Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty One, Part Two): Barbara Lucas and Avi D. Santo

FANDOM AND BRANDING

ADS: In my research and writing, I have been trying to work through the differences between fan communities and brand communities, though this is an ongoing project. I tend to think of brand communities as both non-medium specific in their loyalties and emotional investment, but also more populist in their interpretive and engagement strategies, often using the brand as a launching point for wide-ranging conversations tangential to the brand itself but for which the brand serves as a means of negotiating community tensions. How this differs from fandom however I am still not quite certain.

BL: I'm interested in hearing more about what you have to say about branding, because I'm involved in a fan community that is focused on a brand and a non-narrative product--a set of perfume oils from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab (BPAL)--as their source text and inspiration. The Lab (for short) produces a wide range of perfume oils that draw their inspirations from myth (a line that focuses on various gods and goddesses), legend, and literature. There are currently lines that focus on Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland, Lovecraft, and Neil Gaiman's novels; past lines have taken their inspiration from Poe and Stoker. Each scent has an official Lab-written description, yet the boards and fan communities have fan-produced descriptions that, in many cases, are framed as a sort of fan fiction based on the Lab's line of products.

The Lab is aware of and makes use of fannish patterns of consumption by offering rotating lines of limited edition scents, and releasing other scents that can only be acquired by attending a specific event (such as the goth-inspired Convergence convention). This sort of business model has been enormously successful for the Lab, but it creates tensions in the fan communities. Since the fandom focuses on products that can be bought and sold and since there is a thriving secondary market that resells oils, especially limited edition ones, on eBay and LiveJournal, there are tension points when fans who are in the fandom for the love of the product and not to make money off it clash with resellers who are clearly buying and reselling at higher prices to turn a profit. In this case, devotion to the brand and how fans interact with it has been a source of community tension.

As you've mentioned, the fandom is the gathering point for the fans, but it is one locus in their overall fannish lives. BPAL fandom often leads to involvement in other perfume/soap e-tailers like Arcana Soaps, Villanness, Lush, Possets, and FeMaledictions. The BPAL boards have discussion threads for these other products, but also for politics, media, crafts, pagan discussion, tarot, etc. I see these interactions as similar to media fans (and many BPAL fans are also media fans) picking up on new fandoms through interactions with fellow fans.

ADS: I'd also be interested in talking a little bit about the professionalization of fan practices as not merely selling out to the man but genuine opportunities for intervention and resistance from within (as hopefully your creative works will allow you to do). My thinking about "brandom" to some extent is connected with this loosening of distinctions between official and non-official (fan) cultural producers. Here, I am thinking of how the series The 4400 actively encouraged fans to make mash-up videos and other original works that expressed their particular opinions about the show's fictional promicen debates (promicen gives you superpowers but 50% of the people who take the injection die. Should this be banned? Is this a question of consumer choice?). Fans made videos on both sides that were incorporated into the series promotional websites.

BL: I'm not familiar with The 4400, though in considering the example you posed, it seems to be a very clever strategy for getting buy in from the fan audience. It gives fans the opportunity for their works to be distributed in an officially sanctioned capacity and to participate on a level somewhat higher than the norm.

However, like the fans of Heroes having say in what new one-shot hero will get to join the cast as a regular, I see the fans' involvement as very controlled and restrictive. They have a chance to be more visible, but their participation hinges on their producing something that falls within very narrow parameters and that does not have a real impact on the source text at all. In journalistic terms, they are producing sidebars to the article (which is the source text). I doubt fans are paid for their contributions to the site, and most fans distance themselves from making financial gain from their fan activities. Therefore, the creators, in essence, were able to get copy for their websites donated to them. I have a friend who worked on the "ilovebees" (www.ilovebees.com) ARG/viral marketing campaign for Halo2, and that sort of business is very lucrative for the professionals working in it.

While fans are more visible, do they really have more access, and is having more access better for fandom? If fans have more access and more of a voice would they start interacting more with the creators (who would definitely hold a privileged position in such interaction) than with each other?

ADS: I have recently begun to think about how contemporary media branding strategies have seized hold of fan communities in new ways, hoping to capitalize on their emotional investment in particular texts by extending their reach across myriad platforms and products. One of the strategies I have noticed is the active courting of fans as creators. An example might be the Best Fan Parody Award handed out at this past year's MTV awards. MTV is owned by Viacom, one of the most litigious companies when it comes to the repurposing of its property. Yet, here, MTV not only acknowledges fan activities but re-imagines these practices as not acts of textual poaching and rebellion, but as ways for aspiring media makers to get noticed. I've written about this for In Media Res. While these acknowledgments discursively delimit the function and practices of fandom and align them with corporate interests, they also provide increased opportunities for (some) fans to talk back and be heard (by the industry at least, though not necessarily by other members of the fan community, and certainly within fandom, the people you are conversing with are as important as the conversation). This shift in industry/fan engagement is what I have begun to conceptualize as the move from fandom to "brandom".

BL: Ah. This is similar to the competition that went on last year for fans to design their own SuperBowl advertisement. I can't remember which company was running the competition, but basically, the fan designed the ad, which was professionally produced and aired. In this case, you have people who are enthusiastic about the product or the prizes for the winners entering the competition.

Your point that the MTV award serves as a way for "aspiring media makers to get noticed" brings up an interesting point about fans and their motivation. It is difficult to say "fandom" or "fans" and not imagine some monolithic entities, even though attempts to study even smaller facets of them often prove woefully inadequate. In order to consider wooing the fan as possible co-creator, we assume that all fans want that sort of validation and power, and that is not the case. While there are plenty of examples of people in fandom who are already professional creators in one field or another or who aspire to become professionals, many other fans are simply happy to play with the texts that they have been given. They want the freedom to manipulate those texts in ways they and their fan audience find pleasing. They privilege their fannish interactions and community over the source text itself, and having greater access or visibility is not desirable for them.

GENDER AND FANDOM

ADS: As far as the question of gender and fandom, I must confess that I have rarely given much thought to gender differences within and amongst fandom. My interests have been more focused on the discursive construction and negotiation of gender, race, sexuality, class and citizenship that community members engage in through various brands. Of course, I realize that different gendered, racialized, classed and sexualized identities inform how different community members interpret and interact, but I haven't gone much beyond this in my thinking about the topic.

BL: The thing that really interested me in the early debates was Kristina's Busse's "fanboy" (rational and analytical) /"fangirl" (affective and "squeeful") dichotomy, which she maintains is tied to behavior rather than to biological gender. That people can have more reasoned or more affective responses goes without saying; however, tacking very gendered tags onto those responses, tags which I cannot untangle from biological gender, tends to reinforce the horribly stereotypical ideology that says that "girls" are emotive and intuitive and "boys" are rational and analytical. I find this duality problematic. I cannot imagine telling a male fan who was acting emotively that he was being a "fangirl," and I would be perplexed to have someone tell me I was being a "fanboy" while analyzing a text. Since the group of aca/fans I interact with most often are almost exclusively female, I was especially interested this debate. Also, unlike some of the other female participants of my acquaintance, my interests include topics that tend to attract a largely female audience (slash fiction and paranormal romance/erotica) as well as others that definitely trend male (gaming, graphic fiction, video games, horror fiction and film, action movies, etc). If there was a purple team (blending aspects of the male and female teams) in this debate, I would be on it (biologically female but with a lot of interests that typically trend male). In the past, I have tended to have fairly positive exchanges with aca/fanboys (whether my gaming group, my students, fellow academics, or the guys at the local comic book store), and I have to admit to a curiosity about how, if, and the extent to which shared interests (which carry gendered assumptions in terms of audience) help to bridge the gender divide.

ADS: I agree with you that fans engage in multiple, contradictory practices that are not easily mapped onto gender (whether real bodies or embodied ideas about gender). I am curious though about whether and/or how gendered discourses affect fan interpretations of their own practices. I am also interested in thinking about why certain behaviors are gendered masculine/feminine/queer/normative and how individuals appropriate certain practices (or rationalizations for their practices) according to these codes. I do not believe that there are essential male or female practices or forms of fandom, but I believe there are gendered discourses that shape how we interpet practices and what practices we choose to engage in. My thinking here comes from a couple of places. Borrowing from critical race theory, whiteness is not understood as a separate category but an amalgamated intersecting set of constructed "aspirational" gendered, sexual, classed, ethnic, and other ideals that everyone in society is positioned in relation to (including people who self-identify as white). Within this, of course, some groups will have an easier time than others achieving whiteness, but all groups including the dominant group are caught up in it. Translating this to gender and fandom, I wonder if men and women often self-identify or engage with texts in particular ways because of the social constructions of ideal gendered behaviors they bring with them to their fannish experiences (even if their overt goal is to subvert these). So for instance, I was having a conversation with a friend today who is gay about queer fan practices and while he was adamant that one cannot essentialize gay or straight fan behaviors, he did say that as a gay man, there were certain rules of engagement he felt he needed to learn in order to be invited to the party (like the value of drag or acquiring a camp sensibility).

BL: This seems to be an extremely useful way of looking at forms of practice and discourse. As your friend mentioned, there are definite rules of engagement and behavior that one presents while engaging in fandom (or any other group activity). Meeting those expectations is one way to avoid marginalization by the community. And if we look at communities in video games and MUSHes, the genderswapping that goes on when players assume avatars of the opposite gender (often for strategic reasons), they have to meet expectations of gendered behavior and present that effectively if they want to be successful at masking their own gender.

In the mostly female aca-fan circles I interact with, there is the prevailing thought that participating in fandom online is a democratizing process where many individual voices can be nurtured and included and heard and valued. I see those as utopian ideals that do not always (or even often) translate into practice, where fandoms are definitely hierarchies where dominant big name fans (BNF's) hold sway.

ADS: I, on the other hand, love toys. I have multiple "odd" toys in my office, including a Captain Stubing of the Love Boat action figure and a life sized cut out of David Boreanaz. As a white, middle-class heterosexual man, I have the privilege to play with gender and sexual signifiers and I like the sense of uneasiness these toys cause my students when they stop by. After all, while action figures are supposedly gendered masculine (and certainly marketed to boys), Captain Stubing and Angel are not exactly signifiers of machismo. Generally, I see my choice of toys to display as a queering practice designed to frustrate gendered expectations of the types of things boys like to play with. Yet, I need to also recognize my ability to appropriate gendered codes without risking exclusion or marginalization. In both the case of my friend and myself, there is the place of pre-constituted gendered and sexual discourses informing our fannish practices, yet clearly there is asymmetrical power that structures how we choose to play.

Continuing this somewhat narcissistic auto-ethnographic mode for another minute, I also began thinking about my obsession with Spiderman when I was thirteen. I had a complete run of the comic book Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spiderman, issues 1-175 or so. I loved the colorful covers as well as my own mastery at acquiring this series. So, to show off, I thumb tacked every issue in chronological order to the wall adjacent to my bed. Was this a male or a female fan practice? According to some of the ideas put forward in these fan discussions so far, it could be coded either way. It was a solitary act of mastery that upheld the ordering of the comic book, and yet my thumb tacking clearly subverted the collectors mentality and repurposed the comic books as wall paper. I don't think this is really the right question, however, because this brings us back to essentialist categories of male/female, masculine/feminine, straight/queer practices. What I can say is that even at thirteen (or, perhaps especially at thirteen) I was painfully aware of how my actions made me uncool because they did not conform to gendered expectations (ironically, I would kill to have that same wall paper collection today for precisely the same reasons) and I remember having conversations with myself that in broad terms either admonished my own behavior as aberrant (i.e., this is why girls don't like you) or attempted to rationalize my pleasures in ways that uncomfortably aligned it with more traditional masculine discourses (i.e., but look at what I've accomplished). My practices may not have been gendered, but discourses of gender shaped my understanding of these practices. Within a month, the Spiderman collage came down and I traded in my comic book collection for a batch of Jose Canseco rookie cards. I still cry over this sometimes.

BL: I would want the Spiderman comics back too. We both collect/have collected comics, and when it comes to comics (and really most books I own), I am obsessive compulsive about keeping them orderly and pristine. They're stored in plastic sleeves in plastic storage boxes, and when I had the chance to get some nearly complete runs of some comics when a local shop was going out of business--I remember that Fathom was one of them--I had to track down the others, even the swimsuit issue, which I had no desire to possess except to make my run complete. Certainly, purchasing a swimsuit edition of a comic or a "girls of gaming edition" of video game culture magazine (I think it's Play) factors into my completist mentality, but I'm aware that I'm not the intended audience for them.

The tensions that exist between me and my fannish displays have more to do with the tensions between geek culture and mundane culture. I am a manager in a Fortune 100 company, so I lack some of the shelter that displays in my office would receive if I had them in my office at school. My boss thinks my Transformers are odd not because they (and my video games and comics) are toys that are supposed to be for boys but because they are not toys a middle-aged person, regardless of gender, should be purchasing for herself.

I have similar tendencies when it comes to books that are released in multiple editions (with differing formats and cover styles). For me, the mastery and control aspects of this sort of collecting map more onto geek practices and culture. Yes, geek culture has been presented in the media as a male phenomenon, like collecting action figures, but we know that media representations are not reality.

While I do not have a Captain Stubing action figure (alas!), I have many from other fandoms I follow. Oddly, the collector's mentality that applies to my comics and books, does not apply to action figures (which, perhaps, is due to my writer's privileging of text and fan's desire to play). I do not keep them pristine in the box. I have Transformers on my desk at work, and I have figures from The Lord of the Rings perched on my bookshelves. I know many female fans who subvert the male action or epic hero ideology by posing their action figures so that Aragorn and Boromir or Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are locked in romantic clinches. One friend has a pair of cross dressing Jedi (complete with wedding dress) and knew of another fan who gave her Jedi action figures removable anatomically correct genitalia; they needed to be removable so their clothes could still fit. The intention of action figures to play out and with adventures from the source text shows how some fans define adventure.

ADS: I just wanted to add/clarify that I am not suggesting that most fans are actively questioning or engaging with gender categories in their practices (though some definitely are), but overt awareness (or lack thereof) does not mean that the pervasive cultural circulation of gender norms and ideals doesn't become ingrained into the ways fans explain their behavior to themselves, other fans and non-fans.

Also, to clarify my position about using critical race theory to think about gender and fandom, there is also a historical dimension that needs to be taken account of. Gender and race categories are not stable, but are constantly struggled over. Over time, idealized forms of Whiteness, Blackness, masculinity and femininity shift. Even those of us who come closest are always judged/judging ourselves in relation to these slippery ideals. Of course, I don't mean that whiteness is ideal, but that is socially constructed as normative. We are all interpolated by these ideals, whether we purposely reject, aspire or negotiate our identities and behaviors in relationship to these categories.

BL: What some of the recent discussions in fandom itself have shown is that there is a divide between how academics/aca-fans and fans define fan practices and behaviors. Currently, there is a vogue to consider slash fandom as a "queer female space," a label some fans reject, which raises interesting questions about their reasoning and the investment in the aca-fen in perpetuating the label. I do think there is something queer about the space, though not in the all-encompassing way it has been posed by some aca-fen, just as I do not think that some fans going, "This is not queer space because I am in it and I'm not gay" is a valid assertion. Again, my issues are with the more extreme positions and dualities that provide for good drama but grossly oversimply issues. Those of us who interact mostly with other aca-fen can sometimes forget that we and our methodologies do not always represent fandom's perception of itself at large. This narrowing of focus comes in part from the fact that aca-fans often interact more with other aca-fans than with fans.

While there are fannish spaces that tend to be strongly gendered in terms of the biological gender of the fans inhabiting them and the nature of the behaviors and discourses that are propogated by them, there is also value in paying attention to those parts of fan and media studies that manage to engage both male and female fans (shows like Heroes) and look at qualities that foster inclusion as opposed to exclusivity.

ADS: Barbara, thank you for this really rich and interesting conversation.

Henry Jenkins is the co-founder of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.