Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

So, for those of you wondering what Bob was doing with his Thursday off, I present to you a conference (and here it is on Bob’s blog). I’m sure all of you who already follow his blog knew this, but I figured it was worth posting in the class blog too.

Bob’s going to be heading a follow up panel about gender and fandom in Santa Barbara that continues a discussion about Gender and Fan Studies (link goes to the initial post, here’s part the first) that Henry Jenkins hosted last summer. Bob’s going to be talking about how Blueprint Culture is gendered, touching on the recent Harry Potter Lexicon legal dispute. It seems like a lot of cool people (including Julie Levin Russo) will also be giving interesting talks about gender, fandom, vidding, soap opera, wresting, wizard rock (which, in a very simplified condensed explanation, means rock songs about Harry Potter), and the fanboy/fangirl terminology, all of which on the website. I’m excited, and I hope Bob’ll report back to us when the conference is over.

Also, we apparently made Bob comfortable with threaded comments. Go team us!

These four articles touch on the possibilities of fandom in a global context. What does being a fan mean in different contexts? What are different fan objects around the world? How do fandoms operate around that object? What larger issues are implicated in the fandoms? All of the articles talk about media fandom, particularly film and television stars, and the overlap those stars have in the commercial realm. Punathambekar touches on the overlap between Tamil film stars and politics, but shies away from it because he wishes to place fandom on a continuum that does not highlight the political action of stars in India. However, I would like to go into the political potential of fandom and stardom in a global context. Cieko & Lee’s article highlights the parallels between different kinds of star capital and the political situation in South Korea, and I think this idea is interesting to explore in the Chinese context. They also point out the growing fluidity of gender in Korean film and television, which is also applicable in the Chinese context. All of the articles touch on the possibility of information flow, a flow that does not just go from West to East, but in all directions.

Super Girl was a hugely popular television show in China. It was a three-hour singing show based on American Idol, which is based on the British show Pop Idol. The official name of the show is “Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest” because of the primary sponsor, a yogurt company. In each episode, there are multiple times when the people of China voted for their favorite star. This does not sound unusual, considering that many Americans do the same when watching American Idol. However, the three hour block of voting per week is different, because people in China don’t vote in political elections. The grand finale of the 2005 show drew 400 million viewers, which is roughly the population of the United States and Great Britain combined. About 8 million sent “text messages of support” (the actual term vote was not used). This contest marked the first time that a true Chinese pop star has emerged since the rise of Communism in 1949. According to a Christian Science Monitor article on Super Girl, the show is popular because of its “raw authenticity” and how it indirectly gives individuals in China a voice through the “text messages of support.” The show did not emerge from Beijing, the political and cultural capital of China, but rather from Hunan, a province in the Southwest of China. However, the show became a national phenomenon.

The winners of Super Girl (there were three seasons before the show was taken off the air) were tomboyish, and the one who has gained the most attention is the second season’s winner, Li Yuchun. On BBS websites and blogs, people argued about whether she was pretty or ugly, a boy or a girl, gay or straight, cool or weird. She is the most famous Super Girl and an interesting object of fandom. Her androgynous appearance and the fact that her English name is Chris have led to a lot of speculation about her sexuality and gender. As Ciecko & Lee pointed out in their article, there is a potential for the creation of a newer female gender role through popular depictions of women and men, and if Li Yuchun’s popularity is any indication, gender may be becoming more fluid. As quoted on a blog about the growing industrialization of China, one blogger said “Why is she so popular in China? I guess it reflects the confrontation between male and female in Mainland China. Most of her fans are women, and men prefer Zhang Liang Ying. Her victory is women’s victory and voting for her is voting for our own dream of being ourselves.” Others say that the popularity of this show is due to its unprecedented format and one of China’s most famous sociologists Li Yinhe called Super Girl a “victory of the grassroots over the elite culture.”

Although this is not distinct to Asia, the winners of Super Girl become spokespeople for various brands. Ciecko & Lee discuss the decrease in star capital if a star puts does not produce anything new but appears in commercials. Li Yuchun actually uses the brands that she endorses in her music videos, thus combining the commercial necessity of stardom with production. Amazingly, there is also a Li Yuchun stamp in China, something that normally only happens to important politicians.

One of Li Yuchun’s most popular songs is called “N+1,” and it is a mixture of classical Chinese music and hip-hop. A lot of songs performed on the Super Girl show are standard pop hits from America, such as Zombie by the Cranberries, Don’t Cry for Me Argentina from Evita, and Wherever, Whenever by Shakira. I chose to focus on Super Girl as my fan artifact presentation because I think it elucidates some points brought up in the readings on global fandom. Super Girl is an excellent example of Mainland China’s entrance into the global capitalist economy. The show’s title explicitly says the name of the sponsoring product, the songs performed are often in English, the winners receive product sponsorship with global companies, and when the videos are posted on YouTube, people’s comments, in English and other languages are shown. Americans now have access to Super Girl and can comment in their own right. Li Yuchun has performed in Las Vegas in the Fusion concert and has performed with Kenny G as well, singing Everything I Do by Bryan Adams. As quotes from fan of Super Girl demonstrate, there is also the potential for autonomy.

Here are links to videos:
1. Li Yuchun singing in Las Vegas (“N+1”)
2. Li Yuchun dancing (fan vid mashup!)
3. Li Yuchun “Happy Wakeup” music video (notice the product placement)
4. Li Yuchun and Kenny G (not very good quality; also, not good because Kenny G is involved, but I can tell you, he’s super popular in China)

Link to blog about China’s visibility in the global capitalist economy, with many posts about Super Girl

Questions:
1. Is there such a thing as global fandom? What does it look like?
2. How is/not Li Yuchun an example of fandom in a global context?
3. What do you think of the portrayal of fans in Otaku No Video?
4. Is there political potential in fandom? Why/why not?

THE BACKGROUND:

This post grew out of a New York Times article on the publication of the (book-form) Harry Potter Lexicon, which existed first as a website. MTV has informative and concise coverage of the issues behind the trial. We began discussing this issue at Tuesday’s screening, and Abby, feel free to tack stuff onto this post–somehow, via the design of this site, I guess, posts feel more legit than comments, and I don’t want to shut out your post just because I got to the internet earlier in the night.

THE DISCUSSION:

Of particular interest to me is the idea of transformative work. It seems to me that anything Steve Vander Ark writes in his own words (as opposed to quoting from the HP text) is, in some way transforming or adding to our understanding of Harry Potter.

“It’s not as if we are describing something that exists outside my imagination,” said Rowling, according to the MTV article, which is an interesting contention to say the least. I’m right now trying to decide whether Tolkien would agree with or chastise his most visible of fans, Rowling.

I am reluctant to get into a discussion of the HP Lexicon website, as the book/copyright issue is so interesting, but I don’t think it’s possible to fully flesh out the issue without realizing that the book came out of (and still exists as) a website. Also, once I post this, it’s really out of my hands (a transformed work?).

P.S. For those swing dancers in class, Henry Jenkins presents…THIS

I wanted to continue our conversation about symbolic pligrimages and the question of whether there really is a certain aura that surrounds texts and places of fandom. After reading Brooker and listening to the comments in class, I was thinking about the phenomenon of visiting preserved historical sites such as Plimoth Plantation and the Vanderbilt Mansion. At Plymouth, for example, actors dress up in clothes of the 1500s and stay in character as they go about their daily lives as if they really were pilgrims first settling in America. So, I would say that visitors to Plymouth can make a sort of connection to the past and put themselves physically into space that would otherwise be inaccessible. This seems to be very similar to what Brooker talks about when he talks about pilgrimages to Graceland and the Coronation Street set. He quotes Sandvoss and says, “the emotional significance of visiting a place lies in the ability of fans to put themselves physically into the otherwise textual universe” (Brooker, 160).

At the Vanderbilt Mansion, there are no actors, only tour guides that lead visitors through the home, talking about the significance of certain rooms, paintings, etc. based on the real lives and events of the Vanderbilt family. Still, when you walk through the house, there is a sort of sense of travelling in space and time in order to enter an “otherwise textual universe.” Using another quote from Brooker, “one gets a bit closer to the man and his time by being in places associated with him,” and this seems to be the phenomenon that takes place as countless visitors walk through the rooms of these mansions that have no substantial significance except through the symbolic values tour guides and visitors seem to bestow upon them.

Would we say this is a different phenomenon or practice than the types of pilgrimages and emotional connections fans make to places or other physical spaces associated with a fan object? I wouldn’t necessarily say that all visitors to Plimoth Plantation or the Vanderbilt Mansion are fans of the sites themselves, and they are not necessarily history fans either, so how do we compare what seem to be very similar yet still somehow different practices?

Oh, and on a totally different note, I just wanted to bring people’s attention to a comment I had made on Loretta’s post about 2ge+her…I had been editing the comment and it posted before I was able to finish it, but now the full comment is there, links and all. I’m not sure how that happened, but it’s fixed now. The links to O-Town music videos are good for entertainment value if nothing else if you want to check it out.

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.

Fan Artifact: On Fan Pilgrimages and Producerly Control Over Information

Rachel Turner

 Being from New Jersey (and unsurprisingly, proud of it) I could not help but decide to focus this weeks fan artifacts on everyone’s favorite mafia family, The Sopranos.  The series ran for eight years (1999-2007) on HBO, and has recently been picked up on A&E for reruns.  With an already established “On Location Tour” that can be found on the shows official website that has attracted people from all over the world, I felt a little uncreative simply giving you a run-down on the already established tour.  Instead, I “called in some favors” and am happy to present you with à

  The Sopranos: What You Didn’t Hear on the Tour, and the Reason Why.

 Bob, a Kodak employee in the Film Sales Division in New York City was the main contact between Kodak and The Sopranos production.  He worked intimately and frequently with the executive producer and cinematographers on set (just to name a few).   What the cast and crew of The Sopranos did not know was that Bob is also a fan of the show.  Having had a privileged interaction with the inter-workings of The Sopranos, he was able to comment on his behind-the-scenes experience as a fan. 

 I began my phone interview with Bob and explained what I was interested in talking about regarding The Sopranos.   I then asked what he would be willing to share, and he responded, “Nothing I couldn’t be shot for.”  Joking aside, the secrecy that was kept on the set for eight years was intense (and extremely successful) to avoid spoilers getting out to the public.  Bob mentioned that every single person in the studio (which is located in New York, by the way, not New Jersey) regardless of their connection to the show, was very serious about keeping the storylines and threads very hush-hush.  It was nothing to joke about.  (Bob actually enjoyed this aspect of his job as he hated being on set and overhearing a conversation or a scene being filmed that spoiled part of the story for him.  He wanted to be surprised when he watched the show and was always upset when something was “ruined for him.”) 

 This high level of secrecy and security is certainly something that the producers care deeply about.  Spoilers upset fans and also destroy any reason people have to watch the show.  The balance between giving to the viewers and keeping from viewers is a delicate one which the producers like to be in control of. 

For example, one thing that Bob overheard on set is something that the producers would rather not be common knowledge about their star, James Gandolfini.  In a conversation with a fellow cast member, Gandolfini was heard to be heatedly expressing his frustration with his stalled theatrical and motion picture career due to his association with the Tony Soprano identity.  He felt stuck in the type-cast of Tony and was greatly upset by his inability to move on from the show.  His unhappiness in the show could have greatly dented and jaded the fans that followed his life as Tony Soprano.   For this reason, the producers are concerned about controlling the amount and type of information that the public has access too.  Thompson addressed this issue in The Frodo Franchise, stating that “studios might be willing to reveal what sots of screws they use in their sets, but they’re not about to tell fans everything…their need to keep many things confidential clashes with the fans’ desire to know every last detail.” 

And with good reason, too.  In the Couldry chapter in Fandom, he speaks of his own Sopranos tour experience.  When visiting the “Bada Bling” strip club, which is actually a real strip club that was conducting its everyday business while the tour was there, Couldry comments on an uneasy realization of reality in their fantasy fiction tour.  It was almost as if the magic was broken.  Knowing too much can be dangerous ground for maintaining the sustained level of disbelief needed. 

 This control of information readily available to the fans by the producers is very interesting.  There is a need to promote closeness and an intimate connection for the fans to their show, however, the protection around spoilers is taken very seriously and information about unhappy stars is guarded.  Just as they create a fantasy on the show, they try to recreate it in their tours to keep it alive as long as possible.  Now that the show has come to a completion, the drive to keep fans interactive and, more importantly, consuming, they attempt to make the series more tangible. 

1. Reflect on your own fan interests and practices.  What are the areas you wish you knew more about?  Are there areas you would like to stay away from?
2. What are your thoughts on the producer control clash with fans’ desires to gain knowledge? 
3. Should fans be able to learn as much as they want?  Are their dangers in getting everything you want?  (Is an integral part of being a fan is always wanting more?)
4. We’ve spoken a lot in class about the difference between masculine and feminine fandom.  Can these differences be related to a fan’s desire to seek out spoilers or inside information compared to fans that prefer to wait to be surprised by the show and interact more via fan fiction?

In my pre-sleep browsing, I ran across this interesting link: http://www.fantasymoguls.com/

Below is a description from IMDB (on whose home page I found the link):

“Think you can do a better job of picking hit movies than the studios? Then prove it at Fantasy Moguls.com, the fantasy game for Hollywood movies, now with a new look and easy new gameplay for all seasons. Create your own studio with a budget of $100, which you’ll use to select up to eight movies to fill out your studio slate. You’ll rack up points for your studio based on things like box office, review score, “legs” (the term for longevity in the theaters after the initial release) and per-theater average. You can play in a league with your friends or join a public league and make new ones. Perhaps best of all, it’s 100% FREE to play. The ultra-competitive summer season is now underway, so sign up and join Fantasy Moguls, sponsored by the 2008 Honda CR-V.”

While there are obviously many levels to unpack here (commodification of the process of commodification, for instance, or the “revelation” of “insider” knowledge via the industry term “legs”), I am hitting the sack, and just wanted to get this up here before I forgot about it.

Other possible discussion points include this in-depth strategy article that, at first glance, I took for a film review, or Honda’s large advertising presence in this venture.

Perhaps I will edit this to include a more thorough reading tomorrow, but please don’t let that stop you from commenting.

You know this had to come up eventually. Reading through Victoria K. Gosling’s article, “Girls Allowed?,” in which her female football fans in the UK see “true fans” as constructed by the “footballing establishment” as male, I couldn’t help thinking of a feminist book I once skimmed through, Laurel R. Davis’ The Swimsuit Issue and Sport: Hegemonic Masculinity in Sports Illustrated. Gosling discusses the ways in which live sports venues can be coded as male spaces, making them feel unsafe or uncomfortable to female fans attending live games, and she touches on television and print media’s construction of “sports” as men’s sports, giving little to no attention to women’s teams. However, in addition to individual male fans of sports sometimes using their fan communities as implicit male-only spaces in which they can express antipathy towards women, it seems clear from the example of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that sources of information for sports fans encourage and appeal to this tendency within sports fandom (most likely as a strategy to make money).

I’m not sure if Sports Illustrated is really the dominant publication that Davis seemed to think it was in 1997 (the year her book was published). However, it does seem interesting to me to note that the swimsuit issue is pretty much the issue of Sports Illustrated for any given year. A publication that is in name dedicated to sports coverage is devoted in significant part to soft-core porn distribution. One of the headings on SportsIllustrated.com, for example, among “On Campus,” “Fannation,” “SI Vault,” etc. is “Swimsuit,” and the second hit on Google under the search “Sports Illustrated” is a link to their swimsuit page for 2007.

So, right. Consumers of sports news and consumers of soft-core porn come together to form the readership of Sports Illustrated. This makes more money for the magazine. I could imagine, however, that the people who initially subscribed to SI for the sports might start to like the swimsuits, and the people who started off just to look at the swimsuits may have started reading articles about the sports, too. Masculine heterosexuality (in the implied male gaze of the photographs in the swimsuit issue) thus gets mixed up with sports in that if you’re a heterosexual male who likes soft porn, a publication like this encourages you to also be a sports fan. Not to belabor the point (too late!), sports fans are also encouraged to be straight men who like soft porn.

I remember coming across a swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated as a child in a doctor’s waiting room.  Being the sketchy kid that I was, I liked the pretty pictures, and decided that SI was the magazine for me. For years, I picked up SI in doctor’s offices looking for another swimsuit issue, and getting disappointed. At some point, I got to be the “kind of girl” who doesn’t like sports, so I started picking up Cosmo instead. At the time, I didn’t like fashion any more than I liked sports, but I just assumed it must be “the magazine for me.”  Eventually, I started to like fashion, makeup, boys, telling embarrassing stories about myself, etc.

Sports Illustrated is a sports fan’s magazine, ostensibly, but, like any other magazine, it is also a product that is based on a construction of identity. Not only do you construct your own identity based on what magazine you pick up, but you also announce to the rest of the lobby what kind of person you are based on what magazine they see you with. In the same way that women’s fashion magazines associate femininity with heterosexuality and a fan-like relationship to fashion, celebrities, sex with men, etc., could it be that men’s sports magazines associate masculinity with heterosexuality and a fan relationship  to sports?

In other words, Gosling writes that sports fan communities are hostile to women and celebrates the entrance of women into those communities, but I’m trying to ask: could membership in sports fandom be more accessible to men because they are in some way coercively associated with sports? Just as I felt an increasing interest in fashion, etc. as somewhat pushed onto me with my identification as a feminine woman?

Do men have to like sports to be a “real man?” Are sports not only a location for a confirmation of civic pride, entertainment, and community, but also a confirmation of  masculinity (that is then coded as heterosexual)? Is there an implicit threat to heterosexuality in the male contemplation of male athletic bodies that SI seeks to eliminate with its ostentatious association with het soft porn?

If liking sports is supposed to be a symbol of any male fan’s association with dominant heterosexual masculinity, does he lose those points if he wrestles in the backyard with other men? Especially if he feels “ecstatic pain” at the hands of other men? Maybe I’m going too far reading bdsm-like qualities into McBride and Bird’s backyard wrestlers. What about female sports fans? Do they experience a sense of masculinity through their association with certain teams, their spectatorship, etc?

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?