Global Fandom Conversations (Round One): Bertha Chin, Lori Moromoto, Rukmini Pande (Part One)
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Rukmini Pande (RP) Intro: Like most other fandom scholars I’ve been invested in popular cultural texts and their fan communities from a pretty early age. As a young girl in India I was heavily engaged in everything from the dubbed version of a Jungle Book anime and the WWF (now WWE), to Bollywood, cricket and football. My exposure to online media fandom started with the delightfully weird anime Weiss Kreuz in the early 2000’s and I’ve been in both anglophone and non-anglophone spaces since then. In terms of my research focus, I’ve been interested in seeing how issues of race and racism interface with certain popular assumptions about fandom and fan studies, particularly ideas of shared pleasure, escapism, and progressive politics. I’m @RukminiPande on twitter.
Lori Moromoto Intro: The little blurb I have on my personal website pretty much sums me up, so I’m copying it here in lieu of writing another one: I’m an academic, fan, and mom (she/her) who teaches in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and writes on transcultural media fandom. I became a fan of Hollywood movies in Hong Kong as a kid, a fan of Japanese anime in the US as a college student, and a fan of Hong Kong movies in Japan as an adult, and that has pretty much set the tone for my entire body of work. When I’m not teaching or writing, I’m arguing with my spouse about what to watch on TV, reading fanfiction, and trying to work my way through all 50 episodes of The Untamed [NOTE: I finished the series and then fell face-first into CQL/MDZS fandom. Turns out 50 episodes is just not enough]. You can find me on Twitter at @acafanmom
Bertha Chin Intro: My bio would (boringly) say that I’m a senior lecturer teaching Social Media & Communication at Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak. And that the majority of my publications and research look at the intersections of fan and celebrity studies. It doesn’t say I’m a fan, and my first involvement with online fandom was via The X-Files(which was also incidentally where Lori and I met and bonded over our mutual love of Leslie Cheung and HK movies!). It also doesn’t say that in 2015, I moved back to Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo where I was born and raised after spending more than half of my life in Australia and the UK, and a lot of the points -- and struggles -- I raised about hybrid identities and cultures stem from this personal experience. And this struggle with my own cultural identity continues to inform my work, which has also circled back to transcultural fandom (particularly in light of all the recent debates and Hollywood media content that highlighted Asian representation) as I fell head-over-heels into Never Have I Ever fandom [#TeamPaxton always]. I’m @bertha_c on Twitter.
1. Response to each other’s opening statements
RP: First of all, thank you both for your perceptive statements. I think there are a few threads that are speaking to common concerns we share, particularly when we discuss fandom in a “global” context with all the possibilities and complexities that that category holds. As Lori also points out, I think we’ve all underlined the need for fan scholars (and fans) to engage with local specificities and push past simplistic narratives that assume or impose a homogeneity on something as differentiated as transnational/transcultural fandom spaces. Bertha’s point about the implications of that cultural homogeneity imposed by a corporate behemoth like Disney+ is well taken. It would be interesting to have further research in how these homogeneities are also linked to the geopolitics of the states themselves and how fans align (or do not) with those interests.
And also of course, a shared concern with how Fan Studies as a discipline with global interests interfaces with these issues and also builds scholarship that is suitably nuanced. Lori, I find myself returning to your point about the devaluation of Fan Studies as a discipline within the academy. As you rightly point out, its dismissal is certainly rooted in larger institutional biases. I think you also gesture to a possible way forward, which is for the discipline itself to go further in taking “fluff” seriously and crafting more robust critical frameworks.
LM: Yes, thank you both for your insightful and provocative statements! As Rukmini says, we appear to share an equally impassioned insistence on the need for scholars, industries, and fans to grasp the cultural specificities that inflect not only transnational fandoms, but also transcultural fandoms where fans may have nation in common yet bring different (and differently positioned) cultural orientations to bear on their experiences and expectations. I particularly appreciate both Rukmini’s and Bertha’s attention to American media producers’ continued flattening of difference; something that historically has been reflected in fan studies and still characterizes interactions between normative (white, Global North, English-language) and non-normative fans in online fandom contact zones. To borrow from Bertha’s statement, Hollywood’s eminently questionable “diversity project” is predicated on the same kinds of simplistic identity politics that Rukmini observes in fandoms and fan studies alike, “which paper over the problems of media texts with ethnonationalist or other majoritarian themes with un-nuanced appeals to ‘diversity’ and ‘representation’.”
Rukmini issues a much-needed call above for creating more robust critical frameworks in fan studies, and it’s here that I locate the critical importance of this series of conversations that Henry has been gracious enough to coordinate and host. Yet their potential impact on fan studies is predicated on scholars’ willingness to read and actively engage with them. This is as much a reminder for me, as both normative fan and fan scholar, as anyone reading; that the global reach of our contemporary media landscape means that, in a very real sense, what might appear through the lens of flattened difference to be irrelevant to a researcher in fact is indispensable to understanding the nuances of an always already transnational fanscape.
BC: Indeed, echoing what both of you have remarked on the common threads running through our opening statements! I find Rukmini’s point about not coming to broad conclusions about the politics of any space, even when the space is one with a majority of those from marginalised identities particularly resonant here. My recent and current work, certainly, have been trying to recognise gaps and silences when we talk about fans, but I think it is always important to remember what, or who is considered marginalised in one cultural context may not necessarily be so in another. To utilise K-pop fandom as an example here, Korean fans of K-pop may be a marginalised identity in the US, but Korean fans of K-pop isn’t necessarily a marginalised cultural and fan identity in Korea. So if we want to understand Korean K-pop fans’ relationship with blackness, we still need to return to the national and cultural context of Korea, and by extension, East Asia’s relationship to blackness.
In short, it is perhaps useful to constantly question whose lens are we understanding and viewing marginalised identities from. Which may also mean questioning how other, more established -- and accepted disciplines of research -- conceptualise ideas about the “global”, as if global is a homogenous whole rather than disparate, messy concoctions of geopolitical, national, cultural identities. In fact I think the more we move into discourses on global fandom, the more we should recognise the differences, which is why I think Lori’s work on fandom contact zones is so important here.
2. To what degree is fandom part of a process of globalization?
RP: I think fandom has always been a part of globalization, both in terms of processes of formal and informal circulation of texts and their popularity and sometimes contested interpretations by fans around the world. There are numerous aspects of this process relevant in a contemporary context, but I am currently most interested in how online media fan communities are interfacing with an ostensibly shared, but also extremely fractured, global mediascape. I am also interested in how these extremely heterogeneous and highly self-reflexive communities are intersecting with local and global geopolitical narratives that are often debated and disseminated within them. To briefly touch on an example that Lori also referenced in her opening statement, the recent regulations around fan culture and media content in China have been broadly reported as the “policing” of fan communities in English language media outlets. At the same time, there have also been numerous fan narratives offering alternate explanations and sometimes justifications of the need of such intervention. Fan communities globally then continue to have complex relationships with issues of identity and politics which cannot be mapped simply onto ideas of resistance, subversion, or compliance. This is true for even those sections of fandom that are seen to have somewhat non-normative interests in particular contexts.
BC: I remember not really coming across the term ‘fan’ until I moved to Australia in my teens and being introduced to the concept through the discovery of The X-Files. But then thinking back to my childhood in Borneo, and recalling how it was always framed by trying to procure VHS tapes of a Disney animated film or a newly released Hollywood or Hong Kong film, or exchanging written stories with friends which featured a favourite character from a TV show we all loved, or the latest pop band we were all enamoured with made me realised I have been participating in various fan practices even before I understood the concept from a scholarly manner. And given this was all before the Internet, it stands to reason that fandom -- and media consumption in this case -- have always been a part of globalisation.
What fascinates me, and continues to fascinate me within the context of transcultural fandom, is other fans like me, who accessed different media content but rather embracing the themes, mannerisms and identities that made sense to them, whether it's gender or sexual identity, self-reliance, self-confidence, or even language skills. It wasn't about disregarding a text's national context, but rather, looking beyond the trappings of cultural and national proximity. It's also a fascination with fans who have grown up within a hybrid context, be it via migration or just media consumption, who appropriated these media texts for their own, and who are not entirely visible in the fan studies discourse. Globalisation enabled transnational media flows, and as such, it enabled access to media content from elsewhere, but also access to fan communities online.
LM: Both Rukmini and Bertha get at something I’m still working through myself; namely, the messiness of fandoms existing within what Rukmini describes as an “extremely fractured global mediascape,” and Bertha identifies as the sometimes “hybrid context[s]” of lived experience. Both characterizations capture our current media fandom moment in ways that don’t map neatly onto the more hierarchical, linear assumptions on which “globalization” rests. As mirrored in online fandom shifts from such platforms as LiveJournal, the affordances of which lent themselves to highly controllable and hierarchical fan spaces, to Tumblr and Twitter, whose far more rhizomatic points of entry afford nonlinear access to fan cultural contact zones characterized by “highly asymmetrical relations” (Pratt, 1991) of not only power, but also access in its myriad forms, “globalization” as a process predicated on ‘West to Rest’ conceptions of media and technology flows increasingly cannot adequately account for a multidirectional mediascape of cross-border access to technologies and media often outside the aegis of corporate and/or government strategizing.
In this sense, I’d suggest that what we see today is less media fandom as a process of globalization, per se, than media fandom as both reflecting and enacting changing modes, patterns, and sites of transnational and transcultural media circulation and consumption that exceed the narrow parameters of “globalization” as it’s historically been conceptualized in scholarship.
