"Fandom, Now in Color gathers together seemingly contradictory narratives that intersect at the (in)visibility of race/ism in fandom and fan studies. This collection engages this problem by undertaking the different tactics of decolonization-diversifying methodologies, destabilizing canons of "must-read" scholarship by engaging with multiple disciplines, making whiteness visible but not the default against which all other kinds of racialization must compete, and decentering white fans even in those fandoms where they are the assumed majority. These new narratives concern themselves with a broad swath of media, from cosplay and comics to tabletop roleplay and video games, and fandoms from Jane the Virgin to Japan's K-pop scene. Through this layered multiplicity, Fandom, Now in Color asserts that no one answer or approach can sufficiently come to grips with the shifting categories of race, racism, and racial identity"--
Abstract Scholarship on the creation and circulation of forms of popular culture has always been concerned with questions of audiences and reception. Initial theorizations of audiences as overly credulous, easily swayed masses have long been significantly complicated to account for more active participation. One of the key drivers of this move of framing audiences from passive to active has been the emergence of the discipline of fandom studies. Today, the field is truly multidisciplinary, encompassing popular culture and media studies, literary studies, communication studies and psychology, marketing and tourism studies, amongst others. Additionally, while fan communities have always been transnational and transcultural, the explosion of cross-cultural phenomena like the Korean Hallyu Wave (the worldwide popularity of Korean media texts and celebrities) has brought renewed attention to the interconnected nature of the contemporary global mediascape. Even as it has expanded, one of the main challenges to the discipline has been criticism that it has overemphasized aspects of fan identity, such as gender identity and sexual orientation, while neglecting the role of race. This critique challenges the structure of the field, whereby certain critical genealogies, methodologies, and even fandoms themselves, are granted a canonical and universal status while others are seen as tertiary. This review of published works in popular culture studies focuses on studies of fandom that aim to break these silos, selecting three publications that address different aspects of today's globalized fandom mediascape to underline the necessity for fandom scholars to expand their understanding of how these spaces are interconnected. Thematically, the review considers how these publications address and extend three core interests of fandom studies: 1. Digital Platforms and Politics; 2. Identity and Community; and 3. Transcultural Flows.
Pleasure(s) of people of marginalized genders and sexualities are central to media fandom scholarship, making it suitable to analyze as an identitopia. Recently, the figure of the fandom antifan or anti, an individual deemed hostile to fan pleasure, particularly around shipping practices and fanwork production, has gained prominence in fandom discussions. The anti is seen to interrupt media fandom's identitopia through policing and puritanism. A troubling aspect of this formulation is the consistent identification of fans who are critical of fandom's negotiation of race/ism, as antis themselves. They are then accused of supporting censorship in the name of social justice. This is a disruption of antifandom models as these fans do not claim a negative stance themselves. This article theorizes this disruption via the fandom killjoy, drawing from in-depth fan interviews and examining related racist incidents in fandom spaces.
Fan studies, a thoroughly interdisciplinary field, has drawn on methodological strategies from such fields as anthropology, literary studies, cultural and media studies, and psychoanalysis, resulting in a wide range of analytical frameworks and methodological approaches that highlight the different aspects of the fan communities being considered. Yet a lack of attention to how (unmarked) whiteness underpins these strategies has led to persistent blind spots regarding the operation of race and racism within these spaces. An analysis drawing from cultural and postcolonial studies highlights some of the ways scholars can overcome these gaps. Nonetheless, the logics of white supremacy continue to influence both micro and macro issues around research in fan studies.
Online media or participatory fandom has long been theorized as a unique creative and communicative space for women. Further, scholarly work has highlighted the possibility of it functioning as a space that is conducive to the articulation of queerness—both through transformative work and participant identity. However, this theorization has failed to account for the differential operations of these spaces when they are forced to deal with issues of race and racism. This essay argues that this is a significant blind spot as fannish spaces cannot but negotiate with the multiple loci of privilege and intersectional concerns that underpin their functioning. It therefore proposes a significant intervention in the study of the same, drawing our attention to the historically queer and oft-sidelined fannish spaces of femslash fandoms. This analysis seeks to locate the ways in which such queer spaces grapple with critiques of misogyny and homophobia in popular cultural texts and online spaces, as well as the problematics of race and racial identity within such spaces, focusing on the queer fan community built around the relationship of Regina Mills and Emma Swan, eponymously known as Swan Queen, in the television show Once Upon a Time (2011–).
This article analyzes the mediatized representations of the Indian "rape crisis" that gained global attention in the aftermath of the brutal gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in New Delhi in 2012. While much attention was given to Leslie Udwin's documentary on the incident, India's Daughter (2015), which was subsequently banned by the Indian government, there were several other creative responses that attempted to negotiate with the meaning of the event. This article examines two such texts—the multimedia short story We Are Angry (2015) and the augmented-reality comic Priya's Shakti (2014). Both these texts declare their intention to function as "activist" multimedia pieces that leverage the power of Internet-mediated platforms to raise awareness about the condition of the "Indian woman" in the contemporary moment. This article argues that these texts, in their attempts to portray an essentialized and universalized image of the "Indian woman," reenact certain violent historical erasures along the lines of caste, sexuality, class, and religion. The article undertakes a medium-specific examination of the works, considering their presumed audiences, language, content, and most notably their (failed) attempts at locating themselves within both historical and contemporary Indian feminist landscapes. In doing so, this discussion situates itself within ongoing Indian social justice debates, specifically those pertaining to mediatized narratives of rape, in order to critique the production of "feminism" in We Are Angry and Priya's Shakti. By considering these texts alongside other, more inclusive online narrative spaces, we underline the importance of multiple feminist voices being heard on the issues in question, as well as the need to question any seemingly universal "we" of these narratives, their audience, or the women they claim to represent.
Prologue -- Introduction -- Part I: Norms -- Chapter 1 - Vlogging parlance: strategic talking in beauty vlogs -- Chapter 2 - Facebook and unintentional celebrification -- Chapter 3 - musical.ly and microcelebrity among girls -- Chapter 4 - Being "red" on the internet: the craft of popularity on Chinese social media platforms -- Part II: Labor -- Chapter 5 - Origin stories: an ethnographic account of researching microcelebrity -- Chapter 6 - Fame labor: a critical autoethnography of Australian digital influencers -- Chapter 7 - Net idols and beauty bloggers' negotiations of race, commerce, and cultural customs: emergent genres in Thailand -- Chapter 8 - Catarina, a virgin for auction: microcelebrity in Brazilian media -- Part III: Activism -- Chapter 9 - The rise of Belle from Tumblr -- Chapter 10 - Performing as a transgressive authentic microcelebrity: the Quandeel Baloch case -- Chapter 11: It's just a joke! The playoffs and perils of microcelebrity in India -- Epilogue: The algorithmic celebrity: the future of internet fame and microcelebrity studies -- Index
