Via each books the examples of fandom used are a mixture of primarily North American fan cultures together with mentions of non-Anglophone ones, such as k-pop. Whereas this combine definitely accomplishes the purpose of displaying the variety of fandom areas/objects/practices, how does the sequence additionally accommodate ample consideration of the variations between them and the function of battle in up to date fandom communities? (Particularly, Ebook 2’s overview of sorts of followers and their relationship to each one another and media texts/industries mentions the thought of fandom being the place followers of marginalized identities can “acceptable” texts and refashion them to their very own ends. There may be additionally a side-bar that discusses the completely different concepts of appropriation and their issues, which is nicely taken. How does this dialogue of audiences and their motivations interface with work on fandom areas that has highlighted the roles racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and many others proceed to play in fandom communities and their reworkings of media texts?)
Henry: These are questions we’ve struggled with as we now have been writing these books. The previous decade has seen thorough and evolving critiques of fandom research on the idea of race specifically, and we need to do the very best we will to acknowledge these critiques and issue them into our issues. We accomplish that with an consciousness that there’s going to be a pressure between the significance of representing a broad vary of views on these matters and likewise recognizing that as two white Anglo-American authors, this isn’t essentially “our story to inform.”
All I can say is that we’re looking for our steadiness inside this shifting terrain, and a method we accomplish that is by highlighting the work of fandom students of colour throughout all of these volumes and representing these debates by means of the insights they supply us. Fandom as Audience contains discussions of racebending Harry Potter, for instance, that embrace the interpretive and expressive work of Black followers doing fan artwork and fan fiction as an example Stuart Corridor’s notion of negotiated readings. Our e-book on Fandom as Subcultureforegrounds the instance of a Black Disney bounder, considers the case of hijab cosplay, discusses the methods Black followers work round their marginalization within the mass media texts that encourage a lot of cosplay apply, and way more. Fandom as a Public situates the current discussions about “poisonous fandom” or racism in fandom within the bigger context of Nancy Frazier’s critique of Habermas’s claims concerning the “equal entry to all” supplied by the general public sphere that emerge from his idealized understanding of the early fashionable European espresso homes. We present that contradictions about inclusion and exclusion encompass the notion of the general public from the beginning, and that we shouldn’t be shocked, although it’s vital to know, that fandom usually falls quick of its utopian beliefs about making a secure house for all who share ardour for a similar object.
One of the challenges, then, with making an attempt to symbolize the broadest vary of completely different views and experiences by means of the books is that we will solely symbolize the work that’s already on the market, and thus we’re doomed to breed some of the blind spots within the current literature. Our hope is that in mapping the sector, we make the strengths and limitations of this work seen to rising students, to allow them to focus their energies in ways in which permit them to make unique contributions.
One thing related will be mentioned concerning the shift of fandom research to embody variety on a transnational or transcultural, if not but international, scale. My very own present pursuits embrace supporting and amplifying work on fandoms in East Asia, significantly China. I’ve began a analysis community that’s bringing collectively a mixture of researchers primarily based in the USA, China, Korea, Japan, and past to do collaborative and comparative work collectively. This analysis group has two particular points of journals beneath growth, one for the Worldwide Journal of Cultural Research, and one for the Shanghai-based journal Rising Media.We embrace such views in each e-book within the sequence, however we additionally focus on it extra explicitly within the Fandom as a Power of Globalization and Fan Places books.
There and elsewhere, we take note of the tensions between pop cosmopolitanism/transcultural fandom (kinds that join throughout nationwide borders) and fan nationalism (conflicts that search to align fandom to nationwide pursuits and to police borders between cultures). That is one of the important thing conflicts inside fandom in the present day, and to know it, we might must attempt to hold a number of and seemingly contradictory insights in thoughts on the identical time. We sign the potential mobilization of fandom and fan-like constructions by international strongmen in Defining Fandom, and we discover different kinds of “poisonous” or conflictual kinds of fandom all through all of the books. Our forthcoming e-book on Fandom as Public discusses some of the analysis on QAnon that has emerged inside fandom research, however we additionally have a look at ASMR fandom as an area the place a extra therapeutic or therapeutic perform emerged throughout the pandemic lockdown. We discuss concerning the ways in which the Chinese language state encourages an entanglement between fandom and the nationwide pursuits that restricts what will be mentioned but in addition requires the efficiency of nationalism. However we additionally talk about how the free speech and participatory ethos of the Archive of Our Personal struggles to cope with the structural and systemic racism that make it a generally uncomfortable house for followers of colour.
We definitely have our personal biases as researchers and mine features a framing of the alternatives for cultural and political participation that fandom affords that’s extra optimistic than that of students drawn from vital concept and political economic system. We additionally need to present an summary of the sector as an entire and that features citing critiques of fandom and fandom research.
I respect your acknowledgement of the methods we talk about appropriation. From the beginning, fandom research has centered on the methods various audiences acceptable and rework sources from mass tradition as the idea of participatory tradition. This has included the ways in which teams marginalized within the supply textual content converse again to media producers and re-story the media. But, we additionally should acknowledge that there are ongoing critiques of cultural appropriation which have rendered that time period problematic. How can we reconcile the 2? Writers like Mikhal Bakhtin inform us that every one cultural expression entails appropriation – the language we use doesn’t come pristine from a dictionary however from different folks’s mouths. Relatively than a easy dismissal of appropriation, which might be inconsistent with different points of the sector, we must always ask tougher questions and supply extra nuanced accounts of the ethics of appropriation. When is it acceptable to acceptable?
I’m not positive we now have the solutions to this query but and maybe not even the very best framework for asking it, however at the very least we’re acknowledging the issue right here and contemplating some methods individuals are making an attempt to handle it. In Defining Fandom, there’s a related part the place we think about the metaphor of shopper tribes and tribalism as it has been developed in shopper tradition analysis and critique it from views drawn from indigenous research.
Biographies
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Schooling on the College of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending greater than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Research Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He’s the writer and/or editor of twenty books on numerous points of media and fashionable tradition, together with Textual Poachers: Tv Followers and Participatory Tradition, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Widespread Tradition, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Pc Video games, Convergence Tradition: The place Previous and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Which means and Worth in a Networked Tradition, and By Any Media Essential: The New Youth Activism. His most up-to-date books are Participatory Tradition: Interviews (primarily based on materials initially revealed on this weblog), Widespread Tradition and the Civic Creativeness: Case Research of Inventive Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He’s at the moment writing a e-book on modifications in youngsters’s tradition and media throughout the post-World Battle II period. He has written for Expertise Evaluation, Pc Video games, Salon, and The Huffington Put up.
Robert V. Kozinets is a a number of award-winning educator and internationally acknowledged knowledgeable in methodologies, social media, advertising and marketing, and fandom research. In 1995, he launched the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious establishments together with Northwestern College’s Kellogg Faculty of Enterprise and the Schulich Faculty of Enterprise in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Affiliation for Shopper Analysis and likewise awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, value 75,000 SEK. An Affiliate Editor for prime tutorial journals just like the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Interactive Advertising, he has additionally written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 items of revealed analysis, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic kinds. Many notable manufacturers, together with Heinz, Ford, TD Financial institution, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have employed his agency, Netnografica, for analysis and session providers He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Enterprise Communication at College of Southern California’s Annenberg Faculty, a place that’s shared with the USC Marshall Faculty of Enterprise.
