Core Response #2 by Celeste Oon

The readings for this week all nicely complemented one another, despite each being published over a decade apart. One of Warner’s quotes particularly stood out to me, when discussing why Black women’s fandom has been marginalized within fan studies: “While fan studies traditionally understood fandom as a space that negotiates the subordinated tastes of particularly disempowered bodies, critical and industrial perspectives on fandom in the early twenty-first century have distanced fan practices from this origin point, reinventing fandom as a non-identity-specific-yet-common-interests phenomenon” (34).

This speaks to Jenkins’ piece well, since it was published in 1988, but of course influenced those that came after. I spoke about this topic with others several weeks ago, but nerd fandom was one of the first types of fandom to be “legitimized” (or rather, unpathologized). One of the reasons for this was because the leading voices of then-emerging fan studies belonged to fans of “nerd” culture. Jenkins, among other scholars, pushed back against societal stigmas of fans, making an argument that sci-fi fans could indeed be taken seriously. This work was in many ways necessary in the early days as counter-discourse to dominant mainstream narratives. But it also served to solidify the identity of the fan as a white, straight, cis male by default. Early fan studies, in its focus on male- and white-dominated sci-fi fandoms, erased struggles that women, non-binary individuals, people of color, and other marginalized groups experienced in these spaces. Like Warner stated earlier, in attempting to describe fandom as a community of the “disempowered,” it failed to give voices to those who continued to be disempowered in these spaces of supposed resistance. Even today, fan studies continues to have the same struggles, though there have been great efforts by many scholars to diversify the field and explicitly name the populations they are studying. If anyone is interested in reading some great work on race and fandom, Rukmini Pande’s Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race, and Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (edited collection) are a great place to start.

I will say that Jenkins does mention some interesting things about the gendered nature of fan practices in his piece. His account, along with Warner’s exposition of how Black female fans of Scandal exercise their fandom, are a great example of how female fans create meaning for themselves in spaces that may be unfulfilling or othering. In building out gendered fan practices, however, one must be careful in not perpetuating potentially harmful stereotypes. Early fandom studies attributed knowledge-building and competitive trivia as male-gendered practices when it was in reality largely driven by the object (presence of lore in sci-fi fandoms), which in part contributed to the delegitimization of fan practices in female-dominant fandoms (e.g. obsessed screaming teenage girls).