CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE Moral Agency and Free Will: Speculative Fiction Fandom and the Discourse of Empathy A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts in Anthropology By Julie Strom December 2016 The thesis of Julie Strom is approved: ____________________________________ _________________ Dr. Sabina Magliocco Date ____________________________________ _________________ Dr. Gina Giotta Date ____________________________________ _________________ Dr. Kimberly Kirner, Committee Chair Date California State University, Northridge ii PREFACE “Why study the Internet? Does anyone even say anything real there?” “It’s a shame, with all your talents, that you choose to research the Internet.” As a dutiful postmodern anthropologist, I must warn you that I consider myself a member of the community I am about to describe. I grew up as digital technology took its hold on the world around me. I heard it infiltrate popular music on the radio. Video games went from beeping, two color, 8-bit games like Pong to 4th Generation, 4096 colors, pseudo-3D model scaling and rotation in the time it took me to get to early adulthood. And then the Internet — just a bunch of bulletin boards at first, and soon chat rooms and personal websites where the digital intersected with a host of interests that I had by that time known to be the realm of the nerd, and/or geek. I discovered the online community in these places where other speculative fiction fans assembled to discuss their favorite texts, be they literature, television, film, or video games. We discussed characters, plots, science, philosophy, history — much like what I see in today’s fan discourse. If there is a single message to be distilled from all of my academic training and reading of anthropology, it is this: look in the gaps. The gaps in knowledge, the gaps in understanding, the gaps in gaze and perspective. Anthropology studies culture, yet it is reluctant to study its own. It is especially loathe to address popular culture, and such investigations are left largely to other disciplines. While it is widely agreed that culture is dynamic, it does not respond very quickly to cultural changes. We all come to anthropology for our own reasons. For me it was the perspective and goals of anthropology that I could apply to so many of those things that interested me – art, mythology, history, science, and more – which also happened to qualify me as a iii geek. As I eagerly devoured anthropological studies on these things as I did with all my objects of fandom, I found a gap. My gap, a hole where the study of a community and culture to which I belong could be. The dubious and disdainful attitudes suggested by the above quotes are only reflective of what I’ve heard from many anthropologists. I watch the hope drain from their faces when they find out I’m investigating social media discourse among the Speculative Fiction Fandom community. Much has changed, and the Internet hasn’t been the exclusive realm of geeks and recluses for a very long time. It is estimated that half the world’s population used the Internet this year, a percentage brought down by low penetration in Africa and Asia. Three billion people are using the Internet in a wide variety of wonderful, horrible, and ordinary ways. And so, this thesis is a traditional ethnography, and it’s not. This is an ethnography of Speculative Fiction Fandom, although earlier iterations have attempted to pretend that it is a study of cognition that just happened to choose this understudied community as its research community. It is not a coincidence because I am a Speculative Fiction Fan. iv Table of Contents SIGNATURE PAGE……………………………………………………………...ii PREFACE .............................................................................................................. iii ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1 METHODS AND METHODOLOGY ................................................................. 10 THEORY AND KEY CONCEPTS ...................................................................... 18 SPECULATIVE FICTION ............................................................................... 18 EMPATHY........................................................................................................ 19 COGNITION ..................................................................................................... 24 COMMUNITY .................................................................................................. 30 INTANGIBILITY ............................................................................................. 33 DIGITAL AND ANALOG ............................................................................... 36 CULTURE ........................................................................................................ 41 HABITUS OF FANDOM ................................................................................. 43 HUMANS AND ANIMALS ............................................................................. 51 HUMANS AND SUPERNATURALS ............................................................. 63 ANALYSIS .......................................................................................................... 67 INTRODUCING THE TEXTS ......................................................................... 67 THE LEFTOVERS ........................................................................................ 68 v DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION (DAI) ........................................................ 69 PREACHER .................................................................................................. 70 NARRATIVES OF SELF-CARE ................................................................. 71 CONFLICT: A CONTEXT FOR EMPATHY.................................................. 76 VIOLENCE ................................................................................................... 77 STRUGGLE .................................................................................................. 90 MORAL AGENCY ........................................................................................... 95 DISCUSSION ..................................................................................................... 101 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................. 104 vi Abstract Moral Agency and Free Will: Speculative Fiction Fandom and the Discourse of Empathy By Julie Strom Master of Arts in Anthropology Anthropology has long been exploring the relationship between culture and cognition, but only in recent decades has American popular media culture been a subject of its own ethnographic investigations. This turn of gaze coincides with inquiry into underrepresented communities and variations in social experience as they are affected by issues such as gender, race, and ethnicity. Recent events in the U.S. stemming from tensions between such groups asserting their rights and those who resist their concerns, sometimes resulting in violence, have set in motion a national dialogue which frequently invokes the subject of empathy. This project is an investigation of empathy among one of the oldest Internet-based communities, that of Speculative Fiction Fandom, a self- identifying community of interest whose practices revolve around speculative fiction vii texts. Speculative fiction is a genre of fiction which explores the nature of humanity through narratives which speculate about life under different world conditions. It is a broad container for what are today prolific in popular media culture, including the subgenres of superhero fiction, science fiction, and supernatural fiction. The Speculative Fiction Fandom community is an ostensibly racial-, ethnic-, and gender-diverse community, and so its ordinary discourse is a fertile field to better understand the processes by which diverse people in discursive contexts have empathy, or not, for those others outside their own social groups. Through an analysis of the discourse centered on the thought-experiments of speculative fiction popular media, the relationship between culture and cognition may be illuminated through the identification of key rules for empathy. viii INTRODUCTION This project is an investigation into the social, personal, and cultural production of empathy. Empathy has dimensions of both thought and affect, for which there are social, psychological, and cultural influences. Humans are not merely receptacles for these forces, however, and as agents have a part in the production of the social, the cultural, and the psychological. This flow between person and world, which includes the thought and affect that comprise empathy, is an intersubjective and dynamic process. It is the process of empathy that is the cognitive focus of this research, its aim to identify some of the most salient influences in its production. Language is one means of accessing the social, psychological, and cultural life of persons, for within speech and discourse are traces of our consciously and unconsciously held frames of understanding. Linguistic, psychological, and cognitive anthropologists examine language to illuminate the different social and cultural discourses that contribute to our thought, behavior, and affect. Such analyses have been