{"id":150,"date":"2014-05-29T20:26:28","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T20:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/?p=150"},"modified":"2014-05-29T20:51:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T20:51:00","slug":"why-rhetoricians-need-to-pay-attention-to-fan-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"Why Rhetoricians Need to Pay Attention to Fan Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/ashley-and-tardis.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-151\" alt=\"Ashley and Tardis\" src=\"http:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/ashley-and-tardis.png\" width=\"250\" height=\"405\" srcset=\"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/ashley-and-tardis.png 250w, https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/ashley-and-tardis-185x300.png 185w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/><\/a>For the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ashleyhinck.com\/aboutme.html\">last five years<\/a>, I\u2019ve been making the argument that fan culture is rhetorically significant because of its potential to create fan-based civic engagement. Fan culture is the community, practices, and histories that are developed by fans of popular culture, like sports, TV, movies, and comics. While fan culture is obviously central to disciplines like media studies, I argue that fan culture is important for rhetoricians when fans participate in fan-based civic engagement. In these instances, rhetors invite fans to volunteer, protest, and vote because of their fan identifications: they vote for Obama because that\u2019s what Harry Potter would do. But this weekend,two groups of fan bloggers pushed me to see the ways in which fan culture is relevant for all rhetoricians\u2014not just rhetoricians like me who study fan-specific rhetoric.<\/p>\n<p>On Saturday, May 24, 2014, Kate Lansky, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.notyourexpectation.wordpress.com\">Jennifer Cross<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/raevenx\">Renee Ismail<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/lifeandtimesofawriter.blogspot.com\/\">Lauren Jankowski<\/a>, Jessamyn, and Isabel Schechter led a panel at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wiscon.info\/\">WisCon<\/a> (a feminist science-fiction conference) titled <a href=\"http:\/\/wiscon.piglet.org\/program\/detail?idItems=2646\">\u201cThe Problem of Women and Perceived Authenticity.\u201d<\/a> The panelists discussed the ways in which they have their authenticity questioned in professional, personal, and fan settings and how they respond to or combat those accusations (you can find a storify of their twitter feed <a href=\"https:\/\/storify.com\/hincklet\/wiscon-women-s-authenticity-panel\">here<\/a>). The \u201cfake geek girl\u201d discourse is central to this discussion. Widely circulated, this discourse asserts that women are not real gamers because they don\u2019t play the right games, women are not real fans because they dress up as characters only for male attention, and women are not real fans because they haven\u2019t read every comic book. For a brief introduction to the fake geek girl discourse, see the idiot nerd girl meme <a href=\"http:\/\/knowyourmeme.com\/memes\/idiot-nerd-girl\">here<\/a>, John Scalzi\u2019s well-known blog response <a href=\"http:\/\/whatever.scalzi.com\/2012\/07\/26\/who-gets-to-be-a-geek-anyone-who-wants-to-be\/\">here<\/a>, and a great video from feminist fan-leaders <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/66450430\">here<\/a>. This panel asked us to see fake geek girl discourse as related and interlocking with other discourses that question women\u2019s authenticity as a way to discipline and restrict power.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<style type=\"text\/css\">\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 {\n\t\t\t\tmargin: auto;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-item {\n\t\t\t\tfloat: left;\n\t\t\t\tmargin-top: 10px;\n\t\t\t\ttext-align: center;\n\t\t\t\twidth: 50%;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 img {\n\t\t\t\tborder: 2px solid #cfcfcf;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t#gallery-1 .gallery-caption {\n\t\t\t\tmargin-left: 0;\n\t\t\t}\n\t\t\t\/* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes\/media.php *\/\n\t\t<\/style>\n\t\t<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-150 gallery-columns-2 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/?attachment_id=152'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fake-geek-girl-1-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><dl class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<dt class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/?attachment_id=153'><img width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fake-geek-girl-2-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" srcset=\"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fake-geek-girl-2-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fake-geek-girl-2-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/fake-geek-girl-2.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/dt><\/dl><br style=\"clear: both\" \/>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>According to the panel abstract, women routinely face attacks like:\u00a0\u201cWomen don&#8217;t write \u2018real scifi.\u2019 Women who say they&#8217;re gamers but don&#8217;t play \u2018the right games\u2019 are posers. Women exaggerate or lie about rape and harassment. Women can&#8217;t be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies. Women wear clothes and make-up to \u2018trick\u2019 men into thinking they&#8217;re pretty. Men don&#8217;t listen to women as the authorities on their own experiences but listen to other men if they say the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This panel asked us to see how discourses that frame women as inauthentic, fake, and untrustworthy extend across many contexts. That means that the \u201cfake geek girl\u201d discourse strengthens and maintains other discourses about women in science, law, and tech culture. Accepting the discourse that women fans are \u201cfake geek girls\u201d strengthens the discourse that women are inauthentic decision makers who, for example, need doctors and politicians to make decisions about their abortions for them. In other words, the fake geek girl discourse isn\u2019t only relevant to fan scholars: it\u2019s relevant to rhetoricians studying topics like abortion discourses, feminist social movements, and more.<\/p>\n<p>On May 25, 2014, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/arthur_affect\">Arthur Chu<\/a> at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/\"><i>The Daily Beast<\/i><\/a> published a blog post titled \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2014\/05\/27\/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html\">Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds.<\/a>\u201d Although Elliot Rodgers, the man who shot and killed eight women at UCSB, did not seem to identify as a geek or fan, Chu argues that Rodger\u2019s manifestos sounded a lot like the \u201cstandard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part about mass murder.\u201d Chu argues that male nerds are taught that women reject you, but if you try hard enough someday you\u2019ll get the attractive, non-nerd woman to date you. Chu points largely to media depictions of nerds, but I think many feminist fan bloggers would argue that it is embedded in the social practices and community values of fan culture as well. The point here for rhetoricians isn\u2019t whether Chu (or others) are right or wrong about Rodgers. The point is that Chu articulates the ways in which fan culture contributes to, strengthens, and maintains discourses of misogyny and male entitlement. If we want to critique and disrupt discourses of male entitlement, we need to also disrupt discourses of misogyny in fan cultures.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the lesson here is that fan culture does not perfectly reflect our US larger society nor does it set up impervious boundaries. If it did, rhetoricians could safely ignore it in most instances. But we cannot assume that discourses circulating broadly are circulated and articulated in the same way in fan cultures, nor can we assume that discourses circulating in fan cultures do not strengthen, maintain, shift, or contest larger discourses.<\/p>\n<p>What does this mean for rhetoric scholars? It means that we simply cannot ignore fan cultures and the discourses they circulate. Fan cultures are relevant to the rhetorical research questions we pose. As a result, we must seek out fan texts that constitute the discourses we are studying and we must theorize fan identities, fan cultures, and fan discourses. Doing so will make our analysis richer and our theorizing more complex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the last five years, I\u2019ve been making the argument that fan culture is rhetorically significant because of its potential to create fan-based civic engagement. Fan culture is the community, practices, and histories that are developed by fans of popular &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/?p=150\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhetoric.commarts.wisc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}