The Last Jedi: An Online Roundtable Part 5

WILLIAM PROCTOR

I’m truly sorry to hear that Becca. That’s horrible, to say the least, and it makes me so mad (although it’s not a new phenomenon, unfortunately, but that doesn’t excuse such behaviour).  

I don’t intend on challenging your lived experience and I think that would be a valuable contribution to scholarship on Star Wars, perhaps even at an auto-ethnographic level. I can certainly understand that women may “fight fire with fire” in such cases. But as an empirical researcher, I’m afraid there are many examples of critics, fan-bloggers and so on — female and male — attacking fans en masse. I’m not talking about racist, misogynists either; I’m talking about attacking men because they’re men, nothing else.  Also, as a researcher, it is not up to me to make moral judgements about the way in which people ‘do fandom.’ My provocation was epistemological, not moral. As Mar pointed out, and as Mel Standfill implies, there is a tendency to ignore the “dark side” of fandom, especially when women are involved as violent aggressors. So while I appreciate that women/ men are not ideological equals by any stretch, it is problematic to ignore toxic performances wherever they emanate from or to reframe them as understandable because of masculinity.

I certainly understand where you’re coming from Becca as a fan yourself, and it troubles me a great deal. It’s one of the reasons why my own fandom is kept indoors. I don’t participate in a fan “community,” for example.

However, female fans have also been toxic as Jessica Austin was analysing at the Fan Studies Network conference in 2016 (Mar and I were in the same room!) – and the majority of scholars agree that this needs to be addressed with some urgency. Austin had some powerful examples of fangirl toxicity; in one extreme case, a female fan contingent bullied a fan-artist so much that she tried to take her own life. Mar has already mentioned Swifties, but we could chuck in One Direction fans (“I will pour fucking bleach down your throat,” said one teen), or Supernatural fans, with evidence that a minority literally assaulted Jensen Ackles. That’s not something I think can be ignored by scholars, not least when there’s empirical evidence behind it, nor is it something that I think is worth “protecting” (not that you implied that Becca, I’m speaking more generally).

In addition, crossing over into other disciplines, the research on bullying is so much more frank and less fearful — one study of “mean girls in popular culture” is truly awful, not to mention the cyber-bullying research that claims that women – and girls – are particularly aggressive and hostile to other girls. So while I understand the reason why women may feel as if they need to lash out for the way they’ve been mistreated historically, perhaps in similar ways to your experience, Becca — that is, on the level of lived experience. I’m not interested in either defending or attacking fans — I’m interested in the broader picture. I recognise that I’m putting my head above the parapet, and, in many ways, that’s what I do — confront media “controversies,” and deconstruct myths via empirical methodologies. I’m sorry to say that in my research, some female fans have been quite hostile, venomous and nasty – and not always towards men, but towards women too. I strongly believe that the current state of fan studies, as well as media/ cultural studies, is not only blind to this, but actively works to construct women as victims only and reifies the very gender binaries that scholarship ostensibly aims to dismantle.

I am sure that however hurtful and alarming those comments are to you, Becca, that you did not respond in kind with slurs and insults of your own. So while it is at least understandable why some women also behaviour via the utilisation of toxic fan practices, it doesn’t mean it should be condoned as “fair game,” else we run the risk of infantilizing women all over again  (which many scholars do without realising it; same with constructing the gender binaries all over again).

So my intervention is about how to deal with this on an empirical and epistemological level as scholars without making moral judgements about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of being a fan. And I understand why scholars would be anxious about wading in the toxic filth and sludge of many digital spaces and I feel very ambivalent about how to frame empirical evidence that points in this direction.

I would also cite the many feminists who argue that the concept of 'Patriarchy' as an umbrella concept no longer works. I prefer the concept of Kyriarchy as I feel it allows for more complexity and nuance, not to mention permitting my own ‘white masculine privilege’ to be re-framed in order to consider my working class heritage (I was born in the British council estate ‘projects’, and existed in abject poverty for most of my life) and non-neurotypicality (I am autistic).  Power is intersectional. I also think it’s interesting how concepts of ‘class’ has almost been removed from such analyses.

REBECCA HARRISON

I’m going to jump in here quickly to add that as I don’t participate in any organised fan communities I simply don’t see what is being described by Billy and Mar with regard to the toxicity of women fans, and I don’t know the scholarship on this as I’m a cultural/film historian. However, as fandom exists within patriarchy, I can’t agree that fan toxicity knows no gender. Even the way women fans are being described with regard to toxicity is in gendered language (for example, venomous and nasty are not words I typically hear used to describe men). Surely fan communities, whether positive or negative, are gendered, raced and classed just like the broader cultures from which they emerge?

Anyway, my response was not designed to vindicate bullying behaviour but rather an attempt to explain why women journalists and fans might make sweeping statements about toxic fan cultures being male, which I don’t think is unfair (based on my previous comment, and also Will’s pertinent analysis of gendered power structures), even if it is not always ‘right’. I’m going to leave this here rather than get into a long conversation about radical feminism and/or the design of online architectures that privilege maleness and whiteness, which would be interesting but (sadly) not relevant to the film. I think us responding to Megen’s thoughtful comments will be a much more productive way of developing the conversation.

WILLIAM PROCTOR

I think the point I have been trying to make all along has gotten lost and this is what I was afraid of. I completely agree with everything you say, Becca. Of course fan “communities” are gendered, classed, raced etc. I don’t know what gave you the idea that I thought differently. Indeed, fan cultures are splintered and fragmented across class, race and gender — and other axes too. To talk of a fan “community” is problematic, as we all know: there is no such thing as a homogenous and coherent fandom.

I am not talking about women journalists generalising about male fans — I am talking about specific instances whereby individual male fans are attacked without merit. I’m talking (again) about Henry Walsh being accused of being a neo-nazi, a misogynist, a member of the ‘alt right,’ etc., by both female and male journalists across the world – when in reality he is a disabled individual, an anti-Trump demonstrator with progressive, feminist outlook. I completely agree with you about the overarching discourse, Becca. I apologise if I haven’t made that clear in my essays and my comments earlier.

I’m also quite familiar with the history of radical feminism. I’m a comfortable Marxist and trade union activist, but I don’t agree that ideology works quite as bluntly as you suggest: the way you construct women as existing within the yolk of Patriarchy seems to rob them of agency and make victims out of them.

I’m sorry, but the words “venomous and nasty” are not gendered words at all, at least not in the way I use them (although I could be blind to this, naturally). I think it’s unfair to imply that I used sexist language.

I’m sorry you don’t think that part of the conversation isn’t productive, and I’m happy to stop and leave it be. My point way back at the beginning, and in my essays, is that academics tend not to be able to discuss these things frankly and in the spirit of open debate without relying on arguments that shut down discourse.

I’m truly sorry for your lived experience with male fans. It’s quite rife, to be honest. One of my students wanted to start reading comics and I offered advice on where to go, what to read. She told me that her experience of entering a comic shop for the first time was such a negative experience that she’d never return (I believe there’s work on comic stores as “toxic masculine spaces”).  I shall leave the topic be for now, unless anyone wants to continue. (I’ll get my coat.)

MEGEN DE-BRUIN MOLÈ

 A few points about authorship, textuality, and intertextuality have piqued my interest in the last few comments. Billy, you very usefully mention the issues that arise when too many people try to micromanage a story. Of course, most contemporary texts are engaged in ‘authorship by committee’ to varying degrees. No book, no comic, and certainly no film comes into circulation without the extensive input of many different people, and rather than disparaging Star Wars for foregrounding this process as a central part of their brand strategy, it might actually be to our advantage to consider the ways in which the franchise is just making an existing phenomenon more visible. It might be useful here to reference Jonathan Gray’s concept of 'clusters of authorship', of which Disney/Lucasfilm is a really great example. There are authors all along the Lucasfilm/Disney chain—Kathleen Kennedy, the Story Group, the directors of the films and writers (and translators and editors) of the novels, the advertising department, the makers of the toys, and so on. Of course, each of those authors has a different kind of power, and some of those authors have MORE power, or at least more visibility.

For this reason I also think it’s really interesting what Lincoln has said about the way key worldbuilding and characterisation elements are being shifted from what you consider the ‘main’ platform (the films) to the novels, the TV shows, the comics, etc. Just like we’ve developed clusters of authorship, transmedia storytelling seems to be giving us clusters of characterisation and clusters of worldbuilding—centralised nowhere. So much of these new films involves giving us just enough to go on in terms of characterisation and (more unfortunately) diversity, which are then expanded on in fandom or sub-canon (Stormpilot, for example, or the instance Suzanne mentioned earlier in this roundtable, about Holdo's queerness being relegated to a YA novel).

I’ll be interested to see how the hierarchies between the films and other media develop over the next few years, especially given that it seems like we’ll be inundated with new Star Wars films. This is probably giving Lucasfilm too much credit, but could the long-term strategy actually be what it seems at the moment—to make the films less of a ‘special’ event, and put more emphasis on other media platforms in the franchise? Wouldn’t it (at least on some occasions) be a good thing if fans could choose to skip a film now and then to delve into the universe at another point instead?  

A lot of the legwork TLJ does is indeed not in advancing the plot, but in raising questions for other instalments to answer. As one of the ‘core’ texts of the franchise, its job seems to be more in providing a platform where all of those disparate parts of the Star Wars universe can coexist. For example, I actually saw the Canto Bight sequence as quite a vital bit of world-building. Not just in terms of the story TLJ tells—it reminds us that there are billions of people in the universe who are outside the epic Resistance/First Order divide—but also in terms of creating a cohesive world for the franchise as a whole. TLJ even feels like a well-integrated part of ALL of Lucas’s Star Wars films, taking narrative and visual elements from the original trilogy but also from the prequels (and the special editions). We get weird new CGI animal species and our beloved animatronic puppets. Serious philosophical discussion and ridiculous racing sequences. TLJ is the #CantWeAllJustGetAlong of Star Wars movies. Canto Bight does feel tonally different to the rest of the film, but it also feels like a link to parts of the franchise I haven’t dared to venture for a while. It actually made me want to watch the prequels again.

WILLIAM PROCTOR

I think you raise a number of interesting points here, Megen. You are quite right that comics, films, TV series and so on have “clusters of authors” — clusters that, in Mark J.P Wolf’s terms, are also hierarchical “circles.” I’m not quite sure if Kathleen Kennedy is a traditional author, nor The Lucasfilm Story Group. To be sure, they’re all involved in decision-making and creative planning — Kennedy is the one who green-lights projects; the Lucasfilm Story Group are a canonical police-force, ensuring that transmedia elements align with the films. That said, despite the revised rules about canonicity, with all texts flattened as equal parts of the overarching hyperdiegesis, it remains evident that the films are “the immovable objects” of the Star Wars “world.” In actual fact, then, a hierarchy still exists between transmedia elements. The films still represent “the mothership,” with transmedia satellites orbiting and feeding off of the cinematic “master narrative.” But as Colin B Harvey explores in Fantastic Transmedia (2016), if we consider vast narrative worlds as having a kind of serial “memory,” then it’s interesting that memory often only goes one way: that is, transmedia texts draw from the mnemonic contents of the film series, but the obverse rarely happens. So while Marvel’s canonical comic series introduces new characters, such as Doctor Aphra — who apparently collaborated with Vader between ANH and ESB — or Wookie bounty hunter Black Krrsantan — it is rare to see new transmedia characters “remembered” in the film series. Rogue One took several steps in including references to the animated TV series, Rebels, so perhaps we’ll see more memory tissue between transmedia instantiations and the cinematic core of the franchise, but we shall have to see how that turns out.

In relation to “authorship-by-committee,” I agree in principle — but prior to the Disney acquisition, Lucas was the committee, or at least the “author-God” (thank the Maker!”). But naturally, this perspective only goes so far from ‘a certain point of view’: there have been literally hundreds, if not thousands, of creative agents working on Star Wars and the collaborative nature of film-making, comics, novels, video games, and so forth, demonstrate that unequivocally. Yet as far as the film series goes, Lucas was head-honcho and it was his “vision” that provided a solid footing, which, as Will points out in his BFI Star Wars book, was more detrimental to the creative process as Lucas gained ultimate control and became the very thing he originally fought against: a corporation with Lucas as Emperor. So if we are to include figures such as Kennedy, Hidalgo, Chee and other agents in the LSG as “authors,” then we would need to radically shift our understanding of what authorship is. That seems a valuable intervention, Megen.

One final point, if I may: in Jenkins’ seminal definition of transmedia storytelling, which has been examined, extended and expanded by other scholars since, the hyperdiegetic “mothership” shouldn’t ask viewers to head off elsewhere for canonical information. In many ways, we have seen how fan criticism can end up becoming narrative elements themselves: for instance, when Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness featured Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan, continuity fans exposed a major fault-line insofar as the parallel (Kelvin) timeline was introduced after Khan Noonen Singh was born. Thus, Caucasian Benedict Cumberbatch could not be Khan in continuity terms — Khan should be Richardo Montalbán, or, at least, a character of Latin descent. In order to address fan criticism, Paramount/ IDW rushed out a comic mini-series (‘Khan’) that rationalised the racial disjoint, aiming to police and contain criticisms centred on racial politics. In doing so, the comic book mini-series functions ostensibly as a palliative narrative. This reminds me of Suzanne’s chapter on BSG (“is fan production frakked?’), whereby the producers worked to plug gaps in hyperdiegetic continuity via various transmedia satellites and thus conducted textual operations that would most usually be a fannish play-park.

Although Snoke’s origins (we could also include the emergence and history of the Knights of Ren) have not yet been addressed transmedially, I agree with Lincoln that this is not only plausible but also inevitable. To return to Rian Johnson, the way he has marshalled a number of defences about The Last Jedi in interview paratexts and on social media perhaps points towards the emergence of explanations in Expanded Universe elements. Recently, news has emerged that Gary Whitta (Rogue One) is penning a comic book adaptation of TLJ but that this will include narrative threads not seen in the film itself. Naturally, we shall have to wait and see how that turns out, but it seems to me that fannish criticisms, especially those anchored onto canonical continuity, can be picked up and addressed elsewhere, “in-text.” That said, I personally think this is a “get-out-of-jail-free card” and signals towards the film’s story as deficient, at least across the axis of narrative.

 MAR GUERRERO-PICO

Seriously though, where are my Knights of Ren, Disney? I’ve been waiting for more than two years for that question to be answered. Why did Ben Solo become Kylo Ren and not Nick Vader? Is he one of those hip solo acts whose stage name looks like a band when they really are not a la Marina and the Diamonds? I’m in jest here, but these and other over-top questions piling up in my mind point me towards the ambitious yet flawed transmedia development of the franchise.

Megen’s suggestion of a de-centralised transmedia system is thought-provoking but I truly wonder if that would work in such a literal transmedia jungle like Star Wars. Retrieving my initial intervention citing Verón, the main problem lays on the reading contract that the franchise has been forging with its consumers (in general, not just fans) over the last 40-years which have created a sort of transmedia baggage in all of them, and consequently, in the producers, too. In the same vein as Billy, and from a financial and branding perspective, I doubt that the producers consider the films as anything but the core of the transmedia system in spite of their transmedia ventures. And, certainly, a great mass of consumers still deem the films as such and don’t dive into ancillary content unless they are truly interested (my young adult brother would fall into this category). This way the encyclopaedia of the Star Wars’ viewers stems from the films, so that the existence of hierarchies in the transmedia narrative universe is reinforced. Drawing again on Jenkins’ original concept of transmedia storytelling, each narrative unit of the system has to be self-contained so that it enables the set up of several entry points for different types of audiences. In a way, the narrative autonomy means that the key questions have to be addressed in the text while it can leave any secondary matters (or “absences” as Eco would put it) for the ancillary contents to answer them.  In her PhD dissertation, Christy Dena refers to this as “tiering” which could be applied to the current situation of the Star Wars universe as a contrast to other, perhaps smaller projects who were consciously conceived with a radical transmedia narrative deployment in mind.

In this sense, Carlos Scolari, Manel Jiménez and myself (in Communication and Society, 2012) call this “strategic transmedia” vs “tactic transmedia” which has been developed a posteriori, once the transmedia cat is out the bag, sort of speak.  This does not mean that is not planned but the narrative and textual development has its limitations because it was not transmedia in origin. Then, it can be argued that strategic transmedia is tighly connected with what Dena defines as “intracompositional transmedia phenomena”, in other words, a single story told all across different co-dependent  media (in principle, the opposite to Jenkin’s seminal concept) whereas tactic transmedia links back to Dena’s “intercompositional transmedia phenomena”: a variety of autonomous compositions (be it one-off works or little intracompositional phenomena) spread through different media and that belong to one narrative world. In sum, Star Wars appears as both tactic and intercompositional transmedia narrative universe. Gray’s concept “clusters of authorship “does speak to these tactic, intercompositional transmedia developments. In other words, every author figure in Star Wars has their little dukedom-inside-the-kingdom to play with. However, whether it is strategic or tactic, the transmedia development it seems recommendable to count on a sort of architect (as Jeff Gomez would defend) to put order in the kingdom which is exactly the function of the Lucas Film Story Group.

The problem comes, in line with what Suzanne has extensively studied before, and Billy now brings up, when the transmedia development is used by producers to keep control of the integrity of the transmedia text. Both concepts of transmedia erasure and transmedia (over)reliance mentioned in here can be understood within the general “trans-transmedia” introduced Matt Hills (2012): “Trans- transmedia is thus not simply about serving fans; it is also about seeking to manage and protect the brand value of a TV series, thus involving a form of discursive “fanagement”. Fan  expectations and dissatisfactions are problematically engaged with, and disciplined and contained, at the level of niche paratexts”. If transmedia erasure consists in cutting off the problematic branches in the jungle (as a fan, I still don’t get why they take out Tartakovsky’ Clone Wars supreme animated series out of the canon), (over)reliance provides new trees in the jungle to cover up narrative deficits in light of what I have argued about narrative autonomy within a transmedia narrative world. The amusing side of these narrative patching up takes place when the producers don’t try to fend off criticism by launching more transmedia units but when they resort to “Twitter-pedia” fans as commented by Billy, that’s certainly cheaper than produce a Marvel comic. Rian Johnson’s intervention was based on using now-outlawed Expanded Universe material which paradoxically keeps pervading canonical content as implied in the trailer for the forthcoming Solo film. There so much repackaging, as Suzanne would put it, that a fan can take. And yes, Lincoln, I so need a transmedia detox from Star Wars.

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Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Teaching Fellow in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. She holds a PhD in English Literature, and her research interests include popular culture, adaptation, and contemporary remix. Her article ‘Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses: Star Wars and Popular Feminism’, appeared in the 2017 collection Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (eds. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest). You can follow her (and her research) on Twitter: @MegenJM.

Dr Mar Guerrero-Pico works as a research assistant at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). Her articles have been published in journals such as International Journal of Communication & Society, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, Signo y Pensamiento, Comunicación and Sociedad (Mexico), Palabra Clave and Cuadernos.info. Her research interests include transmedia storytelling, fan cultures, narratology, television shows and media education.

Dr Rebecca Harrison is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on media technologies and how gender, race and class affect people's experiences of visual culture. Her first book, From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity (I B Tauris, 2018) is forthcoming, and she is currently working on her second book, The Star Wars Code, which is due for publication in 2021. In the meantime, you can find information and links to her various Star Wars-related projects, including research, teaching materials, articles - and an accidental controversy about Dr Organa - on Twitter: @beccaeharrison. 

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). 

The Last Jedi: An Online Roundtable Part 4

WILLIAM PROCTOR

Talking about narrative and tonal consistency between TFA and TLJ has me thinking. Now I’m not about to claim that Lucas had the Original Trilogy all “in his head”  — as Lucas often revises his own history, it’s difficult to ascertain his authorial intent. His claims about using Campbell’s hero’s journey as a template from the off isn’t true; neither is this idea of him planning the saga as a series of two trilogies, three trilogies, four trilogies, then back to three etc. Lucas marshals different myths at different moments. However, Lucas was always the driving force behind his ‘vision,’ whether or not he hired writers and directors for ESB and RoTJ.

Who now is the main ‘author’ of Star Wars? Kathleen Kennedy seems to calling shots as producer. The Lucasfilm Story Group is there to ensure that stories don’t break the seal of continuity (although even Lucas’ prequels introduce a series of unstable elements for sure).  Not to get into the nitty-gritty of authorship as the centre of meaning or anything, but I was struck when I learned that J.J Abrams was pitching Episode IX to Disney on the day of TLJ’s release! Moreover, after TFA was written, Kathleen Kennedy said she turned to Rian Johnson and said: “what happens next?” This seems to be more ad hoc in a creative sense; without a singular author to guide the structure, consistency, tone and so forth, Disney’s “authorship by committee,” as Gerry Canavan has described it, is perhaps one of the reasons why I feel TLJ is so out-of-joint with TFA, which Mar remarked upon earlier.

LINCOLN GERAGHTY

Not wanting to come full circle but having read all of your comments and ideas to this point I am struck by something Mar wrote right at the beginning: “there is no coherence­– wasn’t Snoke supposed to be very powerful?” For me how they dealt with Snoke in TLJ sums up/characterises  how the franchise is now under Disney’s watchful eye. It is has become too focussed on the transmedia/world building aspects of a Hollywood franchise. In going to see the film I wanted to some more on how this Snoke was, what his motivations were and how his plans were to unfold. Yet, very quickly, the film basically emphasised to fans and casual audiences alike that who Snoke is didn’t matter a jot. If you want to know then you will have to go to all the paratextual material like the reference books, novels and wikis to find out. I consider myself a fan of Star Wars,I still have my toys in storage, I’ve got the LEGO, I watch the animated series and play the video games, but I did not want to put in the effort to go find out who Snoke is or his background. Even after watching the film for a second time I have not been convinced enough to go look into who he is and where he came from. I guess I should since the film may make more sense if I did… by I’m left feeling is it worth the effort? This is why I say there is too much reliance on transmedia storytelling in the franchise now. I want the film to tell me what is important and what should be noted, not some paratext that I haven’t read yet. So, I suppose, replying to Billy’s last point - I am fatigued!

Now, I enjoyed TLJ, don’t get me wrong. Although, like Will I did fall asleep briefly during my second viewing of it. A shock to me and something I’m not proud of… falling asleep in a Star Wars film - sacrilege! Yet I am justified I feel since I nodded off during the ridiculous casino sequence where some poor treated alien beast were set free, or something like that. Moments I did enjoy included the throne room fight, Kylo throwing his toys out of the pram when he could shoot Luke and every scene that Rey was in. The best scene for me and one I seem to think fans weren’t so keen on was Luke milking the thala-siren on Ahch-To. Having spent years on this tiny island with no one for company except for some aliens nuns why not try out the local brew?!? I did enjoy the stories put out after people moaned about, that the scene has some basis in scientific fact and was planned as an homage to drinking blue bantha milk back in  A New Hope. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/19/16795346/green-blue-milk-scene-the-last-jedi-luke-skywalker-thala-siren-dairy-science

Again, I guess fans getting anxious about whether Luke would do this, questioning his Jedi ways, is another example of the type of criticism TLJ has attracted. But if this is the case then I guess Empire should be criticised just as much since this is where we first see Yoda as hermit completely lost in the madness of Dagobah - eating all sorts of weird stuff that Luke hated. Swings and roundabouts I suppose…

REBECCA HARRISON

I want to briefly tease out a thread of the conversation that has hinted at the Disneyfication of the Star Wars franchise. Billy has mentioned Disney-era authorship and dubbed the moment that Leia uses the Force (still to my mind the single worst moment of the film) as ‘Leia Poppins’, which presumably draws parallels between TLJ and the all-singing, all-flying Disney version of Mary Poppins. Some time ago on Twitter, I recall someone point to the aesthetic similarities between Broom Boy and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and the flash of the passing ship looking like the shooting star over the Magic Kingdom in the Disney logo. And I’ve already commented on the self-reflexive nature of the TLJ’s arms dealer narrative, which alludes to Disney’s power to perpetuate the onscreen war. As M W Lipschutz wrote in an essay on TLJ for the LA Review of Books (that I’m ambivalent about for a number of reasons, not least of all the unchecked privilege of the author – see https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-read-star-wars/#!), Disney is ‘weaponising’ the Star Wars franchise in a ‘content war’ with other content providers such as Netflix and Amazon.

However, there is, I think a more playful and reciprocal dynamic that we risk overlooking. For example, as Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest describe in the introduction to Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, the finale of the 1980 Star Wars episode of The Muppet Show has Luke, Chewie, Kermit and co singing When You Wish Upon a Star—the theme from Disney’s Pinocchio—in front of a Magic Kingdom-esque castle complete with shooting stars.. On the one hand, it’s a humorous sending-up of the cutesy children’s storytelling that the rough-and-ready action of Star Wars, and the subversive comedy of The Muppet Show, tends to undermine. On the other, it’s a gesture that positions both Star Wars and the Muppets in the same category of family-friendly entertainment as Disney. Of course, there’s a certain irony to this as Disney bought the Muppets from the Jim Henson Company in 2004, and Star Wars from George Lucas in 2012. In case it wasn’t already clear… don’t mess with the Mouse.

I think there are also, potentially, fascinating visual continuities between the Star Wars women and contemporary Disney princesses. I was struck watching the live-action Beauty and the Beast in 2017 that Emma Watson’s Belle is, albeit briefly, styled like Daisy Ridley’s Rey in 2015’s The Force Awakens. In a chase sequence with the Beast and Gaston toward the end of the film, Belle wears an off-white outfit consisting of a kind of night-dress/pyjama hybrid that’s reminiscent of Rey’s sand-coloured tunic and leggings, and she also, like Rey, carries a staff. Possibly I’m pushing the theory too far but Moana might fit the pattern, too. It’s interesting that consolidating the Star Wars and Disney franchises might involve the StarWarsification of narratives and aesthetics more typically associated with the House of Mouse, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are references to The Last Jedi in future Disney releases.

WILLIAM PROCTOR

I have read the LA Times article, Becca, and it’s little more than sophisticated nonsense, not to mention the author’s ‘un-dialectical’ approach — that is, not recognising the interplay between ‘exchange-value’ and ‘use-value.’ As a corollary, it is also based on How to Read Donald Duck, an academic work that Martin Barker, to put it frankly, decimates in Comics: Ideology. It is an example of what David Buckingham describes as “ideology-by-numbers,” an approach that constructs figures of the audience as victims of sledgehammer ideologies. That is not how cultural and ideological forces function, I’m afraid!)

WILL BROOKER

This is just a quick note, but surely the intersection between Star Wars and The Muppets has been in place, and in canon, since The Empire Strikes Back? I remember articles commenting at the time that Yoda had the voice of Grover and Fozzie Bear, which is of course technically true. That Muppet Show episode was first broadcast a few months before the release of Empire Strikes Back, so it makes the connection before a character who is, essentially, a realistic Muppet appears with Luke in the Star Wars universe, but I think the relationship between them is interesting.

I also wonder if the Holiday Special set up a precedent for the Muppet Show crossover, as it seems to share a similar loose, playful and intertextual approach. The Holiday Special is of course more of an in-universe story, but it and the Star Wars Muppet Show seem related somehow -- in-between official and unofficial, like lapses into carnival. Perhaps the cantina scenes, the Jabba’s Palace party and the celebration at the end of Return of the Jedi can be situated a little further along the same spectrum, as canonical variations on the same theme; sequences where the story briefly stops, and the characters enjoy an in-house band. At the end of Return of the Jedi, we should remember, fireworks burst over Endor and then, in the Special Edition, over every planet from the saga so far, much like a Disney parade.

REBECCA HARRISON

I think the Star Wars-Muppets crossover actually begins with The Muppet Show! The film’s production aside, the Muppets episode aired on February 23, 1980 and Empire Strikes Back was released on May 17. I do like the idea that the carnival scenes throughout the films situate it in a Muppet-like realm, although I wouldn’t suggest there’s crossover with Disney in that sense (not that you do, but it might be an extension of the argument). Disney musical sequences are too neat, too choreographed, to be comparable. But Star Wars and The Muppet Show do share a chaotic, riotous element of carnival.

To return to the discussion about fatigue… I’ve read some of the novels that fall between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens and so much of my understanding of the sequels is predicated on having knowledge of those books. Without having read about the collapse of the New Republic, the rise of the First Order (what a surprise that this is largely a woman-led enterprise that gets effaced onscreen – I want more Rae Sloane!) and Leia’s reputation across the galaxy, The Last Jedi just doesn’t make as much sense. I only bought the novels because I’m researching Star Wars; it’s asking too much of fans to keep up with so much paratextual worldbuilding. It’s exhausting.

It’s also exhausting, to return to an even earlier point about fandom, to keep rehashing debates about toxic masculinity within some elements of fan culture. Yes, I’m aware that women troll others online and participate in some unpleasant discourse (I think Mar used Taylor Swift fans as an example). I also appreciate that more work needs to be done to understand the nature of fan interactions and cultures in online spaces. However, there seems to be a suggestion that people outside Fan Studies should do that work or be attuned to any and all recent developments in the field, which I don’t think is fair. It’s not my area of scholarship and while I am a Star Wars fan, I don’t tend to write or think about fandom in an academic capacity.

Moreover, in the past year I have written three articles about Star Wars and been interviewed twice about my research and/or experience as a fan. I also discuss my engagement with the franchise on social media. Every single time I become visible as a woman talking about Star Wars I get negative responses from men. Always men. Today, even, just now, a man attempted to undermine me because I’m a woman and like the thing he likes. I have never, at any point in the last twelve months, had women diminish me, objectify me, or tell me I belong in a prison camp (yes, one male fan really did feel that strongly about my ideas). Don’t get me wrong, I know this is personal, and anecdotal, evidence. However, it can be incredibly challenging to be a woman, and also a Star Wars fan and scholar, in public space. We’re talking hundreds of negative, sometimes vaguely threatening comments, and I don’t get the worst of it. If women who write and talk about Star Wars (as journalists; as fans; as scholars) are not always nuanced in our discussions of ‘fanboys’ it’s because we don’t have the emotional or intellectual energy left to do that labour. If someone else wants to, I will eagerly read it! At any rate, I think it’s useful to balance an academic approach with empathy for people’s lived experiences.

WILL BROOKER

In response to Becca, I feel that the important thing in this respect is the way individual, lived experiences map onto and relate back to broader structures of power. Women can be individually mean, rude and hostile, of course. Women can also abuse power in situations where they have relative privilege over someone else, in relation to race or class for instance. But I don’t think this should be a distraction from what, to me, is the most fundamental structure of power in our society, whereby half of the population is treated as subordinate to the other half, on the basis of biological sex.

If a woman calls me a whining man-baby because I express negative opinions about The Last Jedi, I might well find that unfair and annoying. But it doesn’t relate to any broader structure of power. It doesn’t relate to any other oppression I experience in everyday life, in terms of how safe or unsafe I feel walking down the street, or how hard or easy I find it to get promoted or published. If a man online tells a woman her opinion doesn’t matter, I think that has much broader and more profound connotations. I can’t know what that feels like within Becca’s lived experience, of course, but I would guess that a man being rudely dismissive online is more than just an isolated incident of rudeness, as it would be for me if a woman called me a whining man-baby; but, rather, that it is just another instance within a series of similar experiences, which to some extent structure women’s lives. To a woman she belongs in a prison camp is particularly striking, as we could see patriarchy as a system that tries to do exactly that to women: contain and restrict them.

For that reason, I think we should treat the cases of women being hostile and rude online, especially when it’s towards men, very differently from what might, on the surface, seem to be the equivalent male behaviour. Because I don’t think it’s actually equivalent at all, beyond a surface similarity. And I don’t think we should let these superficially-similar forms of behaviour distract us from underlying power structures and hierarchies.

One thing I do agree with Billy about here is that to insult men by comparing their behaviour to stereotypical femininity is unfortunate and ultimately damaging to women as well as to men. If we are insulting men by saying they’re fragile and emotional in their response to a favourite film, we are surely saying that behaviour more usually associated with femininity is shameful, and that, in simple terms, for a boy to be ‘like a girl’ is embarrassing. I don’t think mocking men who protest about Star Wars with tropes about ‘male tears’ is progressive, not least because it seems to endorse more aggressive and traditionally macho forms of male behaviour as a more appropriate response.

MAR GUERRERO-PICO

I'm sorry to hear that, Becca. The fact that is always biting men is due to structural privilege and sexism which as we all know goes beyond fandom, and certainly beyond Star Wars. It's the same system that tells women that they can't be geeks or sporty to begin with, or tells men that they are above women, or tell women to compete against each other. However, I reckon that that structural privilege also works against those fanboys because, maybe they feel entitled to call a woman names, but then again, the system is also oppressing them in a way if they fail to meet normative expectations of masculinity. They aren't victims per se but if we look at the broader picture, and other instances of life, one can argue that the situation is more complicated than it seems. In this regard, I cannot agree that we should treat women attacking men differently under the justification that we (as well as racial and sexual minorities) are victims of the patriarchy especially if, like Billy and Will have pointed out, they are reproducing gender stereotypes which I am at fault of using sometimes in my daily life. Therefore, yes, I acknowledge there is a problem of toxic masculinity in fandom but at the same time we can’t turn a blind eye on toxic fangirls. Work must be conducted in parallel because, it is pointless to try to change attitudes in others while refusing to deal with the effects (here, I mean competitiveness and malice all around) of such a sexist and brutal system on ourselves, as women. So, the way I see it, fan toxicity knows no gender. To clarify, fan toxicity needs to be urgently examined regardless of the gender from which it emanates.

 MEGEN DE-BRUIN MOLÉ

Without rehashing what’s already been discussed, or diminishing what you are trying to say, I want to explain why I am personally uncomfortable getting into an 'open debate' about this here. For me at least, part of the issue is precisely in trying to make this an academic discussion. I'm not a fan studies scholar, so I don't have the tools or vocabulary to discuss this 'objectively' (a term loaded with gendered/patriarchal assumptions about the supremacy of logic and reason over emotion). This forces me to frame my academic debates from personal experience or qualitative data, which immediately places me at a disadvantage in this context.

It also creates a specific kind of power dynamic that (for me) is just too familiar from a fan perspective. The academic or 'logical' vocabulary is the one I've often seen invoked by (predominantly) male fans—not talking about you directly here, Billy or Will—to shut down female fans and their responses. Their response is somehow not rational, and therefore it must be invalid or less important. To the extent that the very use of this kind of language to talk about the 'irrational' pain, anger, and backlash of some female fans in itself shuts down debate on a basic level. This is precisely NOT a rational issue, in that it's an issue coloured by the whole debate about what is allowed to be called rational in the first place. This is also a huge discussion in feminism / feminist philosophy of science—see here, here, here, and here for similar versions of this argument in varying degrees of conceptual difficulty.

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Professor Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University, and author of Using the Force (20020 and the BFI volume on Star Wars (2009) among many other books.

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Teaching Fellow in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. She holds a PhD in English Literature, and her research interests include popular culture, adaptation, and contemporary remix. Her article ‘Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses: Star Wars and Popular Feminism’, appeared in the 2017 collection Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (eds. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest). You can follow her (and her research) on Twitter: @MegenJM.

Dr Lincoln Geraghty is Reader in Popular Media Cultures in the School of Media & Performing Arts at the University of Portsmouth.  He serves as editorial advisor for The Journal of Popular Culture, Transformative Works and Culture, Journal of Fandom Studies and Journal of Popular Television with interests in science fiction film and television, fandom, and collecting in popular culture. He is Senior Editor for the online open access journal from Taylor Francis, Cogent Arts and Humanities. Major publications include Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe (IB Tauris, 2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television (Berg, 2009) and Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (Routledge, 2014).

Dr Mar Guerrero-Pico works as a research assistant at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). Her articles have been published in journals such as International Journal of Communication & Society, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, Signo y Pensamiento, Comunicación and Sociedad (Mexico), Palabra Clave and Cuadernos.info. Her research interests include transmedia storytelling, fan cultures, narratology, television shows and media education.

Dr Rebecca Harrison is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on media technologies and how gender, race and class affect people's experiences of visual culture. Her first book, From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity (I B Tauris, 2018) is forthcoming, and she is currently working on her second book, The Star Wars Code, which is due for publication in 2021. In the meantime, you can find information and links to her various Star Wars-related projects, including research, teaching materials, articles - and an accidental controversy about Dr Organa - on Twitter: @beccaeharrison. 

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). 

The Last Jedi: An Online Roundtable Part 3

WILLIAM PROCTOR

To return to Will’s statement about the representation of fanboys, I think “extremely lazy and misguided” is an understatement. Naturally, the fannish need to protect a treasured fan-object shouldn’t surprise us in any way; but there is also this weird tendency for cultural commenters, be they professional critics or fan-bloggers, to actively refuse to accept that fans could have any real issue with the film beyond fitting into traditional stereotypes of the basement dwelling, lonely fanboy who has nothing better to do than spoil others’ enjoyment with weaponised nostalgia. Discursively, TLJ desires protection from critical assault, while the original trilogy – perhaps the ultimate “good” Star Wars object, at least for first generation fans – ends up being converted into a ‘bad’ object, which is suddenly the sole province of nasty, nostalgic fanboys.

I’d be interested to hear what others think of the way in which fanboys are attacked as “man-babies,” “crying male tears,” “butt hurt,” and other insults surrounding TLJ detractors and anti-fans (does “butt-hurt” mean male rape, for instance, and if so, why is that okay?). As scholars, I recognise that we should keep our moral judgements in check, but I fail to see how marshalling abusive comments towards an entire male contingent is not sexist as well, especially when a bevy of empirical evidence within fan studies/ audience studies literature undoubtedly shows that both fanboys and fangirls can behaviour appallingly at times (although it is undoubtedly asymmetrical and I wouldn’t cast aspersions in peer-reviewed work, obviously). I have been quite clear that I am not claiming that women and men now occupy the same ideological coordinates, but my own experience tells me that it has become so difficult to paint broader strokes, especially when substantiated empirically. I’ve just been chatting with Henry about this and we both feel that it’s difficult to chat about mistreatment of fanboys as it comes across as “a defence of men.”  But I tread where the path takes me.

When a website such as The Mary Sue circles around Henry Walsh’s petition like vultures eyeing a corpse, and refuses to address his politically progressive praxis – or, worse still, didn’t conduct any research at all, which is more likely -- then I can’t help thinking that certain facts have been either distorted, or removed entirely, so as to squeeze the “fanboy-sexist-racist-rage narrative” into preordained and prescribed ideological limits. It seems that scholars are quite afraid of venturing into this territory. I don’t say this easily or without reflexivity, but, rather, to ask whether or not the political constituency of the academic left actively bars scholarship in these areas in case one runs the risk of being contaminated by those same slogans that permeate TLJ discourse. In order for the “transcendental” narrative to function, the only fangirls that are permitted to speak are those who claim TLJ is “feminist,” or to unquestionably – and unproblematically it seems – abuse an imaginary and imagined fanboy cluster. I’d appreciate any thoughts you may have on this as I think readers would too.

I wonder if we could view this kind of knee-jerk generalisation as a symptom of the current political environment? With the emergence of the radical right in the US and perhaps the UK (although contextually and qualitatively different): Brexit, immigration, Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, Trump, snap elections, #Gamergate, sad puppies, and so on and so forth. As the world of men (i’m being crude and general, apologies) is seen as chock-a-bloc with racist, misogynist, homophobic neo-nazis and white supremacists, then perhaps the levels of anti-fanboy rhetoric can be explained, if not condoned, as a kind of “push back” against those ideological currents. I’m shooting from the hip here folks, but I strongly believe that it’s time to stop tiptoeing around these issues (not to say that anyone here is, of course!).

SUZANNE SCOTT

Will, have we been unintentionally force facetiming again?  It’s like you’re in my head! To second Mar, I would agree with all the decapitated muppets here (not a sentence I ever envisioned writing, but I digress…).  I also really appreciate your perspective, Megen, and in particular we are in firm agreement that any move towards more complexity and/or less moral absolutism in the SW galaxy is a good thing!  Perhaps, as you rightly note, asking the questions is enough, and the film certainly forces us (pun absolutely intended) to grapple with our own evolving relationship to the franchise as a whole, and the past more generally, in productive ways.

Your mention of bringing in Leia’s force sensitivity from the EU reminded me of something, though. I, perhaps like you (and probably like many SW fangirls and queer fans and fans of color) have historically looked to the EU as a space that afforded the dynamic and more diverse characterization that the cinematic franchise either economically or ideologically could not. In a project I’m currently working on, I’m exploring the concept of “transmedia erasure,” which might range from archival failure (e.g. failing to record emphera from an ARG) to industrial excision (e.g. ranging from attempts to erase The Star Wars Holiday Special from popular memory, to Disney’s corporate delegitimization of the EU and subsequent formation of the “new unified canon). But, importantly, I also think transmedia erasure conceptually encompasses many of the representational issues we have been addressing.  There’s a long history of “outing” characters via transmedia extensions (e.g. Gaeta in Battlestar Galactica webisodes) and authorial paratexts (e.g. Rowling’s post-canonical outing of Dumbledore and the news this past week that there would be no “explicit” reference to his sexuality in the Fantastic Beasts sequel), or more generally relegating “diverse” characters quite literally to the narrative margins.  Likewise, with TLJ, we are paratextually informed that Holdo is queer, but we have to buy the Leia: Princess of Alderaan tie-in novel to see that actualized in any explicit or meaningful way.

With all that said, I want to pick back up on Will’s closing comment here about the specter of the “butt-hurt fanboy” and how this might ultimately force choke critical conversations around the film, as well as Billy’s remarks. I would speculate that many who have kept their criticisms about the film to themselves precisely because they don’t want to be “on the wrong side of history” or even indirectly affiliated with critiques of the film that potentially are situated in deeper strains of misogyny, racism, and homophobia (much less the performative trollish embrace of these qualities). I agree that it’s a lazy characterization, but it’s also not an entirely incorrect one in some cases, and I think that needs to be acknowledged.

This is why, in spite of my own ambivalent response to the film, I don’t begrudge marginalized Star Wars fans for taking a memetic victory lap on social media. They have, for so long now, been either systematically and discursively erased from the fandom, even in this supposedly new era focused on representational diversity (I see you, J.J. and #wheresrey), or chided for “feeding the trolls” even as they are disproportionately targeted as “SJWs.” I think contextually it’s important to note that the sort of fanboy mockery you’re referencing, Billy, frequently only occured when said fanboys would insert themselves into celebratory threads about the film, not to engage in a fannish debate about the film’s relative strengths and weaknesses, but to spew vitriol and provoke precisely the kind of response you detail.

I can’t believe I’m about to reference this, but this conflict evokes the infamous “I have the high ground!” climax of Revenge of the Sith for me. Marginalized SW fans have for so long been expected to “go high” when it comes to a large chunk of the fan base treating them as inauthentic or unwelcome. And, for the most part, they have.  In the case of TLJ, they finally had the actual high ground, and despite their warnings, certain disgruntled fans attacked anyways.  And they (predictably) got cut down. Is intra-fannish pathologization an appropriate or particularly productive response? No. But it also speaks to the degree to which the fanboy has been, for better or for worse, incorporated into hegemonic masculinity over the past decade.

I also think Billy is spot on to tie this back to the broader political moment we find ourselves in. In my current book project, I draw parallels between the growing strains of misogyny, racism, and homophobia in geek culture and a “make fandom great again” ethos that is committed to re-entrenching an androcentric (if not openly white male supremacist) conception of fan identity.

WILL BROOKER

I think there exists a widespread male discourse, online and offline that is based on privilege and expresses itself, whether naively or deliberately, in ignorant and offensive ways. So I think to a great extent, a ‘push-back’ against that kind of male discourse is justified and appropriate, whether on a purely personal or a broader political level. I can see, taking up Suzanne’s final comment above, how a more general sense of resistance against various forms of bigotry -- and phenomena like #metoo and #timesup -- give further relevant context to this push-back. Whether it is simply a woman countering another man patronising her on twitter, or a more widespread reaction against the Game of Thrones creators being given a Star Wars trilogy, these smaller acts of resistance often seem to fit into a bigger picture.

There are also, surely, examples of privileged, ignorant, naïve and offensive behaviour among male media fans, and specifically Star Wars fans. Social media and journalism have highlighted some particularly extreme cases, like the edit of The Last Jedi that attempted to cut all the female roles. It is hard to know whether these newsworthy cases of toxic masculinity among Star Wars fans are representative of a broader trend within that fandom, or whether they are about individuals and small, atypical groups, perhaps deliberately trying to provoke and troll for attention.

I think it’s an error, certainly, to assume that everyone who identifies as a Star Wars fan and has issues with The Last Jedi shares the views of people who object to the increased diversity of representation (however superficial and ‘plastic’) in the sequels. All the responses above have embraced and enjoyed that diversity, only wishing it went deeper, but we all shared misgivings about The Last Jedi on other grounds, such as storytelling, character, broader continuity and tone.

So I feel strongly that to group anyone who didn’t love The Last Jedi into a category that’s easy to dismiss as bigoted and conservative is patently inaccurate, arguably offensive, and unhelpful in terms of debate. I think it’s understandable from internet journalism but would be harder to excuse from academics.

However, I wouldn’t personally extend that to seeing male media fans as a victimised group. I don’t think it’s the case, in broader social terms, that male media fans are marginalised or lacking in privilege and power. There are some lazy and silly generalisations at work, as is often the case with social media and contemporary journalism, and there are shorthand, slang terms that I feel could be retired – I think the words ‘fanboy’ and ‘fangirl’ have unwelcome connotations of infantilization, and ‘butthurt’ does seem to have associations with rape. But mocking men who get upset online when a woman counters their arrogance is something that goes far beyond The Last Jedi fandom, and I think it’s an understandable response with a history of gender politics behind it and a context of contemporary misogyny surrounding it. I am against closing down all debate about this film to a binary opposition between ‘people who embrace diversity and loved the film’, against ‘people who didn’t love it and are therefore conservative bigots’. I am not personally in a position where I want to ask ‘what about the men’ and sympathise with male fans en masse, because I think they still have it pretty good.

WILLIAM PROCTOR

I agree for the most part Will, but not entirely so allow me to explain. I am not claiming that we should ask “what about the men” or sympathise with male fans. I don’t see how I inferred that and, if I may be frank, saying so actively works to shutdown discourse too (mine), and that is precisely what I am critiquing. Nor am I talking about men who patronise and abuse women online, nor fangirls that “push back” against narratives of hate and misogyny. So to be clear: I am not claiming, nor have I ever claimed, that men need defending from “toxic women,” or that fanboys are under attack by “mean girls.” I am referring to critics, commentators, bloggers, etc., that position fanboys as ideologically complicit with right-wing ideas when empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that the majority are nothing of the sort. I am referring to the way in which the discourse surrounding The Last Jedi seems to have bunched fanboys into one ideological container, which is then adopted as a method to generally scathe fanboys in hostile ways, thus, defending both film and fan-object from negative criticism. More specifically, I am talking about the way in which Henry Walsh was discursively attacked by news outlets and, especially, fan sites, for protesting what he saw as an offence to his fandom. It must have felt like “discursive bullying to him,” and I can see why. He has been fighting off accusations of being a neo-nazi; a sexist; and general ugly human being when it actual fact, he is a committed progressive, anti-Trump protester with feminist values.  And In order for the ‘bad’ fanboy narrative to function, female fan detractors of The Last Jedi have to be side-lined or ignored all together.

I am not saying, “men need to push back,” either, nor am I activating the “not all men” trope. In actual fact, those critics and commenters who work to demonise, infantilize and emasculate fanboys as monolithic hive-mind often evoke the “not all men” trope themselves, but with a qualitative distinction: “not all fanboys” are right-wing but…

As I said in my essay, the deck has been stacked in discursive terms and the more news articles and blog posts that join the indignant choir contributes to a “regime of truth,” as Foucault might put it, that makes it appear that way. I’m not saying this is orchestrated or a sustained campaign against fanboys-by-fangirls – if only things were so simple. But this is what I find most difficult of all when discussing fanboys, gender and masculinity: it is almost as if the topic is verboten unless one is joining in the fray. Although I fully accept that this is a provocation of sorts, my intent is to open up debate about how we, as researchers, address the return of “get a life” stereotyping associated with male Star Wars fans. For if fangirls have historically been mistreated and framed as infantile, sexually unruly and overly emotional, then how should scholars deal with discourses that frame fanboys in similar terms without being viewed as marshalling defences of men and masculinity? I strongly believe that this is a conversation that is urgently required in order to broaden the field of enquiry in fan studies and cogent disciplines, as Jenkins pointed towards in his “Fandom studies as I see it”:

“We need to develop a more complex picture of how gender operates within fandom, which will require us to be as reflective about masculinity as we are about femininity. Those identities being constructed for largely male fans through mainstream representations often rely on tropes of failed masculinity, depicting male fans as arrested adolescents who have not been able or willing to accept adult roles within society […] This approach would ultimately push us to deal with gender identities that do not fit simply in a ‘fan boy/fan girl’ dynamic.”

As for the Pirate Bay “de-feminized edit.” That is one of the issues that I touched upon in my essays: downloading a video from an illegal torrent site, then shining the media spotlight on it, actively legitimatizes it and, in turn, leads to a slew of news articles that ends up making spurious claims about the uploader being a “member” of the Men’s Right’s Activist “movement,” when the fact of the matter is that the person who created this edit remains anonymous (not to mention going against explicit instructions from journalist watchdogs). In so doing, news media and blogs have literally fallen into the trap of spreading noxious ideologies on behalf of the “manosphere,” despite a lack of evidence regarding the political constituency of the anonymous uploader or his intent. Indeed, this is how trolls operate: sowing discord for others to “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.”  So, scholars would need to attend to a broader portrait of the way in which fan cultures operate as a “many splintered thing,” and not work to reaffirm and reinscribe traditional gender binaries themselves. My intervention is more about methodological insights and a gauntlet to scholars to check the validity of press discourses before leaping in with both feet.  

The discursive shift around Disney’s Star Wars, especially since TFA, illustrates that fans are often demonised in some way or other regardless of gender, and that this represents the wholesale return of stereotypes that wouldn’t be out of place in Textual Poachers. Think about the way that Jonathan Gray et al claimed that the so-called mainstreaming of fandom has led to fans being “courted and woo’d”:

“None of the high-profile fan cultures in recent years – from X-Philes via Eminem fans to Sex and the City enthusiasts – had to endure the derogative treatment of Star Trek fans.”

Given that this was published a decade ago – and has since been superseded by a second edition – tells us that things have changed considerably, or, indeed, reverted back, at least in the case of Star Wars fandom.

MAR GUERREO-PICO

I wanted to add something else on Billy’s suggestion of Disney’s rushed symbolic attempts to bury Lucas’ legacy by hiding the prequels under tons of that Tatooinian sand we all know Anakin loves so much. Oddly enough, amidst the TLJ controversy, the prequels have been pulled out of the hall of (fan) shame and somehow revalued by anti-TLJ fans who years later are experiencing some sort of closure with the very same films they despised back then. It only takes a glean over some popular online Star Wars venues like TheForce.net to witness fans coming to terms with the saga most recent troubled past, and all because a new source of antagonism has risen in the fashion of the ultimate Big Bad that threats the world they love. Whether that foe comes in the shape of Leia Poppins, sulky Luke, shirtless Kylo, Force facetiming, or it just simply has the face of Rian Johnson or Kathleen Kennedy, I’m not going to discuss it as I think it has been extensively reviewed so far into this conversation. But I think it is worth noting such a shift in these fans’ train of thought over the years, although it is by no means a new phenomenon.

In his essay about factions, institutions and hegemonies of fandom in Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington’s Fandom (2007), Derek Johnson argues that "fan interpretation is constantly shifting, never unified or maintaining the same valences over time. Despised eras may later become beloved if they retrospectively satisfy the meta-textual desires of dominant fan interests". If we look at the how positively the prequels are being interpreted by some former detractors in light of the sequels, it can be suggested that formerly confronted factions of anti-sequel fans and pro-sequel fans have found a common ground to unite and negotiate “the consensus of interpretation” that the sequels will be held against. Perhaps sequel haters will never get over midichlorians, yet they eventually agreed to them (or accepted them) based on Lucas’ dethronement by Disney’s suits and currents developments in the canon. In a way, this can be seen as a poetic victory on Lucas’ side as his authority has been restored in part by the same people who mocked him for it. However, as I said, such time-evolving ‘swings in the fandom’s mood’ are not a novelty. The Empire Strikes Back, most rated episode of the saga, anyone? Media outlets and fans on Twitter mentioning  the fan backlash it provoked upon its theatrical release does raise some eyebrows because how would it be possible? There was no missa missa speaker to hate in Empire! Nonetheless, it would be sensible to extend the same rationale to the sequel trilogy in the future in spite of my own and others’ conflicted feelings as fans and, most importantly, because time is the best concealer. So new taste hierarchies will emerge and replace the old ones and so forth.

Right now, though, it seems that some fans form of resistance against Kennedy and co. is activated through reinvigorating the prequels as an argumentative weapon. Although the prequels are part of Disney’s new canon as they mark the current origin of the Star Wars universe (unmistakably, Anakin is wired as a Space Jesus), it’s rather apparent that they either have been put under Jabba the Hutt’s bottom or constructed as a staple of “what is bad in the Star Wars world” and symbolically used to delegitimise Lucas’ authorial figure and make him “The Other”. In turn, fans retaliate by shouting their very own version of the “The North remembers”, especially now that Game of Thrones’ showrunners Benioff and Weiss are being awarded with a galactic trilogy to develop.

Without leaving the fan-producer trench, I also wanted to address some of the comments made by Suzanne, Billy and Will regarding burgeoning debates over fan toxicity that speak of ugly places of fandom that need serious scholarly attention. Just because fandom has been normalised or incorporated into broader cultural conversations, it doesn’t mean that issues have gone away from both intra and extra fandom perspectives as our current topic of discussion illustrates. In this sense, and I do not mean it as a critique but rather as a suggestion, fan scholarship cannot rest on its laurels and forget about some of the structural tenets of the discipline which was born amid strong stereotyping and othering by cultural industries. In this sense, scholars cannot stop being aware. Nowadays, stereotyping is still kicking as seen in media outlets  (even in supposedly fan-friendly ones like io9 and The Mary Sue)  covering of the fan outcry about TLJ, but instead of presenting fans as a deranged cultural lumpens like in the 80’s, the focus in 2018 is presenting them still as deranged cultural lumpens but also homophobic, sexist and basically a proxy for Trump [insert your local right-winger here] . This is not to say that this type of fan identities don’t exist as if they were a taboo, or can’t be called out, in no way, but there have been too many broad brush strokes applied on fandom lately by mainstream media that have to be examined in detail in order to put order back into the galaxy help reorient such narratives circulating in the public sphere.

Having arrived at this point then I turn my attention to what happens intra fandom’s walls. While I do agree to an extent that fanboys can’t be seen as victims given their hegemonic position in the media landscape, putting a ‘white-male fanboy’ mask to toxicity, in other words, gendering toxic fan practices might be contributing to invisibilise toxic behavior by fangirls (which Zubernis & Larsen already highlighted in Fandom at the Crossroads) , even those parting from discriminated positions, be it because race or sexual orientation besides gender itself. For instance, you can take a look at the death threats targeted at Jason Rothenberg a couple of years ago after killing off a popular lesbian character in The 100. As myself, María-José Establés and Rafa Ventura show in a recent research on this case for Billy and Bridget Kies’ ‘Toxic Fan Practices” themed section of Participations, the Bury Your Gays trope is a plague that must be eradicated from queer media representation but this aim isn’t incompatible with abiding by the rules of respect to others’ physical and moral integrity (we also provide evidence of intra-fandom self-management against toxic fans which further demonstrate fandom’s heterogeneity). You can also encounter other examples of fan toxicity performed by fangirls in music fandom with Believers’ attacking Selena Gomez as shown by Jessica Austin in last year’s Fan Studies Network Conference where she argued for a reframing of fan studies to consider concepts of “toxic femininity,” or queer Swifties getting hate mail from straight Swifties on Tumblr because they dare to make  queer readings on Taylor Swift’s celebrity persona and songwriting and so those readings shake the ground of straight Swifties’ ontological security.

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Professor Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University, and author of Using the Force (20020 and the BFI volume on Star Wars (2009) among many other books.

Dr Mar Guerrero-Pico works as a research assistant at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). Her articles have been published in journals such as International Journal of Communication & Society, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, Signo y Pensamiento, Comunicación and Sociedad (Mexico), Palabra Clave and Cuadernos.info. Her research interests include transmedia storytelling, fan cultures, narratology, television shows and media education.

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). 

Dr Suzanne Scott is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current book project explores the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as a tastemaker demographic within convergence culture. In addition to co-editing The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, her work has been published in the journals Transformative Works and Cultures, New Media & Society, and Cinema Journal, as well as numerous anthologies including Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2nd Ed), How to Watch Television, and The Participatory Culture Handbook.

The Last Jedi: An Online Roundtable Part Two

WILLIAM PROCTOR

I agree that the Canto Bight sequence is the worst thread of the film; not only does the side-plot lead to nothing in narrative terms, the fact that Johnson chose to have Finn and Rose jolly off to ride sparkly space horses (which, as you rightly said, smacks of the prequel trilogy, despite Disney working hard to ignore or even disavow wholesale with their various promotional videos centred on ‘real effects' and paratextual connections with the Original Trilogy) is quite an ideologically problematic notion -- removing the characters from the film would not change an iota of story content and in ‘the diversity age’ that surely rankles. In Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest’s Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (2016), Megean De Bruin-Molé states: “Star Wars offers a strong example of why increased visibility and accessibility in film do not, by themselves, translate to political change.” I agree that it’s important to fully examine the way in which representation operates beyond inclusion and ‘box ticking.’

I have seen a few news features and fan-blogs waxing egalitarian about TLJ, usually couched in claims about the film being “the most triumphantly feminist Star Wars yet.” Firstly, I don’t believe that feminism is something that can be read off of the ‘text,’ and certainly not by box-checking whether a female character speaks to another woman about something other than a man -- Fifty Shades of Gray passes the ‘test,’ as does the 1970s porn classic, Debbie Does Dallas; whereas a film such as Gravity does not, for instance (Sandra Bullock spends the majority of the film alone in space). So, applying the blunt instrument of the Bechdel Test tells us nothing about the way in which diversity and gender are actually represented. It’s a great conversation starter, to be sure, especially when used in teaching, but shouldn’t be used so liberally -- and reductively – by scholars so as to ‘test’ if popular culture artefacts fulfil arbitrary criterion. Moreover, the racial politics of TLJ have almost gone unremarked upon, except one article on Hypable titled: “How The Last Jedi Failed its Characters of Colour.” Although Warner applies her concept of ‘plastic representation’ to The Force Awakens, I think the same could apply to TLJ (perhaps even more so):

“[a]fter the release and inevitable success of Disney and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015), viral Internet memes attributed a lion’s share of the film’s popularity to the fact that a black man and a white woman were cast as leads. While technically true, the claim obscures the larger fact that the actual star of this film—and a significant reason why the producers did not have to pay these largely “unknown” stars significant salaries—was Star Wars itself, and its status as Disney’s intellectual property. An expectation of massive return on investment, given the profitable track record of the Star Wars brand, is presumably the reason Disney bought it from George Lucas in the first place. Perhaps it is precisely because the risks were mitigated to such a manageable level that the producers could imagine diverse leads.”

Furthermore, I also think we need to keep in mind that equality and diversity in a representational sense has become an economic strategy, which Warner also points toward; that is, if diverse representation was not a commercially viable option, then we’d be right back in white-heterosexual-male waters. For example, when the Creative Artists Agency (CCA) conducted research into matters of representation and learned that “films with more diverse casts outperformed others at the box office,” then we certainly need to be vigilant and wary about broader claims regarding socio-cultural progress without addressing economic factors. In other words, if box-ticking race and gender equates to box-office receipts, then that is only the beginning of a more complicated and complex dialectic between commerce and consumption. On the other hand, if Disney continues releasing new Star Wars films on an annual basis, perhaps it would be best if the galaxy was not teeming with white men at the expense of diverse racial and gender representation. It’s a tricky balance to maintain and one that we shouldn’t embrace unquestionably.  As Warner says,

“Plastic representation operates as a system that reifies blackness into an empirical system of “box checking.” It is a mode of representation that offers the feel of progress but that actually cedes more ground than it gains for audiences of color.”

MAR GUERRERO-PICO

Shamelessly translating an old Spanish saying, it looks like Will didn’t leave any puppet with its head intact! That is, you touched upon all the problematic aspects of The Last Jedi.  I have to agree with the points aptly raised by both Suzanne, Billy and Will, especially on those dealing with representation and an overall sense of subversion interruptus, of yes but not really, that is plastered all over the film in spite of exaggerated claims by some media outlets of it being the ultimate post-modern tale for so-called millennials. The Last Jedi attempts to make the Star Wars universe turn on its head but things truly don’t pay off cinematically or they don’t reach the same level of the precedent they are trying to surpass. This particular past is 40-years old heavy so to candidly be making textual and paratextual claims that you are going to burn down the house seems odd. Amusingly, this reminds me of that time when you are in the early stages of your PhD and gloat about working on a new concept just to find out that there are already a gazillion works dealing with the same topic, and so you are forced to cool down your academic bravado and keep looking.  Unfortunately, it looks like media industries do not follow the same predicament, therefore audiences get all hyped up about newness and edginess when, in reality, it is the same ol’, good ol’ once you scratch the surface a little bit. Marketing logic applied to storytelling if you ask me, nothing that a nice algorithm can’t manage.

So, the first thing that came to my mind while reflecting on Warner’s concept of plastic representation is a similar idea of ‘revamped tokenism.’ In an era when discourses of representation are becoming part of the debate, and the entertainment media climate is increasingly supportive of inclusive narratives and characters, representation should go beyond exhibitions of tokenism such as the Canto Bight sequence. Regarding this one, I share Billy’s impression of cutting that part off and the film remaining just the same, which is precisely how tokenism work. And yet, the token is celebrated as something revolutionary when it isn’t really. Of course, having non-white characters like Finn and Rose playing a somewhat relevant part in a film franchise like Star Wars is a reason to celebrate but, at the same time, this is not an excuse for conformism as we are not living in the 1980 or 1990s when infamous ‘very special episodes’ used to be one of the very few windows to diversity. The representation of diversity has to be compelling in order to make a cultural impact in the targeted audience besides the mere fact that they are present in the media text. Perhaps, considering this astonishing celebration of tokenism, rather than the media, it would be interesting to ask the represented audience about their perceptions on how they are represented, how they envision those characters, or how aware they are about the issues surrounding the fictional treatment of their race, gender, sexual orientation and last but not least social class. Age demographics, I believe, might be determinant here as well as the specifics of the topic of discussion. Just throwing some thoughts out there.

MEGEN DE BRUIN-MOLÈ

So I'm a '90s kid: I only came across Star Wars the second time around, during the Special Edition re-releases in 1997. 

I’m going to dive right in and admit that I loved The Last Jedi. Don’t get me wrong, it had issues. But it spoke to me on many, many levels. It made me remember why I love Star Wars—a love the EU fostered, the prequels turned me off to, and TFA only tentatively rekindled my hope for (as Mar suggests, for me TFA felt like an update of the original trilogy, but one that was committed to some problematic, ‘familiar tropes and motives’ at its core).

I’ve really been struggling to verbalise what I liked so much about TLJ, despite my reservations, so I’m very grateful to (and a mite jealous of) the four of you for so succinctly describing your own disappointments. My experience of the acting, characterisation, and character agency was quite dramatically different, but instead of focusing on each of these individual points, which I don’t feel we need to agree on anyway, I wanted to touch on one key disagreement I had with your readings that might be useful in our discussion of the fan generational gap, the political potential of the franchise, and the inherent paradox in many of Star Wars’ central messages.

I agree wholeheartedly that gender and racial diversity are often still used superficially in the Star Wars franchise, as marketing tools or add-ons to a fundamentally white, Anglo-American narrative. I was not particularly impressed by TLJ’s display of on-screen diversity, though after TFW and Rogue One I didn’t have too many expectations to dash on that front (but damn did it make me happy to see Leia finally use the Force). It’s all a bit too little, too late for me—if any blockbuster could really shake the system, surely it’s Star Wars? The franchise has such a strong viewer base that they could basically have gotten away with anything, including (gasp) unreservedly progressive politics. Which I guess ironically proves the point Star Wars films are repeatedly trying to make: that power corrupts.

Here’s the bit where I get lost:

“The point of The Last Jedi is meant, if we read the defences for it, to be about throwing away our expectations and letting go of what we thought we knew.”

I’ve found it very puzzling that so many commentators (pro-TLJ and anti-TLJ) have taken the position, as Will describes, that The Last Jedi was meant to be about letting the past go (“kill it if you have to”), and throwing away our expectations. That’s not how I read it at all! After all, Luke and Kylo are clearly in the wrong here. Their rejection of the past is framed as selfish and destructive. Kylo wants to kill the past so that he can mould the future in his image. And Luke wants to let the past (and the Jedi) die so he doesn’t have to face up to the mistakes he made.

People who advocate forgetting the past are not generally the ones with a history of oppression. And TLJ seems to be resolutely against that message. If anything, we’re meant to side with Rose on this one: don’t kill what you hate, save what you love.

When Rey has her vision in the Force cave, she asks to see her parents, but the glass shows her own face instead. This could be a metaphor for how she’s on her own in all this, but from another perspective, it’s actually just giving her what she asked for. She is the product of her parents, and the actions of her forebears. Notably, every time Kylo or Luke suggests she forget the past, Rey (our protagonist and our emotional barometer through the film) chooses the other path. At the same time, the film doesn’t seem to advocate blind nostalgia. Rey’s past defines her, but does not immobilise her. Her unrealistic hope that her family will come back for her is ultimately the same hope that turns her into a hero of the Resistance, against all better judgement.

And despite throwing it away at the beginning of the film (cited by multiple critics as a sign of the film’s departure from tradition), Luke takes up Anakin’s lightsaber in TLJ’s epic showdown. This same lightsaber is broken when Rey and Kylo part ways, but Rey keeps the broken pieces, which become a symbol for the broken pieces of the Resistance that will rise again. I could give a hundred more examples of this message at work. This movie is ALL about the past: the value of its words, failures, symbols, and material traces in building something new.

I guess the real question is, is Star Wars even salvageable in the grand scheme of diverse and revolutionary storytelling, or are the things I love about the franchise—its global impact, its sense of “bold, maverick individualism against ridiculous odds”, and the way it inspires me to imagine other, better futures—the very things that are holding it back? I don’t really have an answer for this question, but TLJ actually renewed my interest in finding one.

I think Suzanne is absolutely right that TLJ essentially “zombifies” the Star Wars franchise. But I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. We can’t realistically destroy the past, whether that’s our own past or that of the Star Wars universe. We also can’t accept it without reservation. The zombie is a particularly effective metaphor in this kind of situation, which is perhaps why it’s evoked so often to talk about the global capitalism we can neither destroy nor escape (again, a topic very relevant to the Star Wars franchise). We have to live with the ruins of the past, and work through them, in order to build something new.

I don’t see the film as deconstructing Star Wars tropes at all: instead it builds on top of them, adding interpretive possibilities while also acknowledging (and adjusting) existing beliefs. For all the film could have done, I think this is a more subversive approach than we might give it credit for, especially if the Star Wars ‘canon’ is going to continue into another five (or ten or twenty…) films. It’s also a tactic I’m more commonly used to seeing in biblical commentary, historical fiction, or other genres (fan fiction?) that work with ‘sacred’ texts and devout audiences.

Rather than tearing Star Wars down, TLJ layers on new interpretive possibilities that compete with our previously certain readings. Is Luke a legend, or isn’t he? Can anyone access the Force, or does power belong to the elite? Is Star Wars an evil money-making empire, or does it have the power to change the world for the better? Yes and yes.

REBECCA HARRISON

Owing to enthusiasm, writing articles, and Star Wars cinema-going traditions, I saw the film three times in the first ten days of its release. I consistently enjoyed certain aesthetics and narratives, such as the Elite Praetorian Guard sequence and Rey’s story, which was far more engaging than in The Force Awakens, and yet found others dull and unsatisfying.

What struck me early on was how the film played to a particular kind of fandom. There were so many in-jokes and meta-commentaries that it felt like watching series three of the BBC show Sherlock, which explicitly referenced fan theories and online interactions with the texts. For example, in The Last Jedi, we first see Finn as he emerges from a bacta tank, dazed, half-asleep and half-naked, spurting liquid all over Poe. While the film shut down any suggestion of a relationship between the pair, this felt like a teasing, vaguely homoerotic wink to fans that ship the couple. And then, moments later, Finn interrupts Poe to ask the whereabouts of his friend: Where’s Rey? A millennial in our own galaxy might have hashtagged the phrase, which, as Suzanne has written about elsewhere (http://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1080/15295036.2017.1286023), was used as part of a Twitter campaign in 2015 to get Disney to produce Rey merchandise when the character was left out of toy sets and clothing lines.

Similarly, plots involving Luke and galactic arms dealers also felt like self-reflexive commentaries on the Star Wars franchise. Luke, for instance, insists that people invested too much hope in him and the Jedi to save and preserve the galaxy, and, in his speech, we can almost hear Rian Johnson reminding fans that leaders cannot please everyone all the time. More pointedly, the shadowy presence of arms dealers that fund both sides of the ongoing conflict seems to refer to the corporate entity that owns and monetises Star Wars… As a broader social commentary, and indeed within the film’s own narrative, having arms dealers supply both the First Order and Resistance doesn’t make much sense. Rose alludes to the First Order’s power when she reveals that the organisation has invaded her planet, enslaved its inhabitants, and extracted its raw materials. The Resistance, meanwhile, has only a handful of ships, no permanent base and little support. If we are to take the First Order seriously and recognise them as a real threat to the galaxy, are we really supposed to accept that it would allow arms manufacturers to sell to their enemies? I appreciate that Kylo and Hux are hardly the sharpest tools in the war room, but surely even they would realise they have the upper hand and use their vast armoury to enforce a monopoly over the production of weaponry. So, instead, I think we can read the arms dealers as analogous to Lucasfilm and Disney: organisations that fund both sides of the fight and rely on the perpetuation of the conflict for their own economic gain. Of course, Star Wars has always been self-aware, as evidenced through the callbacks and intertextual references that pervade the previous eight canon films. However, interestingly, The Last Jedi seems to pay more attention to the impact that the franchise has on us, its fans and viewers, in our own galaxy.

Picking up on debates about diversity and representation, I agree with everyone else here that film is not as progressive as many critics suggested. As Billy points out, it’s not feminist by any stretch of the imagination! I’d love for the film to foreground narratives about people of colour (particularly women) but the story arcs of Finn and Rose failed because they didn’t go far enough for me. I’d like to have seen them make a real difference to the plot, rather than embarking on a pointless quest that resulted in failure. I appreciate that failure was an underlying theme throughout the film, but having a black man and an Asian woman subvert that trend would have been refreshing. Instead, it’s Luke, the tried and tested white man, that saves the day by giving the Resistance time to escape. Even the white women are badly served. Leia is hospitalised throughout most of the film; Holdo gets limited screen time. And Rey, whose narrative is better served timewise, does not really develop as a character. She ostensibly finds Luke to have him train her as a Jedi. However, aside from a few cynical lines about his own failure to match her enthusiasm, he does very little to help her test her knowledge or skills. We see her training alone. She searches for answers to her questions alone. She finds that she already had everything she needed, alone. In fact, she must do all the work for both of them: while discovering her own strength, she also encourages him to reconnect with the Force and persuades him to fight for the Resistance. Without Rey, Luke would have remained a hermit on an isolated planet. No doubt this narrative will be familiar to many women. However, it hardly speaks of progression!

I also want to pick up on Will’s comment about the potential generational divide between fans. There are elements of The Last Jedi that appear to be aimed at a younger audience (including the use of Force projection, which makes scenes between Rey and Kylo analogous to Skyping or Snapchatting). However, youth has often been represented as detrimental to success throughout the Star Wars franchise. In the prequels, the elder Jedi warn against Anakin’s use of the Force, and his inexperience casts doubt on his suitability for joining the order. In the original trilogy, Luke undergoes training and takes advice from Yoda and Obi-Wan to guarantee his success. And in the sequels, Finn, Rey and Poe must learn from Leia, Holdo (‘I’ve dealt with plenty of trigger-happy fly-boys like you’), Luke and Han to ensure that they are equipped to continue the fight. As in the prequels and the original trilogy, the real menace that threatens the galaxy, more so than corruption or arms dealers, is untamed, youthful rage and a refusal to take advice from apparently wiser figures. Snoke tells Kylo: ‘You’re no Vader, you’re just a child in a mask.’ But thinking back to Anakin, that’s all Vader ever was, too; toxic masculinity wrapped in a cloak that barely contained the anger and entitlement of an adult who was always a teenage boy.

What’s fascinating about The Last Jedi, though, is that with the deaths of Snoke and Luke, the franchise has, I think for for the first time, pitted youth against youth in the fight to save the galaxy. It seems unlikely that Leia will appear in Episode IX. There will be no Chancellor, no Emperor, no Senator or General. So while Megen makes an excellent point about the film’s recognition of the past, I also think that Will is right, and I’d suggest the Disney-era films are on a trajectory that progressively centralises the younger generation. While Rogue One relied heavily on nostalgia for the original films, it featured a relatively young cast of inexperienced characters that defied their elders and successfully completed their self-appointed mission. The clunky, analogue tech and focus on a youthful Han in Solo looks set to do the same. And in The Last Jedi, Yoda tells Luke that the next generation will ‘grow beyond’ the previous one, acknowledging that perhaps it’s time to let go of the ‘sacred texts’ and step back because Rey has surpassed him. Thus, I think we can expect Episode IX—especially following the final cutaway in XIII to Broom Boy—to follow the same pattern. In terms of its characters and its audience, the franchise is ditching nostalgia and looking to the future.

The decreasing role of the droids in the film is also indicative of a generational shift. Typically, the droids are central to narrative development and feature as storytellers in all the canon films. Artoo mediates Leia’s message to Obi-Wan; Threepio recounts their adventures to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi; Kaytoo rescues Jyn and helps her find the Death Star plans in Rogue One; BB-8 stores and saves information about Luke’s whereabouts in The Force Awakens. However, while droids are still present in The Last Jedi, they are less significant to the narrative. Artoo is reduced to replaying Leia’s ‘You’re our only hope’ message for Luke, like an old VHS player kept for sentimental value to play home videos. Threepio merely panics in the background of the Resistance. And the much-hyped ‘evil’ droid BB-9E barely gets any screen time. BB-8, of course, does see more action. He helps steal a ship for Rose and Finn’s escape from Canto Bight, and later saves them again by commandeering a First Order walker. But he could have done so much more! In the prequels and original trilogy Artoo has competently hacked Imperial systems to aid the Rebellion, and BB-8 demonstrates the same ability with the ship and walker, so it’s a major oversight on the part of the Resistance to use a human, rather than a droid, when trying to access the hyperspace tracker. To those of us that know what Artoo is capable of, and recognise that BB-8 has the same ability, it’s yet another instance of failure in the film based on younger characters Poe, Rose and Finn (and the more peripheral Maz) not knowing how vital droids were to the Rebellion’s success. Again, returning to Megen’s argument, I feel that while the characters venerate the past and fetishize artefacts--Vader’s mask, Han’s dice, Leia’s message--they do not fully understand their own history.

Furthermore, the older droids are denied any emotional story arc. Similar to BB-8 being overjoyed at reuniting with Poe on Crait, in The Force Awakens Artoo emerged from a deep depression when he learned of Luke’s whereabouts. We got that sense that the droid processed feelings and underwent emotional transformation. Yet in The Last Jedi, he and Threepio are side-lined in the final moments of the film when Leia and Rey discuss Luke’s death (just like Chewie was in The Force Awakens following Han’s death – a decision that J J Abrams later claimed to regret https://io9.gizmodo.com/48-things-we-learned-from-j-j-abrams-director-commentar-1788597881). I couldn’t help but feel this was an oversight on Rian Johnson’s part. I’d suggest it demonstrates the increasingly liminal status of non-human characters from the original trilogy, and, in particular, the irrelevance of Artoo and Threepio to a generation that has newer tech and less of a connection to the past.

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Professor Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University, and author of Using the Force (20020 and the BFI volume on Star Wars (2009) among many other books.

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Teaching Fellow in Digital Media Practice with the University of Southampton. She holds a PhD in English Literature, and her research interests include popular culture, adaptation, and contemporary remix. Her article ‘Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses: Star Wars and Popular Feminism’, appeared in the 2017 collection Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling (eds. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest). You can follow her (and her research) on Twitter: @MegenJM.

Dr Mar Guerrero-Pico works as a research assistant at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). Her articles have been published in journals such as International Journal of Communication & Society, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, Signo y Pensamiento, Comunicación and Sociedad (Mexico), Palabra Clave and Cuadernos.info. Her research interests include transmedia storytelling, fan cultures, narratology, television shows and media education.

Dr Rebecca Harrison is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on media technologies and how gender, race and class affect people's experiences of visual culture. Her first book, From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity (I B Tauris, 2018) is forthcoming, and she is currently working on her second book, The Star Wars Code, which is due for publication in 2021. In the meantime, you can find information and links to her various Star Wars-related projects, including research, teaching materials, articles - and an accidental controversy about Dr Organa - on Twitter: @beccaeharrison. 

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). 

The Last Jedi: An Online Round Table — Part One

Over the weekend, Warwick Davis, noted for his performances in various Lucas-directed films, weighed in on current controversies around The Last Jedi: "It's a piece of entertainment, it's not about making political statements. It's just there for people to enjoy. You go in there and are supposed to lose yourself in the world the director has created. Star Wars has always been a great example of that - it's pure escapism and you can forget the 21st century for a couple of hours. That was George Lucas's philosophy with Star Wars - to make a fun adventure." This is characteristic of a Hollywood move which seeks to distance itself from politics and thus absolve itself from critical discussion: "Get a life! It's only a television series." The reality is that Star Wars has always been about politics — if nothing else, Lucas's choice to base the stormtroopers on, well, stormtroopers or to tap the aesthetics of Triumph of the Will for the final moments of A New Hope means that he was tapping certain political narratives to give the story much of its punch.

So, the question is not whether one group or another is "politicizing" Star Wars but whether what kind of politics seems "natural" within the context of a Hollywood blockbuster franchise and whose politics seems intrusive, whose politics gets read as, well, "political." The discussions around The Last Jedi allow us to take certain soundings about where our culture is at in terms of embracing an ethos of diversity and inclusion, in terms of rethinking old genre formulas to encompass people whose stories have not been told in that term before.

This is an important part of the story of The Last Jedi's reception, but it is ONLY one part of the story. There are also questions about how we define notions of quality in a transmedia era -- and what notions of quality are appropriate when factoring in somewhat different and still emerging narrative expectations, ie. what information needs to be contained in the film, what we may legitimately access from other sources, what expectations we have about closure or plot development as the unified Hero's Journey narrative which Star Wars helped to popularize in Hollywood gives way to what Jeff Gomez has called "the collective journey" structure.

And there are also issues around how fandom gets represented in the media, how we break through what is often a monolithic conception of Star Wars fans in the hand of journalists, and how we deal with a legacy of gender politics which still breaks fandom down into male and female binaries despite efforts towards greater fluidity.

William (Billy) Proctor's contributions last week raised many of these questions, including legitimate questions of "journalistic ethics" which seem important for us to address as the news media is still trying to figure out how to incorporate social media discourses into their expanded coverage of audience response to popular media. This week, he has organized a panel of aca-fan scholars to weigh in on these many issues and he has helped to prod the discussion along, constantly expanding its agenda. By the way, Proctor has nicely stepped up lately to help me with some of the behind the scenes work of proofing and uploading the blog installments. Thanks. This has been a solo job for more than a decade and it's great to have some extra hands here.

The resulting exchange is lively and thoughtful. I don't necessarily agree with every perspective represented -- I am personally pretty enthusiastic about The Last Jedi (not necessarily as the best of all possible Star War Movies but as a step forward for the franchise) -- but I have learned something from all of the participants here.

There are moments of tension in the discussion, but the participants are able to work through their disagreements with some degree of mutual respect and with some openness to each other's arguments. You will get four installments of this discussion. And the discussion will continue further as, coming soon, we launch a new podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?., which I am developing with Colin MacClay from the Annenberg Innovation Lab and which will take up The Last Jedi as our first extended case study. Watch for more soon.

MAR GUERRERO-PICO:

For me, the main problem of The Last Jedi (TLJ) is that The Force Awakens (TFA) came first. Abrams’ set up some of the overarching plotlines, conflicts and themes that would develop in the subsequent instalments of Disney’s Sequel Trilogy. In other words, TFA established the “reading contract,” as renowned Argentinian semiotician Eliseo Verón may have put it (Scolari’s 2009 paper in the International Journal of Communication is a deft introduction to both Verón applied to transmedia storytelling).Metaphorically, this contract contains clauses directed both at old and new generations of fans who are the "implicit readers" (Umberto Eco says hi) of the new movies. For a good bunch of 1970 and 1980s kids that grew up dreaming with a galaxy far, far away like myself, TFA felt pretty much like an undercover remake of A New Hope with fresh faces. However, I still could recognise some familiar tropes and motives in the narrative universe unfolding in front of me and the warm feeling of seeing Harrison and Carrie back into their characters’ skins. The canon was steadily being transformed despite the film’s shortcomings in the form of ridiculous villains and questionable plot decisions. Not to mention, as a female fan, I was elated to finally, finally, get to see a female Jedi wielding a lightsaber as one of the protagonists of a saga film (but clearly not the first female Jedi as some commenters have suggested —Aayla Secura? Asoka Tano?). It was my childhood dream come true because I never really identified with  Princess Leia, and even less with Padmé Amidala. Blame Lucas for his lack of attention to female characters and for making me like Luke and Darth Vader more instead. So, why so serious and angry about TLJ? Because TLJ simply breaches the reader contract that TFA put into official record, and it even tears into pieces the constitution of the Star Wars narrative universe as a whole. Nothing in that film seems to make sense narrative-wise when confronted with its predecessor and the other two trilogies. There is no continuity to the mysteries seeded in TFA — I still want some receipts on the Knights of Ren; Rey’s parentage reveal is anticlimactic to say the least after one entire movie revolving around that. There is no coherence­ — wasn’t Snoke supposed to be very powerful? Those are major mishaps when it comes to storytelling at a great scale and also worldbuilding, especially in a saga that has always been a staple of that.

The breach of the contract does not just occur at the deep level of the film as a text, though. It also takes place at the superficial level with Yoda abjuring from the old Jedi ways. That scene can be symbolically interpreted as showcasing the films’ clear intention to cut loose from the canon it belongs to. Is the old Jedi code a proxy for veteran fans, or Lucas, or the galaxy altogether? Why the sudden need to destroy what was working in the name of an urge to subvert and modernise a saga that could have achieve that in more organic ways with a better script and a director in-tune with the canon (no matter how much research he now claims to have done)? Furthermore, not only has Rian Johnson wiped out the foundations of the Sequel Trilogy in a barren attempt to mend whatever mistakes Abrams’ vision had, but he even managed to hinder the development of the film’s feminist hero by demoting her to being the helper to the male characters, to Luke and Kylo Ren’s subplots. Where’s her agency in TLJ? I’d take that over 100 scenes of Laura Dern kamikazing, to be honest.

WILLIAM PROCTOR:

Why don’t you say what you really think, Mar?

In all seriousness, I had a similar reaction so, in the spirit of Mar, I won’t mince words: I hated The Last Jedi. But more than that, I was taken aback by how vehemently betrayed I felt as a first-generation fan. Being reflexive, my reaction certainly bowled me over — my academic identity was chucked aside, and my fan identity moved to the forefront, crying foul-play to anyone who would listen ("that's not how the force works!"). Obviously, I’ve had strong reactions to fan-objects in the past — during the screening of Star Trek Into Darkness, I actually shouted at the screen in the local cinema — but I wasn’t prepared for the affective tempest that brewed within after viewing The Last Jedi. I berated myself frequently (“it’s only a film”) and internalised fan stereotypes (“get a life,” “grow up”). I ended up embroiled in minor internet infractions, so I forced myself to withdraw from social media because I was so hopping mad!

Personally, I don’t mind shifts in canon and mythos as long as they’re deserved, foreshadowed, explained etc. It does show that Johnson listens to complaints closely as he has mounted a number of defences on social media and in press, as Mar points out — perhaps as damage control or at least to potentially resolve fan disputes. The last such defence, I believe, was centred on Luke’s fate and, more pointedly, his 'new' Force power (i.e, projecting a form across the galaxy). What happened to Kylo’s “raw, untamed power” there, then? How come he could deceive Snoke and slice him in two, but didn’t know that Luke was, for all intents and purposes, a hologram (albeit one which could be both corporeal and/ or “astral”)? Johnson’s cheeky tweet showing him reaching for The Jedi Path book to ‘prove’ that the power has precedent seemed destined to irritate detractors. First of all, the book only states that a Jedi has the power to construct a doppelganger to fool enemies, not that one could project across time-and-space. Second, for EU fans, that must have felt like a slap in the face: erasing hundreds of novels and comics from canonical status, and then marshalling evidence from an excommunicated text? Whether or not the novels and comics, etc., were ever really canon anyway is another thing entirely, but I certainly understand fan readers who have purchased EU materials in the past feeling wounded by Disney’s genocidal mandate. Incidentally, I learned from interviewing EU fans that it’s not about the canonical status at all — rather, it’s about the discontinuation of the ‘Legends’ timeline altogether. Many readers would be overjoyed if the series continued despite being non-canonical. Moreover, if a director has to defend a creative choice by showing 'evidence' from an external text, and one not connected to Disney’s now-canonical EU means, I would argue, that the film failed to provide a coherent narrative on its own terms. I’m all for 'subversion,' but I don’t quite see what’s subversive about The Last Jedi. The film seemingly deconstructs the binary between light and dark, only to reify the distinctions by the end; the whole 'burn it all down' sequence is rendered null and void when we see that Rey managed to save the Jedi texts from incineration. I also find it quite absurd that there were more Jedi left alive after Emperor Palpatine’s purge in Revenge of the Sith than at the end of The Last Jedi! In fact, in Disney’s version of Star Wars, there are no Jedi left at all, or as far as we know. Obviously, Rey will be the last Jedi in future, as signposted by Luke (“I won’t be the last Jedi”), so I don't expect that she’ll register as a PhD candidate to study the Jedi texts because, as Yoda explained to Luke, “she already knows everything in there.” What changed Luke’s mind so quickly after decades in hermit hibernation?  I could go on (and on and on).    

SUZANNE SCOTT:

At the risk of porg-piling on to what has already been said, I had many of the same gut fannish responses and narrative issues that Mar and Billy have detailed above. I loved TFA, not for its nostalgic interplay with the original trilogy (which, admittedly, I quite enjoyed), but rather because of its deft approach to characterization. Potentially controversial fan statement time: To my mind, Rey and Finn and Kylo are far more complex and compelling characters than any of their analogue A New Hope protagonists.  Diversity is certainly a part of this for me, but it is not the entire picture.  

Which brings me to this...In processing my own disappointment with The Last Jedi, I keep coming back to the interplay of two concepts: Jonathan Gray’s work on how promotional paratexts function as a form of “speculative consumption,” and Kristen Warner’s excellent recent piece on plastic representation. I was thrilled when I heard Rian Johnson would be taking over the helm, precisely because we were promised something different. The teaser trailer reiterated this, culminating in Luke Skywalker’s promise (or threat, depending on your perspective): “It’s time for the Jedi to end.” I was excited at the prospect of Johnson blowing up canonical conventions, which based on speculative consumption of the trailer might have ranged from Rey going dark to Luke nihilistically refusing to train her.  “Let the past die…kill it if you have to” thus became the lens through which the film was inevitably read.

My own speculative consumption of the various promotional paratexts leading up to the film built excitement around the introduction of Rose and Holdo, and the potential of them finally doing something vaguely interesting with Phasma.  After watching the film, I couldn’t help but share Warner’s complaint that in the “diversity matters” era, “the degree of diversity became synonymous with the quantity of difference rather than with the dimensionality of those performances.” To my extreme disappointment, characters like Rose and Holdo felt decidedly like an exercise in “plastic representation,” which Warner defines as “a combination of synthetic elements put together and shaped to look like meaningful imagery, but which can only approximate depth and substance because ultimately it is hollow and cannot survive close scrutiny.”

Sure, I have some general old/cranky fan gripes, particularly around the entire Canto Bight sequence, which visually and narratively took a particularly dumb page out of prequels playbook and utterly wasted an opportunity to develop the dynamic between Finn/Rose in any meaningful way, perfectly encapsulates the film’s facile attempts at political commentary. That said, my primary complaint is that the film so consistently pulls its punches both representationally and mythologically. It’s not trying to kill the past so much as zombify it...and on close scrutiny, it can’t “pass” as either a nostalgic throwback OR as something progressive.  In the process, it reveals its conservatism even as it is credited for its deconstruction, or even destruction, of the ultimate “sacred Jedi texts,” the original trilogy. Perhaps the best example is Kylo’s speech to Rey, which begins with an admittedly awesome and unprecedented pitch to abandon all of the institutions and binary logics that are central to the Star Wars universe (Sith/Jedi, Rebellion/Empire)…and ends with that age-old dark-to-light force wielder pick-up line: “we can rule the galaxy together.”

Rogue One suffers from the same set of issues, to my mind, and has similarly been given far too much credit for “radically reimagining” what a generic Star Wars franchise text might look like.  While it checks boxes for diverse representation, perhaps more so than any other film in the history of the franchise, it fails miserably in terms of fleshing out those characters with a sense of history and motivation (Chirrut Imwe being the exception).  The raw materials are there, but the execution is lacking. It speaks volumes that the film doesn’t end on the inevitable, poignant death of the film’s protagonists, but rather routes the viewer directly back to A New Hope’s uncanny valley holodeck.

To be crystal clear: I am thrilled that people love The Last Jedi, particularly if they genuinely feel as though the franchise is finally acknowledging them as a demographic.  I haven’t gotten into debates on Twitter, or even publically shared my own deep dissatisfaction with the film, for precisely these reasons. But I do think we need to take a step back and move beyond the #representationmatters positive gut response to the new film offerings and consider if the execution is effective, or even sufficient.  

WILL BROOKER   

I fell asleep during my second viewing of The Last Jedi. I have never fallen asleep during a Star Wars film before, and I think that’s an unfortunate reflection on this one – especially as I’ve seen people claim that the second viewing is where the film comes into its own, on its own terms. So on one level, I simply feel this movie is too long, and that its Canto Bight sequence in particular is desperately unengaging.

I enjoyed The Last Jedi more on my first viewing – parts of it, at least. I felt that the opening scene, with Poe’s X-Wing facing up against the dreadnought, captured brilliantly what Star Wars is classically about – bold, maverick individualism against ridiculous odds, the tiny rebel squaring up to the massive organisation – and that this was a neat way of giving us that visual dynamic at the very start of the film, rather than building up to another run against a super-sized big bad at the climax. I thought Poe was clearly an analogue of the Original Trilogy Han Solo, and that it was equally neat to have his flyboy cockiness quashed by Holdo – again, a classic routine with the new twist that he’s being put in his place by an older woman, rather than the younger Princess Leia of A New Hope. Equally, the combat in Snoke’s chamber was a visually-stunning revisiting and revisioning of the climactic duel at Return of the Jedi¸ signalled by a near-echo of the earlier film’s two-shot where Luke and Vader share a few brief words on their way to meet Palpatine. All of these sequences really hit the mark for me: not nostalgic replays of earlier scenes, but moments which nodded back to dynamics we’d seen before, while giving them a different context, situation, direction and outcome. ‘Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it's all totally different,’ as Alan Moore said of Frank Miller’s revisionist Batman.

As mentioned above, the whole Canto Bight section lost me. I felt it was ultimately pointless, a subplot or fetch quest with no real result, though I’ve read the arguments that claim its purpose is about failure and the fact that plans don’t work out. Aside from the fact that I found its characters and dialogue bland – with the exception of D.J. – its worldbuilding shallow, its CGI unconvincing, its child performances cheesy and its political aspect simplistic,  I think this excuse for the Canto Bight storyline gestures towards one of the fundamental issues I had with The Last Jedi. While there were many enjoyable, memorable moments, like the scenes I’ve mentioned above, and other spectacular visuals like the hyperspace kamikaze and the ships digging scarlet trails into Crait’s surface – it seemed to me as though The Last Jedi was keen to sabotage our expectations from earlier Star Wars, without leaving anything rewarding in their place. I watched A New Hope this week and I think it’s very hard to understand how Luke Skywalker could go from that character, or from his more serious and mature incarnations in Empire and Return of the Jedi, to the character we encounter in The Last Jedi. I find it almost impossible to reconcile this Luke Skywalker with the one we’ve seen before, in any of those three earlier films. On my first viewing, that dissonance was made up for by the fact that his cranky old man routine was surprising and funny. On the second viewing, I didn’t laugh at the jokes at all: they only seemed to work once, and of course the surprise was gone. We are left with long, tedious, visually-dull scenes of him and Rey on an island of over-exposed skies. The enthusiasm and energy of young Luke, and his controlled, balanced confidence in Return of the Jedi, are gone, and we have instead the kind of character Alec Guinness was afraid Obi-Wan would be – not a Gandalf figure, but a grumpy hermit, more Ben Gunn than Ben Kenobi.

The point of The Last Jedi is meant, if we read the defences for it, to be about throwing away our expectations and letting go of what we thought we knew. But as Suzanne suggests, any more radical possibilities are glimpsed, then withdrawn and replaced by half-hearted returns to the old system. Kylo seems to be suggesting a complete change to the Jedi/Sith binary, but then invites Rey to rule the galaxy with him: he’s smashed his Vader mask, but still uses his grandfather’s old lines. Luke argues that the Jedi must end, but by the end of the movie, Rey seems to be confirmed as a Jedi, much like he was. The old books should be burned, but then we see them kept safely in a drawer. Hotshot pilots are put in their place by older women, but those older women are then retired or killed, and the hotshot pilot gets his reward of becoming a ranking rebel leader – just as Han and Luke did, back in the early 80s. We’re introduced to Rose Tico, a plucky woman engineer played by an Asian-American actress, but she seemed more to embody a meta representation of Star Wars fandom, rather than a fully-fledged character in her own right – her short-lived sister Paige, it seemed to me, had more potential. Representation is, of course, incredibly important, but it should surely feel integral to the story and its world, rather than self-consciously inserted.  That said, I’m aware that some viewers genuinely embraced these new characters, which is why, like Suzanne, I’m cautious about criticising them even if they didn’t work for me.

There’s an intriguing hint that these Star Wars we’ve been watching for decades may be funded by wealthy arms dealers, who bid equally on either side when it suits them. This suggestion of a deep-seated deconstructive dynamic – of two seemingly-opposed sides caught in a process of mutual dependency and exchange – seemed to tap into exactly what I’ve theorised underpins the previous six films, where the Republic leads to the Empire, which leads to Leia’s Alliance to Restore the Republic, which has apparently forgotten that the Republic enabled the Empire in the first place. An open acknowledgement of that endless cycle would have been truly subversive, exposing the pointless nature of these wars as a process of interchange, a series of symbolic reversals. D.J’s dismissive assessment, ‘good guys, bad guys — made up words’ is the most interesting line in the film, and if developed, could have broken open the whole galactic conflict that’s been going on for generations. Luke’s observation that the Jedi allowed the rise of Darth Sidious is another welcome acknowledgement of this destructive, deconstructive, circular and cyclical process.

But this fascinating idea is abandoned almost as soon as it’s mentioned, in favour of a black-and-white fairy-tale binary about evil rich gamblers being mean to downtrodden kids and animals. The spiritual end of the redundant Jedi order is also quickly forgotten, in favour of Rey in the hero role, levitating rocks, and D.J.’s political assertion about cynical, independent dealers doesn’t seem so plausible when mapped out into the broader fictional universe: would a colonialist military power really work with suppliers who also arm their enemy? At the finale, we seem to be left exactly where we were in the original trilogy, with an overwhelmingly powerful galactic empire, a scrappy team of rebels, and a lone, last Jedi. The names may have changed, but the situation seems barely different, for all the claims of subversion. And in the name of that superficial, short-term subversion, I think important things have been sacrificed: narrative satisfaction, character consistency, the coherence of this universe and its internal rules.

And what have we gained? Cutely scruffy children – a Broom Boy and his Dickensian friends – who give worse performances in their brief moments on-screen than Jake Lloyd in 1999. The supposedly ground-breaking, democratic notion that anyone can be a Jedi, not just the Skywalkers? Surely we saw that plainly in the Prequel Trilogy, with its diverse, interspecies legions of Jedi warriors; surely this was implied way back in A New Hope, where Vader – with no knowledge that he even has children – comments mildly that ‘the Force is strong with this one’, sensing ability in the anonymous X-Wing pilot he’s about to blow out of the sky.

As noted, I know many millions of people thoroughly and sincerely enjoyed The Last Jedi, and while I also enjoyed several isolated scenes from the movie, I sometimes feel that like Han, Luke and Leia, in their own ways, it may be time for me to let a younger generation gain the joy from these new movies that I got from the old ones. But I believe it would have been possible to entrance that younger audience while still fully engaging older fans like me. I think that would have been preferable to this showy pretence of throwing out the old stuff, switching things up a little superficially, and claiming that a few crowd-pleasing additions count as radical change.

There seems a prominent discourse in journalism and social media that takes pleasure, even pride, in the fact that many viewers who grew up on the saga were dissatisfied with this most recent film. This discourse seems to assume that their objections are based in conservative attitudes --  even outright misogyny and racism -- and to dismiss them as (at worst) bigots, or at best, reactionaries who can’t let go of the past and accept new possibilities. As I’ve suggested, I don’t believe The Last Jedi is as radical as it pretends, and to assume that everyone who criticises it must fit a caricature of basement-dwelling, ‘butt-hurt’ fanboy is extremely lazy and misguided. It’s no doubt reassuring to feel that you are on the right side of history, embracing the future of the saga in all its democracy and diversity -- but to shut down discourse by stereotyping those who raise problems with the film is not an attitude I can admire.

...................................................................................

Professor Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University, and author of Using the Force (20020 and the BFI volume on Star Wars (2009) among many other books.

Dr Mar Guerrero-Pico works as a research assistant at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). Her articles have been published in journals such as International Journal of Communication & Society, International Journal of TV Serial Narratives, Signo y Pensamiento, Comunicación and Sociedad (Mexico), Palabra Clave and Cuadernos.info. Her research interests include transmedia storytelling, fan cultures, narratology, television shows and media education.

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). 

Dr Suzanne Scott is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current book project explores the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as a tastemaker demographic within convergence culture. In addition to co-editing The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, her work has been published in the journals Transformative Works and Cultures, New Media & Society, and Cinema Journal, as well as numerous anthologies including Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2nd Ed), How to Watch Television, and The Participatory Culture Handbook.

Disney's Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Crit

By William Proctor

At this point in time, it certainly seems as if the release of a new Disney Star Wars film — from here to eternity, if Kathleen Kennedy has any say — comes with a tsunami of news reports, blog posts and fan articles criticising fanboys for behaving badly. I’m not talking about reactionary chatter either, but disappointment, disagreement, and discord. Most often, entertainment commentators view fandom as a homogenous, harmonious community that is periodically assaulted by the fan-boy contingent, who really should shut up, grow up and “get a life”:

“Older fans should stop whining about it on the Internet and let Lucas do his thing […] Hollywood is the opium of the internet masses and adults are supposed to have more grown-up things to be concerned about: mortgage payments, school fees, etc. etc. Read a book instead. Take the dog for a walk. Listen to some music. Remind yourself that this is after all just movies for kids.”

Fans gush over The Force Awakens trailer on social media? “Get a grip,” instructs Martin Daubney for The Telegraph.

“Like Beliebers [Justin Bieber fans], Star Wars fans…took leave of their senses, gushed adoringly in quasi-orgasmic tones and posted wildly inappropriate tweets […] Am I the only man who finds this behavior all a bit odd? Shouldn’t grown men get over Star Wars already? […] You can forgive a small child getting overexcited about what is essentially a kids' movie franchise, but not adults. Of course, it’s a free world, I suppose, and Star Wars fans do not inflict any harm, especially if wielding a wobbly, defective light sabre. But like collecting action figures or skateboarding, shouldn't we leave Star Wars at puberty’s door?”

 In Daubney’s account, the “wildly inappropriate tweets” consisted not of animus and hostility, but, instead, heady displays of affect and emotion. What really grinds his gears is not the outpouring of feelings per se, but that such displays of emotion were emanating from men – and “grown men,” at that (the horror!). Constructing an equivalency between Justin Bieber fangirls and Star Wars fanboys as 'abnormally emotional' operates to gender the affective bandwidth as “too girly,” as Kristin Busse might put it.

On the other hand, grown men ought to know better because (let’s call a Wookie a Wookie) #masculinity. We can “forgive a small child getting overexcited,” but once puberty is in the rearview mirror, fanboys – or, rather, fan-men – should put away childish things forevermore and focus on more important issues, such as raising a family and paying the mortgage (you know, like real men are supposed to do). Pulling comments from Twitter in order to satirize and deride male fans visibly demonstrates a deficit of understanding about the fannish experience while simultaneously constructing a stereotypical vision of men and masculinity. “I don’t think I’ve seen my wife this happy since our wedding day,” writes one fan, which Daubney knocks down unambiguously: “Seriously? Perhaps he needs to up his game between the sheets.”

Men that are caught red-handed showing feelings of an almost human nature, clearly will not do at all.   

Over at pop culture website, Acculturated, R.J Moeller is “disturbed” by

“the infantilizing effect that even the mention of Star Wars still has on millions of American adult males. Clearly not all of us grew out of our youthful obsession with The Force. [Star Wars] continues to dominate—sometimes to an unhealthy degree—the imaginations of a generation of men […] there are an embarrassing number of men over the age of 30—and even 40—who treat Star Wars like a religion for which they are the ordained clergy. It’s one thing to nurture a fanatical devotion to a series when you are in grade school or junior high, but there comes a point in life when the Chewbacca T-shirt and metaphysical monologues about Midi-Chlorian levels goes from being slightly annoying to disconcerting. Star Wars won’t love you back. It won’t provide you with meaningful companionship or challenge you to better yourself. As a hobby, it’s not even the most rewarding way to spend your free time (or your money). It is a temporary escape, not a final destination. So to the aging male fanboys of the Star Wars franchise, I offer this advice for the New Year: Enjoy The Force Awakens, but when you’re done, go do some pushups, volunteer at a local charity, and call a girl.”

In academic studies, the tendency to view the so-called ‘mainstreaming’ of fandom as a largely positive shift for the male population, while remaining overly negative for female fans, clearly needs redressing, as Mel Standfill has argued. Historically, fangirls have certainly been constructed as unruly harlots overtaken by the fan-object, swamped by an “excess of teenage hormones and the corruption of young girl’s sexuality,” as Bethan Jones writes. Fan-men may be seen as “embarrassing,” “unhealthy,” “annoying,” “childish,” “infantilized,” “fanatical,” “aging,” “wildly inappropriate,” “disconcerting,” and behaviorally “odd” – but the distinction set up here is not that fan-men are excessively hormonal or sexually corrupted, but, rather, that they’re emphatically asexual and ‘unmanly’: “go do some pushups,” “call a girl,” “up your game between the sheets,” or focus on family, “mortgage payments and school fees.” These “narratives of enfreakment” are also narratives of emasculation. The overriding message is that male fans of a certain age need to stop “whining” about childish things, grow up, and go do “manly things,” like raise a family, walk the dog, have sexual intercourse – or at least get better at it – and head to the gym, perhaps to sweat out the nuisance child lurking within (“let the past die; kill it if you have to”).

By slaughtering history, then, a new man will hopefully emerge from the chrysalis: red-blooded, horny, mature, and resolutely heterosexual (“call a girl”). Busse’s argument about “geek hierarchies” and the way in which fangirls and fan-objects are “negatively feminized,” seems to have shifted recently (or shifted back) as male fans are often ridiculed based on similar reasoning (heightened emotion, unruly behavior, infantilized), but with an ideological distinction: they are negatively emasculated through framing concepts of infantilization and feminisation.  I would argue that such geek hierarchies between the ‘good’ fanboy and the ‘bad’ fangirl are not locked in place, but are constantly ‘on the move,’ re-arranged and re-organized at different moments for different purposes: “the media representation of fans and its slow redemption tends to be focused on fanboys rather than fangirls” might remain true, at least to some extent, but there’s been quite the shift towards the demonization of the former (as well as the latter, naturally). I am not suggesting that women and men are now ideological equals – far from it. Instead, I would argue that the cultural work of re-ascribing and re-affirming traditional gender binaries between fangirls and fanboys (and thus between men and women), is a much more complex situation than critics and fans currently recognize. 

Flashback to Jenkins’ seminal Textual Poachers, which begins with a critique of William Shatner’s famous (and infamous) Saturday Night Live ‘Get a Life’ sketch, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about (if you don’t already): stereotypes of the overly, unruly obsessive fan, either sunk in mother’s basement or daring to venture into public spaces dressed in replica Starfleet uniform, complete with accessories (phaser, communicator, Vulcan ears). For Standfill, these stereotypes are so widely known that they permeate the cultural matrix and fans themselves internalize such behaviors as evidence of ‘bad’ fan practices. In so doing, some fans diligently police the “fan world,” setting up border patrols and checkpoints in order to protect “one’s own sense of fan community and ascribing positive values to it.” Fandom has quite simply “gone wrong.”

As discussed on my last essay, the ‘regime of truth’ built up around The Last Jedi is made possible by a morass of certain kinds of discourse, whereby counter-narratives are either missing or swallowed by the deluge of articles focused on, as The Mary Sue put it, “the sexist, whiny fanboy contingent of Star Wars fandom.” Fanboys are

“so sexist and whiny that they went to all the trouble of getting bots together to tank The Last Jedi’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score. (Yes, there are people who don’t like the movie, and that’s fine, but that’s not what we’re really seeing here.)”

As discussed in my last essay, the so-called 'alt-right' news story is most often given weight and brought into the limelight without any attempt to probe further, dig down and test such claims. “That’s not what we’re really seeing here” is largely speculative, and works to confirm the writer’s world-view, I would argue, as well as working positively as promotion for The Last Jedi. Fans that praise The Last Jedi from online platforms are “engaging fannishly in ways preferred and controlled by the studios,” whereas detractors, or anti-fans, need to be silenced so as not to negatively affect the public persona of the film, of fan cultures, and the box office performance. Both the pro- and anti-contingent are working to fiercely protect the fan-object (and, again, these binaries are largely unhelpful or, at least, myopic); but they’re not the same object. For the former, The Last Jedi is a 'good' object, and any perceived attack, either from within or outside the fan world, is cause for confrontation and combat. For the latter, however, much of the discourse stems from the belief that a pejorative ‘Disneyfication’ has colonized and contaminated George Lucas’ authorial vision; whereby the ‘good’ object of the original trilogy is the yardstick with which to measure and construct The Last Jedi as ‘bad.’ Here, what is remarkable is that many commenters use concepts of nostalgia, canon, and mythos as ‘bad’ ways of doing fandom, items that arguably have been a major part of geek fan cultures for decades at this point. Added to this is the notion that fans do not ‘own’ Star Wars, not even as custodians and active participants:

“he’s not YOUR Luke. He’s Star Wars‘ Luke”

 “until you write a Star Wars movie or write one of the canon stories, none of it is yours”.

“in the case of The Last Jedi, it comes down to fans feeling ownership of a franchise — ownership that they don’t have.

I am sure that readers don’t think for a second that racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other reactionary currents, are a major characteristic of the Star Wars fan world. But I would argue that the deck is inadvertently stacked to appear that way. Star Wars fanboys who dislike The Last Jedi are  “hilariously dumb,” “whiny entitled fanboys,” “cry-babies,” who “ought to get over themselves. It’s just a movie, after all.”

Granted, some articles include explanations about the way in which angry fanboys are but a vocal minority, yet by largely centering attention on the more controversial aspects -- of fanboy rage, of racism and misogyny, of fan entitlement -- the overarching meta-narrative becomes less complex and less heterogeneous. There certainly seems to be a requirement to demonstrate that the Star Wars fan world is a utopian continent, except for a few rebels engaged in a coup d’état.

“Thankfully, this is not most of Star Wars fandom. Whatever fans think of The Last Jedi, most fans don’t think of Rey as inherently awful because she’s a girl with girl-cooties, and don’t see the addition of nuanced men of color or an evolved legacy character as inherently bad things.”

Indeed. But one would be forgiven for thinking differently, I would say, given the discursive decibels ratcheted up to a Spinal-Tap-eleven on the amplifier dial.  

I want to finish this series of provocations by briefly exploring the ‘fan-bashing’ that occurred around the launch of a fan petition to strike The Last Jedi from official canon. As I have written elsewhere in relation to the Ghostbusters reboot, fans that complain about the ruination of an idealized childhood often marshal their dissatisfaction through metaphor, usually attached to self-narratives of nostalgia connected to a treasured fan-object. As a scholar, I think it’s more valuable to analyze what is being said and what this means to whomever is speaking, rather than summon moral judgments about fan behavior and practices.

Shortly after the release of The Last Jedi, Star Wars fan Henry Walsh turned to the affordances of change.org to express his chagrin. Now, Walsh clearly understood that a massive media conglomerate like Disney would not actually consider removing the largest box office hit of 2017 from Star Wars canon and he said as much from the off: “now, I know Disney won't care, and this won't do much, but let’s show them our annoyance.” As with protestations about one’s childhood being ruined, such a petition operates as a symbolic act of resistance, and one of the ways that Walsh (and the 90,000-plus fans who signed the document in solidarity) aimed to address disappointment and dismay. Naturally, news media outlets and fan-blogs turned on Walsh for being “a hater,” and his petitioners are “butthurt,”  “irate and ludicrous,” “ignorant man-babies,” “asshole, idiot cry-babies,” “a few nit-picking babies” and so on and so forth. “One thing that needs to stop,” writes Marykate Jasper for The Mary Sue: “fanboy rage” ('fangirl rage' about Game of Thrones is 'good' fan performance though).

For the petition to be a noxious act of toxic fan practice, any utterances from female fans need to be silenced or ignored altogether. Here are a few select comments from women who signed the petition — or, more accurately, digital avatars and user-names that appear female – which I include here to show that the inclusion of even a few female voices would significantly spoil the “fanboy rage” arc, which obviously doesn’t fit the popular narrative:

At the time of writing (January 25th, 2017), people are still signing the petition. Many commenters mocked Walsh and his petitioners when it has between 2,000 and 7,000 signatures — figures that were viewed as negligible — but no one covered the story as it approached 100,000. That may be a minority of the audience, perhaps even the fan-base, but it’s an incredible figure, nonetheless.

As the discourse surrounding the petition gathered apace and grew legs, galloping around news outlets and websites en masse, Walsh reportedly started receiving death threats on social media and, as a consequence, responded by asking participants to tap into their energetic abundance to donate funds to Force for Change instead. He explained his reasoning in detail, although never backing down on the reasons why he hates The Last Jedi, and this was taken as a positive step towards healing the public perception of fandom by fan-critics: “it's refreshing to see him turn something negative into something positive.”

One thing is abundantly clear: protesting Disney is 'bad,' and doing so makes one a 'bad' fan. Corporate resistance is “hilariously dumb,” whereas cheerleading is what 'good' fans do, unintentionally and inadvertently employed as (free) labourers on Disney behalf (or perhaps on Star Wars' behalf). I had to gawp at one article that slammed Walsh in one paragraph, and then provided a hyperlink below to 'Star Wars Merch.'  Of course, we are all aware that fans are, in many ways, “ideal consumers,” as Matt Hills put it in Fan Cultures. But it is interesting that consumption and celebration is accepted so unequivocally as 'good' behavior while symbolically protesting a corporate leviathan like Disney is 'bad.' The situation becomes even more complicated should one consider what is thought to be ‘healthy’ protest, such as kicking up a stink about the lack of Rey or Black Widow merchandise as evidence of institutional sexism (which it is, of course). But that’s only the beginning of a more complex situation; asking for merchandise is also asking to purchase such merchandise, so there’s a kind of tug-of-war between “exchange-value” (economic/ profit) and “use-value” (pleasure/ affect). The notion that fandom being 'mainstreamed,' thus leading to a more democratic dialogue between audiences and producers, is only partially true. These days, fans may indeed be courted by producers, but only if certain criteria are met; that is, fans-as-champions-and-advocates. Kristina Busse argues that media professionals seek only certain kinds of ('good') fan practices and behaviors, usually “because of viewer loyalty, free advertisement, and increased purchase of connected products.” Hence, “affirmational fans” are what a 'good' fan looks like to industry and, more interestingly, to a lot of fans as well. I agree wholeheartedly with Mark Duffett who, in an interview conducted by our learned host on this very blog, explained it thus:

“because our academic traditions work to ignore or reject a focus on the enjoyment of commercial culture, we are in danger of forgetting that win-win situations are part of this spectrum of relationships. Rather than searching for the dramatic moments where fans contest media producers, to understand fandom it seemed a greater challenge to me to start providing non-generalizing, non-reductionist frameworks within which we might explain why fans are sometimes complicit in doing what they do.”

I will admit to feeling empathy for Walsh, not least because I was also disappointed with The Last Jedi, as well as being aggrieved at the way in which critics, and especially fans, worked so hard to police the petitioners as evincing toxic fan practice. But I believe there’s been a shift, or a misunderstanding, about what actually constitutes toxicity: racism, sexism, homophobia, bullying, ad hominem aggression, and so forth. Generally, fan cultures are often sites of quarrel and contestation (as well as solidarity and “community,” of course), and arguments about canon, continuity, representation, narrative, plot, etc., in no way should be viewed as toxicity, at least according to Bridget Kies and I. Yet Walsh’s petition was described in such terms:

“This is precisely the sort of nonsense that epitomizes toxic fandom. There are, obviously, plenty of legitimate criticisms and questions to lob at The Last Jedi, but this sort of overreaction and hyperbole, with its emphasis on the past and rage against change, isn’t the way to go.”

As well as gatekeeping (“nonsense,” “this isn’t the way to go”) and “Othering” what is viewed as 'bad' fandom (“overreaction and hyperbole”), the idea that Walsh’s petition “epitomizes toxic fandom” is worth exploring further, I think, as well as the evocation of traditional stereotypes of being overly emotional and highly invested but emanating from a feminist website. If argument, debate and protest (the 'normal' operations of contemporary fandom, I would say) are viewed as ‘toxic,’ then what becomes of the fan world? By working to disavow and discipline certain fan practices allows for an idealized vision of the fan world to be constructed, as it should really be: homogenous, harmonious, and cleansed of negative affect. It is “another example of fandom gone wrong” “when passion turns to possessiveness that fandom turns toxic,” a sentiment that symptomatically disciplines other fans simultaneously.

As for Walsh, even a cursory skim of his Twitter feed demonstrates not that “this petition reeks of cough*sexism*cough”, but quite the contrary: rather, Walsh is undoubtedly a politically-engaged progressive, an anti-Trump protestor, who has also kicked started petitions to “stop cultural genocide at Muscrat Falls, Laborador” (4141 signed) and another to help with his medical bills. Walsh was in a horrendous car accident last year and desperately needs a prosthetic brace for his leg although, alas, he was unable to raise the $50,000 needed for treatment (18 people contributed $486), which is all the more tragic given that the people who filled out his Star Wars petition could have raised double the amount with only a dollar contribution per petitioner. Perhaps readers would be willing to head across to donate a dollar and help give Henry Walsh some much-needed hope; maybe we can demonstrate fan power in productive ways and support a fellow geek. 

Incidentally, a petition that petitions Walsh’s petition has managed to obtain 19 signatures, with the following advice attached: 

Thanks to all readers who have taken the time to read my saga trilogy. The next instalment is a virtual round-table discussion with fellow scholars, Will Brooker, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Lincoln Geraghty, Mar Guerrero-Pico, Rebecca Harrison, William Proctor and Suzanne Scott. In the meantime, I leave you with a poem written by Henry Walsh and posted on Twitter:

Trump’s Twitter was down, it was such bliss,

No more of that clown, who we’d never miss,

Then it came back, once more online,

I wanted to scream, I wanted to whine,

Why can’t we get rid of the Cheeto-In-Chief,

Who seems to take joy in causing us grief,

Now don’t get me wrong, Clinton wasn’t much better,

They’re both corrupt as heck, just birds of a feather,

So in a few years, ignore anyone who panders,

Do the right thing, and vote Bernie Sanders.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). 

Disney's Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Groans

By William Proctor

Following the world premiere of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi in December 2017 - and with a review embargo in place - social media carried the celebratory chorus of joy and jubilation, perhaps best exemplified by this tweet:

A few days later, with the review embargo lifted, critics mostly joined in the chorus of celebrations: “an explosive rush of spectacle,” “fun and funny with emotional heft,” “quintessentially Star Wars and richer than anything else that has come before,” “will leave fans beaming with surprise.”  Some critics, however, were less than impressed, and swam against the tide: “a work that’s ironed out, flattened down, appallingly purified,” “a disappointment,” “an untidy, overlong story,” “ranks closer to the Attack of the Clones gene pool” (ouch!). 

As news surfaced about the Rotten Tomatoes score — now a highly anticipated event itself, a sad indictment of our “culture of consensus” — commenters, bloggers and journalists rushed to the organs of social media to investigate the radical asymmetry between critical spheres and user-generated reviews. The audience score being so out-of-alignment with the rapturous critical reception was cause for alarm, because, heaven forbid, this simply can’t be accurate because, well, Star Wars (as if expecting that critics, audiences and fans would agree to an interpretative consensus in any case). Of course, one could feasibly ask: so what? It’s not the first time that the critic-audience ratio has been disjointed, nor the last (I am thinking here about Netflix’s Bright being slammed by critics, hailed by audiences, with hardly a spark of conflagration). I am sure that readers understand the issues with “meta-critic scores,” but it is remarkable, I think, how Rotten Tomatoes has grown into such a powerhouse of opinion regarding the judgement and evaluation of culture.

Then, it all became clear as kaiburr crystal: the Rotten Tomatoes score had been infiltrated by trolls and 'alt-fans,’ torpedoing The Last Jedi as protest against 'politically correct' equality and diversity. As with my last essay, I am not suggesting for a minute that there are no reactionary responses to The Last Jedi. They are relatively easy to find if one goes looking and I won’t participate in amplifying such rhetoric (a point I shall return to below). But as I continue analysis of dedicated hashtags, as well as other discursive arenas including customer reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, the vast amount of commenters decrying the film as a weak entry in the franchise are centring their criticisms on plot, narrative, character, and canon, or simply to slam the film in no uncertain terms – and overwhelmingly so. This is not to imply a harmonious digital environment, not by any means; commenters have often been vehemently hostile, as the battle-lines between ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ constituents are drawn with each side actively batting insults back-and-forth; either across social media, or via the dissemination of memes criticising the film’s various failings (a selection of which pepper this essay). Interestingly, the ‘pro’ lobby have been propping up their defences by invoking institutional authority – such as Rian Johnson citing (non-canonical) EU material as precedent for certain creative decisions  -- while the ‘anti’ lobby have re-activated George Lucas’ authorship, with some even go as far as to summon the prequel trilogy – at one time, the ultimate ‘bad’ object in Star Wars fandom – as a yardstick which to bash ‘Ruin’ Johnson, Disney, and The Last Jedi with: 

“Help us George Lucas you’re our only hope.” “You were supposed to save the saga, not leave it in darkness.” “Jar Jar Binks sleeps well tonight.”

In the main, however, it seems that there is little space to dislike this film without being described as a racist, fascist, misogynist, hate-monger, or a ‘crybaby,’ and providing a counter-narrative that aims for a more accurate, nuanced portrait is lost in the fog of what amounts to little more than professional gossip at this point. Of course, nuanced counter-narratives don’t usually lead to an avalanche of clicks, "likes," tweets, re-tweets, posts and reposts, as questionable 'news' is launched out of the starting blocks and disseminated around our various social networks.

Statistically, hashtag publics, such as #notmystarwars and #notmyluke, certainly contain a minor selection of hateful comments, but, by my reckoning, these amount to less than 3%. After coding over 200 audience reviews from Rotten Tomatoes into discursive clusters — a small sample at this point admittedly, but one which I’ll continue to drill down over the coming weeks and months — over 96% critique creative decisions in the film whereas less than 3% mention people-of-colour, women, and the PC-inflected agenda of 'social justice' Disney.  If Rotten Tomatoes were the sole outlet carrying scathing reviews, then that would be another thing entirely and certainly worthy of keen investigation. However, the sheer wealth of negative utterances unfolding across digital spaces is, I believe, worth drilling into further rather than piggybacking on press discourse without testing claims.  

Nonetheless, numerous outlets claim that the most vocal fans on social media are right-wing tyrants out to sink Star Wars, if such a thing is even possible at this point (although a recent Wall Street Journal story claims that Disney aren't satisfied with the global haul of $1.3 billion as it failed to meet economic forecasts). Writing for The Huffington Post, Bill Bradley states unequivocally: “The Alt-Right takes credit for ‘Last Jedi’ backlash” (note the use of language normally reserved for terrorist attacks, as if one person on Facebook is akin to Al Qaeda with the Rotten Tomatoes score being “review-bombed” by terrorist groups). Tapping into this ‘source’ further to examine the claims made by this single, Facebook poster — who is clearly and unquestionably espousing right-wing politics, as well as being a notorious troll in the community having been ousted from various forums for his toxic behaviour — took a little more than twenty minutes to complicate, or even debunk outright, the anonymous poster’s claims. (Incidentally, it wasn't difficult to track the person's real identity, and his "proper" Facebook page includes no material of this kind.)

First, at no point does the poster mention the term 'alt-right,' nor does he claim to be a part of a wider 'movement' despite Bradley writing that the person is a “self-identified member of the alt-right.” (I won’t go into the way this constructs an image of the so-called 'alt-right' as a unified group compromised of ‘members’). The ‘alt-right’ connection is entirely invented by The Huffington Post writer, although one could reasonably argue that online right-wing statements are automatically awarded ‘alt-right’ status in the current political climate). The post used as source material for Bradley’s article is grabbed from ‘Down with Disney’s Treatment of its Franchises and its Fanboys,’ an open Facebook group ran by one, anonymous individual. It is not the so-called ‘alt-right’ that are taking credit at all but one, single Facebook user, and not, as Variety claim, “an alt-right fanboy group,” or, as The Washington Post said, “a men’s right’s activist” (readers will no doubt see what's going on here as the news tumbles across cyberspace).

Second, the post has 260 comments, 99.8% of which mock the poster with colourful epithets and insults. But what is also interesting is that another Facebook group, ‘Star Wars Anti-Canon Pro-EU’ – EU referring to the Expanded Universe that Disney dumped in 2014 – attack ‘Down with Disney’ for his vaunted claims: 

“We both did it,” replied ‘Down with Disney.’

Of course, including such responses in news stories would significantly shift the terms of discourse and, at the very least, raise important questions regarding these types of claims. Is it plausible that Star Wars fans, especially pissed off EU fans, would turn to Rotten Tomatoes to write negative reviews as a sign of protest? Undoubtedly. But all that really tells us is that Rotten Tomatoes is in no way an accurate barometer of public opinion, especially given the methodology employed to 'measure' critical perspectives via the construction of parochial binaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ or, more accurately, between ‘fresh’ or ‘rotten.’ (How about moving to a spectrum of vegetable-based criteria, such as ‘fresh,’ ‘ripe,’ ‘edible,’ stale,’ and ‘rotten’?)  Is it at all likely that negative commenters could mask racism and misogyny with more text-based criticisms? Absoutely. Yet as Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner point out on this very blog,  “not knowing who created what, what the(se) creator(s) meant to accomplish, or what a given text “really” means, forces one to stay empirical and focus on the things that can be known and confirmed.” However, the so-called 'alt-right' are not known for deliberately masking ideological scripts as a way to penetrate public discourse  — indeed, quite the opposite: provocation and VOLUME is the modus operandi of right-wing trolls, not surreptitious disguise and tip-toeing.   

Third, given the questionable status of the source drawn upon by Bradley, I have to admit to being quite troubled by the way in which 'news' is spread across cyberspace, regardless of the veracity of content. That said, it seems that the flashpoint for The Huffington Post’s article came from another website, Deadline, which was cited later by Polygon, who carried the story about ‘Down with Disney,’ except with a significant difference: there is no mention of the so-called ‘alt-right.’ Written by Julia Alexander, the Polygon article describes ‘Down with Disney’ as a “pro-DCEU [DC expanded universe] community, announced on Facebook that it had generated trolls to review-bomb The Last Jedi’s score on Rotten Tomatoes.” The article then moves to consider that 4Chan could be behind the “attacks,” despite the (again) lack of evidence or community-members who claim otherwise. At the end of the piece, an update is published: “After reports of the attack being organized by a right-wing group began to circulate, a Rotten Tomatoes representative told Polygon that its security team and database experts "haven’t determined there to be any problems.”

Of course, if true, that only means that bots were not used to bomb the site; it is entirely plausible that some fans did indeed converge on Rotten Tomatoes to express their chagrin about The Last Jedi (not that there’s anything wrong with that in principle). Though, if this is so easy to achieve, then it also provides the same affordances for the ‘pro’ lobby to rank the film more positively on the site too, and there is no evidence of that kind of activity hitherto (nor is there any evidence at this point that the Rotten Tomatoes score has been infiltrated by ‘alt-right’ insurgents). Writing for the website, Inverse, Corey Plante described the news as little more than “rumour,” and queried the claims by speaking to ‘Down with Disney,’ who, yet again, could not supply evidence of bot-attack except in the vaguest terms ("a friend helped me"). Said Plante: “online metrics and vocal Facebook pages claiming to have all-powerful hacking bots are no match for a little bit of perspective on your side.” 

So, in order for the “regime of truth” around The Last Jedi to continue, then certain counter-claims need to be disavowed or ignored entirely whereas any reasonable objections are buried amidst the online avalanche. In relation to ‘Down with Disney,’ a Rotten Tomatoes representative claimed that there is no indication that ‘bots’ have invaded the site so as to bring the audience score down. “The number of written reviews being posted by fans is comparable to TFA,” s/he said, although given that TFA was also criticised for being social justice propaganda by Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) site Return of Kings – as well as their outlandish claims that they successfully boycotted The Force Awakens and cost Disney a few million -- we can take this as an indication of precisely, well, nothing. The representative went on to say that, “the authenticity of our critic and user scores is very important to Rotten Tomatoes and as a course of regular business, we have a team of security, network, social and database experts who closely monitor our platforms.” (Naturally, we should believe the anonymous Facebook troller and completely disregard everything else that doesn't fit the narrative, it seems.)

Let me put it another way:

1.     A single individual claims that he sank the user-generated score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is, of course, unsubstantiated in any way.

2.     260 commented on the post, mocking him for espousing hateful rhetoric and extravagant claims, while often employing reactive aggression themselves (some of which could equally be described as hate speech).

3.     Bill Bradley ‘discovers’ the post, perhaps following both Inverse and Polygon articles, viewing it as clear evidence that the ‘alt-right’ is wholly responsible for the user rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

4.     Then conducts a brief conversation with ‘Down with Disney’ via Facebook messenger.

5.     This is then pulled out of the shadows and into the media spotlight.

6.     The article does not contextualise the comments below the post, which demonstrates that other Facebook-users are overwhelmingly critiquing ‘Down with Disney’s’ claims and ideological standpoint.

7.     Then, the article gathers steam and gains significant traction across a litany of news outlets, professional, amateur and pro-am (NME, Variety, Forbes, The Hollywood Reporter, The Washington Post, Slash Film, and many more).

8.     This is then disseminated, shared, tweeted, and re-circulated by readers, thus successfully participating in lifting marginal instantiations into mainstream prominence despite the lack of legitimacy, empirical merit or basic fact-checking.

9.     This spirals and cascades across cyberspace whereby it mushrooms into unequivocal 'fact,' as demonstrated by a video on MSN which creatively juxtaposes ‘Down with Disney’ with an image of white supremacists sporting ‘Make America Great Again’ caps (see image below), as well as leaving no room for manouvre: “the group played a significant role in giving The Last Jedi a 54% user-score from over 100,000 reviews.”

10.  Thus, a single individual has multiplied into a plural 'organisation' and managed to move from internet obscurity and into public discourse.  

That one anonymous person on Facebook managed to spark a discursive ruckus should, I think, be a cautionary tale. That is, if this is the only evidence that the so-called 'alt-right,' or anyone else, is behind the Rotten Tomatoes score, then I would argue that audiences themselves have certainly participated in building up the “regime of truth” around The Last Jedi, and awarded prime space and valuable oxygen to a single individual trolling on Facebook, playing right into his hands. The internet maxim, “don’t feed the trolls” becomes more like offering Mogwai a banquet during the post-midnight hours.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that news organisations, blogs and so on, shouldn't be reporting on the activities of the radical right; instead, I am saying that journalists and entertainment commenters, etc., need to do better and cease constructing narratives that feed the flames of indignation when the fuel source is running low. For if, at times, (cheerleading) fans unintentionally conduct free labour on behalf of corporate organisations, then it stands to reason that fans — and coalition audiences — that share trumped-up news stories (no pun intended) actively perform labour on behalf of the radical right, even as they hold up these examples to mock and rebuke. I'm sure that this will be read as a provocation and, in many ways, it is meant to be. Things are rarely so simple, after all

(As a comfortable Marxist and trade union activist, I am certainly one who believes in 'No Platform for Racists and Fascists.' Why award a democratic platform to those who want to attack democratic values and ideals in any case?)

*NB: In early February 2017, 'Down with Disney' was removed from Facebook. This led to another discursive avalanche legitimising the earlier claims of "alt-right" status, while turning to protest Marvel's Black Panther by asking people to review-bombing Rotten Tomatoes (one may wonder where his bots have gone). There are now over fifty news articles and blog posts doing the rounds, all of which are centred on 'Down with Disney' as, by now, an authentic so-called 'alt-right' group. By tracking and mapping the discourse, then, one can see quite clearly how controversy is not only manufactured, but the way in which it can spread like wildfire, with journalists, bloggers, news anchors, social media users, fans and coalition audiences providing spark and kinder as well. To be clear again, this is not to say that right-wing activity should not be reported at all   — rather, that constructing anonymous user-generated material as evidence of right-wing activity, without doing adequate leg-work and research, is risible, to say the least. After close analysis of 'Down with Disney,' I reported the page to Facebook on 24th January 2017, citing hate speech as rationale. Whether or not that led to the page being shutdown is difficult to ascertain — I was informed that the page did not break any community standards, so it's more than likely that another reason presented itself.

 Many critics are unable to accept the possibility that The Last Jedi could be loved and hated simultaneously by "the people":

It became clear for the world to see that something was seriously amiss when a huge discrepancy opened between the critical and audience scores for the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics largely showered it with praise, while registered moviegoers gave it a failing grade; right now, it stands at 91 percent "fresh" from professional film critics, but has just a 50 percent audience score. The gulf is an anomaly, which we know both because moviegoers gave largely positive assessments of the film to the polling firm ComScore and because a member of an alt-right fan group proudly told HuffPost that dissatisfied fans sent bots to deliberately lower the Tomatometer.

Here, we clearly see the will to homogenize, emphatically rejecting the lack of clear-cut consensus as evidence of right wing activity. Moreover, the polling firm ComScore being upheld as proof that “something was seriously amiss,” alongside activating the Huffington Post news story without qualification  demonstrates an eager willingness to surround The Last Jedi with narratives of praise and fawning, while rubbishing the majority of negative commentary as primarily the work of either the so-called 'alt-right,' or, to a lesser extent, MRAs. 

(As an aside, I wouldn’t mention polls to Democrats or Labour voters, or to Theresa May or Hilary Clinton.)   

In addition to this, news emerged that a ‘de-feminized edit’ of The Last Jedi has been uploaded to illegal torrent site, The Pirate Bay, that cuts all women out of the film leaving the running time a sparse 45-minutes or so. Bearing in mind that one would have to go searching on an illegal site to discover the offending article, not to mention that this was in no way public knowledge at this point, and then bringing it out of the shadows and into mainstream prominence is a worrying turn, I would argue. Then, the news story was shared on Twitter, copying in director Rian Johnson, who then responded with his own tweet decorated with laughing emoticons, a sentiment replicated by John Boyega and Mark Hamill as they joined in mocking the anonymous uploader who, as many news reports claim, is a member of the MRA movement. Forgetting for a moment that nobody knows who uploaded the video at this point – no-one has claimed ‘credit’ on this occasion -- this is, at the very least, somewhat of a stretch, and encourages the spread of conspiracism within mainstream discourse. Writing for The Guardian, Martin Bellam explained his decision to run the story in below-the-line comments:

The news is that Mark Hamill and John Boyega were laughing at it. I wouldn’t have covered it otherwise. I think it’s significant that the stars of Star Wars are prepared in public to push back against the agenda of people who don’t like diversity in sci-fi/ fantasy...I have to say that since covering #GamerGate and Sad Puppies etc over the last few years ignoring these views doesn’t make them go away. I think it’s important to bring to people’s attention that these unsavoury misogynistic and racist views exist among fandoms of things we love.

So, it is ‘important’ to hunt for sexist/ racist commentary, be it a Facebook post, or an uploaded edit, both of which remain anonymous, then to write a story citing this as evidence of reactionary fanboy revolt, which is then disseminated across social media and other organs of cyberspace, for creative agents to mock, thus encouraging the ‘twitterati’ to follow suit (I'm also not quite sure how a tweet swamped with emoji's is 'pushing back' in any case). As with ‘Down with Disney,’ it is entirely possible that this was a trolling operation, and, if so, the trolls are indeed dining well this evening (albeit, two of them). The ‘alt-right’ and MRAs are (lo and behold!) responsible for negative criticisms of The Last Jedi because of two, anonymous individuals either trolling on Facebook, or uploading an edit on Pirate Bay? That’s some mighty fine work, circulating hateful screeds based on nothing but imputation and conjecture. That Johnson, Boyega and Hamill cajole the anonymous uploader may demonstrate their willingness to push back against reactionary current – as well as, let us not forget, amassing cultural capital along the way -- but only because this was pulled out of obscurity and given life in the first place. Of course, it is entirely possible that users would have found it anyway, but that’s not the point. I strongly believe that we need to ask questions about the veracity and validity of news stories before sharing and disseminating across our various networks. It seems as if there is a need to prove unequivocally that right-wing agents are partly, if not wholly, responsible for the backlash against The Last Jedi.

What is interesting is that Johnson’s emoticon mockery was then taken up by Twitter users, and led to a long thread of narratives, many of them performing aggressively by constructing anti-fans of The Last Jedi as MRAs, as “sexless heathens,” “snowflakes” (or “salty broflakes”), “fragile,” “unemployed and living in parent’s basement,” members of the “micro-penis support group,” “the word men is wasted on these fools,” “men who never got laid in their life or men who never experienced an orgasm,” “butthurt man babies,”  that “die hard Star Wars bros have been editing women out of their life for years,” and  so on and so forth. Users that questioned the claim that this anonymous uploader was indeed a member of the MRA movement were largely ignored (as were the criticisms within the hashtag #blackstormtrooper that queried press discourse):

“The assertion that the editor is an MRA appears completely baseless and the whole thing is almost too perfectly cringeworthy to be believed. Smells like fabricated clickbait.”

 “I’m still waiting for proof it was actually an MRA.”

Instead,

“Oh my god can we just like a damn movie without a bunch of fragile asshats pitching a dam fit over nothing. I loved the movie. My family loved the movie. I can’t wait for the next movie.

“The fact the director and many actors jumped on board is also pretty freaking hilarious. The MRAs man-babies are soooo petty.”

As with ‘Down with Disney,’ then, one anonymous person managed to spark a chain of discord without much effort whatsoever. On this occasion, the Twitter feed begins by attacking the anonymous uploader, and then progressed to general claims about “die-hard Star Wars fanboys” (always gendered male, but now homogenised as well). By the time that Sky News picked up on the outrage, it is distorted again: “the editor describes himself as a Men’s Rights Activist” (false), and that the “chauvinist cut” trims 46 minutes off the film’s running time (false – it was trimmed down to that length). Although one may argue that I am nit- picking here, it should at least demonstrate that the digital echo-chamber often operates like a game of "telephone" or "rumours" (depending upon your geography), whereby basic facts become embroiled in spurious misinformation.  

I won’t cry “fake news,” not least because of "he-who-shall-not-be-named," but there is something profoundly troubling about this, not simply for Star Wars, but for the way in which news is disseminated and shared without consideration for the merits of content. As Claire Wardle puts it:

"By now we’ve all agreed the term “fake news” is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we’re left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we’re struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it’s about the entire information ecosystem. And the term fake doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false)."

Wardle’s preferred term, ‘information pollution,’ is something that we should all be concerned about as we traverse the vast expanse of the digital hemisphere. More than this, however, is the way in which the creation and dissemination of meretricious news, however much they might fulfil our world-view, conducts cultural and ideological work on behalf of the radical right by over-amplifying hateful rhetoric, especially when certain news stories are specious at best. In actual fact, the Associated Press and other journalist bodies have all but banished the use of the term ‘alt-right,’ except when citing direct quotes (which should always either be in quotations or with the qualifier, ‘so-called’). However, many of the outlets that carried the story afterwards, which includes reputable outlets, reproduced and recirculated the political noun incontestably.   

Writing for Wired, Issie Lapowski argued that “[t]here’s no right approach to covering this growing movement, but one thing is certain: the press has erred on the side of over-exposure.” Within the article, author and analyst, J.M Berger, who studies political extremism, said: “there’s not really room for debate about cutting off the oxygen to the movement through more measured media coverage.” The mainstream media “gives amplification to the groups, then the groups use violence even more,” said Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. 

In a more thoughtful article for syfy.com, Jordan Zakarin points towards mainstream news media’s complicity in airing extreme right-wing perspectives (although the piece also indisputably presents the Facebook and Pirate Bay news as evidence of so-called 'alt-right' and MRA involvement). Obviously, if one dips their toes into the shark-infested digital networks popularized by figureheads such as Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, and white nationalist Stefan Molyneux, then you would intimately know that it is not safe to swim in those waters without being bitten, chewed upon, swallowed whole. For George Hawley, Professor of Political Science at Alabama and author of Making Sense of the Alt Right, 

"Going on the offensive against a well-known movie or artist is a way to generate angry articles from the mainstream media…And for small movements that thrive on negative coverage, getting mentioned at all counts as a win. It works even better for them in cases where a large number of people genuinely dislike a particular cultural product already for non-racist or misogynistic reasons — as was the case with the new Ghostbusters.”

In actual fact, it has become increasingly difficult in the current climate to criticise films such as the Ghostbusters reboot, Wonder Woman, and, yes, Star Wars, without being viewed as masking something rotten percolating within the body politic, although in some ways, it is understandable — the cacophony surrounding these films is, by and large, orchestrated by mainstream media. 

There is no doubt that extreme right-wing factions have attempted to hijack popular culture over the past few years or so, and shift the grounds of discourse in their favour; or, at least, to turn up the decibels so as to LOUDLY gate-crash the mainstream (“getting mentioned at all counts as a win”). But this also needs to be examined to determine what impact they’re having through multiple so-called boycott campaigns. As I have written for the forthcoming Popular Culture and The Civic Imagination (edited by Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova), the majority of these protests are given life by mainstream outlets and actively serve the cause that they’re critiquing by over-amplifying such rhetoric. Boycott Stephen King’s IT (‘highest-grossing horror film of all-time’). Boycott The Force Awakens (‘top-grossing domestic film in history,’ ‘fastest film to pass the $1 billion goldmark,’ and the third film in cinema history to pass $2 billion).  Boycott Wonder Woman (‘biggest box office hit by a female director,’ and smashing six more records during its theatrical run).

Economically, then, it seems as if the boycott protests have failed miserably. Ideologically, however, the so-called 'alt-right' and MRAs may view this as a win having managed to cause at least a modicum of online mayhem without actually trying; while simultaneously facilitating the spread of ideological currents above and beyond what they would be capable of achieving off their own bat. It is not solely ‘the mainstream media’ to blame, however: we also need to take responsibility for the way in which content is circulated and re-circulated across our digital networks, and our everyday lives as well. There is quite enough right-wing sentiment online as it is without participating in manufacturing controversy. I say this in the spirit of academic debate. 

In the final part of this trilogy, I will discuss the return of ‘Get a Life’ stereotyping in press and fan discourse.

Perhaps it never quite went away at all.

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). 

Disney's Star Wars: Episode I - The Fantom Menace

Think about what you "know" about white male fan response to the recent Star War films. The outrage over black stormtroopers. The alt-right plot to "bomb" Rotten Tomatoes. The petitions to dump Last Jedi from the official canon. The re-edits that cut out all of the women and characters of color. All of this adds up to a portrait of a fan backlash against diversity and inclusion on the same order as the #gamergate and Sad Puppies backlashes. This framing so perfectly fits the current moment, allowing us to recognize the politics of inclusion within contemporary genre entertainment, and our sense that such changes are not going to occur without a fight. 

But what if all or most of what we think we know is wrong and what if the story is more complicated than the media representations we are feeding on at the moment. William Proctor heads the World Star Wars Project, which is seeking to track audience response to the transitions represented by the new Star Wars films (as well as production contexts). Through the years, I have come to appreciate his nuanced understanding of contemporary trends in genre entertainment. He is attentive to the details; he tries to play fair with all of the parties involved. He has progressive political commitments that are deep rooted but he has an even deeper commitment to speaking the truth as he understands it. Over the past few months, he has been corresponding with me about the news coverage surrounding fan response to The Last Jedi and what he has to say has an urgency about it -- he is reframing the current conversation and raising important challenges to the way news travels through the current media environment. I wanted to bring this important perspective to the attention of my readers.

Over the next three installments, he is going to map the current state of the debate from three different vantage points and then next week, he has invited people with diverse perspectives within fandom studies to respond to his provocation. The results should matter not only to fans and aca-fans alike but also to journalists and journalists in training as you think about the ethics and consequences of current entertainment journalism practices.

I offer this as one more chapter in this blog's year long exploration of the current state of fandom studies. 

Disney's Star Wars: Episode I - The Fantom Menace

By William Proctor

Since Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, the Star Wars brand has been besieged by creative chaos, canonical upheaval, and impassioned fan revolt. Consider the following: the sacking of directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller from anthology film, Solo, making way for Ron Howard (not forgetting the trailer that dropped less than four months before the film's premiere, surely a record); the removal of Colin Treverrow from the final instalment of the sequel trilogy, enticing The Force Awakens director, J.J Abrams, back into the director’s chair; the introduction of a unified transmedia storytelling canon which spelled the end of the vast expanded universe (EU) of comics and novels, re-branding them as ‘Legends’ and halting the production of material set in what now amounts to an apocryphal, alternative universe; and, of course, a barrage of online fan criticisms centred on various issues and controversies, highly visible, often baleful and eminently public. 

Across four decades, the Star Wars film series has often been charged with racism, misogyny and fascism, as a container for reactionary ideologies. Indeed, following the debut of the first Star Wars film (re-christened Episode IV: A New Hope in 1981), The Los Angeles Times, ran an article by black actor, critic and activist, Raymond St. Jacques, which went as far as to unapologetically label George Lucas himself as an out-and-out racist. Conversely, Disney’s Star Wars films thus far – The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One (2016) and The Last Jedi (2017) – have all been championed by various commentators, critics and scholars as feminist, multicultural, and progressive. To be sure, Lucasfilm’s strategy of appealing to a wider spread of audience demographics, with female characters arguably obtaining protagonist status in the three films released during the Disney-era, seems to have paid off handsomely, not least for the cash nexus, the yolk of box office capitalism. Following the release of The Force Awakens (TFA) in December 2015, a swathe of critics saw the film as nothing less than the “feminist re-interpretation of the original Star Wars movie,’ “awakening the force of feminism in little girls everywhere,” most often centred on Daisy Ridley’s Rey, “a character for a time that is coming to a new peace with feminism,” as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber argues. 

Some people, however, don’t seem to have received that particular memo. In various digital spaces, especially the “toxic technocultures” of Reddit, 4Chan and 8Chan, as well as YouTube, disgruntled conservative commenters have been hard at work critiquing Disney’s Star Wars as nothing but a PC vehicle for "Social Justice Warrior propaganda," often in ways that can only be described as "hate speech." Given news media’s penchant for transposing these marginal, toxic voices into mainstream consciousness, I won’t award valuable oxygen to these views here, which would only facilitate the spread of invidious ideological currents in any case. (Incidentally, as I continue to review user-generated videos uploaded to YouTube, I have flagged content that I believe is legitimate "hate speech," only for YouTube to state that community standards have not been breached.) 

I am not claiming that some fans are not reactionary – YouTube pays host to some truly hateful reviews of Disney’s Star Wars films, and this seems to have, unfortunately, accelerated after the release of The Last Jedi in December 2017. The issue here is not that some fans are racist, sexist and so forth. As I have argued elsewhere, if “we’re all fans” of something or other, then it stands to reason that the “fan world,” as Matt Hills describes it in a recent article for Palabra Clave, will surely be populated by a broad range of ideological actants and “cannot be viewed as a coherent culture or community.” What I am claiming, however, is that scholars should conduct robust analysis of the Star Wars fan world, warts and all – or any fan world, for that matter -- using adequate research protocols and methodologies that move beyond "cherry picking" — that is, selecting comments that construct a certain kind of narrative while ignoring those that would, at the very least, complicate the popular idea that fan cultures are monolithic and coherent.  I say this for a number of reasons. 

 First, so-called controversies, such as Twitter hashtag “movements” like #blackstormtrooper or #boycottstarwars, have since been overturned as the work of internet trolls, with the hashtags in question amassing a significant number of progressive comments, some of them vehemently hostile themselves, that far outweigh the voices of reactionary actors by a significant margin. According to social media analytics firm, ‘Fizziology,’ for instance, 94% of tweeters in #boycottstarwars “were merely expressing outrage over its existence,” with the other 6% being “racist trolls trying to get people mad.”  The same can be said of #blackstormtrooper, which I discuss below. 

Second, this is complicated even further by the political composition of certain social media platforms, with many from the 'hate brigade' protesting Disney’s PC-inflected Star Wars from within those toxic technocultures mentioned above, whereas progressive agents, or at least critics of right wing ideologies, are more likely to turn to Twitter (although not exclusively). The internet may have provided fans with the affordances necessary to criticise or celebrate the fan-object, whatever that may be, and it has undoubtedly shifted the relationship between producers and audiences, as many scholars have noted. The internet has certainly pushed marginal, hidden fan cultures, practices and behaviours into the mainstream spotlight, becoming more visible, “noisy and public,” as Henry Jenkins has argued. I have seen, however, a number of instances whereby academics embrace press discourse without empirically testing certain claims, claims which later prove to be quite problematic, if not outright false. I don’t intend to single out individual scholars here, nor do I want to erect a protective force field around the figure of 'the fan,' as perhaps the first wave of fan studies necessarily did. Next, I want to share some of my own research before moving onto the recent conflagration surrounding the release of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi in the second episode.  

The World Star Wars Project

In 2012, I conducted a small-scale research project that aimed to capture a snapshot of fan reactions to Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, as well as the news that the Star Wars film series was to emerge from cultural hibernation. Through the use of a structured questionnaire, which combined qualitative/ quantitative methods, and a request for volunteers posted on theforce.net, the central hub of Star Wars fan activity online, I analysed the responses from 100 fans (although I had to request that my invitation be removed from the site as my inbox was pinging incessantly, which echoes Will Brooker’s experience over a decade earlier, documented in Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans). In many ways, the project was galvanised by a bevvy of press articles that reported on the sale, and drew upon a range of social media utterances that ‘proved’ unequivocally that fans were in dire straits, up in arms, barely consolable. Following news of the sale, as one critic put it,

"the internet seemed to shake to its very foundations with the out-of-nowhere news that Disney was to acquire Lucasfilm...One part of the announcement was the confirmation that Star Wars Episode 7 was being readied for 2015. This has met with, it’s fair to say, less than upbeat reactions."

Writing for the free daily UK newspaper, Metro, Ross McGuiness, claimed that

"the prospect of fusing traditional fairytales with those set in space has many Star Wars fans feeling a disturbance in the force...a million voices cried out in terror. On Twitter […] Many Star Wars fans believe the move to make more films is as clumsy as it is stupid, saying the saga was permanently damaged by the prequels."

As these news stories gathered apace, I felt that something was missing, not least of all because of the jubilant chorus I witnessed among my own (fan) crowd. When I turned to Twitter to examine the welter of press stories focusing on the dismayed and the discordant, I found out first hand what cherry-picking quotes and comments really means. Not that the hashtags in question didn’t contain such tweets – they did, and many more besides – but the discourse was so much more ambivalent and complex than contemporary journalism seemed equipped to handle (or ignored entirely in favour of sensation and spectacle). By and large, nuance seems almost entirely absent from press stories about fans, and that, unfortunately, has picked up steam over the past five years or so, with the vast majority of texts within press discourse falling hard into the trap of viewing fandom as a singular, monolithic entity and, perhaps more egregiously, returning to tired stereotypes centred on obsession, pathology and infantile behaviour. 

In a sense, these stories provided a spark, and the research I conducted clearly demonstrated a wide spectrum of emotions, thoughts and ambivalences -- “a range of colourations,” one might say -- centred on the Lucasfilm purchase, rather than the blanket homogeneity claimed by journalists and bloggers (although I certainly make no ‘representative’ claims). Consider the following quote from one of my respondents: 

"My initial reaction was shock and disappointment, because I couldn’t believe that Lucasfilm wasn’t independent anymore and that Lucas had just given away his life’s work. I was nervous that Disney could turn Star Wars into just any other franchise, but Star Wars is special...At the present, I am more focused on the excitement of more Star Wars movies and less worrying about Disney owning Lucasfilm."

Note the multiple affective moves from “shock and disappointment” based on Lucas’ authorship and independence; “nervous” about Disney turning Star Wars into another entertainment franchise like any other, therefore losing its “special” status; then ending with “excitement” that more Star Wars movies will be produced, while dampening down anxieties about “Disney owning Lucasfilm.” Of course, I would not expect journalists to drill down in such a manner — not least because we could all be out of a job — but I continue to feel particularly aggrieved each time I read press stories cherry-picking a certain brand of social media utterance as fodder for clicks and ‘likes.’ By parochially selecting comments that encourage spin and hyperbole, while rejecting those that would no doubt complicate monolithic depictions, actively engages in promoting narratives of "Othering" and “enfreakment”.  

Following publication of the research in the Fan Studies Network themed-section of Participations: The Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, I started tracking the Disney/ Star Wars discourse closely, which led to a paper at the FSN in 2014 examining fan reactions to the next cataclysm — that is, the dissolution of the EU megatext comprising hundreds of novels and comics. During questions, someone noted that there is so much more research to be done on the transition from Lucasfilm to the Mouse House, and an opportunity to explore several discourses holistically, including production, promotion, participation and reception. A pre-conference dinner in Newcastle with Professors Martin Barker and Clarissa Smith opened up a vista of opportunities, and led to the launch of The World Star Wars Project at the FSN in 2015.

 I have made no secret of the fact that I have been directly inspired by Barker’s massive The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit audience projects. To be able to attract such large numbers – just shy of 25,000 and 36,109 respectively – is no mean feat, and I was especially taken by Barker’s own methodology, “a combination of quantitative and qualitative questions [which] allowed the project to disclose what the film meant, and how it mattered to audiences in new and distinctive ways.” To this end, I handpicked a primary research team to collaborate on, first, designing an online questionnaire that, like Barker, could reach multiple nationalities in multiple languages. At the time of writing, we are planning to release the World Star Wars questionnaire online after the completion of the sequel trilogy, probably sometime in 2020 – 21, and are currently seeking international scholars to collaborate on translating the questionnaire into as many languages as possible.

But then the idea began to mushroom (as ideas often do, sprouting limbs and running off on their own). As The Force Awakens (TFA) marched towards its December 2015 theatrical release, project co-director, Richard McCulloch (Huddersfield University) and I discussed an opportunity, one we felt could not be missed. Given that TFA was the first Star Wars film in a decade, and the first Star Wars film beneath the Disney umbrella, we decided to work on an online questionnaire drawing upon Barker’s methodology, with the aim being to capture audiences’ ‘horizons of expectation.’ As the film moved closer to becoming a reality, and with media hype and fan discourses reaching fever pitch, we released ‘The Force Re-Awakens’ questionnaire a mere three weeks before release, but would take it down the day before the film hit cinemas. The idea here is to be able to explore and examine the way in which audiences, not only fans, anticipated – or not – the Disney-era of Star Wars. In less than three weeks, we amassed close to 2000 responses. (At the time of writing, we are continuing to analyse the data set, with a view to publishing our findings sometime in 2019.)

The second phase focuses upon an anthology of essays from scholars: Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception (eds. Proctor and McCulloch) will be published in early 2019. My own contribution to the collection examines the discourse that surrounded the first teaser trailer for TFA and the ‘controversy’ attached to John Boyega’s appearance in Stormtrooper uniform. In the hours and days following the release of the teaser, various news outlets reported on "the dark side of fandom." Many journalists cited #blackstormtrooper as their primary source; so I delved into the Twitter feed expecting to be alarmed at the level of hate speech and racist banter therein. However, by scraping data from the entire hashtag (as opposed to sampling) and carrying out a discourse analysis (coding tweets according to various discursive clusters), I was taken aback by the results. First, I found no evidence of racism, a point picked up by other commenters within the thread itself, but a litany of criticisms centred on Star Wars canon or, in other words, that which is considered 'factual' within the imaginary world. Many fans cited Episode II: Attack of the Clones as supplying evidence that Imperial Stormtroopers are, in fact, genetic clones of Jango Fett (played by Polynesian actor, Temura Morrison). At various points, fans engaged in an exchange of textual evidence gleaned from multiple sources, which ended up with one commenter demonstrating that the clones from Episode II are not the same as Imperial Stormtroopers; rather, that the latter were selected from other populations after the clones were phased out. This is not racism, however; conflicts of this kind are based in arguments about ‘canonical fidelity,’ which is often a key engine fuelling fan debates and discussions (although it is possible that canonical arguments can mask racism, although trolls are usually fuelled by decibels, not silence). Like #boycottstarwars discussed earlier, the vast majority of commenters in the hashtag were progressive voices, many of whom were viperous themselves (although they were speaking to an imputed, imagined racist contingent).

Perhaps more importantly, the idea that #blackstormtrooper was created by racists is quite simply false, despite the claims of journalists. In actual fact, the hashtag was launched in 2010, four years before the release of the teaser and two years before Disney purchased Lucasfilm, in order to discuss and promote Donald Faison’s series of Lego "brick" films titled (you guessed it!), ‘Black Stormtrooper.’ If nothing else, the experience has led me to explore various claims in press discourse before leaping in with both feet (as I did here with the Ghostbusters reboot firestorm).

Perhaps it is conceivable, if not condonable, that highly publicised backlashes and quarrels — from #GamerGate and #SadPuppies to the emergence of the online radical right and the election triumph of Donald Trump (in the real world no less!) — have many people on their guard, including fans, journalists, critics and general audiences. However, as I shall discuss in the next instalment, the way in which right wing trolling operations become sources of outrage, with news outlets, blogs, and user-generated activity actively "normalising" and "legitimising" hateful ideological currents — thus pushing the reactionary agenda into public discourse on behalf of a few online rabble rousers and rapscallions — should be most concerning of all (not to mention going against stern guidance from professional journalistic bodies) . In so doing, rather than acting as political disinfectant, news stories (professional, amateur and pro-am) have actively carried the infection beyond the quarantine zone of right wing media, such as Andrew Anglin of neo-nazi website, The Daily Stormer who embraces "the 'non-stop' media coverage of the alt-right" as it has "actually accomplished a “normalization” of his ideas." He said "the media’s constant churn of outrage and spectacle was extremely beneficial to him, especially since his goal is changing the political orientation of very young Americans, particularly teenage boys." Moreover, I think it is quite worrying that #blackstormtrooper was trending more than #blacklivesmatter during the period. 

The social, political and cultural impact of the ‘net has undoubtedly provided “an embarrassment of riches” for researchers, as Jenkins pointed out sometime ago, but this has also opened up a can of worms, not least of all for researchers. Sometimes, "an embarrassment of riches," can also be "richly embarrassing." 

In the next episode, I will share some of the research I have been conducting around The Last Jedi.

-----------------------------------------------------

Dr William Proctor is Senior Lecturer in Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published widely on numerous topics, including Batman, James Bond, One Direction, The Walking Dead, Stephen King, and Star Wars. William is a leading expert on reboots and is currently finishing up his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia, for Palgrave Macmillan. He is co-editor of Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures with Dr. Matthew Freeman (Routledge, 2018); co-editor of Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Promotion, Production and Reception with Dr. Richard McCulloch (University of Iowa, forthcoming); and co-editor, alongside Bridget Kies, of the themed-section of Participations: International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies on "Toxic Fan Practices" (May, 2018). He can be reached at bproctor@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Chinese Fandom: An Interview (Part 3)

What can you tell us about the status of fandom studies in the Chinese language world? Little of this writing is known here, so it would be helpful to map some of the key debates there.

LY: I know a lot more about the status of fandom studies in Mainland China than in Hong Kong and Taiwan, so I’ll focus on the situation in Mainland China. Chinese fandom studies more or less started with the phenomenal success of Super Girl in 2005. From 2006 to 2009, there were a whole bunch of journal articles, master theses, and one PhD dissertation, my own, centering on the Super Girl fandom. In 2007, Zhang Qiang, a Taiwanese scholar who obtained her PhD from Tsinghua University, published an article about Anglo-American fandom studies in a top academic journal in China, which helped Chinese scholars realize that fandom had already become the subject of serious academic research in the West.

In 2009, I co-edited Fan Cultures: A Reader with my PhD advisor, Prof. Tao Dongfeng. It is a translated volume of 23 English-language essays that cover research on media fandom, celebrity fandom, and sports fandom in the 1990s and early 2000s. This anthology has provided much-needed academic legitimacy and theoretical frameworks for the fledgling Chinese fandom studies and is probably still the most-cited publication in this field for better or worse. We have included two pieces of writing from you in the anthology, along with works from John Fiske, Matt Hills, Cornel Sandvoss, Constance Penley, Jackie Stacey, and Rhiannon Bury, just to name a few.

During the past decade, two issues have aroused great interest and controversy, if not debate, in Chinese fandom studies. One is about how to understand fans’ affective investment into their objects of fandom, especially their idols. Unlike Anglo-American fan studies that inaugurates with research on media fandom, Chinese fandom research has been fascinated by celebrity fandom, such as Super Girl fandom, from the beginning.

To both the general public and scholars, fans’ intense and “irrational” devotion to a remote media personality is culturally unintelligible and politically dangerous. Since traditional Chinese culture emphasizes the importance of family and filial piety, it is morally transgressive for fans to be more dedicated to a celebrity than to their own family members. Fans’ selfless and obsessive devotion is also viewed as incompatible with the modern process of individualization that espouses individual autonomy and reason. In other words, celebrity fans’ behavior cannot be justified by either traditional Chinese values or Western values, and their religious fervor often revives memory of the cult of personality during the Mao Era and the specter of totalitarianism.

TFBOYS

The other issue concerns fan economics, which refers to fans’ growing economic clout in the media entertainment industry and the booming Internet economy. Due to the population base in China, some large fandoms could exert considerable power over the industry. TFBOYS is probably a good example. Although it is managed by a small private entertainment company, the enormously popular boy band gains its popularity mostly through the tireless promotional effort of its numerous dedicated fans. Unlike traditional entertainment celebrities who gain their fame and fans through well-known works, those fan-made idols achieve celebrity because they could attract a lot of fans through their appearance and personality, even though they might lack hit songs or acting ability.

Similar concerns could also be found in the so-called “IP (intellectual property) industry,” the Chinese equivalent of media franchising in the U.S. and media mix in Japan. To be considered as a valuable IP, the media content, usually hit novels and comics, must have already generated a stable fan base. One benefit of big data technology is that we could develop rather objective methods to gauge the popularity of a media product. This kind of evaluation has raised alarm for high-minded critics for prioritizing popularity or commercial value over genuine artistic value.      

JJZ: I don’t think there are fewer scholars and students who are interested fan studies in Hong Kong and Taiwan. For instance, a number of MA theses and Ph.D. dissertations discussing local or transnational Chinese-language fan cultures have been done in recent years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Some scholarly papers about Taiwanese BL culture have also been published in Chinese or Japanese by young scholars recently. Moreover, some established media scholars in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia, such as Sinophone queer scholar Fran Martin (U of Melbourne) who contributes one chapter to our book, have published influential research on queer fan cultures and androgynous star images.

Yet, one of the biggest challenges for developing Chinese-speaking fan studies is to figure out effectively ways to bring these context-specific fan studies together and encourage meaningful, productive dialogue across linguistic, sociocultural, and geopolitical differences in these Chinese-speaking regions. Moreover, most of the existing Chinese-speaking fandom research, especially that done by students, largely relies on Western and Japanese fan scholarship and theories. The question of how to challenge Western or Japanese centrism in the field and establish Chinese-speaking fan studies is what we have been trying to answer in our research projects.

You note that the accounts in your book do not fit easily into “a polarized resistance/capitulation model of fandom.” Perhaps, negotiation is a better term. In what ways are Chinese fans negotiating a space for their pleasures in relation to powerful institutions and entrenched social norms that define the current Chinese context? To what degree has the shift towards a more consumer economy made fandom a possibility in China?

 JJZ: Yes, indeed. Throughout the book, we use different case studies to demonstrate the ways queer fans work within and against dominant commercial cultures and normative social structures. China’s liberalization of its media system and the development of digital tools and cyberspace in recent years have certainly empowered Chinese media consumers to actively participate in media industries and to express certain marginalized desires and fantasies. Meanwhile, the Chinese media industries have also realized business opportunities from these participatory practices and frequently displayed images or connotations of same-sex intimacies in order to encourage fans’ queer readings.

The audience cell-phone voting feature of the show Super Girl is a good example here. The show’s viewers and fans made use of this participatory feature to support their favorite participants, some of whom later became the most successful androgynous icons in the Chinese-speaking entertainment industries. A large number of fans formed queer communities online for further explicitly voicing homoerotic fantasies about their idols manufactured in the shows, which also discursively challenged the heteronormative contour of mainstream media and cultural industries.

Yet, contemporary Chinese society is still largely defined by (neo-)patriarchy, heteronormativity, and ideological and political authoritarianism, in which LGBTQ, feminist, and politically sensitive and sexually explicit information and content remained censored from time to time. Even in cyberspace, online communities and public discussions are still under political surveillance and self-censorship. Not to mention the fact that some queer fan practices, such as fansubbing and recirculating some Western TV shows that have never been officially distributed in China, violate copyright laws. Therefore, both queer fans and celebrities with gender-nonnormative personae have had to simultaneously embrace certain queer sentiments and craftily express dissatisfactions with local social-political systems while distancing themselves with socioculturally tabooed, censored identities and positions.

For example, as discussed in some chapters, Chinese fans use exaggerated, utopian queer imaginaries of non-Chinese nations and cultures to voice their disappointment at or critique toward local societies (e.g., Chapters 4, 9, and 10).

Meanwhile, in some of my own publications, I have also revealed that to protect themselves and their idols, some Mainland Chinese queer fans also tend to silence explicit LGBTQ-related discussions in the fandoms or to awkwardly differentiate the focus of their queer fan communities from real-life homosexual and feminist identities and issues. In Hong Kong and Taiwanese queer fan communities, there have been different ways to negotiate and contest official cultures, ideologies, and regulations, some of which might be more disruptive to the heteronormative logic of mainstream media industries (e.g., Chapters 7 and 10). These negotiative, sometimes compromising, strategies, to some extent, carve out and protect spaces for queer desire-voicing. Yet, they also create hierarchies, segregations, and tensions within queer fan communities and cultures.

The term, “globalization from below,” is a compelling one. So, explain what it means to think about fandom in the terms?

LY: Thank you very much for your interest in my co-authored chapter. Yanrui and I formulate the term “globalization from below” to describe the evolvement of Chinese BL from a marginalized and clandestine fan community to a popular web genre and powerful Internet culture. We want to use the term to draw attention to those cross-border media and cultural flows that have to lay low because of their conflicts with the legal system or official ideology of the nation-state, and at the same time we aim to differentiate those grassroots, fan-led transcultural appropriations from cultural exportations driven by corporate desire for profit or soft power ambitions of the state. 

The term might advance our understanding of fandom in the non-Western world in two ways. While fandom has been widely accepted as a harmless everyday thing and is at most threatened by copyright law in the West, it could be more risky and confrontational in the non-Western world due to legal, cultural, or religious reasons. For example, Chinese BL writers have to face censorship on a daily basis and a few of them have even been arrested by police on criminal charges of disseminating pornographic materials or illegal business operation.

Just last month [December 2017], a well-known BL writer was arrested for publishing novels in print without an official publication permit. This incident has stirred up a new round of panic in BL community, as many BL writers has published their works in print in this underground fashion to satisfy fan demand for collection. To circumvent the legal restrictions, Chinese BL fans have drawn on various resources--Internet technology in particular--to build their own communities and develop a rhizomatic and transborder network of production and distribution.   

Apart from reminding us of the complex and precarious existence of some non-Western fandoms, the term “globalization from below,” might also prompt us to rethink the transnational nature and radical potential of networked fandom in the age of globalization. Despite all the restrictions and obstacles, BL fandom has survived and thrived in China, and has helped bring about some progressive social changes, including contributing to the social awareness and acceptance of nonnormative sexualities, and carving out a lively public space for women to engage in discussion of social and political topics. The success of Chinese BL owes much to its gender, genre, and cultural inclusiveness.

Like slash fandom in the West and BL fandom in Japan, Chinese BL fandom is predominantly made up by young girls and women. Yet there is a significant percentage of young male fans, both gay and straight, in Chinese BL fandom, and one of the top BL writers in China is a self-identified gay man. As a result, BL writings often overlap with gay literature in China to the extent that a number of popular gay-themed novels are categorized as both BL and gay literature.

As mentioned above, Chinese BL has been influenced by both Japanese BL and Western slash fanfic. As a genre of Internet literature, it has also borrowed extensively from other popular genres and media. In societies where political expressions and social movements are severely hampered by the state, networked fandom might well become a major platform for civic engagements and social transformations.  

You’ve organized your book around specific national contexts -- Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Given the different political and economic systems shaping each of these contexts, not to mention different forms of cultural production, does it make sense to discuss them together? What do you see as the key similarities and differences in the ways fan culture operates in each of these cultures? 

JJZ: Although being situated in rather different social-political systems, the entertainment media and pop cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have been mutually shaping and borrowing from each other for decades. For instance, the Chinese government has been trying to intervene in media policies, productions, and celebrity images, especially the ones with heavy political content (e.g., anti-cross-strait reunification), in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Nevertheless, the media and celebrity industries of these three regions have been in productive, continual conversations and collaboration. These intertwined cultural, political and ideological tensions and battles among these three regions are interestingly teased out in transcultural queer fandoms (Chapter 8) and co-produced queer media (Chapter 6).

Moreover, China was invaded by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), while Taiwan has a history of being colonized by Japan. These geopolitical discourses are also manifested in the dissimilar attitudes toward Japanese people and cultural traditions between Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese queer fandoms. As some of our contributors elaborate, while nationalistic sentiments are evident in Mainland Chinese queer fans’ imaginaries of Japan (Chapter 3), the postcolonial Taiwanese BL culture heavily draws on a Japanophilic affect (Chapter 9). Also, as a former British colony, Hong Kong’s LGBTQ movements and politics have been shaped by combined ideological, eco-political, and sociocultural factors and forces, such as traditional Chinese familial ideologies, the British colonial legacy, various religious beliefs, and Hong Kong’s contemporary social-political dilemmas as a post-colonial Special Administrative Region. These factors are also well manifested in Hong Kong lesbian celebrities’ star images and fan cultures (Chapter 7).

Both the editors and contributors have been fascinated by the diversity and productivity of queer fandoms in these regions resulting from their unique contexts. We are very excited about the scholarly dialogues that these queer fan phenomena generate and facilitate when being discussed together in the book. Therefore, we include rich discussion of queer fan communities and practices in diverse Chinese-speaking societies to highlight their interconnections, similarities, and differences in media productions, mainstream cultures, and grassroots activities.

By so doing, we hope to establish Chinese-speaking queer fandom as a promising field of scholarly inquiry and thus encourage future conversations and research that examine queer fan practices in other Chinese-speaking communities, such as cross-racial or Sinophone queer fandoms.

LY: I think one key difference between fan cultures in the three geographical contexts is the size and the role of the fandom in the media entertainment industry. Generally speaking, fandoms in Mainland China are larger and more assertive than fandoms in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It’s interesting to note that a few extremely big and well-organized Chinese fandoms have been described by the domestic media as “fan empires.” There is no media empire in China, but there are fan empires. Apparently, when the number of fans reaches a critical mass, it could drastically change the power dynamics in the relationship between the industry and consumers, and then maybe “a new day is on the horizon.”

(Ling Yang and Jamie J. Zhao are grateful to Maud Lavin for her wonderful input to this interview.)

Ling YANG is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, P. R. China. She is the author of Entertaining the Transitional Era: Super Girl Fandom and the Consumption of Popular Culture (China Social Sciences Press, 2012) and the co-editor of Fan Cultures: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2009, with TAO Dongfeng), A New Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (Beijing Normal University Press, 2011, with ZHAO Yong), Celebrity Studies: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2013, with TAO Dongfeng), and Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017, with Maud Lavin and Jing Jamie Zhao). Yang has published extensively on Chinese fan culture, BL culture, Internet literature, and young adult fiction. She is also the chief translator of Stardom: Industry of Desire (Peking University Press, 2017).

Jamie J. ZHAO is a PhD candidate in Film and TV Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She holds another PhD degree in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work examines queer-natured Chinese entertainment media, grassroots publics, and fan cultures in a digital age. Her academic writings can be found in a number of English-language journals, such as Feminist Media Studies, Intersections, Transformative Works and Cultures, Journal of Oriental Studies, The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Media Fields Journal, and MCLC. She is also a coeditor (with Prof. Maud Lavin and Dr. Ling Yang) of and a contributor to the anthology Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (HKUP, 2017). She is currently working on two English-language monograph manuscripts, tentatively titled From Super Voice Girl to The L Word: A Queer Occidentalism in Contemporary Chinese Pop Culture and A Queer Sensationalism of Post-2010 Chinese Formatted Variety TV.

Boys' Love, Cosplay and Chinese Fandom: An Interview (Part 2)

Let’s work through some core terminology here. Otaku and Cosplay are increasingly well known in the west, but may need to be defined again. Fujoshi is a less well known term. What does it refer to and what are its implications in terms of attitudes towards fan women?

LY: Fujoshi is a term originated in Japan. Midori Suzuki has published an English article  that traces the origins of the term. It first appeared on 2chanel, a massive Japanese Internet forum around 2000 to refer to girls or women who have a “rotten” mindset and would read everything in a yaoi fashion. Since the word fujoshi is written in kanji characters, it was quickly adopted by Chinese BL fans. The term seems to be more accurate than the earlier moniker for female BL fans, tongrennü, literally meaning girls and women who are interested in fan works, because many BL readers are actually more interested in original BL works than derivative BL fan works. With its increased occurrences in mass and new media, fujoshi was officially acknowledged as a “new Chinese word” created between 2004-2006 by experts who work for the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center in China. The word currently refers to all female fans of male-male romantic stories.

While the word fujoshi is a self-deprecating label that involves a certain sense of shame in Japan, it often evokes pride, empowerment, and joyful defiance in the Chinese context. Similar to “gay pride,” some female BL fans have also cultivated “fujoshi pride” and turned a shameful label into something self-affirming. It is not unusual to hear the older generation of fujoshi complain on the Internet that young fujoshi today are too flashy and that they want the whole world to know that they are fujoshi. For those young fan girls, to claim the identity of fujoshi is to claim authority on forbidden sexual knowledge, to rebel against conventional gender roles, and to be a sophisticated, well-informed cosmopolitan, as BL is connected to fan cultures in both Japan and the West.     

Ting Liu published one of the first English articles on Chinese BL in 2009. She observes that Chinese media coverage of BL and fujoshi from 2001 to 2008 is quite ambivalent, oscillating between praising BL’s positive impact on gender equality and denouncing its corrupting influence on minors. The image of fujoshi also alternated between radicals and perverts.

Over the past decade, I personally feel that fujoshi has been treated with more respect and tolerance in mainstream media, partly because the media has been infiltrated by fujoshi journalists, and partly because fujoshi has become a remarkable economic force that the media entertainment industry is eager to court and exploit. Consequently, queer baiting in popular cultural production has become a wide concern in Chinese BL community and the subject of a number of journal articles. The coverage of Chinese fujoshi in foreign media, for instance, the media hype of Chinese fujoshi’s obsession with the gay subtext in BBC’s Sherlock around 2014, has also contributed to their visibility at home.

Break down the term, “Androgynous Idols”, for us, starting with idols. How might we distinguish Idols in the Chinese-language world from celebrities or pop stars as we understand them in the west? What forms does their androgyny take and how central are these gender identities to the ways such Idols are packaged and sold to their consumers?

JJZ: The Chinese translation of the English word “idol” is ou xiang, which means “copy-image.” As Taiwan Studies scholar Teri Silvio noticed, the practices of idol worship and idolizing public figures and media characters rising along the capitalist and consumer economies in East Asian China can be linked to local religious rituals that has been prevalent since the 17th century. There are many kinds of idols in contemporary Chinese-speaking societies, including but not limited to film and TV stars who rise to stardom for their roles in entertainment media, self-made (DIY) stars online who have large cyber fan bases for digitized self-representation and performances, grassroots celebrities manufactured through performances in reality TV, and public figures who became famous for their achievements and virtues, or unique styles/personality, or economic power and social-political statuses.

There are many similarities in the contemporary pop cultural discourses surrounding “idol” between Chinese-speaking societies and the West. Yet, the rise of grassroots celebrity culture, the trend of manufacturing stars and idolizing ordinary people in Chinese-speaking contexts are not new phenomena. In particular, in Maoist China, there were political and patriotic idols that were iconized through media propaganda. In a sense, the construction of stardom in Chinese-speaking societies has always been closely intertwined with context-specific political and ideological progress and related discourses. Star images and celebrity personas have long been loaded with complex social-political meanings and often become battlegrounds for cutting-edge sociocultural debates. For example, media commentaries and public debates surrounding the gender-nonnormative stars manufactured by a series of Chinese-version Idol shows quite often concentrate on discussions about feminism, individuality, and cosmopolitanism, all of which characterize today’s Chinese-speaking public cultures and market logic. In today’s Hong Kong and Taiwanese media industries, many idols have had to carefully and craftily frame their political stances toward the Chinese government in order to “survive” in the Mainland entertainment industry or to please their Mainland fans and media consumers. 

While our book title uses the term “androgynous idols,” androgyny, in fact, is a gendered continuum instead of one rigid gender identity category. In today’s Chinese-language pop culture, there has been a term used to describe a similar yet more complex gender-nonnormative state—zhongxing (neutral gender/sex). In both queer pop cultural and fannish discourses, this Chinese term has been constantly used to negotiate queer and normative identities. It refers to a kind of unique, gendered style that can manifest in the stars’ performances, personality, and fashion senses. It is also possible to construct the zhongxing celebrity persona through the industries’ intentional blurring of the boundaries between same-sex intimacies (homoeroticism) and same-sex friendship (homosociality) of stars.

One of our contributors, Eva Li, has dedicated some of her major works to exploring the zhongxing style in Hong Kong pop culture. Meanwhile, there were numerous reality singing competition shows in Mainland China and Taiwan that exploited the zhongxing style of their participants to attract audience attention and make profits. For instance, in Ling’s, Maud’s, and my own publications on the Mainland reality show Super Girl, we explored the great number of visibly masculine female finalists of the show since 2005. These gender-nonnormative participants usually wore spiky hair, loose jeans, and large-size T-shirts. Their public personas were often characterized by normatively defined masculine or defeminized qualities, such as straightforwardness, innocence, intellect, and toughness. These qualities associated with the zhongxing style often help them accumulate more fans, both heterosexual and lesbian ones. Yet, after the end of the shows, some of the zhongxing idols went back to their “normal,” feminine gender style. A few even publicly admitted that they were asked by the show’s producers and directors to deliberately perform “androgynous” or “zhongxing” on stage. Some, though, continue to personify a zhongxing style—and we explore facets of this, too.

In particular, in some chapters of our book (e.g., Chapter 7), the term zhongxing and its social and political implications in Hong Kong are discussed in depth. Yet, here I would like to add that the zhongxing pop culture cannot be understood or generalized as a Chinese-speaking queer framework that can transgress the geocultural boundaries of diverse Chinese-speaking societies. For example, in Mainland Chinese industries, the term seems to have different meanings and implications when being used to denote androgynous idols. In my forthcoming publication in the journal of Celebrity Studies, I argue that when using zhongxing to describe Hong Kong and Taiwanese androgynous female celebrities in mainstream media and fandom, it implicates a close association of these Hong Kong and Taiwanese idols’ gender and sexual identities with female homosexuality, as, for example, in the cases of the Hong Kong zhongxing singer Denise Ho Wan-see who came out as lesbian in 2012, and Jin Dai, the famous 2007 zhongxing contestant in the Taiwanese reality singing competition show, One Million Star, who self-identifies as a T/tomboy (young, masculine lesbian). 
 

Though, zhongxing carries less stigmatized meanings than lesbianism or butchness does in Hong Kong and Taiwanese contexts. Many Hong Kong and Taiwanese zhongxing celebrities acknowledged that their “androgynous” personas aim to attract a wider range of fans, including those self-identified lesbian and gay fans. Yet, the zhongxing style of androgynous idols in Mainland China, such as the 2006 Super Girl contestants Liu Liyang, Xu Fei, and Fu Jing who were rumored to be butch lesbians, is a strategy sometimes deployed to “cover up” the potential non-heterosexual identities of these stars while packaging (or “arbitrarily explaining”) their gender nonnormativity as a form of fashion or star quality. In other words, the homosexual undertone of this style is mostly silenced, if not completely erased, in this discourse.

Jin Dai

Denise Ho Wan-see

LY: One way to distinguish idols in the Chinese-speaking world from celebrities or pop stars in the West is to look at their relationships with fans. Chinese idols, especially those who gain their fame through fan voting in reality talents shows or fan promotion, tend to have a strong symbiotic relationship with their fans. Some Chinese fans like to imagine their idols as talented but vulnerable children who need steadfast nurturing from fan-parents. Like hardworking Chinese parents, those fans would do all they can to support their idols and take great pride in their idols’ success. Because of their extensive involvement in idols’ career, fans often run into conflict with the idol managers. Such conflicts often make headlines in Chinese entertainment news. 

Finally, talk a bit about “boys’ love”. How does it relate to, say, slash fan fiction as we know it in the west or for that matter, the Japanese traditions around similar themes? The Chinese world seems situated alongside popular culture influences from the west (especially the United States and the United Kingdom), Japan, and Korea. To what degree are fans absorbing these traditions and to what degree are they reworking them in ways that are specific to the Chinese speaking world?

LY: Thank you for this great question. This is an issue my research partner and co-author Yanrui Xu and I have been working on recently. We have contributed a conference paper on the impact of slash fanfic on original Chinese BL fiction to Queer Transfigurations: International Symposium on Boys Love Media in Asia organized by James Welker. In this paper we argue that Chinese BL has functioned as a productive contact zone where Japanese BL and Western slash fanfic interact. Chinese fans have appropriated useful elements from both genres and creatively mixed them to suit the needs of local readers. 

Briefly speaking, there are two major differences between BL and slash fanfic. First, in BL one partner is assigned the role of seme (top), the other, uke (bottom), and the roles are usually fixed. This top/bottom trope, however, is less prevalent in slash fanfic. Second, BL tends to portray the relationship between a strong and dominant seme and a weak and submissive uke, whereas slash fanfic often favors the relationship between two equally strong men.

Chinese BL used to be heavily influenced by Japanese BL during its early stage of development, that is, between late 1990s and the first half of 2000s. Early original BL stories often feature the combination of a strong seme and a weak uke and use rape as a common plot device. Later, influenced by the relationship pattern in slash writings, the strong-seme-with-strong-uke pairing has gradually become the mainstream coupling pattern in original BL works, and non-consensual sex scenes have also become less common. It is even impossible for readers to distinguish the seme from the uke in some works. For instance, in Running Wild (Saye), one of the most popular BL novels in 2017, the two male protagonists are equally tough and rebellious young men and they constantly switch sex roles in their lovemaking. Chinese BL writers have also borrowed some news tropes from slash fanfic, most notably the Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics, or A/B/O in short. The A/B/O universe has offered Chinese BL writers and readers a unique angle to reflect on women’s experience under patriarchy and to explore ways to create an equal society in the face of irreducible sex/gender differences.

Of course, it would be too simplistic to claim that the generic evolution of Chinese BL is all caused by cultural influences from abroad. The blurring distinction between seme and uke, for instance, is also a result of Chinese government’s anti-porn campaigns. Due to tightening control of the Internet and the economic imperative to stretch their works as much as possible, many commercial BL writers would rather focus on the development of plot than the relationship between the two male protagonists. As the narrative function of the seme/uke trope diminishes, the seme/uke coupling pattern also becomes less distinct, especially in works set in the modern world.

Yanrui and I are currently working towards a paper for the Crossroads 2018 cultural studies conference on transcultural and translated feminism in the global queer fandom of BBC’s Sherlock. We want to examine how Chinese fans translate English-language Sherlock slash fics into Chinese, how they discuss those translated works in specific online fan communities, and how they create their own Sherlock fanfics that speak to local cultural contexts and concerns. Hope this case study, once finished, can address your questions in more detail.

Chinese response to western media sometimes makes the news here, and you have some examples here, but it is also important for us to better understand what forms of Chinese popular media are inspiring fannish responses.

LY: The 2005 Super Girl show, an Idol-format reality talent show that witnessed the androgynous idol Li Yuchun’s rise to super stardom (see Maud Lavin’s chapter in our book), is a kind of turning point in Chinese media entertainment industry. Since then, domestically-produced media content has started to rival Japanese ACG (anime, comics, and games), the Korean Wave, and Hollywood in its capacity to inspire fannish responses. Internet literature for one has gained a huge following in China.

According to the statistics released by China Internet Network Information Center in 2017, China currently has 330 million Internet literature readers. This readership is larger than the total population of the United States. Similar to the Harry Potter phenomenon, a number of popular Internet novels have grown into profitable media franchises that encompass books, films, television series, comics, games, stage shows, merchandising, and theme parks because of strong fan support.

I’d like to mention one interesting example here, The Graver Robbers’ Chronicles (Daomu biji) by Nanpai Sanshu. A modern adventure thriller that first appeared on the Internet in 2006, this series is a favorite among Chinese fujoshi and has inspired numerous BL-style fan works. Starting from 2015, dedicated fans of the series, nicknamed “Rice” (daomi), have organized an annual Rice Festival on August 17, the date when the two male protagonists reunite in the novel after a decade-long separation. The festival is held at Changbai Mountain, the place of the reunion in the novel. The festival soon gained approval from Nanpai Sanshu’s company and was warmly welcomed by the local government of Changbai Mountain as a way to promote tourism through cultural activities.

Web television shows, another realm of cultural production related to the Internet, have also become increasingly popular among younger generations of viewers. We mentioned in our introduction the wild success of the web series Go Princess Go in 2015 and Addicted in 2016. In 2017, The Rap of China, a reality talent show produced by and broadcast on iQiyi, the leading online video portal, has converted many young audience members into hip hop fans. Besides, social media platforms like Sina Weibo and live streaming websites and apps in China have generated a legion of micro celebrities, so-called “wanghong” or “Internet Celebrities” in Chinese. Papi Jiang, “The No. 1 Internet Celebrity" in China in 2016, has over 260 million followers on her Weibo account. A film director by training, Papi Jiang earned her fame through uploading funny short videos on the Internet. Her first live broadcast in July 2016 was supported by eight major live streaming websites and attracted more than 74 million views in one day.

JJZ: I would like to add that, the relatively, although intermittently, loosened, less repressive censorship system of online TV broadcasting and live streaming in China might have also encouraged the formation of fan communities, especially the ones with queer foci. There have been many online TV dramas, talk shows, and variety programs, especially in the post-2010 years, that either explicitly portray (or speak to) lesbian and gay groups, such as the gay-themed TV show Addicted, or feature openly LGBTQ celebrities, such as the online talk show You Can You Bibi. Moreover, many cyber celebrities also incorporate cosplaying into their daily live-streaming activities. As some of our book chapters point out (Chapter 2), cosplay itself is a very queer fan-based practice that often involves cross-dressing impersonations. 

Ling YANG is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, P. R. China. She is the author of Entertaining the Transitional Era: Super Girl Fandom and the Consumption of Popular Culture (China Social Sciences Press, 2012) and the co-editor of Fan Cultures: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2009, with TAO Dongfeng), A New Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (Beijing Normal University Press, 2011, with ZHAO Yong), Celebrity Studies: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2013, with TAO Dongfeng), and Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017, with Maud Lavin and Jing Jamie Zhao). Yang has published extensively on Chinese fan culture, BL culture, Internet literature, and young adult fiction. She is also the chief translator of Stardom: Industry of Desire (Peking University Press, 2017).

Jamie J. ZHAO is a PhD candidate in Film and TV Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She holds another PhD degree in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work examines queer-natured Chinese entertainment media, grassroots publics, and fan cultures in a digital age. Her academic writings can be found in a number of English-language journals, such as Feminist Media Studies, Intersections, Transformative Works and Cultures, Journal of Oriental Studies, The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Media Fields Journal, and MCLC. She is also a coeditor (with Prof. Maud Lavin and Dr. Ling Yang) of and a contributor to the anthology Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (HKUP, 2017). She is currently working on two English-language monograph manuscripts, tentatively titled From Super Voice Girl to The L Word: A Queer Occidentalism in Contemporary Chinese Pop Culture and A Queer Sensationalism of Post-2010 Chinese Formatted Variety TV.

Boys' Love, Cosplay and Chinese Fandom: An Interview

Throughout this academic year, I am trying to return this blog to its roots, showcasing emerging research in fandom studies, as the release of a significant number of new anthologies reflects the emergence of a new generation of scholars pushing our thinking in exciting new directions. Among a number of trends, this research is much more transnational than ever before as more translation is occurring across languages in this field. I know most of my own key works on fandom have now been translated for the Chinese market, and I am hearing from more emerging scholars there. 

Over the next few installments, I will be featuring an extended interview with Ling Yang and Jamie J. Zhao, the editors, with Maud Lavin, of Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017). They visited me at USC last fall, sharing the book as a gift, and I was so excited by what I read that I proposed this interview. Here, they offer an overview of how fandom fits into broader changes in Chinese culture, the specific forms that media fandom takes in different Chinese cultures, and the state of fandom studies in the region. I am certain that this exchange will be of interest to fandom scholars, not to mention fans, around the world.

Your opening sentence sets the stage for the book’s argument, “Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age.” How so? What factors have contributed to this change? What roles have digitization and globalization played in this process?

Ling Yang: As we have demonstrated in this book, there has been a proliferation of unconventional, non-heterosexual images, narratives, fantasies, and desires in Chinese-speaking popular cultures in the past two decades or so. As a person who works in the field of literary studies, I am often amazed by the tremendous amount of queer expressions in Chinese popular literary production in the new millennium.

Few canonical Chinese writers in the 20th century had ever dealt with queer sentiments or desires. Yet homosociality and same-sex attraction has become a prominent theme in contemporary popular literature that is produced by and for the younger generations. This kind of queer cultural production and consumption didn’t happen all at once. Some burst onto the scene by chance, like the androgynous idol Li Yuchun who took the Super Girl reality television show by surprise in 2005. Others, such as Boys’ Love (BL), or danmei, as it is commonly known in the Chinese-speaking world, has gradually made inroads into mainstream culture through decade-long expansion. This volume intends to offer a glimpse of this growing trend in the Chinese-speaking world and pull some of the related cultural issues together.

As implied in your question, digitization and globalization have been two of the key players in this process and they converge and contribute to each other. The development of the Internet, mobile technology, and social media have greatly facilitated cultural flows to bypass legal restrictions and freely cross national and linguistic boundaries. In China, for example, the distribution of foreign cultural products is all subject to government regulations and censorship. Without grassroots distribution of transnational cultural content on the Internet, it would be impossible for Chinese youth to access queer media products from overseas.

The Internet has also facilitated the building of fan communities and the emergence of new glocalized and hybridized expressions. For instance, early online Chinese BL forums were established to share Taiwanese BL stories and translated Japanese BL manga and novels. It is through consuming and imitating these cross-border BL works that Chinese BL fans learned the trick of the genre and embarked on creating their own stories.

Today, original Chinese BL novels and their spinoffs have won followers from all over the world. The low-budget, based-on-a-novel BL drama Addicted, briefly mentioned in our book’s introduction, is even one of the highest-rating Chinese dramas on the multi-lingual video streaming website Viki.com. 

The human flows brought by globalization has also been instrumental in the diffusion of queer popular cultures in the Chinese-speaking world. Chinese students who study abroad usually continue to engage with their fan communities back home and make use of their access to information outside the Great Firewall to bring new ideas back to China. Those overseas fans are particularly useful in Chinese slash fandoms of Western media, as they are more skillful at reading the gay subtext of Western shows and could translate Western fans’ reading on Tumblr or Twitter into Chinese. The rapid growth of slash fandom in China owes much to those fan cultural brokers.

Another factor I’d like to mention is the LGBTQ movement. The development of queer popular culture in the Chinese-speaking world cannot be separated from the local and global LGBTQ movement. While progress made by the movement in the real world, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S. and Taiwan, has often been discussed in queer fan communities and bestowed more legitimacy on the production and consumption of queer fantasies, the iteration of queer fantasy has also enabled thinking outside the heterosexual matrix and fostered more acceptance of nonnormative sexuality.   

To what degree does this popular culture (and the fandoms that have grown up around it) contribute to shifts in social attitudes towards homosexuality in the Chinese-speaking world?

Jamie J. Zhao: Today’s Chinese-speaking queer pop culture and fandoms have very close yet extremely complicated relationships with the globalization, glocalization, and translinguistic and geoculturally crossing travelings of sex knowledge related to homosexuality. We actually used parts of the book’s introduction to explain the intricate connections between Chinese-speaking queer fan practices and the information flows within and about inter-Asian and global LGBTQ politics, subcultures, and movements.

For example, the English word “gay” was imported to Hong Kong in the 1970s and was later creatively reinvented and widely used in other Chinese-speaking societies. The commonly used term, “ji,” in Chinese-speaking BL fandoms to refer to queer reading positions or homosocial relationships, in fact, derived from the Cantonese (HONG KONG) transliteration of the English word “gay.”

We can also see a lot of “Chinglish” or “Sinophone” LGBT-related words being frequently used in today’s Chinese-speaking fan cultures, such as “zhai” and “fu,” which were appropriated from Japanese BL/GL fan cultures, and “les” or “lala” or “T,” which were “mutated” from the English terms “lesbian” and “tomboy.”

In addition, as some chapters in our book show, mainstream industries have been carefully tantalizing the audience’s queer desire by adding queer-loaded content in TV dramas or variety TV shows. Indeed, mainstream media practitioners, celebrities/performers, and media consumers and fans have either explicitly or implicitly explored LGBTQ cultures in these processes.

Yet, the flourishing of this pop culture does not necessarily indicate an enhanced public visibility or “acceptance” (or even “tolerance,” which might sound a bit like speaking from a heteronormative position) of LGBTQ communities in local societies and mainstream cultures. It also does not evidence a homosexuality-centered cultural imperialism or cultural homogenization. Instead, similar to the non-confrontational relationship between Chinese-speaking LGBTQ cultures and dominant, largely heteronormative societies, this queer-natured pop culture has always been in negotiation with mainstream capitalist logics and social-political powers on both local and global levels.

For one thing, while the scientific knowledge surrounding the term “homosexuality” and other related concepts and identity politics, such as “gayness” and “lesbianism,” was certainly imported from the West, there has been abundant evidence showing the wide existence of same-sex homoerotic and homosocial intimacies in traditional Chinese culture, even within heterosexual, polygamous familial-marital relationships during imperial China or in the gender-erasing, seemingly desexualizing period of the Cultural Revolution era of Modern China

 Although our book mainly focuses on the burgeoning digital (or cyber) Chinese-language queer fandoms, it should be noted here that in premodern and modern Chinese-speaking societies, literary and theatrical portrayals or connotations of same-sex homoeroticism and androgynous personas were quite common. The queer fan cultures rising along with these media representations back then were definitely not rare.

In this sense, there was a long tradition of queer culture and fan practices in Chinese-speaking societies before the rise of the Internet, yet I would not valorize this local tradition as a “homosexuality-friendly” or “queer-supportive” one either. More often than not, these queer cultures were highly class-based and the fans involved often belonged to the elitist groups. These same-sex fannish fantasies were certainly not labeled as homosexual but as “sentiments” or forms of artistic appreciation. They were “tolerated” or “ignored” by mainstream society and its heteropatriarchal familial system as long as the fantasies and intimacies did not disrupt dominant heteronormative structures at the time.

For another, during an era of new media and globalization, as some of the case studies in our book showcase, Chinese-speaking fans have been enabled to actively translate, revise, and recirculate Japanese and Western LGBT-themed media.

Moreover, there have been more and more Chinese-speaking androgynous celebrities manufactured in film, TV, and music industries, as well as a growing number of entertainment media texts that are queer in tone. In the meantime, homosexuality has been gradually depathologized and decriminalized in Chinese-speaking societies since the late 1990s. LGBT film festivals and gay parades have been held in major cities, while same-sex marriage has also become a possibility for some Chinese-speaking people. 

Against this backdrop, some of the Chinese-speaking androgynous celebrities are also brave enough to publicly come out and stand up for LGBTQ and feminist movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I do not deny the fact that many LGBTQ-identified fans of these celebrities (and of queer media in general) have been encouraged by this phenomenon and have found their own social networking, emotional support, and desire-voicing spaces through these processes. Nevertheless, we can also see many media productions use stereotypical representations of LGBTQ people as effective ways to draw public attention and create public gimmick. Same-sex intimate behaviors and androgynous personas have also often been performed in public by heterosexual-identified celebrities for entertaining their fans. Similar practices can be found in K-pop as a fairly common element in what is referred to as “fan service.”

This commercialization and fetishization of queer images in Chinese-speaking media industries, on the one hand, seem to imply a relatively friendly gesture of mainstream public cultures toward homosexuality. On the other, it also points to an intentional “depoliticizing” and “fictionalization” of LGBTQ-related images and performances as pure amusement. The struggles, pains, and difficulties faced by LGBTQ people within a heteronormative society are rendered even more invisible. Even within queer fan communities, some fans tend to differentiate queer fantasies (which is believed to be fictional role-playing) from homosexuality (a form of nonfictional sexual identification that carries derogatory meanings in mainstream society).

I agree there has been a greater degree of social awareness and acceptance toward homosexuality in Chinese-speaking societies, though to varying degrees. The rise of Chinese-speaking queer pop culture and fandoms, facilitated by the wide use of the Internet and digital media, and these relatively improved sociocultural situations for the survival of LGBTQ people have been mutually shaping each other.

Nevertheless, I would caution against a hasty galvanization of the general public’s attitude toward homosexuality as friendly. In some of my journal publications, I have termed this pop culture that proliferates queer representations yet differentiates itself from LGBTQ identity politics and realities in Mainland China as a form of “queer sensationalism.”

LY: Peiti Wang of National Central University in Taiwan did an online survey in December 2016 about BL fans’ reaction to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. She collected a total of 4,050 responses and found out that over 90% of BL fans support same-sex marriage. In comparison, only 54.2% of Taiwanese citizens are in favor of same-sex marriage according to the results of 2015 Taiwan Social Change Survey conducted by Academia Sinica. Some smaller surveys conducted in Mainland China have produced similar findings. For example, in a survey of 240 female undergraduate students of Yangzhou University conducted by Dai Fei in 2013, 77.9% of the 86 self-identified fujoshi (female BL fans) accept homosexuality, whereas merely 5.2% of the 115 non-fujoshi share the same attitude.

There have been debates about who are true fujoshi and who are fake ones within Chinese BL community. The true fujoshi must meet two criteria. First instead of valorizing male homosexuality in the fantasy world, they must also accept real-world gay men. Second, apart from BL, they must also tolerate Girls’ Love (GL), or femslash, and accept real-world gay women. However, fan attitudes towards homosexuality vary from fandom to fandom. Surveys about queer celebrity fandoms have yielded less optimistic results. We may need to discuss this issue case by case. 

Ling YANG is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, P. R. China. She is the author of Entertaining the Transitional Era: Super Girl Fandom and the Consumption of Popular Culture (China Social Sciences Press, 2012) and the co-editor of Fan Cultures: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2009, with TAO Dongfeng), A New Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (Beijing Normal University Press, 2011, with ZHAO Yong), Celebrity Studies: A Reader (Peking University Press, 2013, with TAO Dongfeng), and Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017, with Maud Lavin and Jing Jamie Zhao). Yang has published extensively on Chinese fan culture, BL culture, Internet literature, and young adult fiction. She is also the chief translator of Stardom: Industry of Desire (Peking University Press, 2017).

Jamie J. ZHAO is a PhD candidate in Film and TV Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She holds another PhD degree in Gender Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work examines queer-natured Chinese entertainment media, grassroots publics, and fan cultures in a digital age. Her academic writings can be found in a number of English-language journals, such as Feminist Media Studies, Intersections, Transformative Works and Cultures, Journal of Oriental Studies, The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Media Fields Journal, and MCLC. She is also a coeditor (with Prof. Maud Lavin and Dr. Ling Yang) of and a contributor to the anthology Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (HKUP, 2017). She is currently working on two English-language monograph manuscripts, tentatively titled From Super Voice Girl to The L Word: A Queer Occidentalism in Contemporary Chinese Pop Culture and A Queer Sensationalism of Post-2010 Chinese Formatted Variety TV.

Millenials, New Media, and Social Change (Part Three)

Are they worried about concepts such as their privacy?

It's a bit of a myth that this current generation doesn't care about privacy. Most contemporary research in the U.S. indicates quite the opposite - that young people are deeply concerned about privacy and control over information, but they don't always understand the mechanisms by which their privacy is being violated and they don't often feel that they have any means of altering trends in the society, which are leading toward a surveillance state on the case of the government and increased encroachment of businesses into their personal data sets online. They've come of age in a world of data mining and a post-9/11 society, and the two combined creates a kind of fatalistic sense that whatever concerns they have about privacy, they are going to be overridden by institutions much more powerful than they are. But for many of them, Edward Snowden is a hero.

I think one of the reasons young people's relationship to privacy is so often misunderstood is that they draw lines in different places. I don't think that we can think about privacy without also thinking about publicity. We can't think about information we exclude from public circulation without thinking about information we disclose, and the politics of disclosure has been central to many of the political movements over the last thirty or forty years. If we think about feminism and the slogan "The Personal is Political," the consciousness raising sessions of the 1960s were precisely moments when women spoke out about issues that had been locked away behind closed doors for so long - they talked about domestic violence, they talked about inequality of pay, they talked about sexual harassment in the workplace, they talked about reproductive rights,  and these issues were ones that made many people uncomfortable when they were first addressed in public, but were central to political agendas over the last several decades. The same would be true of the modern LGBTQ movement, with its "Silence Equals Death" slogan, and the idea of coming out of the closet about one's sexuality. Again this was about violating things people once felt should remain private, and insisting that they were public matters that should be discussed so that we could share collective experiences and form common cause around the process of social change.

So, young people today are simply embracing different notions of sharing, different ideas about what kinds of information can be discussed in public and why. They're more likely to disclose health related information, for example, as they seek out online communities of patients who are speaking behind the backs of their doctors and trying to identify and pursue their shared interest in the face of an increasingly bureaucratized and impersonal medical system. They're likely to be more open about transgender issues than their parents had been, and indeed are much more accepting of the idea of more gender fluidity in the restroom, an issue that seems to be a dividing line between the generations in the United States at the moment. So, publicity is part of the politics of privacy as they understand it. Privacy is not an absolute - no one wants to remain private to the point that they are invisible in a networked society. Rather, as danah boyd has noted, privacy is about control over information, knowing what information you're releasing, to whom, and under what circumstances. Being able to dictate the terms in which your information is used is central to the way this generation understands privacy. We might think of it as a transactional model. And so privacy in this case comes hand in hand with transparency, full disclosure - which groups are tapping our information, for what purposes, and what they're doing with it - and privacy comes hand in hand with mechanisms of control. They want opt-in systems, systems where they have to actively choose what information to disclose, rather than opt-out systems where if they don't know that their information is being tapped, they can be exploited without regulation. So that's where I think the issue of privacy has been going in recent years and why it is so central to understanding the millennial generation.

They appear to be a generation that uses and takes part actively in digital networks, but:  What do they think about intellectual property?

The first thing I think one has to recognize about the millennial generation is that they've come of age with an expectation of meaningful participation. I often talk in my work about participatory culture - by which I mean the culmination of several hundred-plus years of struggles for everyday people to gain greater access to the means of cultural production and circulation. In a participatory culture, people create media, tell stories, and produce culture together for the purposes of expressing their personal and shared interest. The line starts to blur between commercial media producers and so-called amateur media producers, and indeed as Yochai Benkler notes, a fully participatory culture has many layers of cultural production, including government, education, activism, religion, and various non-profit and semi-commercial producers. We're seeing some fluidity of young people who may start out as fans or gamers producing amateur content and increasingly becoming YouTube stars as part of this process that David Craig and Stuart Cunningham are calling community-based entertainment.

Young people have been central to the struggles for a more participatory culture, and they tend to see connections across issues such as net neutrality, copyright control, media literacy education, and surveillance by both corporate and governmental powers as all part of a larger struggle over the terms of their participation. We see different attitudes emerge among those who have become media producers and circulators of digital content and those who have not. They certainly are aware of a kind of double standard where corporations are expecting them to be restrained in their use of commercially owned intellectual property, and yet young people's cultural output is rarely understood as intellectual property, but, much more likely to be read as user-generated content, is often freely used by corporations in the service of their own ends. So as they are starting to assert their identity as producers, they want to opt into some form of system that protects their rights over the things that they create.

That said, they also have moved into a kind of folk economy where it is expected, as media properties circulate across the internet, that people will modify them, remix them, appropriate them and build on them in a variety of ways. It's a highly collaborative culture. It's a culture where one subcultural group's media properties can quickly be adapted for other purposes. Memes operate as a kind of shared language, where the same image gets recaptioned and recirculated many times for many different purposes and can often go back and forth across ideological divides in the course of its lifetime. They recognize as artists the need to build on a larger cultural reservoir. So I think copyright is understood as a much more fluid system for these millennials because of the forms of cultural production and consumption they've been part of, and this often frustrates or confuses corporate rights holders who want to be ever more expansive in the ways they regulate what people do with their IP.

We could look, for example, at struggles over fan filmmakers in the Star Trek community, where fans there are acutely aware of the economic value they generate for media producers and see their cultural output primarily as publicity rather than as infringement. Fan filmmakers for thirty years have made amateur Star Trek films with varying degrees of visibility, and only recently has the studio sought to regulate what kind of fan films might be produced and how they might be distributed. They were pushed to do so by the case of Axanar, a fan-made film which was highly professional in its technical qualities, which told an original story set in the Star Trek universe, and which was funded through crowdfunding via Kickstarter. Axanar becomes an issue when the amount of money being raised by fan media makers exceeds anyone's understanding of what the budget of an amateur film might look like. Axanar becomes the test case for a blurring of the lines between amateur, semi-professional, and professional media production.

So it's not that young people don't value the creativity behind intellectual property, it's simply that they have a different model of creativity than has governed the industry over the last few generations. Their assumption is that creativity is fueled by what we borrow from other artists, that appropriation is not exploitation, that appropriation is simply a natural part of the creative process, and that we need ways that we can build on each other’s work. I particularly note that if politics among the millennial generation of activists is shaped by a civic imagination informed by popular culture, then the right to appropriate symbols, characters, narratives from mass media and deploy them for political purposes is a fundamental free speech issue. Struggles over intellectual property and copyright control by corporations are completely bound up with struggles over censorship by government as it's understood by this generation.

Millennials' attitudes to copyright are also shaped by a strong sense of ethics having to do with sharing information and resources within a community. A networked society is one where people count on each other to be there to provide the information they need on an ad hoc or just-in-time basis, and things that block the flow of information, that block the exchange of resources within the community are seen in much more negative terms than might have been seen by a generation that saw all of this as more privatized, as more exclusive.

Secondly, it's shaped by a sense that they generate revenue, visibility, and support through other means beyond that of their purchasing power. Young millennials often feel like they don't yet have the fluid capital to be able to buy into the consumer system, but because of their social skills and their understanding of how networks operate, they both provide data to corporations that drive future design decisions, and they provide visibility for corporate products among their peers, which increase the circulation of that material. So, it's a different understanding of the economic value they bring to the relationship that I think is fundamental to the ways they are thinking about copyright.

A third factor is they often feel a much closer relationship to artists and have a common cause against corporate right holders, so as more and more artists go independent, as more and more artists directly court their fan base through what Nancy Baym calls "relational labor," or relationship-building labor, the alignment is with the artist and there is a growing sense that the middlemen merely get in the way. So it's not that they wouldn't support artists producing music, it's that they don't want the heavy tax on their income necessary to sustain the entire bureaucratic and corporate infrastructure that supported the music industry up until this point in time. So it's a different way of understanding how artists might relate to their public that drives a lot of millennial thinking about copyright.

In your frequent travels: Have you observed any noteworthy differences in attitudes across different cultures?

Most of my comments here have been focused on American youth. This is not because I don't care about global dimensions of youth culture, but because I'm reluctant as an American to make generalizations about other people’s cultures. Most of my own research has been US-centric, because that's where the funding from various foundations and other supporting institutions has come from, but in recent years, as you note, I've been traveling more and more around the world trying to engage with conversations about the forms participatory culture is taking elsewhere.

A big step in that direction occurred last summer, when I spent three weeks at the Salzburg Academy for Global and Media Change. The Salzburg Academy brings together young people from roughly thirty different countries around the world for three weeks of intensive focus on media literacy and civic change issues. We lived together, we worked together and we created media together all living in a schloss in Salzburg - and it was a profoundly moving experience for me and the other faculty that participated. We were of course dealing for the most part with the digital elites from those countries, people who had the financial resources to send their children to Salzburg for the summer, and it's worth keeping that in mind, but what was striking was the enormous fluidity with which these young people could instantly form relationships with each other, find common ground, discover shared culture and begin working together. Certainly, they brought some historic conflicts with them to the space, but they also brought with them a sense of a global youth culture that provided the frame of reference for the work that they were doing. In that context, the kinds of work my team was conducting around the civic imagination resonated particularly strongly, and there were moments of sheer transcendence. Sangita Shresthova, my research director, did a workshop on Bollywood dance, and watching students from the Middle East, from Latin America, from Europe, from Africa, dance to the beats of Hindi music was particularly powerful - the sense that the body transcended a lot of the borders that we try to erect around it.

Indeed, the focus this summer was on refugee and migration issues and it was striking how many of the young people were simply hostile to the very notion of fixed borders and boundaries, insistent that the freedom to travel from place to place was a fundamental right for the twenty-first century. And I think this may have been shaped by the degree to which they've come of age with a communication system which made it relatively easy to communicate with people elsewhere around the world. Within their social networks, they already had friends in other countries, already had regular contact with people outside of their own environment. They'd come of age consuming popular culture, not necessarily within national boundaries - so they grew up watching Bollywood movies, consuming anime and manga, dancing to K-Pop, watching telenovelas, and so forth. This is what I call pop cosmopolitanism, the idea that if previous generations turned towards art or music to escape the parochialism of their own culture, young people today are more likely to turn towards popular media to serve those functions, and for a variety of reasons popular media from other parts of the world is simply more readily available than it was before, whether it is music, comics, or television. These are not young people seeking out art movies, but they're young people watching transnational media content as a taken-for-granted part of their generational experience.

At the same time, I was struck by the sense that people in that space felt unequal entitlement to the resources of popular culture. There was a young woman from Argentina who felt that Argentina didn't produce popular culture, that it had folk culture and high culture but that the popular culture was culture imposed on it from outside, that popular culture was American, and that they had to define their identity in opposition to American mass media in order to gain a sense of what it was to be Argentinian. I also was struck by different degrees of hope or optimism among this generation. Many of the young people from the Middle East struggled with how to maintain any hope for political change, having had their expectations raised through the Arab Spring movements, and then dashed by the failure of most of those movements to bring about real democracy and real cultural and economic shifts within their borders. So I saw people there struggling with how they could become part of the mechanisms of social change I've been discussing throughout this interview. Just because they're global elites that feel some connection to each other doesn't mean that they have equal opportunities for participation, equal access to resources, equal sense of entitlement and empowerment, and equal access to mentorship and adult support for the kinds of learning they need to achieve their goals. So these are very real issues.

I've also had some encounters in recent years in some of the poorest communities in the planet, going into the slums in Mumbai and the favelas in Rio and watching young people there struggle to get access to the means of cultural production and circulation. I sat in a small one-room squat that had ten people living in it in Mumbai and talked to young people who had made their own videos and put them out via the web, talked to young people who were making their own online newspapers using WhatsApp to report on the activities of their own community. These are young people who against all odds are finding a means to become part of the emerging participatory culture that has been so important to many millennials around the world, and we need to do more research to understand the mechanisms by which they've been able to do this. Sometimes it's tied to family and cultural traditions. Sasha Costanza-Chock has written about the ways that young Mexicans have helped their parents figure out how to maintain contact with the families they left behind, producing home videos to share via the internet, and that through these means they acquired skills at media production and distribution that they then turned to their struggles for the rights of undocumented youth. Sometimes, it's illicit - the young people in Mumbai I met had produced a video paying tribute to one of their peers who had died of a serious poverty-related illness, and they had snuck into one of the young people's workplaces at night and used the office computers there to produce and circulate their video. Most often, they're creating together. It's not a do-it-yourself but a do-it-together ethos that shapes the participatory culture that so many millennials participate in. This is a case where those who have more skills and knowledge pass it along informally to those who are learning, and in that process the community is strengthened by its ability to share.

Millenials, New Media and Social Change (Part Two)

What cultural contents define Millennials in the United States? Which cultural events have had the greatest impact on them?  What cultural reference points does this generation have?

With all of the reservations expressed above, we still have to say that one of the defining markers of the Millennial generation is that since 2000 (and a bit earlier), we’ve been in a period of profound and prolonged media change, marked by the proliferation of new communication platforms and practices, which are impacting every aspect of our lives. These technologies are increasingly taken for granted and incorporated into the texture of our everyday lives. It is not that every Millennial has had access to these technologies but they have all lived in a world that is defined by the possibility of access, a world shaped by their presence. These technologies create new contexts for socialization and learning that may or may not be embraced. Class, for example, determines different degrees of access to the technological infrastructure -- what we call the digital divide -- and access to the opportunities and resources that enable meaningful participation -- what we call the participation gap.

Class matters not simply for the obvious economic reasons -- some can afford different degrees of access than others -- but also because of different underlying parenting styles and different access to the kinds of community resources that might provide youth with effective mentors and different degrees of understanding of how these online experiences do or do not connect to other kinds of educational and economic opportunities. So, at the risk of reducing things too much, there’s a distinction between the involved middle class parent who seeks to shape the world around their child in order to maximize opportunities for success and the working class parent who places greater obligations on their children to serve the collective needs of the family. There’s a difference between the kinds of schools -- public and private -- which middle class youth can access which often embrace more open-ended, more flexible, more innovative, and more accommodating forms of pedagogy and the schools that are more common in working class communities, which have a much more hierarchical and discipline-focused approach, that focus on workplace preparation more than on cultural enrichment or civic engagement as the ultimate goal of their digital instruction. All of these insights come out of the work of the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning research network which seeks a better integration of learning opportunities across all aspects of students lives and which is calling for more equitable access to the resources required to confront and overcome technological and cultural gaps.

What I observe when I meet Millennial students in my classroom at University of Southern California is that this generation has been caught between two totally contradictory impulses. On the one hand, there is the kind of learning which takes place within affinity spaces and participatory culture, and on the other hand there is the model of learning which has lead to such a strong emphasis on preparation for standardized testing. The opportunities on offer from the online world could have produced a generation of risk takers and game changers, students who are encouraged to set and pursue their own goals, who are highly motivated to learn based on their own interests and to apply what they learn in conversation with others who share those interests. This is what many of us saw as the promise of learning in an era of networked communication and participatory culture. On the other hand, the regime of standardized testing has produced students who are highly risk averse, who want to know the rules of the game going in, who want to be taught only what is required to succeed on the test.

But the Millennial generation is defined by more than their relationship to digital technology, having lived through a more or less equally tumultuous period of geopolitical transitions. This is the generation that has grown up post-9/11, living in a world marked by anxieties about terrorism, by a willingness to accept limits on privacy and observing the rise of new forms of surveillance, and by forms of racial and ethnic profiling, especially Islamophobia, which stems from a kind of “see something, say something” ethos that distrusts anyone different from us.  This generation has been more or less in a state of constant war since birth, although the war can often be so far removed from the everyday experiences of most Americans that it disappears from our thinking for extended periods of time. Their understanding of how democracy works has been shaped by a more or less permanent state of partisan gridlock and by some of the sharpest ideological divides in American politics since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Many older millennials cast their first votes for Barack Obama and thus their sense of whether or not government can work in their interest has been held hostage by the hopes and disappointments surrounding this particular political figure. For younger millennials, Obama has been the only American president that they have known (or at least been conscious of). 

They have, as such, been shaped by conflicting messages about race -- the claims of a post-racial society that surrounded Obama’s election, the struggles over immigration represented by the Dreamer movement on behalf of undocumented youth, and the sense of danger and risk for youth of color that has found its fullest expression in the Black Lives Matter movement. The Millennials are on the front lines of a major demographic shift in America, which over the next two decades will result in a Minority-Majority nation, and to confound things, a growing percentage are mixed race and of mixed cultural background so they are blurring the racial and ethnic categories through which we have historically organized our understanding of the society.  And they have been much quicker to embrace LGBTQ rights issues, such as marriage equality or transgender rights, than their parent’s generation had been. There has across much of this period also been a growing awareness of wealth inequalities, of limited opportunities and diminished expectations, which first found its expression through the Occupy movement and later through the campaign of Bernie Sanders, both of which have attracted massive numbers of millennial participants. Looking beyond the specifically American context, we would want to account for the impact of the Arab Spring movements, their short term success and long-term failure to transform governance in the Middle East, again, representing movements heavily shaped by the participation of youth in those countries and observed closely by young people elsewhere. 

Culturally, this generation has been shaped by the expansion of opportunities to create and circulate media -- what we call participatory culture -- and thus the breakdown of the monopoly of corporate producers on the kinds of media that they regularly consume. They are a generation whose expectations about what constitutes entertainment has been shaped by their access to computer and video games and not simply hard-railed games with limited options but the more open-ended forms of gaming represented by The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto at the start of this period and Minecraft at the current moment.  It is a generation that has been shaped by the kinds of heroic but often dystopian fantasies on offer through Young Adult novels -- that is, the generation informed by their shared engagement with Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and a broad array of other stories of often empowered young women who take on powerful social and political structures to change the world around them.

They have been shaped by what people are calling the plentitude of contemporary television -- a period of “too much good television,” even though many of them have cut the cords to cable and may watch television primarily via streaming and downloads on their computers. As we look back on television across this period, we would want to specify the emergence and sustained interest surrounding reality television, the popularity of cult serialized dramas such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, and the increased push to represent racial and ethnic diversity in both comedy and drama. Over the past year, some key markers of generational identity would include Hamilton and Beyonce’s Lemonade, both of which use hip hop, a style of music that has provided the soundtrack of their lives, to comment on racial politics in America.

Having recently seen Rogue One, I was struck by how many of the markers of Millennial popular culture it embodies. We can start with the fact that Millennials have been drawn to large transmedia franchises, which unfold over many different texts, over extended periods of time -- the return of Star Wars, yes, but also the Marvel Extended Universe or now Harry Potter, operate according to these principles. And Rogue One really represents a big step forward in terms of its play with backstory, its shifting of focus from primary to secondary characters, and its emphasis on world-building over narrative development. Second, Rogue One has an ensemble cast which is being celebrated for its inclusion and diversity as defined both by U.S. and global standards, including black, Latino, Arab, and Asian performers in key roles. Third, it has a “strong female protagonist,” similar to those found in YA novels, and reflecting a larger move in the Disney pictures towards heroic women who can handle themselves in action situations. And finally, the whole plot hinges on an act of  media transmission -- the uploading of the data files on the Death Star -- which brings us back to the centrality of digital media to the identity and experience of many from this generation. Other generations had stories about getting messages through in wartime, but not based on the kind of remote networked communication that is so central to this narrative. It’s not all about the digital where this generation is concerned, but the digital informs almost every other topic on their political and cultural agenda.

You’ve been looking closely at their political lives in recent years. How do these various factors shape the forms of citizenship and activism that has evolved there?

Over the last decade, I've been part of a multi-disciplinary research network created by the MacArthur foundation on Youth and Participatory Politics. Our mission was to better understand the political lives of American youth, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. My team's involvement consisted of doing ethnographic case studies of a number of different networks that have actively involved young people in the political process. The networks we looked at were mostly youth-centric, mostly started by people thirty or under, mostly spaces where young people could play very active roles in shaping the tactics and messages, and in many cases they were built around themes that really concern young people's entry into the political process. Altogether we interviewed more than 200 young activists, and what emerged there was a fairly consistent picture of the ways that a generation that had come of age in response to participatory culture was making the transition into political lives. For the purpose of the study we were dealing with youth defined in political terms -- we looked at people of an age who were too young to vote to people who were too young to run for public office - both very specific ages in the American context - people roughly seventeen to twenty-nine.

The first thing that emerged there was the idea that politics was being conducted by any media necessary. The phrase is a play on Malcolm X’s desire to bring about racial justice by any means necessary -- if you look at his speech defining this concept, he both calls for active recruitment of youth into the political practice and the use of a range of grassroots media to get protest messages out to the world. The tendency is to focus on the digital because that's what's new, and digital tools were certainly important in expanding who got to participate in the political process, and what participation meant for this generation, but the more closely we looked, the more it was clear that traditional tactics were also being used. Some of the young activists told us that they had access to very limited resources, and so they tapped whatever they had access to in order to get their message out. They also seemed conscious of the fact that a purely digital strategy would not help them reach older generation voters, and so the need to form coalitions meant they also worked with print media, with radio, did street protests, and used many other tactics that we might associate with other generations of political change. There are striking differences between the generations - research on African American youth, for example, finds much fewer of them engaging in boycotts, which had been a standard method of the Civil Rights movement, and a higher percentage involved in "buycotts," using their purchasing power to support groups that they think have made the right decisions and are doing the right thing. And that's a sea change, I think, in terms of what African American politics looks like in the United States.

What new media has meant has been an expansion of voice. Many of the young people we talked to had discovered their voice through largely cultural activities, participating as fans or gamers in online communities, but they were learning through these activist networks ways to translate those skills into new forms of political participation. So, for example, we were very interested in the work of fan activist groups, such as The Harry Potter Alliance and The Nerdfighters, that explicitly were seeking out young people who were culturally active but not yet politically active and helping them channel their energies into campaigns for social change. The Harry Potter Alliance is very interesting as large-scale organization, with more than 1,000 participants devoted to a range of different political issues, and with the variety to launch many different campaigns in the course of a year. They've involved everything from gay rights to hunger relief in Haiti to fair-trade chocolate to the labor rights of fast food workers in the South as well as issues of minimum wage and issues of environmentalism. So, unlike traditional activist groups, which tend to choose a single issue and focus on it, they tend to work with a shared cultural framework and deploy that to deal with a whole range of issues that their young people care about.

The Harry Potter Alliance led us to think very closely about what we're calling the "civic imagination." Building on a phrase from J. K. Rowling, they urge us to “imagine better,” by which they mean both do a better job imagining and imagine a better world and work to build it.  There's a tendency, especially on the Left, to think about policy in terms of facts, and that information will set us free, but we're seeing that imagination plays a crucial role in the political process. Before you can change the world you have to be able to imagine what a different or better world looks like. You have to be able to imagine what the process of change is, to imagine yourself as a civic and political agent capable of making change. You have to have a sense of an imagined community that you're a part of, a collective larger than yourself that is capable of being mobilized towards political goals. You often need some sense of empathy, or concern for people whose realities are different from your own. And for many who are marginal there is a leap of faith where you are imagining yourself as equal before you have had any direct experience of equality or reciprocity through the political process.

We find that these goals of the civic imagination get performed differently in different contexts. Historically, say, the founding fathers of the United States ran the civic imagination through allusions to ancient Rome and Athens, whereas the black civil rights movement in the 1950s conducted its business through the language of the black church and especially the story of Moses and the promised people's journey to freedom from the Egyptians. Young people today around the world are tying into the kinds of popular culture references we talked about earlier. They're fighting in the name of Harry Potter, they're using the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games as a sort of shared political marker across generations of activists around the world. They're dressing up like superheroes or putting on the Guy Fawkes mask, which in the United States really connotes V for Vendetta, to conduct their politics.

They do this because they're very invested in reshaping the political language. Many of the young people we talked to said that they found the language of contemporary American politics repulsive and exclusive. The rhetoric of American politics is repulsive in that it came in already encoded and partisan narratives that prevented people from finding common ground and common sense solutions, and exclusive in that if you were not already invested in policy discourse there were few points of entry for young people to enter into the political process. What we found was that young people wanted to actively shape the language of their political participation, that there was not a one message or one size fits all sort of rhetoric, and that the creation and circulation of memes is an important part of political speech for this generation. The meme is a shared language or discourse that many of them recognize and feel an affinity with. There's a kind of 'forthelulz' style of politics, which is a bit irreverent - all of which serves to increase their voice but doesn't necessarily increase their influence with earlier generations of political leaders. The messages that speak to millennials do not necessarily speak to the adult population, and so this where I think some of the crisis point is going to come for this generation. Lots of moments of misrecognition and misunderstanding across generations in terms of how people are pursuing their political agenda. It's important that these forms of activism are networked. Messages travel really rapidly from one site to the next, which allows success stories to be duplicated by activists not only around the United States but across the world, and many of the protests that have mattered for this generation do start out as global protesting. We can think about the Occupied movement as maybe the prime example of the kinds of politics that emerge in a global networked society.

Millenials, New Media and Social Change (Part One)

Last year, I was interviewed by José María Álverez Monzoncillo from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos for a report he was preparing Telefonica, Millenials. La Generacion Emprendedora.  The transcription of the interview was published in Spanish so I asked him if I could reprint the English language original here for my readers, and he was happy to agree. This question about how digital media may or may not have shaped the first generation to have come of age with no exposure to a pre-digital world has generated interest from educators, parents, and policy makers around the world. The report makes some recommendations to business who deal with millennials as both consumers and employees.

You can get a sense of the report from what the back cover says:

Who is part of the Millennial generation? What differentiates them from other generations? Do digital natives have new skills? How are they informed and entertained? Have they buried the couch potato forever? Will your personal information become merchandise of data analysts? What vision do you have about life? What are your expectations? How do you define success? Do they have problems adapting to companies organized hierarchically and vertically? What do companies expect from them? How is the relationship between Millennials and Baby-Boomers? How do they face the clash between television and the Internet, rent versus ownership, passivity versus participation, transparency vs. privacy, together vs together alone? Are the environment and technology the keys that differentiate generations? How do they innovate? What do you want to be when you grow up? Are they as collaborative as they say or maybe the property does not interest them? Is flexibility their key? What are the key success factors of this generation? Do they have a hacker ethic? Who are they?

We are facing an ambitious book that reflects on these issues. There are answers, more questions and especially debate. Since William Strauss and Neil Howe coined the term "Millennial" at the end of the 1980s, to refer to the demographic cohort that would come of age in the year 2000, academics, consultants and institutions of all kinds have carried out studies that They try to understand this cultural group. The reader will find an in-depth analysis of the existing bibliography and three specific studies that offer original research results. For this we have focused on a concrete effect: the growing entrepreneurial current shown by members of the millennial generation in our country. To do this, the environmental factors are analyzed to determine if this effect could be conjunctural or was influenced by a structural change, but also intrinsic aspects of the generation itself.

The figure of the Millennials is approached with a central objective: to better understand the minenic entrepreneurial initiative. With a qualitative research approach, we conducted in-depth interviews with a group of Millennials, and subsequently, we developed a survey to expand our knowledge of some of the key success factors that were appearing during in-depth interviews. So the importance of knowing another language and having lived in another country, the motivation to undertake, the level of education or the impact of family support, mentors or acquaintances, were aspects that helped us to better understand how Generation Y undertakes in our country.

But this is a collective work. To complement the aforementioned nuclear study, this book has varied perspectives that significantly enrich the analysis: from the consumption of information, its level of training, its attitude towards unemployment and the new way of working, its capacity for adaptation, etc. To conclude, an interview with Henry Jenkins is offered, which offers a more international perspective of a generation that enters its maturity and that during the next decades will be of vital importance to understand how the present century evolves at the doors of the third industrial revolution and its socio-cultural and economic challenges.

In short, a book of great novelty and interest, written in a pleasant way. We wanted to be original, and offer a different vision of a generation often misunderstood in our country, and above all more committed and entrepreneurial than the topics imply.

The following quote (which was translated from Spanish) gives you some sense of the position taken by the authors of the report:

"It is a wrong perspective to think that the digitization of companies is to introduce the Internet in some of its processes, when, in reality, it linked to a change in corporate culture, and implies a constant process of renewal and improve to provide a better service or make a better product. The innovation involves intergenerational collaboration. Experience and a new impulse new in a technological paradigm shift is a good basis for restructuring many small and medium enterprises. Our analysis of the key factors of success (FCE) makes us think that there is a need to integrate the skills of different generations" (p. 364).

With this context, I will now share over the next few posts my responses to the questions these Spanish researchers posed to me.

A personal question: Why do you think you have connected so well with young people and have become a reference for them in spite of belonging to another generation?

My work has always focused on the ways that ordinary people deploy new media and popular culture resources in the context of their everyday life. This focus emerges from strong traditions in British cultural studies that have stressed that “culture is ordinary” and that forms of cultural expression are a normal aspect of how we interact with each other and with powerful institutions in our lives. These assumptions inform any work I do on children, youth, and new media. Often, there is an autobiographical dimension to my work -- my attention is drawn to forms of culture that are immediately around me, that have touched myself, my family, my students, or other important people in my life.

My earliest work on children and media, thus, involved me working through some of my concerns as a parent about the place that media played in my son’s life, starting with the ways that television programs became raw material for his play and social interactions with his friends and, in turn, thinking about what it means to play with television content as opposed to other kinds of cultural identities and traditional materials. I saw links between his backyard play and accounts in classic children’s novels which saw Anne in Anne of Green Gables, Jo in Little Women, Tom Sawyer, and others re-enacting stories that loomed large in their culture in the nineteenth century. I wrote about how video games might duplicate some of the processes of forging masculine identity through bonding via competition, risk, and mastery that had been identified by historians and sociologists looking at other generations of children at play. As my son got older, my interest shifted from children and media to adolescents and later college students as they interacted with new media. I was interested that his first girlfriend was an online relationship with someone who lived on the other side of the country, and later the other side of the world, or that his strongest social connections were with communities of shared interests that were not necessarily geographically bound by his school or neighborhood. These observations led me to read more deeply into work on learning and education, but also adolescent socialization processes and, more recently still, on how young people acquire political and civic identities.

A second source of my insights for much of the past twenty years came from my experiences as a housemaster in a MIT dormitory, living and interacting with some 150 undergraduates of diverse backgrounds, most of whom were well ahead of the adoption curve in their use of new media platforms and practices. Walking the halls and interacting with students offered me many glimpses of what they were doing with new media and why, and these encounters also inspired some key insights in my work. For example, watching international students share their own media traditions with their contemporaries, or for that matter, seeing murals on the walls of the dorm of anime and manga characters, inspired my interest in pop cosmopolitanism -- the idea that this generation is defining their identities in opposition to the parochialism of their parents’ culture by embracing popular culture from other parts of the world. At the same time, I was interested to see international students listening to podcasts or streaming radio from their mother countries, maintaining closer ties to the world they left behind than would be characteristic of earlier generations of students studying overseas.  Our dorm was  a place that accepted and embraced diverse subcultural, ethnic and sexual identities, so it was a place where I could learn more about goths and gamers, see new and emerging forms of fan culture, and develop a deeper appreciation of how these young people were communicating via social media even amongst people living side by side in the same building.

Part of what has allowed me to make such discoveries has been my openness to popular culture. I have always defined my identity in relation to fandom and so I do not dismiss forms of popular culture that are meaningful to the young people in my surroundings. Too many academics and educators are cut off from the realms of popular culture that matter in the lives of youth, do not appreciate why or how they are meaningful, and so often do not see what is right in front of their faces. As someone trained in cultural studies, we start from the premise that people do not engage in meaningless activities. We may not instantly understand why something is meaningful to someone else, but we have an obligation to identify its meaning and its fit in their cultural context, rather than simply dismissing it as trivial.

How do Millennials differ from other generations? How are Millennials similar to other generations?

I have to admit up front that I have a deep suspicion of the concept of the digital native, which runs through so much writing about contemporary youth around the world, and insofar as the concept of the Millennial becomes another way of expressing that same underlying paradigm, it produces a similar degree of discomfort. For example, consider the language framing a recent call for papers at an academic conference:

“Members of the millennial generation, or Generation Y, were born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. Therefore, most of them are offspring of the baby boomers. They are also known as the most technologically savvy generation. Even though Generation X’ers were known to heavily consume electronic media because they were born when the Internet was in its infancy, the millennials were born into a media-saturated and consumer-driven culture. Moreover, unlike the members of the previous generations, they were surrounded by digital media technologies since they were infants. In a way, they live in a digital media ecology and in fact are known as “digital natives”....Since they live in digitalized platforms, millennials are often disconnected from the members of the previous generations. For the most part, rather than being community oriented, they are self-centered and self-absorbed. Perhaps, this why they are known as the “Generation Me.” ”

This passage sums up all of my concerns in a nice package.

Initially, digital native had some use value insofar as it encouraged adults to recognize and value young people’s unique relationships with new media. It encouraged educators and policy-makers to question taken-for-granted preconceptions about what they might value about formal education, what forms of cultural expression and experience were meaningful, and what activities would prepare youth for their adult lives. Young people, we were told, learned differently as a consequence of access to and familiarity with different media platforms and practices, though here, the argument already starts to veer into a technological determinist argument that video games made them smarter or Google made them stupid. Insofar as the term opened our eyes and minds to new possibilities, it had some constructive impact, but quickly it has become a way of shutting down questions through making universal or general claims rather than being attentive to the particulars of diverse young people and their lives. 

We cannot generalize across all of the members of a generation even in the U.S. context, let alone a global context, and assume that everyone had equal access to the resources, experiences, and knowledge required to meaningfully participate in the new media environment. Access has in fact been unevenly and inequitably distributed across this generation just as other technological and cultural resources have been unevenly and inequitably distributed across prior generations. Not all millennials, even in the industrialized West, grew up with easy access to networked computers, high speed bandwidth, mobile technologies, or game systems. Not all of them spent time with social networking technologies or playing massively multiplayer games. Not all of them wrote fan fiction or mucked around with Minecraft. So a key concern here is that the language we use to talk about millennials or digital natives is not sufficiently attentive to the diversity and inequality in the ways different young people access and learn through these various new media platforms and practice.

A second concern is that the language of the digital native tends to erase the process of learning -- we need to be attentive to the ways that engagement with these practices and platforms enables people to actively master skills, acquire language, and not just assume that these skills come naturally as a consequence of being in the vicinity of computers. Researchers are more and more attentive to how different communities playing with the same technologies may have differing degrees of learning, may or may not be able to articulate what it is they have learned, may or may not be able to transfer that knowledge to other contexts, and may or may not be able to meaningfully deploy such knowledge and skill in relation to educational and economic opportunities. These have been central concerns animating researchers in the Connected Learning tradition that has come out of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative. No one lives exclusively in a digital environment, so the effects of these early experiences with new media get shaped through the larger context of young people’s lives, whereas the rhetoric of the digital native tends to exaggerate digital media’s influence and often dismiss the active agency of those who have sought to build meaningful lives for themselves in relation to the online world. At its worse, the digital native rhetoric tends to focus on what media does to young people and not what young people do with media.

A third set of issues centers around the implicit and often explicit contrast between the digital native and something else -- what sometimes gets described as the digital immigrant, the adult population that came of age prior to the widespread introduction of networked computing. This framing tends to deny the value of what adults bring to the table -- the kinds of skill and knowledge they can transmit to the younger generation. In reality most of the sites of informal learning that have excited educators about the online world are places where adults and youth participate together, often with different, more fluid relationships than those found within traditional families, schools, churches and other institutions. Here, learning is more reciprocal than hierarchical. Adults learn from youth as well as the other way around. Researchers tell us that most youth lack access to adult mentors who can help them understand the ethical choices, risks and opportunities that they encounter in their online lives, and this lack of adult mentorship has consequences in terms of their ability to fully integrate learning with educational and economic opportunities. We should be encouraging more fluid intergenerational experiences online rather than seeing digital literacy as the natural byproduct of a generation that has come of age as the feral children of the Web 2.0 wolf pack.

The use of generational terms to describe media literacy potentially blurs another set of questions we should be asking about whether what we are observing reflects a particular life stage which shapes what people do with networked computers at particular ages as opposed to some permanent traits of a generational cohort that grew up at the same historical moment. For example, someone writing about the Baby Boomer generation in the 1960s might have defined it around the counter-culture and campus protests of the period, which certainly was one formative set of experiences for this generation, but fifty years later, we’ve seen that generation develop other traits and identities over time, and often, see the protests as specific experiences of adolescents and students living in a particularly charged period of American history. It is too soon to make lifelong generalizations about who millennials are, what they value, what their personality type is, etc. Does their media literacy reflect generational differences or simply the kinds of opportunities offered them as people in their teens and twenties in a specific historical and cultural context? It may tell us less than we think about long-term dispositions that come out of this early access to media.

Finally we need to be attentive to the commonalities across generations created around shared experiences of class, race, religion, geographic location, nationality and ethnicity, etc., all of which shape us in powerful ways, perhaps even more powerfully than can be accounted for by generational differences. At the end of the day, these young people share much in common with the older generations in their families and communities.

Ed Tech and Equity: An Interview with Justin Reich

From time to time, I have featured here the work of Mimi Ito and others from the Connected Learning Research Network. Along with danah boyd, Mimi and I wrote Participatory Culture in a Networked Society and we've collaborated on a broad range of education-related ventures. So, when Mimi flags something to my attention, I listen and respond. Last October, Ito sent me the copy of From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes: Equity by Design in Learning Technologies, a report she had written with Justin Reich, currently in the department of Writing and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Having featured Ito several times here, I wanted to put the spotlight on Reich, all the more so when I learned he was now teaching through the program I helped to establish at MIT.

What he has to say here gives some provocative glimpses into what these two researchers found, challenging the discourse of technological disruption and inevitability, which shaped so much early thinking about the ways new media would impact education. In a classic meeting between technology and culture, they find that the culture of schools, much more conservative than even many skeptics imagined, wins out most of the time, resulting in a world where lowered expectations and diminished resources for some youth keep them from enjoying the benefits imagined by those who introduce new media tools and platforms. But, what he shares here scratches the surface. There is no substitute for doing what Reich urges at one point: "Read the report!"

Your report identifies three core myths about technology and education. What are they? Each of these seems to boil down to a form of technological determinism. How do we help people to understand the social and cultural forces that shape our relations with technology?

To provoke people’s thinking on edtech and equity, we argue that there are three myths out there that are worth rethinking

The first is that technology disrupts systems, when very often, culture domesticates technology. From Clayton Christensen on down, we have a whole mythology about the power of technology to reorganize human systems, but what we see over and over again is that schools and other learning ecologies are great at taking new technologies and putting them in service of existing goals and intentions. From slate to chalkboard to overhead projectors to document cameras to projectors to smartboards, we’ve had nearly a dozen display technologies in classrooms and overwhelming they are used to display notes that students are supposed to copy or summarize. I was at Google recently and someone involved in the Classroom team was explaining how they were so successful at scaling up so quickly, and the “secret” turned out to be helping the system do everything it was doing anyway. Generally speaking in schools, it’s a good bet that if you introduce a new technology, it will be used to extend existing practices, and it won’t be a catalyst for disruptive innovation. 

The second myth is that open equals equitable, but more commonly, free technologies disproportionately benefit affluent folks with the financial, social, and technological capital to take advantage of free innovations. I’ve studied this in several contexts now, at the end of the 00s I was studying classroom uses of wikis, and found they were used more often and for more interesting purposes in affluent schools. In the last few years, I studied MOOCs, and found that U.S. residents lives in neighborhoods about a half of a standard deviation more affluent that typical Americans. 

If you want to make a safe bet about any new tech in schools, bet that it will be used to extend existing practices, and most adoption and most of the interesting practices on the margins will happen in affluent schools or in the upper tracks of schools with more affluent kids. 

The third myth is that we can close some of these digital divides through expanding technology access. In reality, social and cultural exclusions are much more difficult to overcome. This is an old lesson, but we understand it better with each passing year. I was first exposed to some of these ideas from the sociologist Paul Attewell’s work on the two Digital Divides: the divide of access and the divide of usage. You can wire everyone up the same with the same devices, and young people from more affluent neighborhoods will have more opportunities to use tech for more creative and production-oriented uses with more support from adults and mentors. Henry, your own work on the Participation Gap—the gap between who has access to new technologies and who actually participation as producers in creative networks—is another source of inspiration for this kind of thinking. 

One overarching lesson from all this is that if you want to build great edtech, you ought to have folks with social and cultural expertise on your team. The tech is just table stakes, it’s really about the integration into the learning ecology. 

I’ve been teaching undergrads at MIT this semester, and most of them are Computer Science concentrators. A big part of how startups encourage developers to think is to focus very closely on a particular and well-defined interaction: think of how Uber tries to create the experience of tapping your phone have having a black car come pick you up and whisk you away like a celebrity. Focusing on a particular interaction makes design tractable, but it also means you aren’t paying attention to the large context and system.                                                   

It might be technological determinism, but even if it’s not the result of strictly deterministic thinking—maybe just a kind of techno-optimism—we think there are real limitations to how much technology alone can shape systems. 

As to your questions about how we help people understand more about how social and cultural forces shape tech, Mimi and I are starting a whole project related to this. Over the past year, we’ve had three meetings with folks from venture capital, philanthropy, and edtech trying to have a good old-fashioned consciousness raising conversation. I think the research on the challenges we face is pretty stable and robust at this point, and the more exciting work ahead is to figure out how we can learn from the exemplar projects out there that are doing great work to close opportunity gaps. 

An underlying argument is that despite our high hopes and best intentions, “evidence is mounting that these new technologies tend to be used and accessed in unequal ways, and they may even exacerbate inequity.” What are some of the indicators supporting this claim?

 I mentioned two of my studies on this, about wikis and MOOCs. Let me describe for a minute some commonalities of both of these studies. First, these technology platforms operate at a global scale and collect massive amounts of data. There are many serious privacy concerns about this kind of data collection, but if you want to understand edtech and inequality, you need to gather enough data to understand how subgroups use technology indifferent ways. In both of these studies we connect log data from the platforms with national datasets about demographics—in the case of schools we use school level data from the National Center on Education Statistics and for the MOOC study we used data derived from the Census. 

For the wiki study, we found publicly-viewable, education related wikis used in U.S., K-12 schools, and measured where they were created, how long they were used, and how rich and collaborative the learning experience was. We then gathered socio-economic status data about the schools themselves, so we could compare how wikis were used differently in school serving different populations. We found that wikis were more likely to be created in schools serving affluent kids, that wikis created in affluent schools were used longer and with more student involvement. 

For the MOOC study, we had all of the data about HarvardX and MITx enrollments and course completions, and we had folks’ addresses, which we could use to identify their census block group, a neighborhood of about 1200 individuals. If you know something about someone’s neighborhood, you can make a good guess about their own level of affluence, There, we found that people who register for MOOCs live in neighborhoods about ½ standard deviation more affluent that typical Americans, and for young people who register, students from more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to complete courses. 

There is lots of previous research on edtech and inequality, Paul Attewell did observational studies in homes and schools. Other researchers have used surveys; Harold Wenglinsky used NAEP surveys in the 90s to identify that Black and low-income students were more likely to use computers in math class for drill and practice than for more cognitively complex math work. For the methods nerds, the observational work had great validity, but problems with generalizability, and the surveys probably had low validity, but good generalizability. The virtue of some of the newer work examining whole systems is that it has high validity, since we can peer closely at exactly what people do, along with the generalizability that comes from massive, international platforms. But all this work points in the same direction- people with more financial, social, and technical capital have a greater ability to take advantage of new innovations, even free ones.  

This is a rather dire finding for people who have spent the last few decades trying to bring new media platforms and practices into schools. I can imagine it was hard won. Has it force you to rethink some of your earlier work in this space?

Hard won, for sure: I started working on this is 2008, and 2017 was when I felt confident to get together with Mimi and say “Look, we know what’s going to happen when the next piece of edtech comes out, and we have to start avoiding some of the same mistakes.” Each little brick takes years to stack up on the foundation, but at this point we have thirty years of work with computers, and 100 years of work on signals technology going back to radio—we can make good bets about how edtech will affect equity when in context. . 

I started my work in edtech in affluent private schools as a history teacher, and I thought teaching in 1-1 environments there was fabulous—16 kids, computers for everyone, batteries always charged, networks always working. When I started into research, I was pretty sure that the things that worked great for me in the world’s best teaching environment weren’t going to work other places. But that was the real start of the Web 2.0 era, and there were all kinds of calls that social media and peer production tools were going to democratize education, my instinct was that wasn’t going to happen because even though the tools were “free”, the infrastructure to make them valuable was very expensive. So I was right from the beginning.

What are some of the factors that result in this reproduction of unequal relations?

 My favorite story about this comes from an observation in a school in rural New Hampshire. The teacher was preparing a lesson using wikis, and all the kids had laptops, the batteries were charged, the broadband was coming into the building, the internet was reaching the wireless access points and connecting to the computers, the projector had a bulb, and the introductory slides were all ready to go. The teacher went to plug in the projector, and the electrical outlet fell behind the dry wall, and the teacher needed to rethink everything. Getting technology working in schools requires the maintenance of a complex logistical infrastructure, that includes outlets, wires, wireless access, power, batteries, policy, and pedagogy. It takes a big investment in staffing to keep all that running, and it’s easier for affluent schools to make those investments. 

Mimi’s student Matt Rafalow has some great research about how cultural perspectives at schools also reproduce structural inequalities. To oversimplify, when rich white kids play around with technology, they are treated as hackers, and when poor black and brown kids play around with technology, adults treat them as slackers. Adults can treat very similar behaviors differently based on the demographics of the students engaging in the behavior. 

Maybe one other important point is that there are some sectors where introducing technology does lead to certain kinds of reducing of inequalities. I’ve seen data about agricultural prices in rural parts of southeast Asia where before cell phones, prices are very volatile, and after the widespread introduction of phones, prices stabilize dramatically. Or even something as basic as cameras, which were the provenance of the elite for many years, but recently have played a crucial role in documenting police violence and so forth. So I understand why people might have an intuition that free technologies would be particular good for people without a lot of resources, and certainly sometime they can be, but it’s unusual in edtech for new technologies to disproportionately benefit low income students. When it happens, it happens because designers are very intentional about that as a goal. 

Even when educational materials are free and open to all online, they tend to draw the most use from those who are already educational and informational haves. I can imagine frustrated designers and educators throwing up their hands and saying, What more can we do? What steps can we take to decrease or even reverse this process of inequality in educational opportunity? Do you have some good exemplars of what this better practice looks like?

 So that’s the second part of our paper: From Good Intentions to Real Outcomes. There is great work that’s happening out there, and terrific researchers, developers, and funders and finding out all kinds of important strategies for making technology work for the students furthest from opportunity. 

There are a number of great strategies that folks have identified. Ricarose Roque’s Family Creative Learning and Boston’s TechGoesHome both get families involved in learning more about tech so they can support their kids learning… if it takes a village to raise a child, then let’s teach the village. The folks at OpenStax at Rice University realized that there were something like 20 college courses in the US that were responsible for over half of all enrollments in universities: Calculus I, U.S. History, etc. So they got donors to fund the development of really great open source textbooks books on these topics that they target at the community college market, where textbook costs are a substantial burden on student budgets. This seems to be a case where free things do the greatest benefit for the students furthest from opportunity. 

In the paper, we offer four types of strategies to get people started. First, co-design with learners and communities. Make sure that your development teams include people and have close relationships with the learners you most want to serve. Second, align home, school, and community—get parents and families involved and build their capacity alongside students. Third, building on all the great work in the Connected Learning community, leverage the interests that students bring from their cultures and backgrounds. Fourth, measure the impact of new technologies on different kinds of learners, and really try to understand how innovations get picked up differently by different communities. There is much more in the paper we released about each of these strategies, but what they have in common is the call for people to think about the context of edtech, not just the tech. 

Here’s one thought that I’ve been playing around with in teaching my undergraduates: one question that edtech developers and advocates might ask is: “What is the human-human interaction that you hope results from the technology that you are developing? Before, during or after an interaction with edtech, what kind of conversation will a kid have with an adult or with another kids because of the technology.” That might be a simple way to get people to start thinking more about the broader context of edtech. 

What advice do you have for people trying to develop ed-tech for use in the current cultural and educational climate? What should they do differently if they want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem?

Read the report! I guess that’s sort of a boring researcher answer, but we wrote the darn thing to help people find their first steps. 

We think that step one is getting a handle on the basic findings of 30 years of research into education technology and equity. If you are working on a project that’s trying to make education more equitable using tech, there is a long history to suggest that it’s really hard to do that. 

Step two is looking out there at the great examples out there, many of which we describe in the paper, that are finding creative and clever ways of partnering with learners and other stakeholders to build equitable edtech. 

Step three is getting your team together and saying, “OK, we haven’t done as well as we wanted to as a field on this over the last 30 years. From our own vantage, what could we be doing in the next 30 days or 30 years to make some improvements.” This New Gilded Age that we are in is a very difficult place to finds ways of connecting innovation and equity, but the challenge that we face shouldn’t dim our hopes. Education is a great place for people who maintain hope in the face of structural adversity. 

What are the next steps for you and the other researchers on this team?

Mimi and I have some schemes that we’re working on. We’d like to continue to find ways of engaging the venture capital, philanthropic, developer, researcher, and practitioner communities around this. There aren’t that many people in the US who are gatekeepers to what kinds of edtech projects get started and what gets adopted. If we could educate and engage a good portion of those folks, I think we could start a new conversation across many different actors in the field. 

While we have some good early exemplars of how to think about edtech and equity in sophisticated ways, there is much, much more work to be done. We’re hoping to find a way to have the technology industry come together to fund some of that research collaboratively, so it’s not just something coming out of one foundation or one research lab, but it’s something that the edtech industry takes on itself to better figure out how to serve all kids, especially those who need us most. 

Justin Reich is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an instructor in the Scheller Teacher Education Program, a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. The Teaching Systems Lab investigates the complex, technology-rich classrooms of the future and the systems that we need to help educators thrive in those settings. 

"I Have a Bad Feeling About This": Reflections on Star Wars, Fandom, and Transmedia

My wife, son and I are psyched to have tickets to see The Last Jedi tonight, all the more so because the early reviews have been so glowing. In hopes of helping others get into the Star Wars Christmas spirit, I wanted to share an excerpt for a  much longer interview I did as the foreword for Sean Guymes and Dan Hassler-Forrest, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia, out this holiday season from Amsterdam University Press. If you enjoy this, there's much more where it came from, including great essays from some of the world's leading scholars of fandom and transmedia. 

Dan: You’re probably one of the world’s best-known Star Trek fans – certainly within academia. Since you have always reflected on popular franchises from the dual perspective of the “aca-fan,” it seems most appropriate to start with a question about your own relationship with Star Wars. What’s your own history with this franchise?

Henry: I grew up on Star Trek. It was a formative influence on my identity and my understanding of the world. On the other hand I was an undergraduate when A New Hope first appeared, so I necessarily have a different relationship to it. It took a while for Star Wars to win me over. When I saw the first preview in the movie theaters, I laughed it off the screen. From the highly generic and on-the-nose title to the dorky robots, it seemed to embody everything that I thought was wrong about Hollywood’s relationship to science fiction as a genre. It just looked laughably bad. Keep in mind though that that first trailer didn’t have John Williams’ musical score, so the tone would have felt very different for those of us seeing it for the first time. And keep in mind that it followed trailers for Logan’s Run and Damnation Alley, which were both releasing at the same time. What I really wanted was a new Planet of the Apes movie!

After I had seen that trailer, I was given the chance to interview three unknown actors, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, about the upcoming film as a young undergraduate journalist and declined, giving the assignment to another reporter. I was, down the line, able to have a one-on-one interview with John Williams about the music, which is ranked as one of my all-time favorite opportunities to see behind the screen.

So it took me a while to even go see the movie. By that point it had started to build up some buzz. And when I saw the film, I fell hard. It totally excited my imagination. It had such a strong sense of fun and adventure; its reliance on the Hero’s Journey would have been particularly resonant with me at the time since I was undergoing a period of undergraduate infatuation with the writings of Joseph Campbell.

I’ve gone out and seen every subsequent film on opening day with my wife. I wasn’t seeing her at the time the first Star Wars came out, but it is a ritual we have kept up down to the present day. My wife loves to tell the story of how we first met: she arrived for her first undergraduate film class, and saw this undergraduate standing around talking to anyone who would listen about the social significance of Star Wars. She rolled her eyes, and later in that afternoon wrote a letter to her best friend talking about this “pretentious ass” she’d seen in the class who had embodied everything that she was afraid a film class would be like. Two years later, by the time The Empire Strikes Back came out, this “pretentious ass” was hers, and she never ceases to remind me of her first impression.

But the story from my point of view suggests just how deeply I was, at that point, engaging with the mythology around Star Wars. Subsequently, my fandom of Star Wars would wax and wane. I’ll talk about some of the twists and turns along the way, but I think that I, like many fans of my generation, was cranky when Star Wars becomes too much of a children’s franchise, and engaged when there is material there that works at a more mature level.

Dan: So as an highly engaged witness to the Star Wars phenomenon as it took shape, how would you place it within the larger framework of science fiction fandom?

Henry: In some ways I see it as a crucial turning point for the kind of media-centered fans, the mostly female fans that I wrote about in Textual Poachers. Up until that point, most of fandom had been organized around Star Trek, which had been a defining text for a generation of fans. Suddenly, you were seeing forms of fan expression that were taking shape around Star Trek expanded to incorporate new texts, including, first and foremost, Star Wars. We can see this as a move from a fandom centered around individual stories to a multi-media fandom, which would continue to expand across genres, across franchises, down to the present day.

So if we think about the text that defined fandom over time, Star Trek is certainly one of those, Star Wars is another, Harry Potter is another, Buffy is another, maybe Xena - these are the fandoms that represent a profound shift in the way fandom operates. It’s easy to understand, then, why some Star Trek fans saw Star Wars as a threat or competition. It certainly fell into the fault lines of what people thought science fiction was. Star Trek was seen as true science fiction – science fiction about ideas, about the future, about utopian and dystopian alternatives. Star Wars was seen as space opera, fantasy, bound up with spectacular special effects. But I never understood why you had to pick one over the other. Different tastes, different moments in our lives, but all representing exciting contributions to the larger development of science fiction.

Dan: Unlike most previous fantastic storyworlds, Star Wars was in many ways a transmedia experience from the very start: the comic books, the novelizations, the arcade games, the action figures, the soundtrack albums, and so on. While all the merchandising and transmedia spin-offs clearly contributed to the franchise’s phenomenal financial success and its impact as a cultural phenomenon, they also made the storyworld appear more childish, more frivolous, and more obviously commercial than other science fiction. But at the same time, its ubiquity also made it a gateway drug for millions of young fans who felt inspired to look beyond Lucas’s space opera and discover a whole universe of fantastic fiction. What is your take on the way Star Wars’ commercial success has colored its perception among fans of the genre? Is it less of a “cult text” because of its sheer scale?

Henry: There’s no question that George Lucas was a founding figure in the evolution of modern transmedia storytelling. A lot of this has to do with the deal he cut with Twentieth Century Fox around the production of the film, Lucas waiving his normal fees as director in favor of a percentage of the gross from ancillary products. Because the ancillary products became so central to his revenues, they became central to his interest in the stories. This arrangement created a strong incentive for those pieces – the comics, the toys, the novelizations, and so forth – to be more fully incorporated into the story system of Star Wars. Such experiences became central to Star Wars’ commercial success, and meant the experience of Star Wars extended off the screen and throughout the intervals between the releases of individual films. No other science fiction property had so totally saturated a generation’s media experiences. No previous science fiction film had gained this kind of blockbuster status. The summer blockbuster had only really been established as a category in Hollywood through the success of Jaws (1975) just a couple of years earlier. Star Trek barely survived on television, limping along through its three seasons, heavily backed up by two letter-writing campaigns from its audience, and only really regained the impact it had on the culture through reruns in syndication. As Star Wars achieves this kind of instant mass success, you could make the argument that science fiction was no longer a marker of subcultural identity, but something that could be a mass phenomenon.

It’s hard therefore to talk about anyone who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s for whom Star Wars and subsequent science fiction franchises weren’t a central influence on their lives. We could look toward Harry Potter as a similar mainstream niche success, a seemingly contradictory category, but one that seems earned in both cases. It’s a mass success because almost everyone in the culture would have gone to see these films, or read the books in the case of Harry Potter, as they were released; but at the same time, it’s also a niche success because there were so many subcultural practices that grew up around them. So each person’s experience of these mass hits would have had slightly different inflections and would have brought them into contact with likeminded communities. Liking Star Wars was no longer enough to gain fan street-cred, and various forms of fan involvement could still be seen as being too geeky. There’s not just one Star Wars but many Star Wars, which is why I think the ancillary properties or transmedia extensions become so interesting to study.

Dan: While the narratively self-contained original trilogy clearly wasn’t organized as a form of transmedia storytelling, the popularity of the early toys and videogames gave audiences at the time unprecedented ways of engaging with the storyworld outside the actual films. How did this affect the development of fan culture in the early years of the franchise, and how would you describe this constant interaction between immersion (in the films’ spectacularly visualized and richly detailed storyworld) and extraction (of toys, games, and other items into audience members’ lived experience)? 

Henry: There’s a tendency to underestimate how central the toys were to the Star Wars transmedia system. Academics, particularly those of us of a particular generation, are primed to dismiss toys in all forms as simple commodities that are ways of exploiting the markets opened up by individual franchises. In the case of Star Wars, as with many other contemporary media franchises, they play a much larger role. They are evocative objects that shape the imagination in particular ways. They are authoring tools that grant to the purchaser the right to retell and extend the story that they saw on the screen. The action figures suggest that there is more going on than can be captured in an individual movie, and that the background details of a fictional world can be as important as the saga of the central protagonist. Indeed it hints at a place where any given character’s story could be of central interest to us, and so in that sense we can see the action figures as paving the way for the kind of stand-alone films that are part of the new Star Wars transmedia plan. In many cases the action figures that mattered were not those of the big protagonists but those of secondary characters, background figures. In some cases characters that barely count as extras are given new emphasis and new life as they become part of the personal mythology of the fan. We often tell the story through the example of Boba Fett, who developed a fascination off-screen that far exceeded the amount of screen time granted in the films, and paved the way for Boba Fett to become a much more central character in the prequels. But I think you could tell the same kinds of stories around characters like Admiral Ackbar and Mon Mothma or Hammerhead, all of whom gained greater resonance through their extension in playrooms and playgrounds across the country.

I think this results in several different ways that one might read Star Wars. One is to see Star Wars as the Skywalker saga, which is grounded in the Hero’s Journey and which has a singular focus even as it expands outward over time and space. But the second would be to read Star Wars as a world, where many different parts can be explored, and where background details can be as rich and meaningful as anything that goes on in the lives of the protagonists. This logic of world-building, of extension, expansion, extraction, shapes all the other elements that would emerge around the Star Wars constellation. Each new extension of the Star Wars text adds potentially more depth or appreciation of the world depicted onscreen.

I’m particularly fond of a book called Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, which consists of a series of short stories, each centered around one of the aliens featured in the Cantina sequence in A New Hope. We learn who these characters are, what brought them to the Cantina that day, and in some cases what happened to them after the events of the film. So when you read this and then go back and watch the Cantina scene in the original film, you have a much deeper appreciation of every detail in the background. You come to understand the whole of what’s going on, and in some ways the central protagonists are dwarfed by all the other dramas taking place in the bar that particular day. Given how rich the background stories provided on these various characters are, it should be no shock that say, Rogue One, features several of those characters in a different setting, depicting earlier points in their particular journeys to the Mos Eisley Cantina.

I don’t know that there’s necessarily a friction between immersion and extraction. I know I originally described this as a kind of paradoxical relationship, one drawing us into the film, one drawing us out of the film. But in the case of Star Wars, the mastery built up through the extracted elements can result in greater attention or a greater sense of immersion into the world when we return to the film. Immersion involves kinds of recognition, mastery, built up investments in certain series’ elements that pop off the screen, the more we know about them and the more we appreciate them from the world off-screen. This is a sense of making Tatooine and other fictional spaces our own by making them the sites of our collective fantasies.

Dan: In the many years between the original trilogy and the release of the prequel films, Star Wars moved away somewhat from the cultural mainstream and became something that was more of a “cult text,” maintaining its core audience of fans through the production of novels, videogames, tabletop RPGs, comics, and collectables. At the same time, the growing popularity of fantastic franchises and the arrival of the internet contributed to fan culture’s dramatic growth in that period. How do you look back at this era from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, and how would you describe Star Wars’ position within science fiction fandom at that time?

Henry: Around the time that The Empire Strikes Back was released, George Lucas did what is now a notorious interview with Time where he described his vision for where the Star Wars franchise might be going. There he spoke about three trilogies as adding up to the full Star Wars saga. The first was the one initiated by A New Hope. Once that was completed, he had announced that he was going to go back and do a series of prequels which told the events surrounding the collapse of the Jedi knights, the Clone Wars, the corruption of Anakin Skywalker, and the breakdown of his relationship with Obi-Wan Kenobi. After those were completed and after the actors had a chance to naturally age a bit over time, he planned to go back for a third trilogy, which suggests what happened to these ruling families as they were forced to hold the galaxy together. What I think none of us anticipated was quite how long the gaps would be between each of those three trilogies, even though the interview in some ways maps out precisely the future course of the Star Wars franchise.

As fans, we knew then what to expect from the prequels. They would be Arthurian, operatic, mythic, pick the word of your choice, but shaped by Lucas’ particular reading of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory. All of this pointed towards a more mature, darker conception of the series that would require strong performances to achieve the emotional intensity we wanted to see on the screen. This goes hand in hand with the degree to which fans of my generation embraced The Empire Strikes Back as the best of the three Star Wars movies, and the intensity with which they repudiated the introduction of Muppets and stuffed toys, especially the Ewoks, into the next Star Wars film and its spinoffs.

Part of what cemented that sense of a shared conception of the prequels was the beginnings of the internet fandom, certainly by the 1990s. Early internet fandom was marked by sharp divides, flame wars between different factions who had very different sets of expectations about what Star Wars, or any other media property, was supposed to do. But over time, online fan communities tended to develop very strong senses of consensus around what’s best and what’s worst about a particular media franchise, and that consensus becomes more entitled and empowered over time, so that by the time the prequels came out Lucas was facing a very intense and embedded sense of fan expectations, expectations which had been building over almost twenty years during the gap between the films.

You mention here that this fan interest is kept alive by the secondary production by the corporation, but it has also been kept alive by fan cultural production. Over the 1980s and 1990s you’re seeing the extension of the timeline of Star Wars as fan writers flesh out incidents earlier and earlier and later and later in the life of the characters, and then move beyond them to tell the backstory of the Sith or the Jedi, often in ways that extend across centuries. Fans sort through these, debate them, some become semi-canonical in the fans’ imagination, and these become central forces shaping what fans want Star Wars to become. During the same time period, we’re seeing both the increased visibility of fan-cultural production, and the first rounds of skirmishes with Lucas and the other producers over what the rules of our participation are going to be. Lucas early on seems to feel a very strong need to control what fans did with Star Wars, an issue I’ll come back to in response to one of your later questions. And so Star Wars became one of the central battlegrounds by which fan relations to intellectual property would take place.

The Multiplicity and Diversity of Fandom: An Interview with Fansplaining's Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel (Part Three)

You have argued against assuming that all forms of fan culture are transgressive or resistance, a position with which I strongly agree. The status of slash as a political expression has shifted as GLBT representations have become more mainstream and commonplace. Why do you think this transgressive reading of fandom has been so persistent? What do you see as the investments within fandom in seeing themselves in these terms?

Elizabeth: I have a lot of thoughts about this—I’ve written about it and we’ve had entire episodes on the topic. One thing I’d say from the outset is while I don’t believe that male/male slash is even remotely the act of transgression it once was, it’s undeniable that amongst the types of media that transformative fandom tends to gravitate towards, canonical queerness and queer relationships are still a rarity. Fans are queering texts in genres that still fail to deliver significant queer representation; that makes this conversation even more complicated. And from my vantage watching the way the media, dominated by straight men, talks about and engages with fans, there is certainly still an element of bafflement and even derision about slash. “Why slash?” A question that will not die!

That being said, in 2017, I think the way you characterize our stance on slash as political or transgressive is correct. I was chatting about this with Anne Jamison oh, maybe 18 months ago—some of our conversation made it into this article—and she had a theory that really resonated with me. Acafans talk about affect all the time, but fans rarely do, even using simpler language; how often do you see people arguing on behalf of their favorite show or character or ship by saying, “It just brings me a lot of pleasure.” If the act of shipping and romantic desires around a text is largely coded as female, there might be some subconscious internalized misogyny at work here; I ship these guys because it is Serious and Important and Vital for Gay Rights, not because it brings me pleasure, because my (female) pleasure is frivolous and foolish.

Flourish: I think you’re absolutely right, and I also think that the idea that your pleasure might be also serious and important is heady stuff to lots of people! It marches well with sex-positive feminism, for example. I think that it’s easy to think of it as—wow, I can have my cake and eat it too!

And you can have your cake and eat it too; it’s not wrong to say that slash can be important, serious expression as well as romantic, sexy, and/or fun reading. But that can become an armor against critique, against gay men saying “this seems like you’re fetishizing gay dudes,” against people pointing out that slash sometimes writes women out of stories entirely, et cetera. I think that that armor, that method of defending yourself against critique, is very important to some people. Humans find it hard to hold two or three ideas in their head at once: Slash is important in creating queer representation; it’s fun and pleasurable for many people and that’s important too; but slash can sometimes be regressive, sexist, or fetishizing.

Elizabeth: And I think that the limits of the “progressiveness” of slash shipping patterns also belies how flimsy the “it’s politically important” argument is to both of us. Rukmini Pande, a scholar who’s been on the podcast twice now, is the person who really clarified this for me: she talked about how slash so often means only specific sorts of bodies: white, first and foremost, but also cisgender, able-bodied, etc. Sometimes fandom seems to go out of its way to seek out white men to slash, stepping around canonical characters of color and thrusting background white dudes, especially ones who look and act certain ways, to the forefront of fanworks. It’s systemic, and it’s pervasive. And I think it’s impossible to have a conversation about queer fanworks without talking about it.

You have consistently brought in historical perspectives about fandom into the program. Why should fans care about the history of fandom? What have been the most interesting insights you've discovered along the way?

Flourish: To me, the history of fandom is most interesting where it helps us think about our fandom today. I’m interested in the way that supporters of the Blues in Byzantine chariot racing rioted, but the reason I’m interested is mostly that football fans riot today. And that’s not to say that there’s any sort of coherent lineage between chariot racing and Manchester United. It’s to say that humans are humans, and have always been humans. By seeing the patterns people fall into, we can learn something about ourselves, and about our fandoms.

At times, I’ve thought of fandom history as a way to establish a lineage or a hierarchy of authority. This is a pretty common way that people think about fandom history—go on Tumblr and search for “fandom grandma” or “foremothers of fandom” or something like that and you’ll see an infinite number of people over the age of 40 holding forth on how Kids Today Just Don’t Remember How Hard It Was When We Had To Mimeo Our Zines And Pay For Shipping Both Ways, And Mimeo Fades, Dagnabbit. There’s an implicit plea for attention, often: “this stuff is important, so lend me your ears (and don’t listen to those newbies, they don’t know shit from shinola).” Sometimes it seems like people are upset that fandom has moved on from their favorite sites, zines, or fannish practices, so they’ve turned to cataloging what it was like “in their day” and insisting that that’s really important. And sometimes I’ve fallen into this trap and claimed authority just because I’ve been in fandom longer than others. (Whoops.)

Yet I do think that fandom history can be really important for fans today, especially fans who feel like fandom is shameful. Lots of fans still feel that way, and feel very isolated, believing fannish behaviors to be some kind of weird, avant-garde thing that’s only come to be with the advent of Tumblr or the internet. They don’t need to feel that way, because people have been behaving like fans forever, long before we had the word “fan.” These behaviors are part of human nature! I hope that anyone who doesn’t know that has the opportunity to study enough fan history to be aware that they’re part of a glorious tapestry of people freaking out about how much they love things.
 

You often move beyond our stereotypical understanding of fandom in terms of the community of women who write fanfiction to include fans of sports, popular music, and gaming.  Again, academic writers have struggled to bridge between these different forms of fandom. What do you find they have in common? What are main points of difference? Does this help us to refine our definitions of fans and fandom?

Flourish: I think it’s easy to see the ways that these different forms of fandom connect. Is there really that much difference between a person waiting in line to see Harry Styles and a person waiting in line to see the Harry Potter presentation in Hall H of SDCC? Of course there are differences, but the lines in both cases are long; people camp out; people wear costumes; some bring fanfiction to read; everyone is thrilled if a celebrity comes by and visits the line.

Part of the issue here is really internet-enabled fandom. I believe that fandom has become more “same-ish” across different properties and different media types because the internet has enabled people to see more, to search for more, to find more types of people. The person who loves Harry Styles may write fanfiction because they read fanfiction about Harry Potter when they were a kid (or vice versa) (hey, it’s me!). But fifty or sixty years ago, the person who turned up for the Beatles was less likely to be the person who went to a Star Trek convention, not because people who like the Beatles don’t like Star Trek, but just because it was so unlikely that you’d ever find out about either a gathering of Beatles fans or a Star Trek convention. How? The newspaper? Rumors from your friends? Not so easy as just Googling or finding a trending hashtag on Twitter.

As far as points of difference, I think that the main point of difference is the way the wider culture treats these different types of fandom. Since time immemorial people have pointed out that if you come in to your Boston office on a Red Sox game day wearing your Red Sox gear, it’s normal and even team-building, but if you come in dressed as Captain Kirk on the day a new Star Trek movie comes out, it’s absurd and career-damaging. One of the reasons it’s easier to see the similarities, though, is how those differences are a little less stark than they used to be. People watch Game of Thrones like it was the World Series. Dressing up as Daenerys is still a big statement, but it’s not quite the brand of eternal nerd shame that it once might have been.

I wonder if this cultural difference isn’t the reason that academic writers have struggled to bridge between different types of fannishness. People don’t publish very much about sports in the Transformative Works and Cultures, even though (as we learned in our interview with Cecilia Tan) baseball fans cosplay, they re-enact historical games, they write what seems an awful lot like real person fanfic (but not called that, of course.) People who write about sports fandoms do it in their own journals, and they’re often (in my admittedly limited experience) more focused on marketing: those fandoms have been culturally recognized as socially OK and as a source of profit for longer, and in our capitalist system that’s one of the reasons they have more cachet, I think.

Flourish Klink is half of Fansplaining. She is Chief Research Officer and a partner in Chaotic Good Studios, where she develops entertainment franchises and helps companies and brands understand fan culture. She was formerly a partner in The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. and led fan strategy for the award-winning Hulu Original show East Los High. As a teenager, Flourish helped organize the first ever Harry Potter fan convention and was a co-founder of FictionAlley.org. She holds an MS from MIT and a BA from Reed College.

Elizabeth Minkel is the other half of Fansplaining. She's written about fan culture for the New Statesman, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Millions, and more. She's the audience development editor at Storythings, where she helps both foster and study communities of
readers. She's also the co-curator of The Rec Center, a weekly fandom newsletter she writes with fellow fan culture journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. She studied English at Amherst College and has an MA in the digital humanities from University College London.

An Interview with Fansplaining's Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel (Part Two)

You recently surveyed your listeners to get a clearer sense of how they defined fanfiction. What were some of the more interesting insights to emerge from this discussion?

Flourish: The survey was pretty provisional and unscientific! But for me, the most interesting takeaway was that the newer people were to fanfic and fandom, the less of a line they drew between fanfic and original fiction. Nearly everyone we surveyed agreed that it was really important that fanfic was based on a source text—that is, most people shared a formalist definition. But people who used a cluster of terms that we called “fanfiction is nonprofessional” (making statements like “fanfiction is unauthorized,” that it is “not written by the original creator,” that it is “not for profit,” that it is “distributed for free,” or that it is “amateur,” “unprofessional,” “noncommercial” or “nonliterary”) were more likely to have entered fandom earlier, often in the 1990s.

My unsubstantiated theory is that fandom was much more discrete in the 1990s, because the entertainment industry was more litigious. Today, companies like Wattpad have closed that gap. So people who have gotten involved with fanfiction more recently don’t believe that there is as much of a difference between fanfic and what older fans might call “profic.”

What I personally realized, more than any insights the survey gave, was how much I would love to do a properly representative study of the entire United States and learn about the wider public’s fannish behavior patterns and perceptions of fandom. The study we did, and nearly every study I’ve seen (with the exception of one completed by the agency Troika last year), involved only people who were tangentially aware of fandom or knew to call their own behaviors “fannish.” I’d love to see a study that was carefully designed to measure fannish types of behavior separate from the “fandom” label, and given to people who aren’t necessarily already part of fan culture.

I know when I was writing Textual Poachers there were certain topics which were basically taboo to discuss outside the fan community—at the time, real person slash was perhaps the biggest one of these. Are there still taboos within fandom? If so, are there any topics that you have discussed in the podcast that have drawn fire from people in the fan community?

Elizabeth: There are certainly topics that provoke a great deal of debate in transformative media fandom spaces these days—I’m not sure I’d describe them as taboo, since they are widely practiced and have strong defenders and detractors, but conversations about, say, whether people should be allowed to create explicit fanworks involving underage characters, or whether people should be allowed to depict rape in fanworks, are mainstays on my Tumblr dash these days. These are murky conversations, and we haven’t necessarily avoided these topics, but we haven’t devoted full episodes to them, just touched on them in passing.

Often complex intra-fandom discussions that we’ve devoted full episodes to include topics like racism in fandom and the intersections between queer shipping, queer representation, and queerphobia. I don’t want to call any of these topics taboo—at all. But they certainly are conversations that tend to be strongly critical of fans and fandom at large—the same critiques we have for the media and content creators extend to fandom’s consumption and creation as well.

For the racism conversations in particular we’ve worked to center as many fans of color, especially black fans, as we can; we’re extraordinarily aware of the limitations of two white women talking about race and fan culture. I definitely see a sort of defensive pushback from fans with these conversations about fandom and marginalized identities—the old “I’m just here to have fun” line—but the response to our fandom-critical episodes has been pretty positive. I mean, we’re not actively googling ourselves here, there could be plenty of hate out there for any of what we do, but we’re not getting angry messages in our inbox.

One topic we circle that I think tends to touch a nerve is the monetization of fanworks, specifically fanfiction—whenever we bring it up we get a good amount of pushback (often against things we aren’t even advocating—a fair bit of it feels like a knee-jerk response to another set of ideas). A few people have even included our podcast (and the work we do with fandom professionally) in their criticism: they disapprove of anyone “profiting off of fandom” in any capacity.

Perhaps tangentially related: we get a bit of pushback when we talk about the evolution of the culture of critique in a lot of fanfiction spaces, how it’s taboo (there we go!) in a lot of spheres to give critical or negative feedback on fanworks. Flourish and I are coming from tricky positions here: most of the work we put out in the world is in a professional context, but it’s also heavily scrutinized and critiqued. (I can tell you from editing Flourish that she actually expects—even welcomes!—her work being torn apart.)   

Flourish: I agree with what Elizabeth has said, and want to note that I think the reason why some of those taboos have broken down is because of the way that fan culture has come more fully into contact with capitalism. (Only slightly kidding.) Take, for example, Wattpad. Fanfic archives didn’t prioritize mobile reading and writing, because they were run by people primarily seeking to serve the needs of their existing community, not to imagine the needs of a possible larger community and innovate to draw them in. So people who prefer to consume and create stories on phones found Wattpad and began creating fanfic there. Wattpad took notice and, to their credit, began learning about fandom and trying to appeal to a segment of fanfic authors. But in so doing they discovered real person fanfiction and began to publicize it. In other cases fanfic authors were doing this themselves, as 50 Shades of Grey began to break down the idea that if you file the serial numbers off your fanfic you should have the courtesy to hide it.

In other words, money is what has made these taboos weaken, and I don’t hide the fact that I think this is an inexorable force that ends in the commodification of all parts of fan culture. My main hope is that fans can leverage this change to protect their rights, be taken more seriously by the culture at large, and preserve spaces in which fans can create transformative works for love and not money. But, of course, not everybody shares this view.

Francesca Coppa recently published an anthology of fanfiction for use in the classroom. What criteria would you use to determine which stories to include in such a book?  Do you have any general insights in terms of how fans assess the quality of fan works?

Elizabeth: I’m not 100% sure I would be publishing such a book! :-) But the question of how fans assess fanworks fascinates both of us—we devoted a whole episode to it, talking with my newsletter partner, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, another fandom journalist. Gav and I have been collaborating on The Rec Center for nearly 100 issues at this point: it’s a weekly newsletter where we share fandom-related articles, our favorite Tumblr and Twitter posts, fanart (with permission!), and a dedicated fanfic section, 5-10 recs written by one of us, a guest poster, or culled from our one-off submissions form that readers submit to every week.

Early on we sent out a survey to readers asking for feedback and trying to get a sense of preferences—were people fandom-monogamous when they read? Did they prefer certain types of fic over others? It was a relatively small sample—only a few hundred readers—but I was really surprised to see how many people said they would read fic without knowing the source material it was based on. I cannot do this; I actually have a hard time reading fic from fandoms I’ve been in but have drifted away from, even though I remember those stories as being technically good as well as emotionally meaningful. For me, fic is wrapped up in my feelings about the source material at the time, so much so that I wonder sometimes if it affects my critical judgement of a work.

So to put together an anthology would be to strip out all that context—which I know is not an issue for a lot of fanfic readers! But it certainly is for some: fanfiction separated from that active fannish feeling about the source material—a friend recently described this, for her, as a lightswitch that gets flipped on and off—can be, for some people, missing some integral part of the work. For others, fanfic divorced from the communal is similarly incomplete, whether this means actual dialogue with fic writers and other readers or simply a fic’s contextual position within fanon or a body of fanfiction.

Flourish: Like Elizabeth, I don’t particularly love the idea of reading fanfiction without the context of the original work. So while I really like Francesca’s book, and think it’s a good idea, I would prefer to assign students fanfiction based on something I can assign them to read or watch in the context of the class. It’s not enough to assign a class an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then give them Buffy fanfic to read, in my opinion. I’d rather give them an Inception story to read, after assigning them the movie to watch. In my experience, the new Star Trek movies have been a boon: students with Trek familiarity get a lot out of reading Trek fanfic, but even a student who’s never seen Star Trek can watch the 2009 movie and know enough to at least begin approaching fic.

I think emotional engagement with the source material is a significant part of fan reading and writing, but for me it’s only one of two pleasures I get from fanfic, and I don’t need every story to fulfill both pleasures. The other pleasure is the pleasure of seeing a clever argument made about the source material. This is the Wide Sargasso Sea model of fanfic and I think it’s much easier to teach. You can’t induce someone to feel a particular way about canon and so understand from the inside the feeling of reading a fic that is just perfectly about your OTP. But you can show someone a story that’s making a fabulously convincing and clear argument about a source text and they can understand that argument whether or not they have that affective response.

If I were picking stories to teach, I would certainly lead with that type of “argument story,” but I would try to include stories that are primarily valuable for emotional engagement reasons as well—tropey stories, stories that exist solely for shipping purposes, stories that are short and plotless and just drop you into a character like a warm bath. I think that these stories, which many people might dismiss as “bad” from an outsider’s perspective, actually get at the heart of a lot of what people love from fanfic, and so even if there’s not a hope in the world of getting that across, I’d like to talk about it. (Of course, this runs the risk of suggesting to students that fanfic stories are either great arguments or emotionally engaging, which is very far from the truth, but nothing’s perfect.)

Elizabeth: So to add on that, it’s my understanding that Anne Jamison, who teaches fic in the classroom, tries to choose works from very well-known source material—most of her students will have some knowledge of, say, Sherlock Holmes, or Harry Potter. So that gets to your understanding of the source text worry. But like I said, there are lots of fic readers out there who don’t care about the source text—maybe it’s a self-selecting pool of people who are really into fanfiction at large, but the fact that so many of The Rec Center’s readers don’t need source material knowledge was really telling to me—as is the popularity of things like high school and college AUs, soulmate AUs, Hogwarts AUs, some modern AUs for non-modern source material, and other intra-fandom tropes that often talk more to each other, across fandoms, than they do to the source material from which they’re derived.

And I know Flourish tried to backtrack a bit from creating a binary between “great arguments” and “emotionally engaging”—for me, a fic really needs to have both, so that blows the binary right there—but I also want to push back against the idea that “emotionally engaging” means things like “tropey stories, stories that exist solely for shipping purposes, stories that are short and plotless and just drop you into a character like a warm bath.” For me, a lot of the time that great argument is directly tied up in my emotional engagement with the source material.

But I think what Flourish writes here is directly tied up in how tricky it is to explain fic to non-fic people, and how difficult it is to talk about affect without resorting to “some stories make serious arguments and other ones are id-pleasing warm baths.”  A lot of my journey as a ~fandom professional has been, I don’t know, maturing out of my desire to prove that some fanfiction was very Serious Literature, and today a lot of my work is getting people to take the practice seriously, rather than trying to lift up the “serious stories.” But that’s easier to teach in the context of fan studies, where you’re looking at fans and their practices, than it is to teach in an English class, when you’re primarily looking at texts rather than readers and writers. Luckily neither of us are compiling these anthologies or teaching these classes, so I guess we’re safe for now!

Flourish: And now all your readers understand what it’s like when we record our podcast and get into arguments in which we basically agree with each other! (We can’t help it.)

 A central media narrative in recent years has centered around "toxic fandom", and in particular, white male fan backlash against diversity casting. Yet, we also know that many fans have been strong advocates of diversity and inclusion in popular media franchises. How would you characterize the current state of the debate within fandom around these issues?

Elizabeth: [long weary sigh] Fandom isn’t broken and fandom isn’t inherently toxic, but fandom is undeniably a mess right now. And the straight white male fan reactionaries are using the same channels, and often the same techniques, as the fans who are clamoring for increased diversity in pop culture media—I understand why people try to draw these parallels! But I also see “fans clamoring for more diversity” to be pretty muddled in practice: many, many fans are doing so in good faith (and the sort of pop culture texts that draw in fandom have a *particularly* bad track record on this front—has there been an explicit acknowledgement of any queer character in any of the superhero franchises onscreen? Don’t get me started on Star Wars...) but there are certainly fans who are using calls for diversity as a weapon to bludgeon other fans in ship wars, as justification for harassing creators who don’t validate their ship, etc.

Meanwhile fandom isn’t particularly good at cleaning its own house, as it were: within fandom, conversations about racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc, can be met with reactionary defensiveness.

People often suggest that when our screens become more diverse, when we actually see a broad range of queer characters, or characters of any given racial and/or ethnic background, or we finally dump the ratio of 7 dudes to 1 lady in every group teaming up to fight the bad guys, then a lot of this will die down. I’m skeptical, to put it lightly. Look at Harry, Ron, and Hermione: ship wars get ugly even when people are fighting about which white dude the woman should wind up with. (I’m feeling fairly cynical about all of this right now because my current fandom has a lot of queer rep, about half the main cast, and I still see the same fights and patterns replicated in fandoms where there are zero canonically queer characters.)

Fan/creator interaction remains one of the top things we discuss on Fansplaining, and it’s a fraught topic to explore right now—it’s easy enough to say that these are the “growing pains” of the mainstreaming of fandom and the exposure of both sides of that fan/creator divide to each other via social media, but in practice, it’s hard to see past that to a world where fans’ desires aren’t weaponized in the way they are now. Add on top of that my general sense that the “mainstreaming” only goes so far: people outside fandom only have a fraction of the whole picture, and wind up running with their assumptions.

I can see why fandom looks toxic to someone who hasn’t actually spent any time in the world. I can see why creators would be totally freaked out by the exchanges they see on Twitter. But I also see creators learning all the wrong lessons from these exchanges—and I’m not sure how we stop these cycles.

Flourish: And this goes both ways! One of the reason “toxic fans” are considered toxic, whether they are pro-diversity or not, is that they lash out directly at creators, many of whom don’t have the kind of power fans think they do. While I have more sympathy for the politics of some groups of fans that do this than others, the fact remains that whether you are sending threats to a creator for making a character queer or for not making a character queer, you are still sending threats.

But I think it’s wrongheaded to view this as “toxic fandom” alone. We see the same kind of behavior exhibited in politics and in every other arena of life. In my opinion, what we are really dealing with here is the result of the social media systems that shape our daily interactions, and these systems have the greatest impact on our behavior when we’re using them to connect with people we don’t know or rarely interact with in person. Most of the time we talk about this with regard to the increasing polarization of the public, not just in the United States but everywhere that social media exists (which is everywhere). But I think it has a great impact on fandom as well.

Unfortunately, neither fans nor anyone else seem to be talking about the structural problems that impact our behavior. It’s a lot easier to frame things in a personal responsibility narrative: “toxic fans need to not be such jerks,” “people who advocate for diversity but then use toxic tactics should be kicked out of fandom,” etc. But I don’t think that personal responsibility and good judgment alone will get us out of these cycles, which fundamentally continue (at least in part) because of the way our communities and communication methods are designed.

Flourish Klink is half of Fansplaining. She is Chief Research Officer and a partner in Chaotic Good Studios, where she develops entertainment franchises and helps companies and brands understand fan culture. She was formerly a partner in The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. and led fan strategy for the award-winning Hulu Original show East Los High. As a teenager, Flourish helped organize the first ever Harry Potter fan convention and was a co-founder of FictionAlley.org. She holds an MS from MIT and a BA from Reed College.

Elizabeth Minkel is the other half of Fansplaining. She's written about fan culture for the New Statesman, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Millions, and more. She's the audience development editor at Storythings, where she helps both foster and study communities of
readers. She's also the co-curator of The Rec Center, a weekly fandom newsletter she writes with fellow fan culture journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. She studied English at Amherst College and has an MA in the digital humanities from University College London.

The Multiplicity and Diversity of Fandom: An Interview with Fansplaining's Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel (Part One)

Throughout this year, I am showcasing work about fandom at a time when the field of fandom studies is once again reinventing itself, often in very dramatic ways.

People often ask me where I go to learn about contemporary developments in fandom and fandom studies. Much of the time, I don't have to go anywhere, because being who I am, many people come to me to seek advice on their projects in this space. I also might go to some of the academic journals, such as Transformative Works and Cultures or The Journal of Fandom Studies, or the great folks at the Fan Studies Network. But I also listen most weeks to the Fansplaining Podcast, which is one of the very best way to keep on top of new developments in this space.

Its hosts Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel get so much right with this podcast. It is, as they note in this interview, not the place you go to get fan theories about Game of Thrones, not that there's anything wrong with that. They are doing what fans call Meta, asking big questions about how fandom works, who gets included or excluded from fandom, how fans intersect with the industry or journalism, why fans do what they do -- in other words, it is about fandom culture and its practices, not about the shows fans love. They may have Orlando Jones as a guest one week and an academic studying race and fandom the next. They work hard to insure a diverse and inclusive representation of fandom, week by week, and in the process, they often help me to discover new and emerging perspectives in the field who had not crossed my radar in any other way. I do not know how they do it -- stay some far ahead on the trends and consistently call attention to new voices and new ideas. They often allow room for graduate students and junior scholars who are not yet being heard elsewhere, and in the process, they are helping to define the next generation of researchers in this space.

I've wanted for a LONG time to feature Flourish Klink (my former student) and Elizabeth Minkel on my blog and I could not be happier to finally be able to do so. 

Tell us something of your background in fandom and how it relates to your professional life. How did you come to start Fansplaining and what have been your goals for the podcast?

Flourish: I’m a long-time Harry Potter fan with a lot of involvement in the fan community—with fanfic archives, conventions, all of the things that require you to get off the internet and physically interact with lots of strangers. In my professional life, I work in audience research, basically combining the “big data” that's produced out of sales, website traffic, and social media tracking with qualitative research into individual fandoms. Another way to put it would be “explaining fandom to Hollywood,” and I got the job in fact because of fandom—Henry, you know this, but I got my start through studying fandom with you at MIT.

Elizabeth: I’ve been in fandom about as long as Flourish, but I’ve only been speaking up for the past half-decade: I was a lurker for my first decade-plus (most of which was also spent in HP fandom). I started talking in 2012: I was a book journalist—working both as a critic and writing about the industry and culture around books—and 50 Shades of Grey came out and book journalism did...a very bad job talking about its fanfiction-al origins. I had been warned against talking about fandom in my professional work, but I was too annoyed to stay silent (ha). I wrote a few explicitly fandomy pieces over the next few years, but it wasn’t until the third season of Sherlock aired and, once again, people had a lot of bad takes on the fannish reactions, that I felt compelled to speak up (there’s a pattern here). I started writing a regular column on fan culture not long after, both explaining fandom practices to a mainstream audience and standing up for fans as they clashed with both the media and content creators.

The podcast grew out of a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015. Flourish and I had never met but we wound up on the same (too-large) panel of people who straddled the intersection between creators and fans. Our go-to line is that everyone on the panel was having a different conversation—but Flourish and I were having the same one. Afterwards she approached me about starting a podcast; I laughed and said sure, why not, assuming this was the sort of throwaway suggestion you make at a party. But Flourish was not kidding: a few days after we flew back from San Diego, we were having a long and very business-like call where we were setting up the whole thing

Flourish: I suggested the idea to Elizabeth because I felt like, in my professional life, I’d seen people working and talking in a register that was somewhere triangulated between academic discourse, fannish discourse, and journalistic discourse. But I didn’t know of any forum that used that kind of tone. Most places seemed to lean one way or another, or seemed to be very focused on a particular fandom, not on the phenomenon of fannishness.

Of course, our goals have evolved over the course of 60 episodes. Today it’s especially important to us that we feature a diversity of voices in terms of race, gender, sexuality etc., and partially as a result of so doing, to include a wide range of types of fannishness. There’s always more to do in these directions.

Elizabeth: I can think of two major themes that have emerged over the course of these 60 episodes. One is striking a balance between loving and critical—the same line that many fans walk as they talk about their favorite thing. We get messages from people, they leave reviews, etc, saying how grateful they are that we’re critical of fandom and fannish practices; I always feel like there’s a little bit of surprise in there, which is interesting, because I think a lot of meta-fandom posts within fandom are pretty critical. One thing I always feel frustrated by in my work for mainstream outlets is I when I stand up for fandom in my pieces, I feel like there isn’t a ton of space to critique while I defend. The podcast lets me do both.

The other major thing is what Flourish has already touched on—we’re talking about behaviors and ideas, not about the cultural products that fandom focuses on. We actually get a ton of requests like this—“Talk to my friend in X fandom!”—from people who don’t seem to be familiar with our work: at this point, it should be pretty clear that we’re talking about fannish practices, not about objects of fandom. We often lean on specific fandoms for examples—we worry sometimes we bring up Harry Potter too much, but it’s our only real shared point of reference, and, to be fair, it’s the place where we both have spent the most time in fandom. But we’re not interested in deconstructing Harry Potter itself, even through a fannish lens. (We save this for our patrons-only episodes, of which we’ve done a handful so far.) I think the fannish podcast landscape is only growing more crowded, but the vast majority of the podcasts out there are about specific fannish objects or fannish projects (watching every episode of a show, for example). Which is awesome! But it’s just not us.

You focused some of your early podcasts on the relations between fans and the media industries, in part because of Flourish's involvement there, so let's use that as a starting point. What do you see as some of the core ways that people in the entertainment industry misunderstand or mistreat their fans? What are some of the things fans misperceive about the way the contemporary media industry operates?

Flourish: These two questions are very interrelated. In both cases, the problem is often oversimplification. Fans don’t know all the roles or understand the power plays that go into making even the simplest decisions on a TV show (for example), so they often end up advocating for outcomes they want in ways that aren't going to ever succeed. (And, by the way, why should they know all the roles? The entertainment industry is purposely opaque. It’s a club you have to fight to get into and you can't really see what's going on except from the inside.)

Similarly, not every person who works on a TV show has the mental space or the inclination to immerse themselves in complex fan cultures (and the plural is important: it’s not like there’s a single fan culture, even for one property!), so they'll form simple “good-enough” ideas about what fans are into: “Trekkies are dudes who care about the blueprints of the Enterprise,” "Fans freak out with joy when the two male characters almost kiss so let's do more of that even though the characters aren't gay." These are simple assumptions that aren't completely unsupported, but they miss important aspects of the fandoms in question!

And those assumptions are the good assumptions, the ones that get made when people are invested in and trying to understand what their fans are saying. When you get into the upper echelons of the industry, many people don’t even try, because they don’t see hardcore fans as being a significant impact on their bottom line. Those people are the ones who say, “I can make Two and a Half Men and make money hand over fist without any ‘fan culture’ to speak of. Why should I bother?” When you mix someone like that with a property with a strong fan culture, it’s never pretty. But the core of it is that people with that attitude do not believe that fans are important to their bottom line (and fans are absolutely not the only group they feel that way about—not that that’s any comfort).

You have come back to some of these issues recently with some discussions of shipping and showrunners. How has the awareness of fan response started to shape the choices showrunners make, for better or worse? Is there such a thing as too much fan service and if so, can you point to some good examples?

Flourish: I’m not entirely sure how to answer this, because it can be very hard to know what decisions are shaped by fan input, what decisions were always planned (people prevaricate about this sort of thing all the time) and even what decisions aren’t decisions at all but are shaped by the paratext that marketing provides—for example, an official social media account run by a show’s marketing team may really push a particular pairing or reading that’s never been planned as “endgame.” Marketing departments are incentivized to do this because they notice particular keywords, often ships, getting traction, and their metric of success is clicks, shares, eyeballs. They’ll usually jump on any bandwagon quickly, no matter what the showrunner’s opinion or plan is, and not worry about the long term impact that might have on the way fans read a text. As a result of this stew, I’m hesitant to call out particular examples. I don’t know enough details about what goes on behind the scenes of any particular show.

Elizabeth: If I can jump in here with a little fan perspective, or maybe more like, perspectives on fandom: I think that many fans believe they are far more influential than they actually are, even in an era of heightened visibility on both sides of the fan/creator divide. My favorite example was after episode 3.1 of Sherlock, “The Empty Hearse,” a meta-textual commentary on fannish/viewer conversations on how Sherlock survived the fall at the end of the second season. In the two-year hiatus between seasons, this was a major topic of conversation in all sorts of fannish corners and amongst millions of casual fans in Britain—British newspapers published articles speculating how he did it, that sort of thing. The actual episode offered up a bunch of theories, some jokey, some serious, and the punchline of it all was that no solution would be as satisfying as the act of speculation itself.

On Tumblr after the episode aired there was a ton of commentary along the lines of, “OMG they are totally looking at Tumblr for their ideas!” And people dredged up headcanons, fics, metas, that shared themes or concepts with what wound up in the episode. This frustrated me; this isn’t rocket science. The idea that TV writers would need to mine Tumblr for ideas seems like a fairly egocentric way for fans to position themselves? Finally someone wrote a post that expressed exactly what I was thinking: I could never find it now, but to paraphrase, it was something like, “Folks, there are thousands of us generating ideas in exponential combinations; the odds that, amongst all those combinations, we will hit on the same ideas as the writers are fairly good.”

I thought about this, too, when I saw people discussing Korrasami, the f/f ship from the Legend of Korra, becoming canon in the show’s finale. “It was because fans shipped it!” I saw flying across my dash. “They listened to us and made it happen.” A quick Google led to an interview with the creator saying he’d planned it from the start, long before there were any fans to ship these characters. I think this sort of underscores the trend of shipping fandom thinking of themselves as detectives solving a case: when a writer is planning on bringing characters together, they likely leave some subtextual clues and build-up along the way.

Again, this is not rocket science: if you pick up on subtext that then becomes text, it’s likely because the writer did a decent job? And these are exceptions—most of the time, fans want something, and are even picking up on very real subtext, but it will never become text. What can feel like secret clues to a master plan often don’t amount to anything more than that. A lot of the biggest dust-ups in fan/creator interaction in the past few years have been over ships (not) becoming canon; I do think creators are seeing fans talking about this stuff—but that doesn’t mean they’re following fans’ wishes. If anything, I can mostly think of examples where the opposite is true.

Flourish: I always tell fans to assume that the Powers That Be are half as together and aware of fandom as you think they are. That’s not an insult directed at any individual writer or showrunner; it’s just that when you get a lot of people working on a TV show together, things get lost the cracks, and collective intelligence doesn’t always function as smoothly as one would hope.

Now, let's slide this over to Elizabeth's expertise—how would you assess the current state of reporting on fans and fan related issues? Have we made progress over some of the stereotypical and dismissive representations in the past? What role have fan blogs and podcasts played, if any, in challenging dominant media narratives about fans?

Elizabeth: It’s funny—I’ve been a fan culture journalist for five years now, and I’d have given you a wildly different answer at the end of each of the past five years, from everyone’s favorite trend of talk show hosts mocking fanworks to the misunderstandings on all sides as fandom became more mainstream. But at the close of 2017, here’s what I’m observing:

A few weeks ago I gave a “fandom 101” talk at a conference largely for professional content creators. To take the temperature of the room, I asked the crowd of about 150 people a series of questions. “How many of you consider yourselves in fandom?” Only a couple of hands went up. (It was at this moment when I realized that I needed to make things far more 101 than I thought I would!) I continued: “How many of you know the term ‘transformative work?’” Roughly the same hands—just a few. But when I asked, “How many of you know what ‘fanfiction’ is?” the majority of people in the room raised their hands. “And finally, the term ‘shipping?’” The same: most people in the room said they knew it.

After the talk, multiple people came up to me and said something along the lines of, “I didn’t raise my hand when you asked who was in fandom, but after your talk I realized I totally was in fandom.” This really struck me, as did the disparity between the “who’s in fandom” question and the number of people who said they know about fic and shipping.

I think this reflects the way that fannish practices and terms have only sort of seeped into mainstream culture—lots of people have heard of shipping, or can give a rough definition for it, but they don’t actually understand it, and often fill in the gaps in their understanding with a lot of (bad) assumptions. Tons of people are out there assuming they understand these fandom terms—and maybe gatekeeping themselves out of fannish practices based on poorly-informed assumptions, like those people who didn’t raise their hands during my talk.

The other big trend I’m seeing—which overlaps a bit with the half-formed fandom assumptions—is the conflation of “geek culture” with fandom. This is partly driven by these mainstream conceptions, partly driven by the entertainment industry (take a stroll through SDCC or NYCC and you’ll see “fandom” used as a quick-and-dirty stand-in for a relatively narrow set of cultural products rather than behaviors or communities, specifically SF/F, comics, and superhero media), and partly driven by media outlets: the past few years have seen a proliferation of geeky news outlets that reference fans and fandom constantly without any real connection to or acknowledgment of fannish practices.

This is particularly tricky for me—my personal fannish interests don’t really align with the big pop culture geeky properties, and while it might seem like there’s a proliferation of fannish media out there, it so often falls within these constructs: places for fans of certain types of media to read and write about those types of media. If I had to place bets on the next few years, I’d say associations between “geek culture” and “fandom” will only grow stronger. In a way, with superhero and SF/F blockbusters, this actually helps fight some of the mainstream’s dismissive ideas about fans and fandom—Marvel, Star Wars, they’re all hugely popular, and let very casual fans get super fannish around new installments. But I worry that this doesn’t do much to disabuse mainstream assumptions about the rest of fandom—there’s not a lot of crossover understanding. I might be proven wrong, but this is the way things have been trending, in my view, in my years covering fan culture in the mainstream media.

Oh, and to address your final question: I think that fan blogs and podcasts give more people entry into fandom, but only certain types of fandom, or fannish practices. I remember when Westworld came out, there were like 9,000 fannish podcasts about it, many from mainstream media organizations. “Non-fans” on my timeline—people who don’t self-identify as “being in fandom”—were rushing to figure out which of these podcasts were the best and following along with the show and various accompanying fan theories and analysis in a way that was pretty damn fannish. I think fandom podcasts in particular give people a route into fannishness that they might not otherwise take. But that’s not going to change their knowledge or assumptions about a lot of preexisting fannish practices—I’m thinking specifically of those in female-dominated transformative media fandom. I think there are a lot of female-led pop-culture-oriented podcasts and blogs that kind of skirt up along the edges of fandom, but in my mind, there’s a difference between shared enthusiasm and shared practices. And when it comes to stuff like fic, fanart, meta, shipping conversations, and the other stuff that fills my dash, I still don’t see a ton of crossover in this realm.

Flourish Klink is half of Fansplaining. She is Chief Research Officer and a partner in Chaotic Good Studios, where she develops entertainment franchises and helps companies and brands understand fan culture. She was formerly a partner in The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. and led fan strategy for the award-winning Hulu Original show East Los High. As a teenager, Flourish helped organize the first ever Harry Potter fan convention and was a co-founder of FictionAlley.org. She holds an MS from MIT and a BA from Reed College.

Elizabeth Minkel is the other half of Fansplaining. She's written about fan culture for the New Statesman, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Millions, and more. She's the audience development editor at Storythings, where she helps both foster and study communities of
readers. She's also the co-curator of The Rec Center, a weekly fandom newsletter she writes with fellow fan culture journalist Gavia Baker-Whitelaw. She studied English at Amherst College and has an MA in the digital humanities from University College London.