Global Fandom: Lori Morimoto (American/Adult Third Culture Kid)
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This Star Wars poster is familiar in the west as a somewhat exoticized image on t-shirts sold at Disney parks, but it also happens to be the actual poster used in the Hong Kong run of Star Wars, with the theater I saw it at circled in red. Something that’s since become somewhat ironically commodified that has a lived past,
I can trace my interest in the ways texts move and transform across borders to coming across, sometime in the sixth grade at the Lutheran Hong Kong International School, illustrations representing Jesus as Chinese. It obviously made enough of an impression that I remember it some 40 years later; in particular, I recall how it gently challenged my theretofore unexamined mental image of “Jesus” as dirty blond, bearded, and unequivocally white (think Ted Neely in Jesus Christ Superstar [1973]).
It was also in Hong Kong that I became a fan of American movies like Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and this too was inflected by Hong Kong’s transnational milieu. Where fans of such films in the US were buying up special edition magazines and interviews with their stars in publications like People Magazine, I had accidentally discovered in local Japanese department stores movie magazines like Screen and Roadshow that were replete with stills from the films and photos from stars’ Tokyo junkets. I couldn’t read them (although they were very much the genesis of my subsquent study of Japanese language), but I cut the images out and pasted them into embroidered Chinese photo albums, which I pored (and squee’d) over with friends for many enjoyable hours.
Author’s Scrapbook, including Carrie Fischer eating with chopsticks on lower right,
In short, as I’ve written elsewhere (Chin & Morimoto, 2013), I’ve always been a fan of the wrong thing in the wrong place – American movies in Hong Kong, Japanese anime in the US, and Hong Kong films in Japan – and it was these formative experiences that laid the foundations of my research. Indeed, the scholarly significance of those movie magazines I used to ‘read’ in Hong Kong was driven home to me when, many years later, I stumbled across images on Tumblr of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Japan junkets taken from Screen magazine, punctuated by hundreds of reblogs, likes, and the occasional “thank you” to Screen for publishing heretofore unseen images of the star. Seeing them in an entirely different communication context drove home for me both a relative constant of media fandom – the largely borderless pursuit of more and new content now afforded by the Internet – and the critical role played by access in fostering fannish attachments across geographic and cultural divides.
Historically, global fan studies has focused on why people become fans of media from outside their own cultural/language/national aegis, focusing on the attractions of their differences to more familiar media texts. Such media, or the places from which they come, historically have been understood as intrinsically exotic, obscure enough to generate cultural capital for its aficionados, and – if lucky – engrossing enough to precipitate further delving into its culture of origin. Certainly all of these are possible, but it’s important to keep in mind that fans of something seldom, if ever, seek out their fannish texts. As they say in English language transformative fan culture, we don’t find fandom, it finds us. While the national aegis of a text can have a strong affective pull, it’s just as (if not more) likely that cross-border fandom begins when we happen to stumble across something in a space we regularly frequent that just catches our attention and keeps it until we’re hooked.
In this sense, the important question becomes less one of why someone becomes a border-crossing fan – although I absolutely love a good origin story! – than of what happens next. What happens when a white Australian becomes a fan of black American hip-hop? What happens when mainland Chinese women become fans of Sherlock? What happens when American women become fans of Chinese dramas that flirt with (originally Japanese) boy’s love narratives? When black American women participate in global online K-pop fandom? What do we, as fans hailing from our own cultural habitus (fan, but also national, racial, sexual, gender, and so on) bring to bear on not only how we interpret texts from outside that habitus, but also on our interactions with other fans in the spatiotemporally convergent contact zones of online fan culture?
For me, research on global fandoms begins in the deceptively simple observation that people become fans, ultimately, because we love something, and as we know, love is seldom logical, nor does it always overcome problems of systemic inequality and discrimination. It can move us to do wonderful things – raise funds for people in crisis, support fellow fans in times of need, participate in politically congruent activism – but that same passion that motivates such acts is equally susceptible to motivating more harmful behaviors in the name of what we love. Too, fannish love is itself vulnerable to manipulation by corporate interests in ways that may not actually benefit fans themselves, particularly in an age of algorithms and the (attempted) datafication of affect. Within this context, my research focuses on the critically important question of what happens when we love a thing – when, to borrow from Lawrence Grossberg, it matters to us in ways that exceed everyday mattering – particularly in a global contact zone we have yet to learn to effectively (and safely!) navigate.
In my entirely volunteer role as inveterate fan studies proselytizer I often foreground the importance of understanding affect and fannish investments in relation to politics. I do this as a way of appealing to those who might otherwise dismiss fan studies as preoccupied with ‘fluff’; while I am personally all about the fluff (particularly insofar as the fluff is critical to understanding the love, which is critical to understanding how fandom intersects with a host of concerns), fan studies can be a hard sell in academic environments that prioritize quantitative over qualitative research and teaching (as well as qualitative fields whose own legitimacy in academia has been hard-won). As I write, arguably the most salient example of what fan studies brings to the understanding of global politics is Chinese government disciplining of womens’ fan circlesin August, 2021 and the subsequent banning of those “effeminate men” on television and in the music industry who have been the focus of intense fan interest in both China and abroad for several years. This action followed on, among other things, a fandom conflagration that resulted in Archive of Our Own being banned in China, and it reflects ongoing concerns over the effects of globally ubiquitous media (in this case, K-pop and Korean dramas) on domestic media industries and markets. While broadly legible at the level of a somewhat pat discourse of “[X authoritarian regime] cracks down on [Y subculture],” any meaningful understanding of the broader history and implications of such actions requires intimate knowledge of not only its Chinese governmental and popular cultural contexts, but also its embeddedness in non-Chinese fan cultures and objects. That is, it requires the kind of transcultural lens that researchers of global fandoms bring to the scholarly table.
It’s this kind of more meaningful understanding that my own research and teaching advances, taking seriously the ways that fan cultures both reflect and effect both global media fandoms and their cultural milieu in all their messy complexity.
Lori Morimoto is an Assistant Professor, General Faculty in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She researches transnational/transcultural fandoms and transnational media co-production and distribution. Her work has been published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Transformative Works and Cultures, Participations, Asian Cinema, and Mechademia: Second Arc. She has also contributed to Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge, 2018), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), and Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics (Iowa, 2021). She also teaches courses in media fandom, East Asian film and media, and videographic criticism.
