice “prestigious” not because all fans who engage in it gain cultural capital, but because some fans do. Based on the prestige of the fan interest, this practice can be considered “smart and cool” (hipsters), “smart but not cool” (the person who punctuates everyday conversation with quotes from Shakespeare) or “neither smart nor cool” (the episode-citing Trekkies from SNL).

III. A less prestigious fan practice comes in when the knowledge that the fan has access to becomes not just a source of  factual tidbits, but begins to resemble a way of looking at the world. This includes:

- The fan who relates every situation to a situation taken from their fan text, rather than merely quoting the text (When the Trekkies from SNL accept the “reenactment of Evil Kirk” explanation, or I know someone who, when hearing of the Queen song “Don’t Stop Me Now,”  immediately said, “That’s James McAvoy’s favorite song to dance to!”).

- The fan whose involvement with the fan text leads them to see beyond the “canon” of the product (fanfiction writers and readers, history buffs who romanticize historical characters’ lives in a fanfictional manner, science geeks who imagine the unproven possibilities of various theories — could some Science Fiction be called “Science Fanfiction?”).

           – Fans whose emotional involvement with the fan text leads them to not only look beyond the “canon,” but to                         deliberately go *against* the canon in the pursuit of still greater emotional involvement (shippers whose chosen                     pairings are unlikely if not entirely noncanonical, history buffs who insist on interpretations of historical figures that             contradict the facts of their life, a “mad scientist” who continues to dedicate their life to a disproven theory)
 

All of these practices are almost exclusively low prestige, regardless of the fan text referenced. Based on the text, however, the cultural interpretations of these practices can vary from “fanatic” and “overzealous” (my James McAvoy-adoring friend), to “weird” (fanfiction writers/readers), to “crazy” (Fred Weasley/George Weasley shippers — this ship is called “twincest” for a reason).

IV. As a feminist, I believe that in many cases, areas of high cultural prestige end up getting associated with men, while areas of low prestige are left to women. Examples of this phenomenon include the higher valuing of work outside the home as opposed to domestic upkeep work (“housework” and child-rearing), and  the higher pay given to science professors, especially those in the “hard sciences” (Physics, Chemistry) than to Humanities professors and “soft science” (Biology, Psychology) professors.

V. Henry Jenkins has already pointed out in the first chapter of Textual Poachers that men who sometimes engage in the second group of fan practices, such as his Trekkies in the SNL sketch, are often portrayed as FEMINIZED, through the suggestion that they are “weak” (physically and emotionally), dependant, and that they have little sexual experience with women. These practices, however, are often accepted for women, especially young women (Beatlemania, ex.), as part of a general cultural propensity to see women as “overemotional” and susceptible to media control.

For men, therefore, the repetition of purely factual information from a fan source is, therefore, seen as an acceptable relationship to the text, whereas the relation of the text to seemingly unrelated situations and the desire to build on the text, associated with an emotional relationship between fan and fan product, is seen as an unacceptable relationship to the text.

VI. Men and women  who engage exclusively in the first set of fan practices, however, are judged more often by the prestige of their fan text than by their relationship to that text. For example, a woman who repeats quotations from popular movies will be seen as more “cool” than a woman who repeats episode titles and numbers from the original series of Star Trek. Therefore, the first set of practices can be seen as an acceptable relationship to the fan text for both men and women. However, I would argue that a woman who repeats quotations from popular movies, memorizes band members and album names/years, or knows every Star Trek episode by number and name does risk being seen as “masculine” or “one of the boys,” if not more “annoying” or “overaggressive” than her male counterparts. Overall, the first set of practices, being more commonly associated with men, is increasingly acceptable for women as well as men. However, the second set, associated with women, is not acceptable for men who wish to maintain an aura of “masculinity.”

Based on the points outlined above, it is easy to see that the first set of practices is more commonly associated with the idea of a fanboy, while the second is more commonly associated with the idea of a fangirl. These practices are not artificially divided by fan communities in order to ostracize women, but are rather culturally recognized as stereotypically “male” and stereotypically “female” patterns of engagement with texts. Fan cultures, in creating and using the terms “fanboy” and “fangirl” merely recognize and name already-existing cultural stereotypes.

            However, naming these stereotypes is an important step in recognizing and deconstructing them. For example, the practices I have identified with the fanboy are not exclusively identified as “fannish.” Many high-prestige fans engaging in the practices listed above would therefore resist the term “fanboy,” since that label is normally associated with low-prestige fans, such as those described by the SNL sketch in Jenkins Chapter 1. The existence of the fangirl/fanboy system allows for the kind of relabeling I described in class, whereby a slash shipper, having created the term “het,” can use it as a tool to point out that all shippers are equally “strange,” and none are “normal” (het-shippers, for their part, have often never heard the term “het,” since they consider themselves to be the norm). More than just petty name-calling, however, is the potential in the terms fanboy and fangirl to cross gender lines. These terms can allow fans to embrace the culturally-assigned gender ambiguity of a boy who is a shipper, giving him a way to express his way of relating to his fan text and the feminization associated with that relational mode in a single word. It is possible for a boy to take pride in being a “fangirl,” just as a girl could proudly declare that she is a “fanboy.”

            Of course, just because male fans could embrace fangirlishness does not mean they do. This brings me to Lauren’s response to an earlier post about fangirl/fanboy distinctions. The terms fangirl and fanboy, rooted as they are in gender distinctions, turn what could be a debate about modes of relating to texts into a debate about men’s and women’s roles in fan culture. Though these two questions are very linked, as I discussed above, the Kristina Busse post cited by Lauren in her comment suggests that turning the first question into a question of gender puts many men in the (male-dominated) field of fan studies on the defensive. Thus, the fanboy/fangirl distinction may create more problems than it solves, reinforcing the association of fan practices with gender according to the prestige of these practices that I described above.

            I am not here to suggest whether or not fans should use the terms “fanboy” and “fangirl” to describe themselves or others. However, I hope that this essay, if anyone reads it, helps to explain the deep cultural roots of the two terms. Since anything deeply rooted in cultural power dynamics tends to seem “right” or “natural,” I am not surprised that the terms “fanboy” and “fangirl” have gained wide acceptance among fans, to the point of being used in academic debates over gender in the fan studies community.