Henry Jenkins’s seminal fan studies text has gotten me thinking about how popular discourses surrounding “the fan” shift over time and in relation to different fan objects. Since I study early Hollywood, I found a lot of resonances between the ways that franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe construct and commodify fandom, and fandom in early Hollywood. Around 1908, middle-class female audiences became central to the cinema’s attempts to legitimize itself as a social institution. The cultivation of fandom around certain texts, and particularly stars, quickly became an indispensable way for the industry to garner women’s investment in the cinema. Shelley Stamp has documented how female audiences were solicited as fans of early serials through “tie-ins” (promotional materials in newspapers and magazines), advertising based around female stars, and intertextual adaptations. As she writes in her influential monograph, Movie-Struck Girls, serials “offered multiple sites for consumption, most of which were located outside the space of the theater; and they encouraged viewers to see themselves as part of a community of fans (entering contests, gathering to play games, singing songs together), rather than as isolated ‘spectators’” (115). Much like Star Trek or Marvel’s creators solicit and commodify spectators’ affective investments by constructing an intertextual experience of fandom, early serials similarly created proto-franchises with multiple paratexts and points of entry into the story-world. Like in modern franchises, most sites of consumption “are located outside the space of the theater”; while Marvel in particular is extremely adept at getting audiences into the theater (an increasingly impressive achievement), this strategy would not be complete without the proliferation of extra-theatrical sites of consumption, from comic books to TV shows to Disneyland to People magazine’s Chris Evans “Sexiest Man Alive” issue.
Yet, one key difference between the industry’s imagined serial fan of the 1910s and the imagined Star Trek or Marvel fan (whether in the 1970s or present) is, in large part, gender. In the 1910s and 1920s, early Hollywood’s target audience member was largely a white, middle-class woman, and major infrastructure—like the fan magazine and, with it, the star system—developed around soliciting her investment. Thus, unlike the moment in which Jenkins is writing, when female fans of Star Trek must constantly negotiate a gender that is in opposition to the textually constructed position of the Star Trek fan, women were actively solicited by Hollywood, particularly through the fan magazine (see Anthony Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine). With this shift in the gendered address of fan objects, we’ve also seen a shift in how fandom is pathologized. In the era of early Hollywood, with fandom as a decidedly feminine activity, critiques centered around the fear of women becoming too invested in their fan objects, from reports of hysteria after the death of Rudolph Valentino, to suspicions of women’s narcissism in their devotion to female stars. Arguably, this femeninization of fan practices carries over into the male “social misfit” that Jenkins’s reparative reading of Trekkers is responding to (472). The stereotypical image of the frail, nerdy, proto-incel “Trekkie” is rooted in his failure to achieve proper heterosexual masculinity.
What remains constant throughout fandom’s evolutions is a tension between the industry’s production of fans and fan practices that, as Jenkins describes, contest creators’ authority over the text. Since early Hollywood, the industry has sought to manage fan behavior through a hegemonic process whereby it provides outlets for creative input that are incorporated into its own economic control. For example, in the 1910s and 1920s fan magazines often ran contests that invited women to contribute their ideas to a particular textual property; as Stamp argues, these “contests invite fans to participate in the ongoing construction of a text in a way that sanctions and legitimates activities in which fans are often engaged on their own, encouraging them to channel their interest back into the product itself, rather than circulating competing narratives” (122). This tension is epitomized in Jenkins’s example of the different responses Star Trek and Lucasfilm took to fan publications; whereas Lucasfilm aggressively enforced its copyright, Star Trek took a more relaxed approach, so long as fan publications remained non-profit. This latter response seems more tenable in the digital era when franchises and brands often benefit from the “free” labor of fans, frequently co-opting fan-produced content for their own purposes. It is not uncommon to see the Twitter accounts of media properties re-posting fan-created memes, or see the stars from shows interacting with and sharing fan-produced content. Recently, fans of the Netflix show Wednesday created a viral Tik Tok trend by recreating Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega)’s dance from the show, giving the show (and Lady Gaga, whose song they used) a ton of “free” publicity. Honestly, I had heard nothing about the show until I saw some of these reposted on my Twitter timeline (along with a million tweets about Jenna Ortega). The show responded by tweeting about the trend and re-focusing Ortega’s interviews around her role in choreographing it. The rapidity with which fan labor and content is co-opted opens a question of what cultural “poaching” even looks like today, when so often, it is the franchises and corporations who are poaching from us (Jenkins 471).
Compilation of Wednesday Addams dance Tik Toks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPLQh5mBiEc.
Valentino on the cover of Movie Weekly in 1923
Chris Evans on People's 2022 Sexiest Man Alive cover (downloading this image was humiliating for me)
Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Stamp, Shelley. Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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