Fangirl/Fanboy debate confusion…
January 30th, 2008 by aweintr1In class on Tuesday the discussion of gendered norms in fandom was brought up. Having never heard the terms before today, I was a little confused as to why the world of fans would even bother constructing what appears to be a false binary, since the activities related to the terms aren’t mutually exclusive. After hearing their definitions, I found that my fan practices included most of the criteria for both a fangirl and fanboy. My knowledge of other fan’s practices is relatively limited, since I’m not really involved in communal activity. Are fangirls and fanboys empirically seen to be the norm in fandoms? If so, at what cost to those who are exceptions to the rule?
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In my experience, the binary — if there even is one — isn’t very strict, but I suspect it really depends on the fandom. Part of the issue is that, as far as I’ve seen, anyway, the vast majority of fic is both romantic in nature on some level and written by and for women. I’ve read fic by men and known men who read and wrote fic, but most of them were gay, which brings up a whole other bag of issues about masculinity and gender and such.
Really, I think this is one of those situations in which fandom mirrors society at large. There are certain activities that men seem to pursue more and others that women seem to pursue more, but in fandom, as in society at the moment, there’s not a lot of vitriol for people who “cross lines” as it were. Sometimes straight guys get a little freaked out by slash and sometimes women get freaked out by how rarely guys shower at fan conventions (thus signs that say “Soap Is Your Friend”).
Would it help here to list some of the ways in which gender differences in fandom are traditionally described? I don’t want to reify a false binary (as we say in academia), but a list of the stereotypes — with scare quotes firmly in place — might clarify the terms of this discussion.
Well, it’s more behavior than anything else. As I’ve known it, fangirling and fanboying are far from mutually exclusive gender-wise. A girl can easily fanboy as a guy can fangirl.
Kristina Busse’s blog post that started it off.
An excerpt of my own correspondence with Prof. Burke regarding Busse’s post.
Henry Jenkins announces the debate.
A LiveJournal mirror for those who find that site easier to navigate. (This first post there includes some comments by female fans and academics discussing how they feel the technological interfaces to be gendered– this is just one tiny part of a much larger discussion but I thought you might want to see the trend of the rhetoric.)
whoops, sorry, I meant to introduce that set of links:
A lot of discussion in this subject swelled up this past summer, after Kristina Busse offered a feminist critique of the Media in Transition 5 conference. In response, Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers, moderated a series of exchanges between male and female fan scholars.
I think (although I could be wrong, of course!) that a lot of this debate assumes everyone generally embraces the ideas that typically male and typically female fan practices
1. cleave something along the lines of solitary and consumptive (fanboy) and collaborative and creative (fangirl)
2. exist as serious social trends which to an extent are self-perpetuating
3. do not stem from some biological imperative (so, as has been observed above, male fans can write fanfiction and female fans can memorize movie quotes) and also do not categorize perfectly neatly into two types of behavior (so a fan coming out of the slash music video tradition can make a music videos completely dedicated to celebrating the cool explosions and fancy CGI of her favorite show, and a fan coming out of the, I don’t know, comics who-would-win-this-fight tradition can feel intense emotional identification with his favorite character, etc).
Ahem: I’m not trying to say everyone totally agrees with those three claims, and even the people who do agree with those three claims can get into heated debate figuring out the specifics of their scope. Still, it’s my understanding that those three premises sort of define the shape of discussion.
Hope this makes sense.
Wow, Lauren! I didn’t know that *academics* use the terms “fanboy” and “fangirl” to describe gender divides even among fellow scholars!
Though of course, I’m not surprised that modern fan scholarship conferences tend to break down along gender lines, with female-coded events being attended largely by other women, and male-coded events having
a more mixed audience. This seems to be true (sadly) in many different contexts.
As for Textual Poachers being considered the most feminist work of academic-level fan studies (as Busse suggests in her post)… whoa! When I first read it, I was actually looking for *more* consideration of even *more feminine* fan cultures! I felt like Jenkins was taking a rather *male perspective* on what I guess Busse is calling “fangirl” practices!
Anyway, your comment got me thinking about what the *root* of the terms fanboy and fangirl actually is… since even academics use them so naturalistically, they must have a really deep basis in American cultural assumptions..
I’m writing a post about it now, for the actual blog (it’s really long).
Aaaah, I am really torn about this and I haven’t even read the debate part yet. On the one hand, I disagree with you about fandom not being essentially about the text, although clearly for people in fan communities it’s not *only* about the text, either. But Kathy, for example, has shown how she is a fan outside of fan communities. I think this is another case where we need to think in dualities, as in the narrative/object thing — the attraction of fandom for many being both text and community.
Furthermore, I agree with Jenkins somewhat: female fan communities have been doing what female fan communities do for years. I’m going to make the blithe assumption that a lot of the second period of fan studies that Fandom delineated was almost entirely centered on “female” fan behavior. The new Web 2.0 phenomena haven’t yet been studied to that extent and insofar as they’re “male” phenomena, the scholarship on them will be male-centered, and I’m not sure I see anything sexist in that per se (i.e., maybe if women want to be studied more, we should do things that are more study-able, or more novel, at least).
At the same time, however, it’s hugely problematic that men won’t listen to women talk about fandom, and I say that not as a rule or even a generalization, but as an acknowledgment and recognition of Busse’s experience. The best-attended presentations at HP cons, where about half of the talks analyze the series and the other half analyze the fandom, are by a man named Steve Vander Ark, who runs the HP Lexicon. HP fandom is almost entirely female-dominated. So why do so many women flock to listen to a man tell them about their own fandom?
This seems to me on some level to be less about fandom and more about gender relations in general — for example, it’s also the case that women who listen to the fashion industry are essentially letting men tell them what to wear and how to look. But still, it’s problematic.
To respond to Lauren’s summary list, I agree, but I think that in terms of being self-perpetuating, the perception that such a distinction exists is perpetuated by the facelessness of the internet. When readers don’t know anyone’s gender (or some other characteristic), rather than not assign them one they assume the one that makes the most sense. So even though there are men on Harry Potter livejournals and women on World of Warcraft boards, we and our stereotypes don’t have to confront them.
Good point, Leah!
Actually, I know a guy who plays a female avatar (thus is seen as female) on Second Life, which is like a fan community in the sense that people interact quasi-anonymously over the internet… it does sort of allow artificial gender stereotypes (using a female avatar, being in the HP livejournal community, ex.) to overtake the gendered cues most people pick up based on things any given person can’t control (their personal appearance, their biological sex).
Then, doesn’t that also allow for more fluidity between male/female spaces since no one has to know that their favorite slash author is actually a man?
Being a fanboy or a fangirl could become a choice of gender identity like choosing your Second Life avatar. My friend is always praising this element of Second Life exactly because it allows people to choose their gender and have no one question it based on factors outside their control.