University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Communication Graduate Student Publication Communication Series 2017 Emotional Realism, Affective Labor, and Politics in the Arab Fandom of Game of Thrones Katty Alhayek University of Massachusetts Amherst,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/communication_grads_pubs Alhayek, Katty, "Emotional Realism, Affective Labor, and Politics in the Arab Fandom of Game of Thrones" (2017). International Journal of Communication. 8. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/communication_grads_pubs/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Communication at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Graduate Student Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 3740–3763 1932–8036/20170005 Emotional Realism, Affective Labor, and Politics in the Arab Fandom of Game of Thrones KATTY ALHAYEK1 University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA This article examines the Game of Thrones (GoT) fan phenomena in the Arab world. Although I contextualize GoT as a commodity within HBO’s global ambitions to attract a global audience, I study GoT Arab fans as an organized interpretive online community. I examine the Arabic fan Facebook page “Game of Thrones‒Official Arabic Page” (GoT- OAP), which has over 240,000 followers, as a case study of cultural