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Judith Fathalla, Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts: Explores how fan fiction both challenges and reinscribes the authority of white men—both as main characters and often as authors, sometimes at the same time, since that’s how hegemony works. Unsurprisingly, fandom often does a better job of questioning maleness than whiteness; likewise, fans of sources like Game of Thrones often accept the premises of rule by divine right/force because it supports the stories they want to tell, even if those stories are about challenging gender roles. Sherlock and SPN are her other main texts—she focuses on genderswap/mpreg in Sherlock and differing constructions of author/fan/God in uses of Chuck and Becky in SPN. In complicating earlier views such as ‘slash offers an idealized version of what masculinity could be if it were emotionally open,’ she points out that, in her experience as a woman “raised partly or wholly according to Eastern social norms … strong and demonstrative same-sex bonds are a very condition of masculinity and sociality in general.”
Ashley Hinck, Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in the Digital Age: This 2019 book looks at various campaigns based in fandom that try to enact broader social change, and argues that fandom can spur valuable involvement in civic activity, including political activity, though corporate takeovers remain a risk. “When fans practice deliberation, careful research, writing, and art within fan communities, they are preparing themselves to participate in politics.” Of course, that can be good or bad—Gamergate was also political, and Qanon is the current version; I wish she’d talked more about the dark side.
It was interesting to read about non-media fandoms like Nebraska (Husker) football fandom and a coach’s use of football fandom to encourage more Nebraskans to serve as mentors to kids in need. This connection leverages the idea of Nebraskan pride and hard work, which also connects to Nebraska’s long-running welcome for walk-on football players. But there are caveats: “[T]he walk-on program and the discourses surrounding it function as a way to admit more white men to the team (in an increasingly black sport) and function as a way to value those white players by praising their hard work.” Likewise, using football coaching as the organizing framework prioritizes straight white men. By partial contrast, Nerdfighters, while organized around two white men, are primarily white women; while they value civic involvement, whiteness still structures their activities. And Greenpeace’s anti-Shell LEGO campaign, pressuring LEGO to cut ties and stop branding sets with Shell logos, annoyed adult fans of LEGO (again, lots of white guys) as wrongly blaming LEGO for Shell’s conduct even as it might have been more effective for casual fans/parents of kids who wanted to feel good about the toys they buy. And finally, corporate takeovers tend to make charitable campaigns anodyne and disconnect them from real civic participation—she points to the Lucasfilm/Disney-organized Force for Change campaigns as ineffective because they didn’t mobilize fans according to Star Wars ethics, but just tried to raise money for “good works.”
Still, Hinck is bullish about fannish practices as civic practices: “By connecting popular culture ethical frameworks with civic ethical modalities, fan-based civic appeals invite fans to see themselves as citizens and public subjects, as public beings with a stake in public life. Indeed, political subjectivity is a process, and fandom offers a particular path through which individuals can come to see themselves as connected to citizenship, civic engagement, and social movement activism.”
Jessica Balanzategui et al., Fame and Fandom: Essay collection focusing on celebrity fandom, both in the West (SPN) and elsewhere, including Chinese “fresh meat” idols, Brazilian YouTube influencers, and—a different kind of celebrity worship—Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and the tensions that arise with estate-authorized works, published as part of the timeline, whose authors are not allowed to make real changes or get equal credit. Unfortunately, the pieces are often too short for people already steeped in the literature to learn more than anecdotes. I did like Zhen Troy Chen’s piece on fresh meat idols, which argued for the multivalence of female Chinese fandom: “female fans are perfect consumers who conduct labor as ‘digital housewives’ on the one hand; on the other hand, via their cultural jamming endeavors, they are creating ruptures that disturb the dynamics of gender relationships in a patriarchal society.” One wonderful quote from a user justifying the work she and other fans did did to promote her idol: “Everyone, every single one of us is exploited. We are instruments getting tasks from our masters and work the shit out of ourselves . . . Sisters, we are building this together. Cai started from nothing. But the advertisers don’t care, they look at the numbers. What can we do? Do some datawork while you are working for your bosses. They are the real exploiters! If you work without cyberslacking, you are a real dickhead!” I’d love to see Chen’s take on the government’s recent anti-fandom crackdown.
Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: Somewhat overtold/repetitive but still engaging story of the creator of Silk Road, the website where people could order drugs, guns, and poisons to be delivered through the mail and believe they’d stay anonymous. I learned that two of the main agents on the case used the opportunity to enrich themselves—one by stealing Bitcoin from a lower-level guy they arrested and another by selling information to the Dread Pirate Roberts who ran Silk Road. That they caught him at all ends up being a combination of his mistakes and the dedication of a couple of other, noncorrupt agents. The story is tightly focused on the Silk Road investigation, with only one story of a kid who died from the drugs it sold; we will never know many of its other impacts.
Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died: Memoir about surviving an abusive mother who, in the course of pressuring McCurdy into acting, also pressured her into an eating disorder, which is described in much greater detail (including detailed descriptions of what forcing oneself to vomit is like) than McCurdy’s OCD. It is written in a light tone that puts the heavy subject matter into sharp focus.
Jana Mathews, The Benefits of Friends: Inside the Complicated World of Today's Sororities and Fraternities: This is a great, disturbing book. One chapter is heavily excerpted in Slate, How Female-Heavy Sex Ratios Are Changing the College Dating Scene, https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/10/sex-ratio-college-campuses-hookup-culture-friends-with-benefits.html. The arguments are rich and I’m doing an injustice by summarizing, but she argues that white sororities and fraternities uphold heterosexuality through homosociality and even homoeroticism. White sororities redefine intimacy as that which is shared with sisters, not with men, who are for fucking. While the consequences are not all bad, one really depressing dynamic relates to sexual assault: Reasonably certain that there will be no formal justice for them, sexually assaulted sorority women redefine what happened as a betrayal by their sisters who left them alone/let them get too drunk/etc., so the rupture is repaired by rituals of apology and forgiveness from one sister to another—but nothing happens to the rapists. There’s so much more in the book, including discussions of how white fraternities get their members jobs while white sororities resist mixing business with sisterhood, to the detriment of their members.
Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World: Herman Melville wrote a novel about the historical incident at the center of this book—enslaved Africans took over a slave ship and then, nearly out of resources, forced the captain to pretend that all was well and seek aid from an American ship that came near, captained by Amasa Delano (yes, that family). But the scheme was revealed and the mutineers killed or reenslaved. The book is about South American slavery, the links between the Americas, and the resource extraction that encompassed slavery but also included the massively wasteful sealing operations that Delano’s ship was trying to profit from. It couldn’t because the seals had quickly been depopulated; Delano also failed to get what he thought was a just reward for helping the enslavers retake the other ship. It’s a story of intersecting lifeworlds and brutalities.
Luke McDonagh, Performing Copyright: Law, Theatre and Authorship: History of copyright treatment of plays and authorship mostly in the UK, with some comparative bits, along with interview-based discussion of how participants in the process see authorship and ownership. Doesn’t really resolve much about who should be considered the “author” or not—directors, actors, and dramaturgs often all have credible claims to have contributed copyrightable creativity, but is that enough to let them share authorship? Concludes that the playwright’s interest in control is highest for initial productions, where a work’s reputation will be set, and then declines over time; notes that companies may favor public domain works where they can “distort” to their heart’s content.
Larisa Kingston Mann, Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power: A book about the Jamaican tradition of using riddims and the difference between formal law and lived reality. When a riddim is used, “the DJ plays a recording of the instrumental parts of a song separated from the vocals so that a live performer can sing their own vocal line over it, or a producer records a succession of new vocal lines over a preexisting instrumental recording.” Mann concludes that “[m]ost Jamaican popular music has developed through practices that contradict a law supposedly intended to structure the behavior of creators and consumers.” The law is underenforced in Jamaica, however, and the Jamaica/rest of world interface hasn’t led to much change because the people who claim copyright interests in receiving royalties for Jamaican music are largely privileged and don’t need to trace ownership of the portions of works that they didn’t originate. Indeed, Jamaican music is apparently the third-largest industry, and a 1995 UN study puts “worldwide income from [Jamaican-based] reggae music at not below 3 percent” of global music production— “an impressive figure for an island with a population of around 2.5 million.” And yet Jamaican elites portray the music makers on the ground as generally lawless or disobedient. It’s a great look at how music is actually made and how little law might have to do with it—but that very lawlessness prevents musicians from benefiting from innovations like Spotify and other potential sources of revenue.
Ashley Hinck, Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in the Digital Age: This 2019 book looks at various campaigns based in fandom that try to enact broader social change, and argues that fandom can spur valuable involvement in civic activity, including political activity, though corporate takeovers remain a risk. “When fans practice deliberation, careful research, writing, and art within fan communities, they are preparing themselves to participate in politics.” Of course, that can be good or bad—Gamergate was also political, and Qanon is the current version; I wish she’d talked more about the dark side.
It was interesting to read about non-media fandoms like Nebraska (Husker) football fandom and a coach’s use of football fandom to encourage more Nebraskans to serve as mentors to kids in need. This connection leverages the idea of Nebraskan pride and hard work, which also connects to Nebraska’s long-running welcome for walk-on football players. But there are caveats: “[T]he walk-on program and the discourses surrounding it function as a way to admit more white men to the team (in an increasingly black sport) and function as a way to value those white players by praising their hard work.” Likewise, using football coaching as the organizing framework prioritizes straight white men. By partial contrast, Nerdfighters, while organized around two white men, are primarily white women; while they value civic involvement, whiteness still structures their activities. And Greenpeace’s anti-Shell LEGO campaign, pressuring LEGO to cut ties and stop branding sets with Shell logos, annoyed adult fans of LEGO (again, lots of white guys) as wrongly blaming LEGO for Shell’s conduct even as it might have been more effective for casual fans/parents of kids who wanted to feel good about the toys they buy. And finally, corporate takeovers tend to make charitable campaigns anodyne and disconnect them from real civic participation—she points to the Lucasfilm/Disney-organized Force for Change campaigns as ineffective because they didn’t mobilize fans according to Star Wars ethics, but just tried to raise money for “good works.”
Still, Hinck is bullish about fannish practices as civic practices: “By connecting popular culture ethical frameworks with civic ethical modalities, fan-based civic appeals invite fans to see themselves as citizens and public subjects, as public beings with a stake in public life. Indeed, political subjectivity is a process, and fandom offers a particular path through which individuals can come to see themselves as connected to citizenship, civic engagement, and social movement activism.”
Jessica Balanzategui et al., Fame and Fandom: Essay collection focusing on celebrity fandom, both in the West (SPN) and elsewhere, including Chinese “fresh meat” idols, Brazilian YouTube influencers, and—a different kind of celebrity worship—Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and the tensions that arise with estate-authorized works, published as part of the timeline, whose authors are not allowed to make real changes or get equal credit. Unfortunately, the pieces are often too short for people already steeped in the literature to learn more than anecdotes. I did like Zhen Troy Chen’s piece on fresh meat idols, which argued for the multivalence of female Chinese fandom: “female fans are perfect consumers who conduct labor as ‘digital housewives’ on the one hand; on the other hand, via their cultural jamming endeavors, they are creating ruptures that disturb the dynamics of gender relationships in a patriarchal society.” One wonderful quote from a user justifying the work she and other fans did did to promote her idol: “Everyone, every single one of us is exploited. We are instruments getting tasks from our masters and work the shit out of ourselves . . . Sisters, we are building this together. Cai started from nothing. But the advertisers don’t care, they look at the numbers. What can we do? Do some datawork while you are working for your bosses. They are the real exploiters! If you work without cyberslacking, you are a real dickhead!” I’d love to see Chen’s take on the government’s recent anti-fandom crackdown.
Nick Bilton, American Kingpin: Somewhat overtold/repetitive but still engaging story of the creator of Silk Road, the website where people could order drugs, guns, and poisons to be delivered through the mail and believe they’d stay anonymous. I learned that two of the main agents on the case used the opportunity to enrich themselves—one by stealing Bitcoin from a lower-level guy they arrested and another by selling information to the Dread Pirate Roberts who ran Silk Road. That they caught him at all ends up being a combination of his mistakes and the dedication of a couple of other, noncorrupt agents. The story is tightly focused on the Silk Road investigation, with only one story of a kid who died from the drugs it sold; we will never know many of its other impacts.
Jennette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died: Memoir about surviving an abusive mother who, in the course of pressuring McCurdy into acting, also pressured her into an eating disorder, which is described in much greater detail (including detailed descriptions of what forcing oneself to vomit is like) than McCurdy’s OCD. It is written in a light tone that puts the heavy subject matter into sharp focus.
Jana Mathews, The Benefits of Friends: Inside the Complicated World of Today's Sororities and Fraternities: This is a great, disturbing book. One chapter is heavily excerpted in Slate, How Female-Heavy Sex Ratios Are Changing the College Dating Scene, https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/10/sex-ratio-college-campuses-hookup-culture-friends-with-benefits.html. The arguments are rich and I’m doing an injustice by summarizing, but she argues that white sororities and fraternities uphold heterosexuality through homosociality and even homoeroticism. White sororities redefine intimacy as that which is shared with sisters, not with men, who are for fucking. While the consequences are not all bad, one really depressing dynamic relates to sexual assault: Reasonably certain that there will be no formal justice for them, sexually assaulted sorority women redefine what happened as a betrayal by their sisters who left them alone/let them get too drunk/etc., so the rupture is repaired by rituals of apology and forgiveness from one sister to another—but nothing happens to the rapists. There’s so much more in the book, including discussions of how white fraternities get their members jobs while white sororities resist mixing business with sisterhood, to the detriment of their members.
Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World: Herman Melville wrote a novel about the historical incident at the center of this book—enslaved Africans took over a slave ship and then, nearly out of resources, forced the captain to pretend that all was well and seek aid from an American ship that came near, captained by Amasa Delano (yes, that family). But the scheme was revealed and the mutineers killed or reenslaved. The book is about South American slavery, the links between the Americas, and the resource extraction that encompassed slavery but also included the massively wasteful sealing operations that Delano’s ship was trying to profit from. It couldn’t because the seals had quickly been depopulated; Delano also failed to get what he thought was a just reward for helping the enslavers retake the other ship. It’s a story of intersecting lifeworlds and brutalities.
Luke McDonagh, Performing Copyright: Law, Theatre and Authorship: History of copyright treatment of plays and authorship mostly in the UK, with some comparative bits, along with interview-based discussion of how participants in the process see authorship and ownership. Doesn’t really resolve much about who should be considered the “author” or not—directors, actors, and dramaturgs often all have credible claims to have contributed copyrightable creativity, but is that enough to let them share authorship? Concludes that the playwright’s interest in control is highest for initial productions, where a work’s reputation will be set, and then declines over time; notes that companies may favor public domain works where they can “distort” to their heart’s content.
Larisa Kingston Mann, Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power: A book about the Jamaican tradition of using riddims and the difference between formal law and lived reality. When a riddim is used, “the DJ plays a recording of the instrumental parts of a song separated from the vocals so that a live performer can sing their own vocal line over it, or a producer records a succession of new vocal lines over a preexisting instrumental recording.” Mann concludes that “[m]ost Jamaican popular music has developed through practices that contradict a law supposedly intended to structure the behavior of creators and consumers.” The law is underenforced in Jamaica, however, and the Jamaica/rest of world interface hasn’t led to much change because the people who claim copyright interests in receiving royalties for Jamaican music are largely privileged and don’t need to trace ownership of the portions of works that they didn’t originate. Indeed, Jamaican music is apparently the third-largest industry, and a 1995 UN study puts “worldwide income from [Jamaican-based] reggae music at not below 3 percent” of global music production— “an impressive figure for an island with a population of around 2.5 million.” And yet Jamaican elites portray the music makers on the ground as generally lawless or disobedient. It’s a great look at how music is actually made and how little law might have to do with it—but that very lawlessness prevents musicians from benefiting from innovations like Spotify and other potential sources of revenue.