Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

I was thinking about the ways in which our conversations about media fandom based around television or film have focused on the commercialization of of fan texts as a corporate strategy. Clearly, certain fan texts (Star Wars leaps to mind) have a massive corporately-owned commodity culture associated with them. Others may be equal in terms of the collection of items such as unofficial costumes and fanfic, but some of this fan activity has been connected with the idea of the gift economy.

Sports franchises also sell costumes in the form of jerseys, and officially licensed trading cards and baseballs and footballs and the like. I was wondering whether or not the class considered sports fandom more commercialized than other fandoms we have examined, as well as to what extent the fans who buy the items associated with their team are participants in the corporate structure of the leagues vs. in the ideas of avatar and identification we have discussed in earlier weeks i.e. the wearing of a favorite stars jersey while playing in order to play out a fantasy.

Opening disclaimer: I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with the post–mostly I was hoping to put something out there and hope that other people can figure out what to say about it.

So, one of things that didn’t come up today, but that occured to me during our discussion, is how incredibly raced the music industry and music fandom is. Boy bands and girl bands and their followings seem to especially embody this theme. Off the top of my head, I can’t name one multi-racial boy band. New Kids on the Block: all white. Boyz II Men: all black. New Edition: all black. Menudo: All latino.  *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, LFO, O-town: all white.  Furthermore, when rivalries are constructed, the racial frontiers are maintained. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera (and to a lesser extent Jessica Simpson and Mandy Moore) were all constructed as rivals to each other, but Brandy and Maya weren’t considered in the bracket, even though they were young, hot women producing PG to PG-13 boy-centric pop music for a similar demographic. The only counterexample that I can think of right now is that the Spice Girls had one black member. And I think it’s pretty telling that she was “Scary Spice.”

I just had a few observations based on these samples. The first is the obvious statement that the music industry reproduces and perpetuates social cleavages. Especially since all of the above music is targeted at pre-teens and teens, it’s somewhat sinister that the expectation/stereotype that people of different races won’t have similar tastes is being reinforced in the next generation. The other, slightly less boring, but related observation I had was that I think a lot of this is bound up in the sexual and homosexual subtext of pop icons. Girls aren’t only supposed to find a member of *NSYNC to identify with (“The Sensitive One”; “The Young, Hip One”; “The Wacky One”), they’re supposed to want them sexually. And it’s still seen as threatening for the stereotypical boy-band consumer–a 13-year-old white girl–to sexually want a black man. And it is especially threatening if she discovers her sexuality through wanting a black man, entirely possible given the middle-school target age of a boy-band consumer. The homosocial dynamic of boy bands also seems to be similarly raced/racist.

I guess a way to end this post would be ask: how does this relate to what Brandon was saying in class about what people stand to gain or lose through particular music fandom identifications? And is this mostly constructed in the fandom (i.e., a black person who likes Jessica Simpson won’t get respect from black peers), constructed in the industry (the industry tells black people to like Beyonce and white people to like Christina Aguilera), or both? Hopefully someone else can say something coherent, because I’m just not entirely sure where I’m going.

So, there were a couple of things that I wanted to discuss today that came up in class and in Julie Levin Russo’s talk. They aren’t really related, but I thought it would be obnoxious of me to create two blog posts, so I’ve created one obnoxiously long post. Here goes.

1. In the discussion of fan economy v. mainstream economy, there has been a fair amount of objection to the ways the producers have run their economy, i.e., for profit. This has been contrasted to the fan “gift economy,” which I think in our discussions has been cast as somehow a little more pure, worthy, creatively inspired (the assumption that if you’re not doing something for the money, your artistic vision becomes the primary focus of a reading), etc. One of the things that I’ve think we’ve lost track of is that fandom, ultimately, is a hobby. It may be an extremely consuming, engaging, important, totally all-consuming hobby, but it is not a person’s job (mostly–for a very few it is). Presumably, fans are participating in capitalist forms of commodity/labor production and exchange–just not in fandom. But they have jobs that give them the capital that allows them to work within the fan gift economy. Going back to Bizzy’s point from last week about exclusionary issues in fandom, I think that you could make an argument that the gift economy is not necessarily lowering the barriers to fandom, but raising them–people who would perhaps like to produce for fandom may not be able to afford to enter this world if they cannot turn their significant time and effort investments into money. Poorer people may need to spend their time on a profitable venture–it’s only those with a financial cushion who can afford this gift economy.

On the flip side, I do think we need to recognize that producers create their texts and expect to live off of them. To me, it is therefore not the same to ask them to participate in an economy of free exchange the way fans ask other fans to. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems when producers attempt to turn fan work into a profit-venture or attack fans for violating copyright (and therefore their profit margins). There’s a huge power imbalance that Julie Russo brought up with YouTube taking down videos when producers ask, but fans basically can’t appeal. Also, many make the argument that producers are making truly ludicrous amounts of money off of their work, and therefore the fact that fans have cut very narrowly into that is negligible. I’m more in tune with the first argument than the second; I just don’t think it’s up to fans to decide what a reasonable salary is.

2. I’ve been thinking a lot about the point that Julie Russo made about how fandom should, in some ways, be a protected space for queer and feminist expression, and that’s part of the reason why certain voices in the mainstream should not be able to co-opt vids (to give one example from the lecture–people laughing at the Brokeback Mountain parodies out of homophobia). Ultimately, I think I still disagree. I’m simply not prepared to say that being a fan is the same thing as being queer, or being a woman, or being a person of color, or any other kind of deeply marginalized group in our society.

To explain, I want to reference where I come down on a similar issue–the recent controversy over the Campus Republicans’ use of queer slogans like “coming out.” (I know many people are sick of this discussion, so I’ll try to keep it short.) I really support the people who objected to the Republicans’ posters, because I think that a) Being queer is not something that is/should be negotiable–society has no right to question the legitimacy of someone’s sexual orientation; b) Queer people are very silenced in society; c) Republicans are doing a lot of the silencing; d) Republicans appropriating queer slogans is therefore doubly silencing, problemmatic (though indirect) mockery, and a totally illegitimate comparison of what it means to be a conservative in a liberal environment v. what it means to be queer in a straight society. (Note: I really don’t mean to piss off any Republicans in the class, I’m trying to make a point about fandom, I promise.)

Now, right off the bat, I don’t think that fans as fans (not as queer people, women, etc.) can simply claim an unquestionable perspective because they are a minority. I think that there are legitimate ways to look at fan production and disagree with it–maybe even laugh at it. I understand that this may be hurtful to the producer, but I don’t think that it is necessarily oppressive. Being a fan means taking a certain perspective on a text; it is not an inherent, unchangeable part of an identity (like sex, race, sexuality). Questioning it is therefore not the same as questioning other marginalized identites. I could laugh at a Kirk/Spock slash vid not out of homophobia, but because I see these characters as so obviously straight that this pairing is amusing. My interpretation of that text should not be less privileged. Similarly, I could also laugh if a vid took a character that in the show canon I interpreted as obviously queer (say, Jack from Will and Grace) and paired him with a woman–that would be amusing to me, even if the vidder was completely sincere (and maybe trying to make some kind of feminist statement about editing women out of fan texts).

Because fan identity is a choice, the fan community is so diverse, and fan production has so many available meanings, I think it’s simply impossible to take most of fandom and say, “This is subversive minority speech. Because it protests The Man (the mainstream), it is silencing for The Man to comment unfavorably upon it/co-opt it/trivialize it.” This isn’t to say I think it’s okay that people laugh at Brokeback Mountain parodies out of homophobia; it is to say that I think that fan production should not be sequestered away and viewed by limited communities, and given the openness with which I think it should be displayed and discussed, I have to accept the fact that a few idiots will comment on the conversation.

Before the screening Tuesday night, Lauren and I briefly the various meanings that the word ‘fandom‘ can possibly have.  The Wikipedia definition touches on the fact that fandom can refer to narrow or broad subcultures. The term has been used in a wide array of ways throughout class and blog discussions, and I definitely felt uncertain while writing my paper about whether or not I was using the term correctly.  To me, fandom refers mostly to the phenomenon of people clustering towards a text.  For example, in my paper I referred to Star Trek as the “object of a fandom.”  Considering that I have already handed in my paper, I hope that I was on the right page as far as my usage.  But, the main goal of my post is to hopefully illicit discussion and establish a flexible class definition of fandom.