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.

2ge+her - click here for the entire movie on youtube

(I hope this makes sense…)

So, throughout class I was thinking a lot about how the boy band craze affected my life… and while I completely perpetuated the false, constructed rivalry by being a strict BSB fan only; I think one of the most intriguing, hilarious and complex phenomena to come out of this period has to be – 2ge+her.

In short, 2ge+her is a completely fictional boy band created to capitalize on and simultaneously mock the boy band hysteria of the moment. The band was first revealed in a mocumentary about the formation and rise of a new boy band to rival the dominant group – Whoa!. This mocumentary was the first feature-length film produced specifically to air on MTV and I distinctly remember the hype and my excitement building up to the commercial-free broadcast in 2000. The band went on tour one summer as the opener for Britney Spears. And the group was given a sort of reality TV show extension from the movie that was short lived due to the sudden death of the youngest member, Michael Cuccione.

(My personal attachment: I saw them at the Granite Run Mall after school one afternoon. It was kind of a major deal for me… at the time. And I bought one of their albums. My love for BSB was much greater than my appreciation of 2ge+her but I think it’s fair to consider my youthful self a fan.)

I think 2ge+her is relevant to our discussion in class for two main reasons: 1) the construction of the musician-fan identities and relationships; and 2) the consumption of the performer’s multiple identities.

This “Boy Band Training” clip from the movie highlights the commodification of the boys in order to provide individual personas for the fans to identify with. It acknowledges the need to present constructed identities that will be judged not only by the media but more importantly by the fans. Also, prior to this scene, as the boys are individually found and brought together to form the group, each one is chosen due to the necessity to fill/cast a distinct character type. They end up with a well-rounded group:

Jerry O’Keefe (Evan Farmer) – “the heart-throb”

Mickey Parke (Alex Solowitz) – “the rebel”

Chad Linus (Noah Bastian) – “the shy one”

Doug Linus (Kevin Farley) – “the older brother”

Jason “QT” McKnight (Michael Cuccione) – “the cutie”

But 2ge+her not only highlights the absurdity and falseness in constructing commodified identities to cater to the audience-consumers, it also complicates the multiple identities that we discussed in class. So for “the heart-throb,” there is Jerry O’Keefe who has an entire history and personality that the fans are privy to through the tv show and movie, and then there is Evan Farmer, the actor, whose identity is completely obscured by the constructed O’Keefe. It isn’t until a few years later with the TLC reality show “While You Were Out” where Evan Farmer, as the host of the show, becomes the commodity consumed. But this publicly televised version of Farmer still is not the private Farmer who audiences may feel connected to… and really- it probably doesn’t matter at all which identities fans identify with but as Brandon pointed ount in class- how these identities affect the fans…

Overall, I thought that it was another interesting example of the degrees of distance between a fan and the fan object. I also think that 2ge+her is a specific case, and I can’t imagine there are still fans of 2ge+her who struggle with defining themselves in relation to this group; but the 2ge+her project provides an extreme model of fan interactions and the construction of commodified identities.

A few parting questions/thoughts:

- What do you think the intent of creating 2ge+her was? Was it simply to capitalize on a fan? What is the underlining commentary on the band boy craze?

- How does 2ge+her compare to “real” boy bands? How does 2ge+her vary from any other transmedia franchise?

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 I thought that the screening on Tuesday was really interesting. It struck me as very different from Trekkies, although that might be because I’ve never been a Star Trek fan. The film blurred the boundaries between the fans and the producers in a much more obvious way, where you had interviews with people who were almost professional fans, who were also producers of books about Tolkien and about the LOTR movies. Having Dominic Monaghan (who played Merry in the films) do the narration also created a really strong link in my mind between the officially sanctioned movie and the fan produced Ringers. Many of the interviews with the actors strongly reminded me of the interview extras on the DVDs to the extent that I almost felt during the movie that I *was* watching an extra. Also, if I remember correctly the company that distributed Ringers is also somehow linked to one of the companies involved in LOTR?

However, the film clearly also had roots in online fandoms and places outside the official domain of the film. It was produced by the TORN people, and had a detailed section on The Very Secret Diaries, which was a huge internet phenomenon. There was talk about Lord of the Peeps (also in the reading), and many of the fans interviewed mentioned the importance of the internet to their fannish activity. I personally spent a lot of the film looking at the watercolor art work, being sure that I recognized it from somewhere, and tracked it down to Anke Katrin Eissmann. The mild, though surprising, criticism of the materialism surrounding the LOTR films is not something that I think would have appeared in the actual films.

I wonder if part of the differences between the two movies can be traced to the emergence of the large internet fandoms between Trekkies (1997) and Ringers (2005). Do we think that the two movies would have looked more alike if they were made closer together? Or is it simply that they were investigating different fan bases? Is there even a significant difference between the two fandoms (remember that one guy dressed up in Trek costume, and I’m pretty sure one costume was supposed to be Obi-Wan Kenobi)? Does anyone else feel like there’s an important differences between the two films? Random other things about Ringers that I should have talked about but didn’t?

I was looking through the New York Times today, and there was a fairly negative article
on the Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales. I don’t really have much of an opinion on this article because I don’t really know much about Wikipedia besides what’s in the reading. I was wondering if people would mind talking a bit more about their experiences with Wikipedia and similar sites especially in regards to the reading. Ben made an interesting post before where people got talking in the comments, but I’d like to bring it up again and see what people are thinking and perhaps get more perspectives.

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.

I found something interesting the other day.  I was flipping through my roommate’s issue of GQ when I found a small article describing popular slash texts.  It was entitled “Lord of the Cock Rings” and gave the title, author, a brief synopsis, and a quote from each of the four texts (my favorite is “You’re a nice kid, but if it gets around that Tony Soprano swings both ways…you’re dead.  Capeesh?”).  This article interests me because it serves as an example of Dick Hebdige’s concept of the incorporation of subculture.  Historically, slash has been very much an underground fan community.  Due to its (homo)sexually graphic and fantasy-based content, it’s usually met with shock and disapproval when encountered in the mainstream.  But here we see it as the subject of an article in a mainstream magazine.  Like the television station that ran a story about “punk families”, this magazine makes money by covering innovative cultural phenomena.  But by running an article about slash, GQ brings this type of fan production into the mainstream, and perhaps robs it of the exclusivity that has historically characterized it.

So, after the screening last night I was watching some of the BBC miniseries about Casanova with David Tennant and was reminded of how David Tennant came to be an actor: by watching Doctor Who and thinking that was what he wanted to do. t the moment, David Tennant is playing the Doctor, which is an interesting slide along Bob’s producer/consumer scale. So, we’re discussed the idea of canonicity of multiple authors, but what about multiple actors in the same role? Tennant’s portrayal of the 10th Doctor must be influenced by the acting of the 3rd and 4th Doctors that he watched as a child (for those who don’t know, part of Doctor Who canon is that a Time Lord, like the Doctor, can reincarnate a limited number of times and ergo David Tennant’s character is the 10th incarnation of the Doctor and he is the 10th actor to play the role). Does that mean that his acting is fanfic-esque in some sense?

It seems to me there are three possibilities for different actors in the same role: things like the Doctor, where it’s part of the canon; situations where there are re-makes and multiple adaptations, like the fact that Laurence Olivier, Colin Firth, and Matthew McFadyen have all played Mr. Darcy, but Darcys with different scripts; and things like Broadway musicals, when many different people play the exact same role.

So what’s canon in the latter two situations? Whose portrayal is the canonical one?