Gender and Contemporary Fandom
March 19th, 2008 by BenI think our discussion of gender was cut short on time during the last class. There is definitely more to discuss on the subject, but I was taken aback at first by the Diana’s introduction of gender into the topic of contemporary fandom and fandom identity politics.
The way I interpreted her comment was that the “emotional attachment” definition of fandom is “feminine”, and the more time/activity-dependent part of fandom was “masculine.” Contemporary fandom focuses more on defining fans as activity-based and that both ignores and “Others” fans who have important emotional relationships with texts. This marginalization is a masculine marginalization of a feminine approach.
I was taken aback because I do not see emotional fandom as feminine. Perhaps I am interpreting too literally (by ascribing feminine/masculine roles to biological males and females), but are most female fans emotional while man fans activity-based? Jenkins brought up this hypothesis in Textual Poachers and it seemed controversial in the class.
I simply do not see contemporary fandom as marginalizing women in this respect. Take, for example, sports fandom. Many sports fans have very emotional attachments to their team and sport. This doesn’t seem particularly Othered, and it is highly male-dominated. If one argued that fandom related to relationships/romance was feminine, perhaps some empirical evidence would be available, but claiming that mere emotional involvement is feminine is not supported by evidence and is belittling to men by playing off a stereotype traditionally used by males to subjugate women (their emotion is “irrational”).
The conversation on this topic was short, so it is easily possible that I have misinterpreted a more nuanced argument. I hope we can discuss it further on the blog and in class. I am particularly interested in analyzing the current gender composition of different fan activities. Jenkins argued that slash/fan fic was at the time of his writing female oriented. I wonder what gender compositions exist in this “new” age of fandom.
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I am also wondering about interpreting the terms too literally. I understand the differences between masculine and feminine fandom, and I think it is a really well-working system. But are we supposed to think that most female fans are feminine fans and male fans are masculine fans? If that is the way it is supposed to be looked at, I also have a lot of trouble with it like Ben. Sports fandom I think definitely helps to disprove the theory. I have a much more “feminine” connection with the Mets than masculine. I am emotionally affected by wins and losses, but cannot really name all of their best players in history and when they played (which many sport fans can do without problem.)
Moving from sports fandom though, I think the theory does not apply to other types as well. I have a good amount of guy friends that were all really into Naruto (an anime) two years ago, and we talked about the new episodes a lot. But we all unanimously agreed that our favorite aspects were the characters and their development, a seemingly feminine fannish activity. And I think we all have many other examples.
So either I am in an obscure sample group, the terms should not be interpreted literally, or the theory is a little weak. If anyone knows more about the origins of these terms, I would really like to know what they think about the literal interpretations. Either way though, I think the actual differences in the types of fandom are interesting and crucial to fan studies. People definitely are masculine or feminine fans (or a combination), but who knows if they are specifically men and women respectively.
I see your point about sports fandom, Ben. I’d just really like to point to my earlier post about male and female gendered types of fan activity : http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/students/fmst85_s08/2008/01/30/fanboy-fangirl-gonna-take-you-round-the-world/
… not that I believe everything I said back then was perfect, but I really think I explained my point much better back then (and in ridiculous detail!)
I guess the reason I was hearing “gender” was probably because of all the binaries coming up in Kristina Busse’s article, and in our discussion of the new set of ideas associated with convergence culture:
isolation vs. community
activity vs. emotion
profit-based vs. gift-based
legal (sanctioned by producers) vs. illegal (unsanctioned)
canonical vs. uncanonical
etc. I guess to a knee-jerk feminist like myself, or perhaps just because I’ve been taking too many English classes based around structuralism, the next binary sort of looming around the corner is male vs. female.
You don’t have to be willing to map a male/female binary onto these kinds of sets, but I still think there is something to this whole activity vs. emotion thing in terms of gender. Especially when one starts to get valued over the other, as in the case of some of the slash videos Julie Levin Russo showed us: I would interpret the ones submitted to contests (thus sanctioned by producers) as having more of an element of “activity” than “emotion” to them, since the producers seemed to be making fun of the idea of a gay relationship from a position of detachment. Videos that were more clearly “slashy” I would interpret as “emotional” as well as “active” in the sense that the producers had a real, personal connection with the ship which motivated them to produce the video. In that sense, I saw a clear male/female divide in Russo’s examples.
It’s not that any element of activity precludes the feminine, or that emotion precludes the masculine. It’s just that in all this celebration of “active” producers, I see those who are seen as active being defined as primarily masculine, and their products as being less emotional than the efforts of their more feminine counterparts.
As always, I remind myself and everyone else that, in my usage, the terms “male,” “female,” “masculine” and “feminine” are independent of chromosomes/other “biology.” Gender identification as “male” or “female” does not preclude either “masculine” or “feminine” behavior, presentation, or identification.
You know, as much as we can all *say* that describing certain behavior as “masculine” and “feminine” doesn’t associate it with actual men and women, it really does on some level. I’m getting progressively more uncomfortable with applying gendered terms to these two modes of engagement, exactly because “feminine” behavior tends to be devalued. I understand that you’re saying that the videos Levin Russo showed us that were done by women were devalued due to their content rather than their “gender identification”, but I’m not sure you can really separate the two. If slash were seen as a male activity no matter what the level of emotional engagement, I don’t think it would be devalued in the way that it was in those examples. While it’s true that “masculine” and “feminine” are useful shorthands for kinds of activity, I don’t think there’s a way to use those words without bringing in gender politics. Take the first question from the fan artifact presentation for this week: does the Marvel Universe favor a masculine or a feminine mode of engagement? Having been in comic book fandom to even a very limited extent, I think that the comics world cannot possibly favor anything with the label feminine, since up until very recently it was extremely hostile to women. However, that’s a totally different question from whether or not the Marvel Universe favors an emotion-based mode of engagement.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think it’s productive to link modes of engagement with gendered terms to the extent we’ve been doing — after all, we’ve seen numerous examples of the gender labels being inaccurate — and that moreover it’s kind of harmful to the cause of women, since we’re taking behavior that’s already devalued in society (“excessive” emotional engagement) and deliberately applying the label feminine to it. I’m not saying it’s not useful to consider questions of gender and marginalization in media and fandom, far from it, just that we might want to keep a division between our conceptions of mode of engagement and our conceptions of gender more than we have been.
Can you give an example of comic book fandom being hostile to women? I have no clue about comic book fandom in general so I’m curious about this.
So, first of all, the comics world is still very male-dominated on the production side. I’d say at least 95% of Marvel/DC producers are men, and that includes the people who write the scripts, do the pencil sketches, ink, letter, and color the pages as well as the people running the corporations. That’s down from 100% in the near past. It’s still the case that the major creative outlet for women in the comics medium is in writing independent graphic novels — although the only one I can name off the top of my head that’s by a woman is Persepolis, and Marjane Satrapi didn’t come out of the U.S. comics world even remotely. Only one woman has ever won an Eisner (the major comics award), and that was for, as I say, a graphic novel rather than a compilation of comics (Lynda Barry for One! Hundred! Demons!, and yeah, I had to look that up). This is mostly a problem in American comics versus other comic traditions, especially Japanese manga, which has a lot of women writers and artists and a strong tradition of comics produced by women, for women (as well as for men).
Comics are also traditionally male-dominated in terms of content. I mean, picture the average woman in a superhero comic, you know? Even the ones with superpowers have Barbie bodies. And yes, the men in comics also have distorted bodies, but distorted in a way that makes them more powerful rather than more objectified. Most women in comics are defined by their relationships, romantic or otherwise, to men — Lois Lane, Mary Jane Watson, even Jean Grey and Rogue to a certain extent are good examples. This aspect has gotten a lot better in recent years, but for most of the history of comics, women really were mostly eye candy and damsels in distress.
Finally, for a very long time, the way that people bought comics was by going to a comics store, and these stores were extremely hostile to all outsiders, a category that included almost all women. Often these stores were small, kind of dark, not particularly well or clearly organized, etc. Partially this is because for the past few decades there hasn’t been a ton of money to be made in running a comics shop, so small, dark shops in basements is pretty much what people could afford, but there was also a xenophobic ethos attached a lot of the time. Generally, it was only easy to buy comic books in a comic store if you knew what you were looking for and where to find it already, and almost everyone who had this “insider knowledge” was male, because comics were generally only marketed to boys. Again, this is slowly changing — there are a lot more comics stores now that have, you know, lights and friendly staff and other such amenities of civilization.
I feel like somewhere along the line I should mention that I love comic books (even if I don’t read them as regularly as I could), and I really do think the comics world is opening up to women — there are slowly more women producers, and more quickly than ever, more women fans and reasonable female characters (Death in Sandman, for example, is one of my favorite female characters of all time, I really think she’s the strongest character in the entire series). But the fact remains that it was nigh on impossible to be a female comics fan from the Golden Age (the heydey of comics in the 40s) up until, like, 1992, and it’s still pretty hard. I think a lot of what’s happening now, actually, is that women are becoming part of “comics fandom” by approaching the comics canon through different media: watching Smallville, going to the Spiderman movies, etc, rather than being traditional comics consumers.
I’m glad you qualified that last post by saying that the comic book world is in fact changing. As someone who loved comic books in middle school (xmen and green lantern), I think that the world of superheroes can easily be read in different ways. For example, X-Men in particular has a HUGE queer audience because it can easily be read as dealing with very similar difficulties associated with the queer experience. I think the fact that superheroes have been predominantly male IS problematic, BUT I think that they can be read in the same alternative fannish ways as any other text. I think the bigger problem may be the implicitly gendered archetype of the superhero. The idea of a superhero itself may prove hostile to female readings because it has been basically established that what is valued in superheroes are traditionally masculine traits. I think this may be a more important way in which comics have been hostile towards women, and that fact is compounded by how they are visually depicted. I think, although I find it hilarious and I’m sure it can be read differently, that Sailor Moon is a good example of this point. When she isn’t a superhero she is extremely feminine, but her voice and demeanor changes upon transformation (at least after she learns a bit more about her powers.)