Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

I 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.