Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Alexia Smit (South Africa) and Ioanna Vovou (Greece) (Part One)

Alexia Smit: Response to Ioanna’s Opening statement

Ioanna, I feel fortunate to be paired with you and during our initial zoom meeting we discovered a wealth of shared interests and ideas. Both of us have an interest in television (though Ioanna’s interests are wide ranging) and particularly reality TV. We both study television culture in nations (South Africa and Greece) whose television histories, have been impacted by complicated political and social histories.  And we both share an interest in ironic or mocking fan practices. It is refreshing to talk with you about the complexities of considering fandom in our respective nations.  

In your opening statement you explain how Greece gained a television service later than other European nations and how the military junta beginning in 1967- 1974 had tremendous impact on Greek social life. South Africa has a similarly fractured television history. The apartheid government banned television as a dangerous foreign influence until 1976. Television was then controlled as the mouthpiece apartheid state up until the advent of democracy in the 1990s. The television service has been overhauled in the post-apartheid era but has still been subject to tremendous instability due to factional party politics within the ruling ANC. As in the case of Greece, the 90s also saw the deregulation of the South television industry with global television pay television options expanding in the country.

While I can’t speak for Greece, certainly within South Africa the concept of a stable “national” television culture is something of a myth, and in my context television culture has been seen as conduit of transnational culture from the outset.  Audiences and fan practices in both of our nations might be understood in terms of complex struggles around identity and national positioning. It is thus not surprising that we have both identified irony as a fundamental feature of the fandoms we examine. 

In your opening statement you identified modes of fandom which rely on a playful critical distance and comic take-downs of the text. And you call this “[c]ynical fandom” or “fandom as mockery”. Both of these phrases could easily be applied to the cutting comic commentary made by TV fans in my own consideration of South Africa’s black twitter. 

I so enjoyed your description in this paragraph: 

Fandom shifts to mockery, into having fun at the expense of the participants and of the situations watched on various screens. At this point, we could diagnose a turning point, a shift taking place gradually over the years to a cynical way of watching TV and of enjoying popular culture products: that of derision, not only in production strategies but, also, in consuming attitudes.

Both of our studies are evidence of fandom as a form of creativity and criticism. It struck me that your ideas about cynicism could be brought into conversation with work on irony, cynicism and camp by British television studies scholars. I am reminded of Karen Lury’s  work on “cynicism and enchantment” in British Youth TV  and Faye Woods discussion of camp in British reality TV. But given our respective positions in Greece and South Africa, this shared observation of irony as a key characteristic means it might be interesting to examine what dimension nationality and the transnational brings to questions of irony the negotiation fans must make with global media cultures. That is, both South African and Greek fans place themselves and their fandoms in relation to globally popular texts produced the U.S. and the UK. This is evidenced in your discussion of fan responses to I Genia ton 592 Evro a text fans were able to enjoy while still acknowledging its debt to American shows like Big Bang Theory and Friends. It is possible that the negotiations and displacements involved in watching TV transnationally might be especially conducive to a critical or ironic positioning. 

In my work with Tanja Bosch on the twitter fandom of Our Perfect Wedding, fans are responding to a local show but also adapting global and largely African American cultural phenomenon of “Black Twitter.” The show itself is also drawing on the conventions of bridal reality TV. While we did not code for this in our study it would productive to examine fan responses to OPW which highlight tensions between ideas about local vs global bridal and television culture. From my familiarity with the twitter feed I know that many of the conversations turn upon comparisons between an aspiration to emulate global celebrities like Beyonce and the parochialism of the actual lifestyles represented onscreen. For example, twitter fans responded with great mirth when a bride described a dress as being “imported from Durban”. The joke turned on the fact that Durban is a city within South Africa rather than an elite overseas fashion capital. These comic observations are conditioned by the particular ways in which fans are located at the intersection of local and global ideas about femininity, blackness and luxury.

You introduce your  discussion of ironic fandoms by explaining the context which partially enables this ironic positioning: 

The circulation of concepts, ideas, formats, styles is a trend that characterizes in an international level TV and media production diachronically. The matrix of many media products and productions, as well as the adaptations of radio and TV shows, films, etc… seem to design a borgesian universe. Or, in other words, the mosaique of intermedial culture can, also, be perceived as a palimpsest: if one scrubs the surface, the remaining of another writing appears. As the French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1982) has pointed out, it is quite impossible to trace back the original text (impossible to figure out the urtexte). (Vovou, 2021)

I like the way you resist framing the discussion as an exchange between an imposing culture and a grounded local-ness but rather understand fan culture as operating in response to a “mosaic of intermedial culture”.  This is a lovely and useful phrasing. You’re description of media culture as  palimpsest conceives of fans as readers, not just of a surface  message but of layers of textual relationships. 

The ideas in your opening statement prompted to re-read an older article: Playing at Being American: Games and Tacticsby John Caughie. Please forgive me for going on a bit of a tangent into this work. The openness of this format is making me feel playful! I so enjoyed re-reading the piece (written by my former thesis supervisor) after years of thinking about global television and fan cultures. I think it connects with so much of what you are discussing. While this article dates back to 1990 and a great body of work on transnational television and transnational fandom has been developed since, I think Caughie’s approach is still worth rehearsing now, especially when trying to understand TV fandom from particular national contexts. 

Caughie recounts an experience of watching Dallas and then a British Royal Wedding in the Pyrenees as a Scottish Tourist. He uses this anecdote about displacement and disjuncture as the starting point for thinking about the “suspensive irony” enabled by transnational tv viewing. Caughie notes the importance of early feminist work on the ironic fan experiences of women viewers and argues for thinking in similar ways about national audiences who we might be tempted to other as the “dupes” of an imperialist television system (1990, 47). Instead of thinking about the relationship between located viewers and imported television texts in generalised terms as a battle between dominant culture and ‘active’ or resistant audiences Caughie argues that thinking about irony might enable a rethinking of local fan practices in terms of knowingness and play. This means thinking about viewers as self-aware and active subjects but not necessarily overestimating the degree to which engagement means radical resistance. Caughie draws on Alan Wilde’s description of “suspensive irony”(Wilde cited in Caughie, 1990, 52), an ironic mode linked to postmodern discourse which responds to the world’s  “disorder” with “acceptance” rather than despair or a quest for order.  Caughie sees “ironic suspensiveness” as something which has “very little to do with authorial or institutional intention, and more with historical and textual condition” (1990, 52). In Caughie’s account ironic suspensiveness is a pleasurable viewing position enabled by the fragmentary and segmented nature of television texts and compounded by the global distribution of television texts beyond their immediate production contexts. That is, in contrast to the absorption and identification encouraged by the traditional viewing conditions of the cinema, television’s discontinuities might provide the conditions for critical ironic detachment. Such a set of “historical and textual condition[s]”  provide the framing for your discussion of the multi-layered engagements produced by the conditions of global television culture. 

Intermediality is another key theme which connects my research with yours. You discuss how fan parodies of television on TikTok complicate the false dichotomies between “old and new media” in popular culture. Similarly, the South African twitter fandom surrounding Our Perfect Wedding demonstrates the degree to which fan practices enmesh twitter activity and traditional television viewing practices in which pleasure relies on the relay between these media. 

Sometimes when I present on my research at international conferences I come away feeling that work on South African tv and audiences being received as an aberration from “normal” TV or as a quaint local example. But in reading your work on irony has allowed me to consider how the idiosyncrasies of the television fan cultures we have observed in our respective contexts are powerful sites for theorising about contemporary television as a cultural form which is by definition intermedial, transnational, layered with readings and open to ironic engagement.

Another feature of your discussion that I’d love to pick up on, perhaps in our next engagement, is the question of authenticity which you explore in relation to Wild Bees, #MeToo and the pandemic.  This investment in authenticity might appear to contradict the ironic discourse we have discussed so far but it would be exciting to explore to what extent a desire for authenticity lives alongside cynicism in television fan cultures. Indeed, such a discussion takes us back to early work on the soap opera. But I will leave this for our next exchange.

References

Caughie, John (1990) ‘Playing at being American: Games and tactics", in P. Mellencamp (ed.) Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University pp. 44- 58  

Lury, Karen E. (2001) British youth television: Cynicism and enchantment. Oxford University Press.

Woods, Faye. (2014) ‘Classed femininity, performativity, and camp in British structured reality programming.’ Television & New Media 15(3), pp.197-214.

Ioanna Vovou: Response to Alexia’s Opening Statement

#Global… as Intercultural ?

The above though came to my mind with persistence, after reading your opening statement, dear Alexia, and, also, after having followed the evolution of the Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation so far. That is the idea of something evolving between cultures, deriving from them, shared and transformed in multiple cultural and media landscapes. In the same time and as a paradox, though only apparent, the question of locality as an important element of reception and of creation of fan communities. 

It kind of struck me as a sort of epiphany that the so well-known global circulation of TV programs is not only about TV formats but also and, mainly, about collective imaginaries solidly granted in geo-cultural topoi, and at the same time travelling and metamorphosing from one register to another, just like ideas, concepts, thoughts and materialities move in a “géopoétique”, as MC Solaar would sing – you can read/hear through the lines/lyrics, that I am totally immerged here in an aca-fan posture, speaking à la manière de…!  

The palimpsest of TV formats’ circulation

Firstly, I thought about the kind of popular culture products generating fandom activities in South Africa, i.e. reality TV shows such as Our Perfect Wedding and Date my Family, that I immediately looked up on YouTube to get an idea. Thinking in a playful mood, we could also consider the programs in a logical association of series, at first dating the family in order, afterwards, to assure the perfect wedding. By that, I tent to shed light on the human interest storytelling involving sentimental relationships. In other words, the promise of love and happiness undertaken by these programs, in the core of our existence, of our personal life. How universal and global can this be? And yet, how socially/historically/culturally delimited? 

Date my family is a format, based on a concept that has circulated in various versions worldwide. It reminded me of the reality TV show Meet my Folks (NBC, 2002-2003), in which we could notice intertextual associations with the film Meet the Parents (2000). In Greece, we had a sort of a Greek version of Date my Mom (MTV, 2004-2006), a factual (sic) reality TV show called A bride for my son [Mia nifi gia ton yio mou, (Μια νύφη για τον γιο μου, Aplha TV, 2010)], the gendered representations of which would be the object of another jamboree conversation…. In this show, the mothers examined the potential brides for their sons. I am wondering whether we could find gendered representations and fan reactions in Date my family… Another interesting thing is that these formats seem to take some time before implementing local TV markets, in this case, several years (2010 for Greece, 2017 in South Africa, if I am not mistaken).

As for Our Perfect Wedding, it reminded me of two “factual” based entertainment TV shows: Say Yes to the Dress and Don’t tell the Bride (BBC 3, BBC1, Sky 1, Channel 4, 2007-2020), the latter produced also in a Greek version (Min to pis sti nifi [Μην το πεις στη Νύφη], Antenna, 2011), where the concept evolved around weddings organized exclusively by the groom, surprising the bride (see any gendered allusions there?)

Illustration n.10

Don’t tell the Bride, Greek version (Antenna TV, 2011)[1]

The “identity” question in fandom

Secondly, a very insightful element in your opening statement is the “negotiation of black identity in the post-apartheid space” and, consequently, the need to “seek out site of community around shared black cultural understandings” and the modalities of a “black belonging”. Consequently, your perceptive overview of the understanding of fandom as a “white phenomenon” reducing South African TV viewers to consumers, points out the neuralgic position of the researcher, as well as socio-historical features functioning as a prism under which theoretical analysis will develop. In a different register, following Tzvetan Todorov’s thoughts on ethnocentrism “the judgements that are carried on nations by other nations inform us on those that speak, not one those they speak of […] instead of the other, we find, most of the times, a distorted image of itself” (Todorov, 1989: 32). The latter quotation is also relevant when thinking for instance the claims on the special “community of Greeks”, made by the presenter of the first Greek version of the reality show Big Brother, back in 2001 (Antenna TV). Or, thinking of the claim on ‘diversity’ when it comes to the casting of participants in recent reality shows, ‘surfing’ on the social demand for the acknowledgement of “diversity” as a question that runs through political and public life, institutions, the business world and interpersonal relationships, retrieved intensively on social media. The question would then be not only “what is the meaning of ‘identity’ or ‘diversity’ in popular media products?” but, also, how this meaning is negotiated by the community of fans. 

Fandom as a democratization of TV entertainment 

Thirdly, the fan activity of retelling the story events in these two TV shows you mention, parodying scenes by the use of memes or mock the English language featuring in the shows on Twitter (as a marker of class identity and mobility), is, broadly, an inclusive one. Inclusive of a larger community of audiences within which everyone does not, effectively, watch the program but participates, nevertheless, in its narrative universe; more precisely, in its discursive universe. For the programs’ meaning is not only to be found in the audiovisual text broadcasted on a pay TV service, but also in the cultural practices taking place on Twitter, based on the idea of connectivity (see for instance, Simonsen, 2013). Hence, the dialectic between the “primary site of consumption” and the “backchannel” can be understood under the prism of a Gestalt perception, where the figure and the background are interchangeable. Depending on the situation one is placed, having or not having watched these TV shows, participating or not in the fan activity on Twitter, the meaning, as well as the discursive reality perceived by audiences, may oscillate. In a global fandom context, it would be interesting to observe and apprehend these oscillations in a cross-cultural perspective; what a thrilling social oriented and ongoing research project that would be!

References

Simonsen, T. M. (2013), « The Mashups of YouTube », Nordicom Review 34-2, pp. 47-63.

Todorov, T. (1989), Nous et les autres. La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine, Paris : Editions du Seuil.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16ONDC9DBlc, accessed on February 3, 2022.