States of Fandom: Community, Constituency, Public Sphere
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STATES OF FANDOM: COMMUNITY, CONSTITUENCY, PUBLIC SPHERE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Hannah Ruth Mueller January 2017 © 2017 Hannah Ruth Mueller STATES OF FANDOM: COMMUNITY, CONSTITUENCY, PUBLIC SPHERE Hannah Mueller, Ph.D. Cornell University 2017 Approaching grassroots fan communities as political constituencies, this dissertation traces the historical development of self-organized fan groups from the 1930s to the present, focusing specifically on conceptions of community, the negotiation of public discourse, processes of decision-making, and fannish engagement with social and political issues. While fan studies scholarship previously has emphasized the relationship between text and fan, this study thus steers attention towards the relationships between fans themselves and articulates the interrelations between fan activism, transformative fan practices, and the discursive conditions within fandom. On the basis of archival and online-ethnographic research, the dissertation investigates crucial controversies in the Western literary science-fiction and fantasy community from the 1930s to the 1980s as well as in contemporary online transformative fandom to show how historical context, the demographic makeup of the fandom, fans’ use of communication technologies, and their self- conception as community influence the negotiation and resolution of internal conflicts. Drawing on different theories of community formation and the public sphere, the first chapter of the study proposes that pre-internet literary science-fiction fandom was dominated by a communitarian ideal that regulated in-/exclusion by prioritizing the community over its individual members. In contrast, transformative online fandom promotes the ideal of a non-hierarchical, inclusionary, unregulated alternative public sphere, in which the ethical principles of consensus-building have to be constantly re-negotiated. As the following chapters show, this constellation has facilitated the increasing fan-organized political and social activism in the past decade which goes beyond resistant practices of reception and consumerism: from Glee fans supporting LGBT rights to the appropriation of images and symbols from The Hunger Games by political activists around the globe. The dissertation further shows how the industry attempts to control, appropriate, and incorporate resistant audience behavior and transformative fannish practices through the proliferation of transmedia storytelling and marketing strategies in contemporary entertainment franchises, thus threatening fans’ attempts at meaningful action. At the same time, these marketing strategies, meant to ensure consumer loyalty by encouraging audience participation, not only appropriate fan practices and consumer-generated content but can inadvertently also facilitate fan- organized activism. Biographical Sketch Hannah Mueller, the author of this dissertation, graduated with an M.A. in German Literature, Art and Media Studies, and Philosophy from Konstanz University in 2004. In the following years, she worked as a managing editor for UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, an academic publishing house in Germany, before returning to her own research in a graduate program at Cornell University, where she completed her M.A. in German Studies (minor fields Film Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) in 2013. She has taught classes in German language, Academic Writing, Science Fiction, and Participatory Culture at Cornell University and Auburn Correctional Facility, and served at both institutions as a teaching assistant for courses on Feminist Theory, Film, Television, and Native-American Literature. At Cornell, she has organized conferences on the idea of contemporaneity, seriality as narrative concept, and the prison in performance and media. She has published articles on the dangers of ‘queerbaiting’ in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film adaptations (2015), same-sex romance and non-traditional masculinity in the theatrical films Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho and Do Começo ao Fim (2015), class and gender in the Czech/East- German cult film Tři oříšky pro Popelku/Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel (2016), the gendered representation of nudity in contemporary US quality TV (2017), and male nudity and violence in Starz’ Spartacus (2017). iii Acknowledgments Many people and institutions have contributed to the completion of this dissertation in different ways. My work would not have been possible without their support, and I am deeply grateful to them. First of all, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation advisory committee at Cornell University, Professors Elke Siegel, Jane Juffer, Sabine Haenni, and Geoffrey Waite, to whom I owe so much not only for their invaluable advice and expertise, but also for their continuous belief in my project and my work, and their unwavering support of my academic and professional decisions over the past six years. At Cornell University, I am indebted also to the Department of German Studies, the Program of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the American Studies Program, the Department of Performing and Media Arts, the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, and the Society for the Humanities for providing necessary funding and financial resources for my work. Many thanks go to Science Fiction Studies for the R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship, as well as Professors Sherryl Vint and Nalo Hopkinson in the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science Program, and the staff of the Eaton Collection at UC Riverside. My gratitude also belongs to the staff of the Fandom-Related Collections at University of Iowa, in particular Peter Balestrieri; and to the staff at the Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University. There are many others I am grateful to: the faculty and staff members at Cornell University who have supported me in different ways, in particular Professor Paul Fleming and Miriam Zubal in the Department of German Studies; all those who have become valued colleagues and dear friends alike – in particular my graduate cohort Nathan Taylor, Anna Horakova, and Matteo Calla, for making me feel like I wasn’t going through it alone; the members of the Popular Culture iv Reading Group and the Popular Culture Dissertation Writing Group, especially Jane Glaubman, Seth Soulstein, Leigh York, Lee Tyson, Aya Saiki, and Anaar Desai-Stephens, who share my belief in the academic and societal relevance of all things pop culture; also Carolyne Strain, Eliza Allen, Diana Hamilton, Lena Krian, and Frances Fairbain, for having my back when I needed it. Last but not least, many thanks go also to my family and all the old and new friends, near and far, for the big and the small things that make life and work worthwhile. This is for Phil, for trusting me, and for the little monster, who helped me finish this dissertation in his very own way. v Table of Contents Biographical Sketch p. iii Acknowledgments p. iv Table of Contents p. vi Introduction p. 1 I. “Preserving harmony in all the fan field”: The Great Exclusion, the Breen Boondoggle, and the Debate over Community p. 15 II. From Secretive Subculture to Alternative Public Sphere: Journal-Based Fandom and Political Discourse p. 59 III. “A Loser Like Me”: A Community of Outsiders, Fan Activism and Transmedia Marketing in Glee Fandom p. 95 IV. We Are The Districts: Fans’ Reactions to Lionsgate’s Hunger Games Marketing Campaign p. 135 V. A Questionable Bromance: Queer Subtext, Fan Service and the Dangers of Queerbaiting in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and A Game of Shadows p. 170 Conclusion p. 194 Bibliography/Works Cited p. 198 vi Introduction When workers in the US fast-food industry took to the streets of New York City in the fall of 2014 to protest against poor working conditions, they were backed up by unexpected allies: Fans of the young adult fantasy trilogy The Hunger Games had rallied to support the workers’ fight for fair wages. Pictures of the protest circulating on social media platforms like facebook and twitter showed fans and workers side by side, raising their hands in the three-finger salute that rebels in The Hunger Games use as a gesture of resistance against the government.1 In early 2016, during the primaries for the US presidential election, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’ twitter account shared the picture of a young woman holding up a sign that com- pared Sanders to the Mockingjay, the symbol of revolution in The Hunger Games’ oppressed na- tion of Panem. The photograph was accompanied by the caption: “Casey knows a political revo- lution when she sees one. She Voted Early in Wisconsin!”2 Both events, in which young fans of a popular entertainment franchise became active to sup- port a political cause, are merely two examples of a recent trend that has seen fans increasingly entering public discourse as advocates for social and political issues: Hunger Games fans advocate for social and environmental justice, Glee fans speak up in favor of LGBT rights, and Harry Potter fans convince entertainment giant Warner Brothers to use fair-trade products for their merchan- dise.3 These developments seem to contradict the often-repeated complaints about generations of 1 Reeves Wiedeman, “#Activism,” The New Yorker, December 22, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/maga‐ zine/2014/12/22/activism. 2 People for Bernie, “Casey Knows a Political Revolution When She Sees One. She