Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Ariel Horowitz

Full paper: Worshipping the Text: Fandom as Religious Practice in Modern Society

I explore the ways in which fan activity satisfies the lack of ritualized worship left by the secularization of modern society. It has often been posited that religions are created by humanity to satisfy some inherent need for belief, ritual, and an interpretive paradigm for navigating life. Presently in Western society, a large part of the population lives a generally secular lifestyle; even if many people celebrate technically religious holidays, their worldviews are not built with religious tenets. I theorize that for many people, fandom serves as a substitute for this sort of religious activity. Fandom provides an environment for the subsuming of self in a greater narrative. Fan texts are modern mythology, their archetypical characters ripe for investment with belief. This belief leads to fan practices that are comparable to religious practices. Fans sanctify the watching of weekly television shows like a sabbath. Fan tours to significant locations are transcendent in the same way as pilgrimages to holy sites. Fans deify the creators of texts and canonize fans that gain prominence. Finally, fans absorb the ideology of a fan text, incorporating the text’s representations of concepts such as morality and duty into their own. Fan engagement with texts is, I argue, directly comparable to religious adherents’ engagement with holy texts, and fan activity serves as a modern kind of religion.

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Abigail Graber

Full paper: Racial Stereotyping in Star Trek and its Fandom

Gene Roddenberry conceived the world of Star Trek as a multicultural utopia, where the racial divisions that scarred the American social and political landscape in the ‘60s have been eliminated. This is also the vision of Star Trek depicted in official representations of fandom. Throughout Trekkies, fans are consistently quoted as appreciating the egalitarian ethos that pervades Star Trek—from the story Trekkies tells, the racial liberalism of Star Trek is one of the qualities that fans are most drawn to in the series. However, several scholars have recently questioned Star Trek’s pretensions to racial progressivism. Daniel Bernardi and Denise Alessandria Hurd, among others, document pervasive patterns of racial discrimination in the production of Star Trek, racial stereotyping in the world of Star Trek, and the placement of white actors, white characters, and white culture at the top of a racial hierarchy within the Star Trek-verse. Fans reproduce these racial issues. In fannish behavior surrounding Star Trek, the essentialization of biological race is taken for granted. In fannish discussions of problematic racial representations in Star Treks, stereotypes about human “races” are reproduced.

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Nicole Boyle

Full paper: Female Fans, Published Authors

My project is about the transition of and porous boundary between fans and producers of media texts in a gender specific manner. I am looking at female fans who wrote/write fanfiction who have also published novels, in much the same way Henry Jenkins looked at the male amateur filmmakers who then become professional film makers in his book Convergence Culture. I discuss case studies of three fanfiction writers who are publishing or have published their own novels, Sarah Rees Brennan, Jaida Jones, and Naomi Novik. I look at personal correspondence, livejournal entries, and interviews to investigate how each author has negotiated their fannish production when they became published authors. This paper looks at the fan/producer binaries that have been prevalent throughout this class, and also suggests the further investigation in role of gender in the transition between fan and producer.

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Brandon Washington

Full paper: fandom-performing-ethnicity.pdf

My paper is on Race and Fandom and the modes of performativity they activate . My paper will look at various examples within sports fandom in particular, and explore the role race plays in fandom. Some of the questions I will be posing are: How can race determine one’s fandom? Are certain fan cultures targeted towards certain races? Does fan culture point to race or does race point to a fan culture? In this analysis the parallels will become clear that fandom and ethnic identities are not mutually exclusive, but in fact are linked by the element of performance.