intersections of technology, identity, law and economics in shaping cultural access and interpretation.
Stanfill applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Fandom is Ugly, I discuss how fans who engaged in a large-scale Twitter campaign (#LexaDeservedBetter) to protest the killing off of lesbian character Lexa on CW show The 100 did not have the same level of concern for Lincoln, a Black man character who was killed off the following week. In particular, while there were also Twitter campaigns to complain about his death (#LincolnDeservedBetter), and to point to the combination of the two deaths as undermining the show’s inclusion of marginalized people (minorities are not disposable, without a hashtag), most tweets from the supporters of Lexa did not engage substantively with Lincoln’s death, prioritizing the white lesbian and using Lincoln only to support that cause.Visit Mel Stanfill's website.
Overall, I do think that page 99 provides good insight into what Fandom is Ugly talks about. One of the book’s key interventions is to push back on the longstanding and widespread assumption that fandom is progressive, a view held by both many scholars and many fans. Such arguments are rooted in a sense that fandom is resistant—whether to media industries in particular or norms in general. This resistance is particularly acute around hegemonies of gender and sexuality. This argument isn’t wrong. Fans are progressive and resistant to various hegemonies. But it’s not the entire story—fans are reactionary and shore up hegemony at least as often, and this case of white queer people failing to take racism seriously shows this clearly.
Another key intervention of the book is to resist the ways media and consumption and pleasure continue to be seen as frivolous and unimportant, both unworthy of study and irrelevant to matters of broad social importance. Through thinking of fandom as having three basic characteristics—public, collective affect, or feels; public, collective interpretation of shared text(s); and identity and community formation structured by affective ties and texts—Fandom Is Ugly is able to think about how these factors are at work in many kinds of ugly public culture, from the January 6 riots to the moral panic around Critical Race Theory. The book takes up fandom as both a site of articulation of power and a mode of articulation of power. It asks both about how fandom as traditionally understood reflects and refracts broader relations of power—and, specifically, domination—and how we understand those broader relations of power better when we look at them with the tools of fan studies.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
