Examines how fannish and feminist modes of cultural consumption, production, and critique are converging and opening up informal spaces for young people to engage with feminism. Adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and bringing together media and communications, feminist cultural studies, sociology, internet studies and fan studies, Hannell locates media fandom at the intersection of the multi-directional and co-constitutive relationship between popular feminisms, popular culture and participatory networked digital cultures. Feminist Fandom functions as an ethnographic account of how feminist identities are constructed, lived and felt through digital fannish spaces on the micro-blogging and social networking platform, Tumblr.

Reveals the systematic marginalization of women within pop culture fan communities When Ghostbusters returned to the screen in 2016, some male fans of the original film boycotted the all-female adaptation of the cult classic, turning to Twitter to express their disapproval and making it clear that they considered the film’s “real” fans to be white, straight men. While extreme, these responses are far from unusual, with similar uproars around the female protagonists of the new Star Wars films to full-fledged geek culture wars and harassment campaigns, as exemplified by the #GamerGate controversy that began in 2014. Over the past decade, fan and geek culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream as fans have become tastemakers and promotional partners, with fan art transformed into official merchandise and fan fiction launching new franchises. But this shift has left some people behind. Suzanne Scott points to the ways in which the “men’s rights” movement and antifeminist pushback against “social justice warriors” connect to new mainstream fandom, where female casting in geek-nostalgia reboots is vilified and historically feminized forms of fan engagement—like cosplay and fan fiction—are treated as less worthy than male-dominant expressions of fandom like collection, possession, and cataloguing. While this gender bias harkens back to the origins of fandom itself, Fake Geek Girls contends that the current view of women in fandom as either inauthentic masqueraders or unwelcome interlopers has been tacitly endorsed by Hollywood franchises and the viewer demographics they selectively champion. It offers a view into the inner workings of how digital fan culture converges with old media and its biases in new and novel ways.

This book follows the ways in which women negotiate and navigate between their feminist identities and their belonging to science fiction fandoms that at times disregard or dismiss them. It explores frictions and discords, including those between feminist women fans and other members in their communities, and between the fan and the object of her fandom. This book examines the intersection of fandom and feminism through the lenses of gender, ethnicity and age, and provides an in-depth and intersectional perspective on fan communities and the layered discrimination and marginalization enfolded in them. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with women fans of Star Wars and Doctor Who, this book highlights the different aspects of a feminist woman fan’s identity: becoming, being, belonging, representing, and reconciling. Each chapter in this book unravels the complexity, ambivalence, and contradictions between feminism and fandom, and reveals the tactics women develop to overcome and harmonize them.

Women fans have entered the traditionally male domain of the sports stadium in growing numbers in recent years. Watching professional sport is important for women for so many reasons, but their expectations and experiences have been largely ignored by academics. This book tackles these shortcomings in the literature and sheds new light on the many ways in which women become sports fans. This groundbreaking study is the first to focus on the phenomenon of the feminization of sports fandom. Including original research on football and rugby union in the UK, it looks at the increasing opportunities for women to become sports fans in contemporary society and critically examines the way this form of leisure is valued by women. Drawing upon feminist thinking and intersectionality, it shows how women from different social classes and age groups consume the spectacle of sport. This book is fascinating reading for any student or scholar interested in sport and leisure studies, sociology and gender or women’s studies.

An illustrated exploration of fandom that combines academic essays with artist pages and experimental texts. Fandom as Methodology examines fandom as a set of practices for approaching and writing about art. The collection includes experimental texts, autobiography, fiction, and new academic perspectives on fandom in and as art. Key to the idea of “fandom as methodology” is a focus on the potential for fandom in art to create oppositional spaces, communities, and practices, particularly from queer perspectives, but also through transnational, feminist and artist-of-color fandoms. The book provides a range of examples of artists and writers working in this vein, as well as academic essays that explore the ways in which fandom can be theorized as a methodology for art practice and art history. Fandom as Methodology proposes that many artists and art writers already draw on affective strategies found in fandom. With the current focus in many areas of art history, art writing, and performance studies around affective engagement with artworks and imaginative potentials, fandom is a key methodology that has yet to be explored. Interwoven into the academic essays are lavishly designed artist pages in which artists offer an introduction to their use of fandom as methodology. Contributors Taylor J. Acosta, Catherine Grant, Dominic Johnson, Kate Random Love, Maud Lavin, Owen G. Parry, Alice Butler, SooJin Lee, Jenny Lin, Judy Batalion, Ika Willis. Artists featured in the artist pages Jeremy Deller, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Anna Bunting-Branch, Maria Fusco, Cathy Lomax, Kamau Amu Patton, Holly Pester, Dawn Mellor, Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Women of Colour Index Reading Group, Liv Wynter, Zhiyuan Yang

In Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s, Rox Samer explores how 1970s feminists took up the figure of the lesbian in broad attempts to reimagine gender and sexuality. Samer turns to feminist film, video, and science fiction literature, offering a historiographical concept called “lesbian potentiality”—a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was, in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. Samer shows how the labor of feminist media workers and fans put lesbian potentiality into movement. They see lesbian potentiality in feminist prison documentaries that theorize the prison industrial complex’s racialized and gendered violence and give image to Black feminist love politics and freedom dreaming. Lesbian potentiality also circulates through the alternative spaces created by feminist science fiction and fantasy fanzines like The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus. It was here that author James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon felt free to do gender differently and inspired many others to do so in turn. Throughout, Samer embraces the perpetual reimagination of “lesbian” and the lesbian’s former futures for the sake of continued, radical world-building.

Women worldwide are making their presence felt as sport fans in rapidly increasing numbers. This book makes a distinctive and innovative contribution to the study of sport fandom by exploring the growing visibility and interest in women who follow sport. It presents the latest data on women’s sport spectatorship in different regions of the world, posing new theoretical paradigms to study the globalised nature of female sport fandom. This book goes beyond conventional approaches to analysing the practices of women sport fans. By using a critical feminist perspective to investigate cultural conditions and social contexts (including globalisation, digital networked technologies, consumerism, neoliberalism and postfeminism), it brings into view a diversity of women’s voices and experiences as sport fans. It sheds new light on the power dynamics of gender, ethnicity and sexuality influencing women’s participation in sport spectatorship and interrogates the ways female sport fandom is made visible through transnational media networks. Women Sport Fans: Identification, Participation, Representation is fascinating reading for all those interested in sport and gender, the sociology of sport, or women’s studies.

Rukmini Pande’s examination of race in fan studies is sure to make an immediate contribution to the growing field. Until now, virtually no sustained examination of race and racism in transnational fan cultures has taken place, a lack that is especially concerning given that current fan spaces have never been more vocal about debating issues of privilege and discrimination. Pande’s study challenges dominant ideas of who fans are and how these complex transnational and cultural spaces function, expanding the scope of the field significantly. Along with interviewing thirty-nine fans from nine different countries about their fan practices, she also positions media fandom as a postcolonial cyberspace, enabling scholars to take a more inclusive view of fan identity. With analysis that spans from historical to contemporary, Pande builds a case for the ways in which non-white fans have always been present in such spaces, though consistently ignored.

Cyberspaces of Their Own interrogates the social and spatial relations of the rapidly expanding virtual terrain of media fandom. For the first time, issues of identity, community and space are brought together in this in-depth ethnographic study of two female internet communities. Members are fans of the American television series The X-Files and the Canadian series Due South. Forging links between media, cultural and internet studies, this book examines negotiations of gender, class, sexuality and nationality in making meaning out of a television show, producing fiction based on television characters, creating and maintaining online communal relations, and organizing cyberspace in a way that marks it out as alternative to that which surrounds it.

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are.