Lesley Goodman | Albright College (original) (raw)
Papers by Lesley Goodman
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2015
HE ANGER AND DISAPPOINTMENT OF PROFESSED FANS WAS THE FIRST SURPRISE FOR THE fictional protagonis... more HE ANGER AND DISAPPOINTMENT OF PROFESSED FANS WAS THE FIRST SURPRISE FOR THE fictional protagonist of Supernatural, upon learning that there was a series of books written about him and his brother with a devoted cult following. In this fourth-wall-breaking episode, the writers behind the show were registering their own mixture of fondness and frustration with their vocal fans, who seem to love and hate the show in equal measure-whose love, in fact, takes the form of disappointment, anger, and indignation. Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, an adult spin on Harry Potter and similar fantasy stories, makes a similar point, one that is easily overlooked by those who take the label "fan" to describe someone slavishly adoring:. .. a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you'll read these stories and it'll be like "What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?" And of course the point is that they don't, and they wouldn't, because they don't have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There's a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there-which I find fascinating and interesting and cool. (Canavan) The affiliation Grossman identifies between fan fiction and critique-the "almost punklike" anger-is not an especially new point in academic studies of fandom, where much of the interest has been in its subversive potential. Fan studies began as a form of cultural studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the intersection of feminist criticism, queer theory, popular culture studies, and media studies, where the price of admission for attending to a subculture like fandom was, in part, reading it as counterculture, evading and resisting the dominant ideologies of popular media (Gray 2). Henry Jenkins, one of the most prominent early scholars of fandom, has acknowledged that in his first book on fandom, Textual Poachers, he "accented the positive rather than the negative," a "tactically necessary" move as academic discourse on fandom tended to reinforce negative stereotypes (Hills, Fan Cultures 10). The rule-breaking aspects of fandom have thus often been at the center of academic fan studies: indifference to copyright laws and capitalist models of artistic labor, the insistence on representing what the mainstream media refuses to represent (particularly feminine or queer forms of desire), the rejection of the distinction between author and reader-in short, the critique and the punk-like anger.
Journal of Popular Culture, Mar 2015
fictional protagonist of Supernatural, upon learning that there was a series of books written abo... more fictional protagonist of Supernatural, upon learning that there was a series of books written about him and his brother with a devoted cult following. In this fourth-wall-breaking episode, the writers behind the show were registering their own mixture of fondness and frustration with their vocal fans, who seem to love and hate the show in equal measure-whose love, in fact, takes the form of disappointment, anger, and indignation. Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, an adult spin on Harry Potter and similar fantasy stories, makes a similar point, one that is easily overlooked by those who take the label "fan" to describe someone slavishly adoring:
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2015
HE ANGER AND DISAPPOINTMENT OF PROFESSED FANS WAS THE FIRST SURPRISE FOR THE fictional protagonis... more HE ANGER AND DISAPPOINTMENT OF PROFESSED FANS WAS THE FIRST SURPRISE FOR THE fictional protagonist of Supernatural, upon learning that there was a series of books written about him and his brother with a devoted cult following. In this fourth-wall-breaking episode, the writers behind the show were registering their own mixture of fondness and frustration with their vocal fans, who seem to love and hate the show in equal measure-whose love, in fact, takes the form of disappointment, anger, and indignation. Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, an adult spin on Harry Potter and similar fantasy stories, makes a similar point, one that is easily overlooked by those who take the label "fan" to describe someone slavishly adoring:. .. a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you'll read these stories and it'll be like "What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?" And of course the point is that they don't, and they wouldn't, because they don't have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There's a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there-which I find fascinating and interesting and cool. (Canavan) The affiliation Grossman identifies between fan fiction and critique-the "almost punklike" anger-is not an especially new point in academic studies of fandom, where much of the interest has been in its subversive potential. Fan studies began as a form of cultural studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the intersection of feminist criticism, queer theory, popular culture studies, and media studies, where the price of admission for attending to a subculture like fandom was, in part, reading it as counterculture, evading and resisting the dominant ideologies of popular media (Gray 2). Henry Jenkins, one of the most prominent early scholars of fandom, has acknowledged that in his first book on fandom, Textual Poachers, he "accented the positive rather than the negative," a "tactically necessary" move as academic discourse on fandom tended to reinforce negative stereotypes (Hills, Fan Cultures 10). The rule-breaking aspects of fandom have thus often been at the center of academic fan studies: indifference to copyright laws and capitalist models of artistic labor, the insistence on representing what the mainstream media refuses to represent (particularly feminine or queer forms of desire), the rejection of the distinction between author and reader-in short, the critique and the punk-like anger.
Journal of Popular Culture, Mar 2015
fictional protagonist of Supernatural, upon learning that there was a series of books written abo... more fictional protagonist of Supernatural, upon learning that there was a series of books written about him and his brother with a devoted cult following. In this fourth-wall-breaking episode, the writers behind the show were registering their own mixture of fondness and frustration with their vocal fans, who seem to love and hate the show in equal measure-whose love, in fact, takes the form of disappointment, anger, and indignation. Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, an adult spin on Harry Potter and similar fantasy stories, makes a similar point, one that is easily overlooked by those who take the label "fan" to describe someone slavishly adoring: