Global Fandom: Jennifer Duggan (Norway)
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Image reproduced by permission of NRK
Hello, everyone! My name is Jenny (Jennifer Duggan). I am a dual Canadian and British citizen, and I work at the University of South-Eastern Norway. I am particularly interested in the juncture between alterity and fandom, and as such, my published work has drawn on masculinity studies, trans studies, queer studies, multilingualism, and childhood studies' focus on age-related alterity. My research is therefore located at the intersection of childhood studies, children's and young adult literary and media studies, cultural studies, and fan studies. It has been published in, amongst other venues, Television and New Media, Transformative Works and Cultures, Children's Literature in Education, International Research in Children's Literature, Bookbird, and Journal of Popular Culture. My research has focused on two fandoms: Harry Potter and the cult Norwegian transmedia youth series SKAM (2015–2017), produced by NRK (Norsk rikskringkasting, known as the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation in English).
Contributors to this blog discussion have been asked to comment on the push–pull of global and local factors on fandom in our research contexts. I would argue that fandom in Norway is global in that many of the biggest fandoms are familiar fiction franchises, like Harry Potter, Star Wars, He Man, or Marvel, as well as Japanese anime and manga, video games, bands like One Direction, and European football (soccer) clubs. Many fan activities take place in English for this reason. Certainly, there are also many families with children who travel to Norway because of its association with Disney's Frozen. (When I lived in Bergen in 2013, I could not escape "Let It Go," which seemed to be the only song on the radio other than Ylvis's "What Does the Fox Say?") Nonetheless, there is also great investment in local, Scandinavian/Nordic, and European fandoms. Melodi Grand Prix and Eurovision are extremely popular, for example, as are Nordic noir series, whether Norwegian or not. In fact, crime as a genre is so popular here that there is a tradition every year at the Easter for book publishers and TV companies to publish various "Påskekrim" (Easter crime) novels and series.
As I am not (yet) Norwegian myself and have only lived here for eight years, I felt it necessary to confirm my impressions of fandom in Norway for this commentary by doing a small-scale quantitative study of the Norwegian-language fanfics on AO3. If we take AO3 as a microcosm of Norwegian fandom, we can see that there are some noticeable patterns in language use. There are, admittedly, only 461 Norwegian-language stories on AO3, which I quantified for this introduction as a small-scale study. The results are not definitive, but they do point to tends in language choice:
Very few stories linked to global franchises, series, etc., like Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, One Direction, are published in Norwegian. Meanwhile, 76% of the Norwegian-language fanfics on AO3 are related to the Norwegian cult hit SKAM. While the show did eventually gain a global following, it nonetheless enjoyed a large local following and Norwegian ability conferred significant cultural capital within the fandom (see Duggan & Dahl, 2019). The children's franchise Kaptein Sabeltann is the second-most popular Norwegian-language fandom on AO3 (7% of fanfics in Norwegian). Other franchises, books, and shows written about in Norwegian include Zombie Lars, various Norwegian crime and detective novels, Norwegian bands such as Ylvis (known globally for the aforementioned song "What Does the Fox Say?"), NRK (the Norwegian national broadcaster) television series like the political satire Nytt på nytt, and so forth. This suggests that fans in Norway make purposeful choices about their language use based on the assumed reach of the fandoms in which they participate.
However, the use of language by Norwegians participating in fandom is complicated. This is particularly true for Norwegian fandoms that have become global, such as the SKAM fandom. SKAM was a truly transmedia series spread between a dedicated website, characters' social media accounts, and other media. Moreover, although a summary episode was published once a week on Friday's, the series was in fact published in small pieces throughout the week: a video might be published on the official website at 1:08 a.m. on Wednesday and be followed the next morning by social media posts by characters and screenshots of their text conversations. This made the series particularly "spreadable" (Jenkins, Green, & Ford, 2013), as I and others have argued (e.g., Andersen & Tanderup Linkis, 2019; Duggan, 2020). The global success of the series was due largely to fans' translating and sharing it via online networks such as Tumblr and YouTube, but while its global success would not have been popular without English, the series prompted a great deal of interest in Norwegian fluency in which came to have significant cultural capital in the online fandom (Duggan & Dahl, 2019a). Nonetheless, there were arguments within the fandom, particularly visible on the official website, about language use. The success of the series inspired pride in its Norwegian viewers, and this prompted a linguistic and cultural nationalism that at times created conflicts, as some fans considered their fellow fans' use of English a betrayal of the local fan community (Dugan & Dahl, 2019a, 2019b).
The discussions fans had about language closely mirrored academic and popular discourses regarding the threats and affordances of English use in Norway, and in particular, the worry expressed by Språkrådet (the Norwegian Language Council) that Norwegian is losing ground to English in Norway. I find it quite interesting how a single fandom, like the SKAM fandom, can become a microcosm of wider sociopolitical concerns over local versus English language use, as I have just discussed; globalized popular culture versus locally produced cultural artefacts, as we can see, for example, in the Norwegian government's desire that Netflix produce and stream more Norwegian content (Drabløs); and other similar concerns. I am sure this is the case in many other countries and contexts.
References:
Andersen, T. R., & Tanderup Linkis, S. (2019). As we speak: Concurrent narration and participation in the serial narrative "@I_Bombadil" and Skam. Narrative, 27(1), 83–106.https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2019.0005.
Drabløs, Ø. T. (2019, October 7). Staten vil tvinge Netflix til å lage flere norske tv-serier [The state wants to force Netflix to make more Norwegian TV series]. NRK. https://www.nrk.no/kultur/staten-vil-tvinge-netflix-til-a-lage-flere-norske-tv-serier-1.14729822.
Duggan, J. (2020). Revitalizing seriality: Social media, spreadability, and SKAM's success beyond Scandinavia. Journal of Popular Culture, 53(5), 1004–1022. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12954.
Duggan, J., & Dahl, A. (2019a). Fan translations of SKAM: Challenging Anglo linguistic and popular cultural hegemony in a transnational fandom. Scandinavian Studies in Language, 10(2), 6–29. https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v10i2.115610.
Duggan, J., & Dahl, A. (2019b). A challenge to Anglo pop-cultural hegemony in the era of multicompetence: SKAM fans, translation, identity, and power [Conference paper]. Digital Diasporas: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, University of London, London, England.
Jenkins, H., Green, J., & Ford, S. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. NYU Press.
Jennifer Duggan is Associate Professor of English at the University of South-Eastern Norway. She is one of the editors of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures and copyedits for Transformative Works and Cultures. Her research interests include reader response and reception theory, fandom and popular culture, and children's and young adult literature, media, and cultures. Her work has appeared in various venues, including Television and New Media, Transformative Works and Cultures, Children's Literature in Education, International Research in Children's Literature, Bookbird, and Journal of Popular Culture.
