Global Fandom Jamboree Conversations (Round Six): Naja Later (Australia) and Jenessa Williams (UK)
/Naja Later, Australia
Doing fandom online was absolutely a windfall for me! As a teen getting into alternative music, I lived in a small town where my classmates thought the Foo Fighters were obscure and alienating. I should mention that fandom was also part of me discovering queer identity and community—something which felt impossible to acknowledge in my real-world environment. There’s a parallel with the idea of being too into something (or someone), where an online group of like-minded people can be both an outlet and a retreat. Twitter and Reddit didn’t hit my radar until I was in my 20s, much more secure in both a fan identity and a queer identity: I really benefited from the smaller environments of message boards and mailing groups. To this day, I tend to keep to smaller platforms for a lot of my fanning: as you say, I find it so enriching to have different people and spaces—private and public, online and offline, academic and creative. Knowing where to share those easter eggs is an art!
To talk about comic club and the different tone of conversations: there were so many great conversations over the years, big and small! Sometimes it felt like a tutorial, prompting discussion question about our set text to critically analyse it. It was often really liberating to not like a book, and find that others have their own nuanced critique of it. Being able to constructively critique what I wanted in a story with each other was such a helpful process. Beyond the book club element of it, being able to fangirl in person was a rare treat: a great icebreaker idea one of the organisers had was to make name stickers that said ‘Hello my name is ___ and I like ___.’ You’d see someone you know was also playing Breath of the Wild or watching Money Heist, or someone you’d never met was also really into Pretty Deadly, and start a conversation. I think for a lot of women in comic shops, there’s pressure not just to like the right texts but to like them the right way. Unpacking and articulating the problems you had with Wytches is just as valuable as the chance to squee about Ms Marvel.
As for community members staying in touch, I know some have their own established friendships outside the club that are thriving! The store itself has done great work shifting to mailing comics and keeping up a sense of community. I’m also active in local zinemaking culture, which has plenty of events between our prolonged lockdowns. One of the major shifts for me recently has been from teaching and discussing comics to making them myself. It’s very cool to be able to apply everything I’ve absorbed and share that!
I’m definitely one of the people who slipped into comfort zones in the pandemic. Looking at my pattern, it tends to be a season of more challenging new media and then something more cozy—still new, but a genre I know will be easy to devour. One of my favourite things to do as a fan/scholar is dig up a (literally) cancelled TV show that had an active fandom: Leverage, Merlin, White Collar, The Musketeers; all stuff I was peripherally aware of at the time. I find it quite comforting to know there’s a complete narrative ready to watch, and lots of fan material to devour afterwards and nostalgic friends to talk with. Sometimes just a few years’ hindsight can make the problematic elements feel archaeological: the implicit faith procedural shows have in law enforcement, for example, is tinted differently in hindsight.
I love the way you frame it: If a cancelled tree falls in the woods and twitter isn't around to hear it, has any further harm really been served? I think it speaks to the value of consuming things privately, and enjoying them for yourself. Having close friends who know that you’re listening to Michael Jackson (because you enjoy pop music and there’s no collaborative text that’s untouched by people-who-have-behaved-badly) is going to be different to an acquaintance seeing your public Spotify activity and sees it as endorsement of his behaviour. It feels like a very tired adage to say not everything you do has to be public or online, and I can see how the tension of lockdown meaning you have no public life offline, making it even more tempting to reach out to people by sharing what media you’re consuming. You’re absolutely right about how you broadcast those actions, and I want to play with that metaphor some more in a post-broadcast world! I’m wondering if we could embrace personal narrowcasting when it comes to conspicuous consumption. Does everyone need to know what you’re watching/listening to/playing/reading all the time?
To hopefully not-too-clunkily segue into talking about food, that idea of public/conspicuous consumption definitely feeds this problem of self-identification through consumption and the implicit moral worth of it. It’s like how restaurants are pressured to create visually-appealing, Instagrammable food at the expense of taste, and to counter it there’s an ‘ugly’ food movement. Sometimes, our favourite artist is a box of mac and cheese, or chocolate produced ny child labour. Or we’re warming up leftovers in tupperware, or we tweet about what we had for lunch even when it’s just an egg sandwich. What we consume, and how we communicate what we consume, and whether we’re also consuming moral values in that process—we’re going to hit the word limit before we untangle that.
Finally, to address the question of streaming and getting releases a day early: I don’t think so! Usually if it’s something streaming, we get it at an unusual time of day to match the American launch hour. I know with some Disney/Netflix shows, episodes appear very conveniently around dinnertime for a Californian midnight. Sometimes the seasonal divide feels stark, though: as a horror fan I love celebrating Halloween, despite it being completely abstract. Really, though, I think a lot of it is what we bring when we engage with a text, especially music. Lorde obtains that synaesthetic summer-ness (maybe she composed it in NZ summer?) because that’s where you were when the album found you. Maybe it will hit home differently with southern-hemisphere audiences come December. It’s something I love about being a fan: letting something find you when it finds you, and as many of us are doing at the moment, coming back to a story when you need it again.
Jenessa Williams, UK
I think you touch on something really interesting when you talk about the relationship between the value of queer and minoritized readings and fangirling in person. This idea of using social media to try out identities that maybe don’t quite feel fully comfortable in offline spaces just yet is so important – I know that I definitely benefitted from this in my mid-to-late teens, coming to terms with my mixed-race identity and beginning to properly embrace my heritage through exposure to intersectional feminist theory and black musicianship on twitter and Tumblr. Pop culture was a huge vessel for that, and The global element of fandom is so important here too – in my little pocket of predominantly white England, who knows how long this journey might have taken me without the multi-cultural world I carried around on my phone in my back pocket?
I full relate to the joy of discovering things that are already complete too, especially with TV. Being out of the loop in that way definitely takes the pressure off of having a hot take - we academics and journalists are so used to consuming things through an analytical lens that I think it’s easy to forget to be a fan for the sheer pleasure of it. No consumption is ever entirely passive, of course, but I can tell you that when this teaching term is over, I look forward to embracing some seriously low-brain impact fandoms! I’ve never been much of a gamer, but Animal Crossing New Horizons has been my saving grace during this pandemic. A low-stakes world with little to no peril, a string of repetitive tasks and creativity as complex as you want to make it…it felt utterly meditative when the news was at its worst. Watching the way that that game has united so many demographics of fandom has been so wonderful to see, and a keen reminder not to dismiss certain texts because they feel ‘lightweight’ in their field. Without the pandemic, who knows if I ever would have made the time for that kind of simple joy? Now that I have, I really hope to protect that as a fandom that I keep purely for myself.
I think we’re definitely similar in our interest in the pressure of having to ‘perform’ the things you like, as you say, and having to make those pleasures palatable. There is a real fulfillment that comes from sharing your interests and talking about them online in order to connect with your community, but my thoughts return to that of guilty pleasures. ‘ I know this person is problematic but’…”I know I shouldn’t like this anymore but”…are phrases that I often see on my timeline, presumably from people who enjoy sharing but also worry that people might misinterpret enjoyment as total endorsement. I completely understand that impulse and desire to explain, and yet it must be tiring trying to add this context every time, to perform a sense of morality and knowledge instead of maybe just quietly consuming the thing instead? I think you’re onto something with personal narrowcasting, but I don’t know which is better – it’s jarring to think that somebody might be tweeting for transgender rights while simultaneously extolling the virtues of JK Rowling’s wonderful storytelling in their personal life. But then again, we also can’t pretend that those texts immediately die just because of our opinions of their creator. Which all serves to bring us all the way back to the top of this never-ending soul-searching cycle!
Maybe this is an interesting way to think about our host’s theory of textual poaching – leaving the problematic elements aside, poaching the bits you like, coming back and forth as and when you need it. Being okay with that nuance in yourself, and leaving room for others to find their own balance feels like a way through, even if it isn’t always entirely comfortable. We do still need to deeply address the various injustices that occur in entertainments industries, and work together to demonstrate how those communities can learn to become safer spaces for us all. In terms of my own fan practice, I’m still not sure how I feel personally about consuming art by problematic people - at current, I err on the side of not wanting to financially contribute to them any further, and a great deal of music I once loved has simply lost its listening appeal given that I can’t not think about what they have done. Nonetheless, I consistently try to remind myself that there are many different degrees of ‘wrong’ out there, just as there are many different types of way to perceive art. It’s not a conversation I suspect will yield definitive answers soon, but I’m learning so much in the process of trying and talking and realising just what fandom means to different people. Isn’t that what all of this academic fun is about?
