Orienting Fandom: the Discursive Production of Sports and Speculative Media Fandom in the Internet Era

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository ORIENTING FANDOM: THE DISCURSIVE PRODUCTION OF SPORTS AND SPECULATIVE MEDIA FANDOM IN THE INTERNET ERA BY MEL STANFILL DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications with minors in Gender and Women’s Studies and Queer Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor CL Cole, Co-Chair Associate Professor Siobhan Somerville, Co-Chair Professor Cameron McCarthy Assistant Professor Anita Chan ABSTRACT This project inquires into the constitution and consequences of the changing relationship between media industry and audiences after the Internet. Because fans have traditionally been associated with an especially participatory relationship to the object of fandom, the shift to a norm of media interactivity would seem to position the fan as the new ideal consumer; thus, I examine the extent to which fans are actually rendered ideal and in what ways in order to assess emerging norms of media reception in the Internet era. Drawing on a large archive consisting of websites for sports and speculative media companies; interviews with industry workers who produce content for fans; and film, television, web series, and news representations from 1994-2009 in a form of qualitative big data research—drawing broadly on large bodies of data but with attention to depth and texture—I look critically at how two media industries, speculative media and sports, have understood and constructed a normative idea of audiencing. The project considers how digital media have influenced consumption, including through transmedia storytelling that spreads content across multiple delivery platforms. I also interrogate the conditions of labor in the realm of fandom, with particular attention to the relationship between industry labor and unpaid user labor. Third, the project examines which fan bodies are recruited by industry in terms of race, gender, age, and sexuality. I contend that fandom has gone from being seen as something that periodically happened to media to being interpreted as something endemic to manage. In this orientation toward management, media organizations encourage particular practices in a way that, at a general level, produces, disseminates, and reinforces a norm of proper media use. This redefinition functions to transform and reorient the threatening or unruly fan into a domesticated, useful one, maintaining industry imperatives to the exclusion of other claims on media through the very figure of challenge itself. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Chapter 1 Introduction: Domesticating Fandom ............................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 Consumption and the Management of Desire .............................................................. 44 Chapter 3 Consumption 2.0: Transmedia, Reactivity, and the Specter of Excess ........................ 70 Chapter 4 Fandom and/as Labor ................................................................................................. 100 Chapter 5 Enclosing Fandom: Labors of Love, Exploitation, and Consent ............................... 137 Chapter 6 Fandom’s Normativity: Assuming and Recruiting the Socially Dominant Fan Subject ..................................................................................................................................................... 162 Chapter 7 The Fandom Menace: Failed Masculinity, Maturity, Heterosexuality, and Whiteness ..................................................................................................................................................... 190 Chapter 8 Conclusion: Owning Fandom, Owing Fandom ......................................................... 229 Appendix ..................................................................................................................................... 251 References ................................................................................................................................... 254 iii Acknowledgements There are a great many people without whom this project would have been much poorer. Megan Condis, Brittany Smith, Michelle Rivera, Aimee Rickman, Stephanie Brown, and Andrea Ruehlicke helped sharpen my thinking and argumentation with their excellent feedback on several parts of this project in our writing group. Robert Mejia, my very first friend in the ICR, was always good for a complex conversation or a companionable meal, both of which are the fuel of grad school. Many thanks to Lisa Cacho, Lori Kendall, and Michael Twidale whose first-rate classes made Fall 2009 the semester when this project started to fall into place. Similarly, I am grateful for the excellent methodological advice Mary Gray has provided on several occasions. Ray Fouché similarly went above and beyond as a mentor. The generosity with which these two senior scholars shared their time is greatly appreciated as well as inspirational for my own future mentorship. My fan studies scholarly community has been indispensable as inspiration and generous with its members’ individual and collective intelligence. Thanks especially to Nina Busse and Karen Hellekson. Julie Levin Russo and Suzanne Scott were excellent models as scholars just ahead of me in this process, even if their work is so spot-on I first feared one or both of them had already written my dissertation. Laurel Westbrook has been irreplaceable as my go-to academic and life sounding board. T.J. Tallie, Alicia Kozma, and Jaime Hough were always there with intellectual and emotional support, especially at the lowest points. Sarah Rosenberg and Emmy Gladney helped me keep perspective by sharing the view from outside this academic bubble. My appreciation and love always to my family for their support and belief in me and tolerance of my need to work on iv vacations. And, last but not least, thanks to my committee: CL Cole for having my back, Siobhan Somerville for striking that perfect balance between making me feel interpersonally safe and intellectually unsafe, Cameron McCarthy for pushing me to think globally, and Anita Chan for sharpening my thinking about method. Portions of this dissertation have been previously published. Earlier versions of arguments made here appear as follows: “Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 8 doi:10.3983/twc.2011.0256 (2011); "Fandom, Public, Commons." Transformative Works and Cultures 14 doi:10.3983/twc.2013.0530 (2013); and "Fandom and/as Labor" [editorial]. In "Fandom and/as Labor," edited by Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 15. doi:10.3983/twc.2014.0593 (coauthored with Megan Condis, 2014). These are reused under Transformative Works and Cultures’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Portions of my “‘They’re Losers, but I Know Better’: Intra-Fandom Stereotyping and the Normalization of the Fan Subject.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30 (2): 117-134 doi:10.1080/15295036.2012.755053, published in 2013, are reused here under Taylor and Francis policy allowing the right to include an article in a thesis or dissertation that is not to be published commercially, provided that acknowledgment to prior publication in the journal is made explicit. Parts of my article “‘The Interface as Discourse: The Production of Norms through Web Design.” New Media & Society. OnlineFirst. doi:10.1177/1461444814520873 are reused under SAGE policy that one may use the published article in a book any time after publication in the journal with the inclusion of a link to the appropriate DOI for the published version. v Chapter 1 Introduction: Domesticating Fandom This is not a study of “fans” as people or “fandom” as a culture or even “fandom” as a practice but of The Fan as a concept. As the Internet has become broadly accessible in the United States since the mid-1990s, media interactivity has come to be seen as normative audience behavior by both scholars and the general public. Because fans have traditionally been associated with an especially participatory relationship to their objects of fandom, the shift to a norm of media interactivity would seem to position the fan as the new ideal consumer. Orienting Fandom examines the extent to which fandom is actually rendered as an ideal mode of audience participation and in what ways in order to assess emerging norms of media use in the Internet era. The analysis proceeds by tracing cultural understandings of the fan across three sites: fictional and nonfictional representations of fans (television, film, news reports), official websites for media properties (television shows, sports franchises, etc.), and statements made by media industry workers who produce content for fans. The dominant narrative about the Internet era contends that because audiences can increasingly do things for themselves on the web, media companies have needed to become more responsive to them in order to retain their loyalty, lest the media industry become completely unnecessary. My project uses the figure of the fan

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