Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation (Round Six): Naja Later (Australia) and Jenessa Williams (UK) (Part One)

Naja Later, Australia 

This is such a fascinating and timely project. There’s so many details I want to comb over, so I’ll try to limit myself to a few. I know I didn’t mention my own myspace-teen-to-feminist-twitter-adult pipeline, but it’s great to discover we have it in common!

A problem you mention that’s really captured my attention lately is that of ‘parasocial relationships’ and ‘problematic fandom’: it seems to speak to a wider movement of fans carefully enforcing norms around how to be a proper fan, and the appropriate distance to maintain from the object of one’s fandom (especially if the creator behaved problematically). How much have you found that fans of ‘cancelled’ creators are grappling with expectations of other fans to correctly break up that parasocial relationship? How much do the lines between enthusiasm and endorsement blur, especially as the divisions between public and private enjoyment become stark? I’ve certainly felt that disappointment and guilt at discovering an artist I enjoy has behaved awfully in private: it’s a heartbreaking moment when those songs no longer bring any pleasure without misery hanging over it, compounded by the guilt at knowing royalties will go to an artist with every listen, and algorithms will be encouraged to promote this work to others.

It’s an area I’ve only just started looking at, but I’m really curious about the overlaps between fandom, especially fan cultures that centre on women, and food politics. A lot of the policing reminds me of how women are expected to treat food: you should only consume healthy content, and you must carefully select nourishing, homemade content even it’s not to your taste initially. We see this in the language of ‘bingeing’ and the description of certain media as ‘unhealthy’: in the case of enjoyment-as-endorsement, an echo of ‘you are what you eat.’ Of course, a real creator’s behaviour and challenging fictional/lyrical content makes the ethics consumption has entirely different context. I’d love to see how this links back to the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’—distinct from a genuine guilty displeasure when we break up with a creator (which feels to me more like your favourite food going rotten)—being such a core theme in your work.

Finally, a more silly aside on the subject of music fandom: when American and British bands tour Australia, the tour merchandise tends to be designed with lots of touristic imagery: kangaroos, beer, and down under jokes. Of course, the central novelty to the band is being-in-Australia, but to a fan, it’s not novel at all. It can feel bizarre to represent an international band with imagery of borderline-nationalist Australiana. It’s a particularly minor example of what you mention: suddenly becoming aware of your perceived otherness as Australian, despite identifying yourself through fandom before nationality. That, along with the rarity and price of women’s-fit shirts, is probably why I got so into making my own patches and tees.

Jenessa Williams, UK

I find such a relatability in feeling like your fandom is primarily online. I am so fortunate to have friends (and a fiancé) who care about music just as much as I do, but who maybe don’t share my tendency to fixate on analysis of lyrics or setlists or interviews. I am immensely grateful to the Internet for that; Twitter and reddit can sometimes feel like very hostile places, but there is always someone out there who cares about a band more than you do or has some special easter-egg insight that can enrich your own.

 All of that said, your in-person comic fandom meet-up sounds so wonderful. Did you find that the tone or range of conversation differs significantly in these spaces? I’m glad you’ve been able to take what sounds like an extremely well-earnt break, but how have community members stayed in touch/ related to comics during this time? I have found something interesting in thinking about how the pandemic has helped us to slide into certain comforts; re-consuming childhood shows instead of always seeking out new ones, maybe deciding to revisit the familiarities of that ‘cancelled’ artist or text you thought you’d sworn off years ago. For many of my PhD interviewees, the overwhelmingly mortality and fear of Covid-19 has served to put some things into a kind of personal perspective; if bringing out that old Michael Jackson vinyl or JK Rowling book serves you a private comfort in your own home in the midst of seeing apocalypse, is it really akin to support? If a cancelled tree falls in the woods and twitter isn't around to hear it, has any further harm really been served?

Bad jokes aside, I think it definitely speaks to your point about whether fans are placing expectations on each other for the ‘right’ thing to do. You can definitely see that tension play out in online spaces, varying from artist to artist, case to case. The reasons for this I’m still figuring out (and I doubt if there will be ever be a hard-and-fast blueprint), but it does seems to me to have something to do with the nature of what has been said or done, and the timespan in which it occurred. An allegation of recent violent sexual misconduct will understandably cause more uproar than an uneducated tweet dug up from years prior, but the end result of ‘cancellation’ are very often the same. And what does ‘cancellation’ actually mean? We all have a right to decide that we no longer want to consume an artist’s work, and that isn’t necessarily akin to personally making it our business to ensure that a disgraced artist should never be allowed to make a piece of art again. Perhaps it comes down to the nature of how your broadcast those actions; the difference between quietly continuing to listen to a CD that you already own, and vocally using your online platform to suggest that others should do the same. Deplatforming, and ‘cancellation’, I feel, are not necessarily the exact same thing, but tend to get weaponised as such.

Food is not something I have ever really thought about academically, but I love the way you’re thinking about it; the idea that we have ‘’low’ and highbrow culture, important cultural texts and ‘trash’ pleasures. I’m really interested in how feminist methods and scholarship have changed over the years to try and move away from this mode of denigrating certain media texts as inherently bad, or in telling audiences what is worthwhile for them to like. It’s something I try to be mindful of as a researcher; not assuming that I  understand why a participant likes what they like before I give them the opportunity to tell me for themselves.

To think about your edible metaphor even more, something else I am really interested is the financial and cultural value of the food, the supermarket experience of consuming music. I am keenly following the work being done by Professor David Hesmondhalgh at my home university about digital economies in the streaming age, exploring the ways that we have come to treat music as total commodity. Being in Australia, does streaming now mean that you get global album releases a day early? From a fan perspective I hope that that is some kind of small consolation to the years that you have felt distanced or dismissed as a fan, but I do think the pittance paid for music has definitely contributed to a feeling of powerlessness when it comes to cancellation or even some cases of full fan embodiment, the feeling that buying music is maybe less of an emotional engagement point than it once was.

The point you make about geographical ‘novelty’ is really poignant too - I absolutely know the exact kind of merch you mean! Reaching Australia feels like such a distant achievement for a lot of UK/US bands that I understand the desire to mark it in some way, but I think it also speaks to the way that so much of UK/US culture treats music and popular culture as if it solely belongs to us, with everyone/everything else being niche or ‘other’ in some way. Things are getting better slowly; increasingly scholarship on K-Pop, for example, or on Brazilian music culture, a fanbase who have historically been maligned or mocked for their culture of fannish enthusiasms (‘Come To Brazil!’ memes etc.), but there is still a long way to go. Have you read any interesting things on the topic of non-UK/US music fandom lately? As another aside entirely, but speaking as someone in Australia, do you think the seasonal difference ever affects the way you consume the art? I think for instance about an artist like New Zealand’s Lorde; her latest record ‘Solar Power’ seemed perfectly timed for a northern hemisphere summer, perhaps at the expense of her own home audience. How do we relate culturally to a ‘summer’ record in winter, or a fall record in spring? Obviously we can and do all listen to all sorts of music all year round, but does the idea of seasonal mis-step ever contribute to that feeling, as you put it, as if your national identity is an inconvenience to being a fan? I hope that makes sense — so many different thoughts all at once!