Transformative Works and Cultures, special issues: Transformative

Works and Fan Activism, No. 10 (June 15, 2012)

Editorial

Henry Jenkins & Sangita Shresthova, Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism

Theory

Melissa M. Brough & Sangita Shresthova, Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political

participation

Henry Jenkins, "Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, & Chris Tokuhama, Experiencing

fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations through members' narratives

Ashley Hinck, Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic

engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance

Andreas Jungherr, The German federal election of 2009: The chal enge of participatory cultures in

political campaigns

Matt Yockey, Wonder Woman for a day: Affect, agency, and Amazons

Praxis

Sun Jung, Fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms in K-pop fandom

Bethan Jones, Being of service: "X-Files" fans and social engagement

Marcus Schulzke, Fan action and political participation on "The Colbert Report"

Alex Leavitt, Andrea Horbinski, Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic

expression, and a public for the Japanese dôjin community

Tanya R. Cochran, "Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses

Lili Wilkinson, Nerdfighters, "Paper Towns," and heterotopia

Cheuk Yin Li, The absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in

Hong Kong

Tom Phil ips, Too fat to fly: A case study of unsuccessful fan mobilization

Symposium

Jonathan Gray, Of snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish play at the Wisconsin protests

Aswin Punathambekar, On the ordinariness of participatory culture

Stephen Duncombe, Imagining No-place

Lucy Bennett, Fan activism for social mobilization: A critical review of the literature

Ritesh Mehta, Flash activism: How a Bol ywood film catalyzed civic justice toward a murder trial

Review

Stacey Marie Lantagne, "Fan fiction and copyright: Outside works and intel ectual property protection,"

by Aaron Schwabach

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), ISSN 1941-2258, is an online-only Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit

Organization for Transformative Works. TWC is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0

Unported License. Download date: March 15, 2017. For citation, please refer to the most recent version of articles at TWC.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Editorial

Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism

Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Editorial for Transformative Works and Cultures, No. 10, special

issue, "Transformative Works and Fan Activism."

[0.2] Keywords— Dream Act; Invisible Children; Kony 2012; Participatory politics,

Participatory culture

Jenkins, Henry, and Sangita Shresthova. 2012. "Up, Up, and Away! The Power and

Potential of Fan Activism." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by

Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and

Cultures, no. 10. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0435.

[0.3] [Fandom] is built on psychological mechanisms that are relevant to

political involvement: these are concerned with the realm of fantasy and

imagination on the one hand, and with emotional processes on the other…

The remaining question then becomes whether and how politics can borrow

from the elements of popular culture that produce these intense audience

investments, so that citizenship becomes entertaining.

—Liesbeth van Zoonen, Entertaining the Citizen

[0.4] Scratch an activist and you're apt to find a fan. It's no mystery why:

fandom provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according

to different norms, laws, and structures than those we experience in our

"real" lives. Fandom also necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans

with whom to share interests, develop networks and institutions, and create

a common culture. This ability to imagine alternatives and build community,

not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism.

—Steven Duncombe, "Imagining NoPlace"

1. Introduction

[1.1] In 2011, American political leaders and activists were surprisingly concerned

with an 80plusyearold popular culture icon: Superman. When presidential candidate

Rick Perry was asked by a 9yearold child during a campaign stop which superhero he

would want to be, the toughtalking Texan chose the man from Krypton, because

"Superman came to save the United States!" (Well 2011). At almost that same

moment, conservative commentators were up in arms because in an alternative

universe DC comics story, Superman denounced his American citizenship to embrace a

more global perspective: "I'm tired of having my actions construed as instruments of

US policy. 'Truth, Justice, and the American way!'—It's not enough any more." Rightwing rage was expressed by one FoxNews.com reader: "This is absolutely sickening.

We are now down to destroying all American Icons. How are we going to survive as a

Nation?" (Appelo 2011). Such responses suggest a widespread recognition that

popular mythologies may provide the frames through which the public makes sense of

its national identity.

[1.2] Meanwhile, immigrant rights activists were questioning when Superman ever

became an American citizen or whether he even possessed a green card, given that he

entered the country without permission and, we must presume, without

documentation, a refugee from a society in turmoil who has sought to hide his origins

and identity from outside scrutiny ever since.

[1.3] Hari Kondabolu, a South Asian comedian, recorded a video entitled "Superman

as Immigrant Rights Activist," distributed through Colorlines

(http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/10/superman_as_immigrant_rights_activist.html),

asking why no one ever tried to deport Superman for "stealing jobs" and suggesting

that other immigrants might wear glasses, like Clark Kent does, to mask their

identities. Photographer Dulce Pinzon

(http://www.dulcepinzon.com/en_projects_superhero.htm) produced a powerful set of

images depicting a range of (mostly Marvel) superheroes performing the jobs often

done by undocumented workers. As Thomas Andrae (1987; see also Engle 1987) has

noted, at the time of his origins in the late Depression era, Superman adopted an

explicitly political stance ("the champion of the oppressed") rather than the more

vaguely civic orientation of subsequent decades. As Matt Yockey demonstrates in

regard to Wonder Woman in this issue, superheroes have long functioned as

mythological figures or rhetorical devices for debates around identity politics. Even DC

Comics has described Superman as "the ultimate immigrant" (Perry 2011).

[1.4] Arely Zimmerman (forthcoming), a postdoc with the Media Activism and

Participatory Politics Project (part of USC's Civic Paths Project), interviewed 25

undocumented youth activists involved in the campaign to pass the Dream Act. She

was struck by how often superheroes cropped up in her exchanges. One respondent

described the experience of discovering other undocumented youth online as like

"finding other XMen." Another compared their campaign, which involved youth from

many different backgrounds, to the Justice League. A third suggested that posting a

video on YouTube in which he proclaimed himself "proud" and "undocumented" had

parallels to the experience of SpiderMan, who had removed his mask on national

television during Marvel's Civil Wars story line (note 1). A graphic created for an online

recruitment campaign used the image of Wolverine to suggest what kind of hero youth

volunteers might aspire to become.

[1.5] On the one hand, we might read these various deployments of the superheroes

as illustrating the trends Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) describes: groups promoting

social change are tapping the affective and imaginative properties of popular culture to

inspire a more intense connection with their supporters. In this issue, Jonathan Gray

shows similar appropriations of images from Star Wars and a range of other popular

media franchises during labor rights protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Gray argues that

such images (which have also been widely associated with the Occupy Wall Street

movement) proliferate because popular culture, especially blockbuster franchises,

constitutes a common reference point (shared between fans and more casual

consumers) within an otherwise diverse and fragmented coalition of protestors and

observers. Gray stresses the morale and communitybuilding work performed through

the remixing of popular culture for those gathered in an icy Wisconsin winter to

express their support for collective bargaining. Zimmerman (forthcoming) also

suggests that the Dream activists' use of pop culture references might be understood

as part of a larger strategy to signal their assimilation into American culture. Given

how much contemporary speech of all kinds is full of snarky pop culture references, it

is not surprising that such references are also reshaping our political rhetoric,

especially as campaigns seek to speak to young people who have famously felt

excluded from traditional campaigns and have often been turned off by insidethebeltway language. Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes to Washington!

[1.6] Yet as the epigraph from Duncombe (this issue) suggests, such popular culture

references also reflect the lived experiences of activists who also are fans, whether

understood in the casual sense of someone who feels a strong emotional connection to

a particular narrative or in the more active sense of someone who has participated in a

fan community or engaged in transformative practices. Civil rights leaders in the

1960s deployed biblical allusions because part of what they shared were meaningful

experiences within black church congregations. Zimmerman's Dream activists

referenced superheroes because reading and discussing comics was part of their

everyday lives as young people, because these references helped them think through

their struggles, because they offer such vivid embodiments of heroic conflicts and deep

commitments. Unlike Perry, who had only a faint recollection of Superman's mythology

and acknowledged that he was no longer actively reading comics, these allusions to

superhero comics were apt rather than opportunistic, grounded in a deep appreciation

of who these characters are and how their stories have evolved over time. That is,

they show the kinds of mastery we associate with fans. Here, we see what Duncombe

describes as the fan within the activist.

[1.7] However, we can push the idea of fan activism one step farther: by now, the

capacity of fan communities to quickly mobilize in reaction to a casting decision or a

threat of cancellation has been well established, going back to the nowlegendary

letterwriting campaign in the 1960s that kept Star Trek on the air. Fan groups have

also had a long history of lending their support to the favorite causes of popular

performers and producers, or more generally working in support of charity. Some

slash fans, for example, have been motivated to march in gay rights parades, raise

money for AIDS research and awareness, or, more recently, work in support of

marriage equality. Fans have rallied to challenge attempts to regulate the Internet,

restrict their deployment of intellectual property, or censor their content. For example,

in this issue, Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski trace the responses of Japanese otaku,

involved in the creation of dôjinshi (underground comics), to metropolitan Tokyo

ordinance Bill 156, which they perceived as an attempt to curtain their artistic

freedom.

[1.8] More recent efforts (such as Racebending, the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine

Better, the Nerdfighters) deploy these same strategies and tactics to support

campaigns for social justice and human rights, inspiring their supporters to move from

engagement within participatory culture to involvement in political life. Fan activism of

the kinds we've known about for years models many effective approaches for using

social media to create awareness and mobilize supporters—tactics now being adopted

by even traditional charities and activist organizations as they adapt to a networked

society.

[1.9] All of this suggests the urgent need for scholars to explore more fully the many

different potential relationships between fandom and political life, since fan studies as

a research paradigm has something vital to contribute to larger considerations of the

relationship between participatory culture and civic engagement. Fan studies has long

depicted fandom as a site of ideological and cultural resistance to the heteronormative

and patriarchal values often shaping mass media. Such work is and remains highly

valuable as we seek to understand the place of fandom in contemporary culture, but

our focus here pushes beyond abstract notions of cultural resistance to focus on

specific ways that fan culture has affected debates around law and public policy. Many

fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a

release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than

the more overtly political term activism to describe their prosocial efforts. Our goal is

not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something

more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices,

social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of

fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking,

mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support

expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement.

2. Political participation and fan activism

[2.1] This issue's two editors are part of the Civic Paths Project research group,

housed in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University

of Southern California. This group has partnered with the Spencer and MacArthur

foundations to try to document new forms of political participation that are affecting

the lives of young people. Our work is part of a larger research network that is trying

to develop a model for understanding what is being called participatory politics.

Through our internal discussions, we had begun to identify the concept of fan activism

as central to addressing larger questions about what might motivate young people,

who are often described as apathetic, to join civic and political organizations. We had

located a core body of scholarship, such as the work of van Zoonen (2005), which

examined how the playful, affective, and fantasy aspects of fandom were starting to

inform political discourse, or the work of Earl and Kimport (2009), which discussed fan

online campaigns as part of a larger exploration of what networked politics might look

like, or the work of Daniel Dayan (2005), which debated the similarities and

differences between audiences and publics. We had already identified some powerful

examples of how fanbased groups had helped support civic learning and had

developed resources and practices that could quickly mobilize supporters behind

emergencies, charities, or human rights campaigns.

[2.2] We knew that there must be many more examples out there. Still, after we

released the call for papers, we were blown away by the range of submissions we

received from all over the world, describing other examples of fan activism in practice,

debating why calls for fan participation sometimes yield spectacular results and other

times fall flat, contesting the borders of fan activism, speculating about its

contributions to the public sphere, and making important distinctions between topdown celebrityrun models and bottomup participatory ones. As you will see, this issue is overflowing with cuttingedge work that takes fans seriously as political agents

and that draws on a range of different theories of citizenship and democracy to explain

what happens when fans act as citizens. Examples here encompass a wide variety of

fandoms— Harry Potter, The XFiles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Colbert Report, comic books, pop music, and Bollywood.

3. Essays in this issue

[3.1] The Civic Paths team is well represented here, with a cluster of three essays

offering multiple and complimentary frames for discussing fan activism, and two other

contributors (Ritesh Mehta and Alex Leavitt) are active group members. Taking a deep

dive into the existing literature around cultural and political participation, Melissa M.

Brough and Sangita Shresthova provide an overview of core debates surrounding fan

activism, including the diverse forms that participation may take, the tension between

resistance and participation as competing models, the value of affect and content

worlds, and the criteria by which we might measure such campaigns' success and

sustainability. They argue that the study of fan activists may make a significant

contribution to crossdisciplinary debates about citizenship and political engagement.

Henry Jenkins maps the history of fanbased activism, providing a context for

understanding the Harry Potter Alliance, perhaps the most highly visible of the new

generation of fan activist groups. Jenkins defines fan activism as "forms of civic

engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often

in response to the shared interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure

of existing fan practices and relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn

from popular and participatory culture" (¶1.8). By exploring the concept of "cultural

acupuncture," a phrase coined by HPA's founder, Andrew Slack, Jenkins explores how

fannish borrowings from J. K. Rowling's fictions inspire and inform the group's diverse

interventions (from an initial focus on human rights and genocide in Darfur to more

recent campaigns pushing Warner Bros. to tie their chocolate contracts to fair trade

principles). Neta KliglerVilenchik, Joshua McVeighSchultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and

Chris Tokuhama share some of the results of Civic Path's extensive fieldwork,

interviewing young participants from the Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children,

the latter a San Diego–based human rights organization that deploys various forms of

participatory culture to motivate high school and college students to become more

aware of how Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has kidnapped and conscripted child

soldiers. Tracing the trajectories by which these young people become more deeply

involved in these efforts, the authors suggest the importance of shared media

experiences, rich content worlds, and a desire to help in changing how young people

see themselves as political agents. From an initial focus on fan activism, the Civic

Paths project has expanded the scope of its research to consider the participatory

culture practices associated with Dream Act activism, the efforts of collegeaged

libertarians, the work of the Nerd Fighters and Imagine Better, and the political and

cultural activities of Muslim American youth, each offering models for understanding

the cultural and political factors affecting the lives of contemporary American young

people.

[3.2] Ashley Hinck extends this special issue's consideration of the Harry Potter

Alliance, drawing on core concepts from the literature of social movements and the

public sphere. Focusing primarily on their campaign around Darfur, she argues that

the HPA taps into the world of Hogwarts to construct what Hinck calls a "public

engagement keystone," defined here as a "touchpoint, worldview, or philosophy that

makes other people, actions, and institutions intelligible" (¶4.6). The fact that Harry

Potter is so widely read, known, and loved not only by hardcore fans but by many

who are not part of fandom makes it a useful resource for bridging the two, helping to

revitalize public discourse around human rights concerns in Africa. Lili Wilkinson also

explores the value of content worlds from popular culture in facilitating new kinds of

political interactions, in this case through an application of Foucault's notion of

heterotopia to understanding the links between John Green's young adult novel Paper

Towns and his involvement in the Nerdfighters, an informal network of young people

who use social media and video blogging to "reduce world suck." Though coming from

different theoretical backgrounds, KliglerVilenchik et al., Hinck, and Wilkinson all

converge around the importance of reimaging the world through shared fantasies.

[3.3] Another central strand running through the discussion has to do with the

differences between efforts of celebrities (authors such as John Green, pop stars such

as Hong Kong's Ho Denise Wan See, cult television actors such as Gillian Anderson,

filmmakers such as Kevin Smith, television show runners such as Joss Whedon, and

comedians such as Stephen Colbert) to mobilize their fans around their pet causes and

more grassroots efforts by fans to draw resources from popular culture to help fuel

their own efforts at social change. A group like Nerdfighters straddles the line between

the two—they are partially a response to the ongoing cultural productions of the

brothers John and Hank Green (as Wilkinson suggests) but also a much more openended, participatory space, where anyone who wants to claim the nerdfighter identity can produce media and rally support behind his or her own ideas about what might

constitute a better society. Lucy Bennett offers a critical review of the literature

surrounding celebritybased activism, exploring how such causes often take off

because of the sense of intimacy the stars create with their following. Bethan Jones

challenges a tradition of research that has tended to pathologize the parasocial

relations between media fans and celebrities by describing the ways that XFiles cast

member Gillian Anderson was able to inspire her fans to raise money for various

charities. Tanya R. Cochran examines the efforts of Joss Whedon ( Buffy the Vampire

Slayer, Firefly, Angel, Dollhouse) to use his blog to increase awareness about sexual violence against women. Cochran sees Whedon's promotion of feminism as consistent

with the focus on strong female characters across his television series, reinforcing the

themes that draw fans to his properties in the first place.

[3.4] The idea that the personality of celebrities, as much as the themes of popular

fictions, may shape what issues fan activists embrace (and in this case, which issues

generate little or no response) is further explored in Tom Phillips's exploration of the

failed attempt by Kevin Smith ( Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma) at stimulating fans to write letters to Southwest Airlines when the filmmaker was removed from his flight

because he was viewed as "too fat to fly." Although the incident sparked online

conversations around "corporate practice, body image, and consumer rights" (¶0.1),

Smith's fans were not able to cohere around a strategy for exerting pressure on the

airline. Cheuk Yi Lin explores why a sexually ambiguous pop star in Hong Kong has

offered fans new language and images to represent their own erotic identities, but her

queer fans have not coalesced into institutional politics around the rights of sexual

minorities. Any urge toward more overtly political responses are dampened both by

the cultural traditions of Hong Kong and by the institutional structures surrounding the

fandom.

[3.5] Although the first wave of research has stressed the potentials for fan activism,

such practices are still relatively rare, with most forms of fandom stopping at the level

of creative expression and not translating into collective action. For this reason,

studies such as those by Phillips and Lin, which help us to understand the constraints

on fan activism, may prove as useful in the long term as those studies which

document successful models for translating fan investments into social change. Further

challenging a utopian view of fan activism, Sun Jung explores antifandom around the

KPop star Tablo, showing how some fan discourse may incorporate intense

nationalism and even racism, even as other groups actively and productively challenge

these discourses.

[3.6] Contributing to van Zoonen's notion of the entertained citizen, several articles

engage the direct connection between the political sphere (as traditionally defined)

and participatory cultures. Andreas Jungherr investigates the German federal elections

in 2009, arguing that citizen use of new media platforms and practices challenges the

candidates' topdown communication practices. Contrasting design and deployment of

such strategies across the German political spectrum, Jungherr finds that the

participatory possibilities of emerging political practices vary depending on ideology.

Jungherr concludes that the more liberal German Social Democrats (SPD) were more

successful in designing an online environment that supported grassroots participation

than the German conservative party (CDU). In the United States, The Colbert Report,

a satirical latenight television program featuring Stephen Colbert, a character who is

a parody of conservative media personalities, further blurs the lines between politics

and entertainment. Marcus Schulzke shows how the program encouraged audiences to

remix content and otherwise manipulate the words and images of political figures in

ways that foster critical media literacies. By now, the idea that young Americans are

as apt to learn about the political system through such newscomedy programs as

from traditional journalism has become commonplace, while the program producers

have sought to link creative expression and political participation to what it means to

be a fan of their shows.

[3.7] The simultaneously transnational and local dimensions of fan activism are

another strand that runs through this issue. With examples of fan activism that include

South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Australia, and India, the essays in this

issue expand the transnational dimensions of fan activism. These examples highlight

some of the similarities between various instances and discussions of fan activism

(including the role of communities and content worlds, catalyzing moments, and

challenges to sustained mobilization), but we are also acutely sensitive to the local

dimensions and specifications of these mobilizations. In sharp contrast to the United

States, where we are constantly working to establish participatory culture links to the

political sphere, Aswin Punathambekar aptly observes that the connection between

participatory culture and politics is "not news to anyone in India." Punathambekar goes

even further, observing that the struggle in India is to, in fact, demonstrate the

"ordinariness of participatory culture." Complementing this observation, and using a

public protest inspired by the a Bollywood film to demonstrate his argument, Ritesh

Mehta proposes "flash activism" as a crucial element of India's civil society.

4. Kony 2012

[4.1] The power and challenges of activism through fanlike engagement with content

worlds came into sharp focus with Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign, an effort

to increase public awareness of the human rights violations and genocide conducted by

a Ugandan warlord. At the time of writing, the 30minute Kony 2012 film released at

12 PM on March 5, 2012, has topped 76 million views on YouTube to become one of

the most viewed and fastestspreading videos in YouTube history. In The Daily Show's

coverage of Kony 2012 on March 12, 2012, host Jon Stewart sets up the popularity of

the film by saying, "This guy Kony is probably dropping some sick beats." The show

cuts to an excerpt from Kony 2012 in which Jason Russell's voice describes the war

crimes committed by the LRA set to images of what we gather are victims of those

atrocities. We now cut back to a shocked Jon Stewart who goes on to exclaim, "So a

thirtyminute video on child soldiers has gone viral—how popular can this thing be? I

am sure it's not teenage girl sings song about day of the week hot." The show cuts to

mainstream news media coverage of Kony 2012 focused on its extraordinary reach

(http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/monmarch122012/mylittlekony).

[4.2] Given this almost overwhelming visibility, the film—and with it Invisible

Children as an organization—was the subject of sharp debate. In the following days,

IC's financials, their activities in Uganda, and their support of military action to "bring Joseph Kony to justice" were examined, debated, and critiqued ad nauseam in news

media, through discussion forums, and on IC's own public Facebook page. The

importance of these issues notwithstanding, these debates have by and large failed to

recognize why the IC has been so incredibly spreadable (to borrow Henry Jenkins's

term). Yes, the film is very well edited, and yes, its message, "make Kony famous," is

compelling. But as Henry Jenkins (2012) points out, the success of the Kony 2012

YouTube campaign owes much to the fanlike support IC has built around its films over

its past eight years of existence. In asking their supporters to reach out to a range of

celebrities and policy makers who have a high level of visibility through social media,

the organization also tapped into the desire of fans to see their favorites take a stand

on issues that matter to them. With Kony 2012, IC activated this supporter base,

which then willingly, strategically, and enthusiastically tweeted, posted, and then

reposted the film to set its phenomenal spread in motion. They supported it with such

fervor that they surpassed IC's goal of getting 500,000 views by the end of 2012

within a few hours.

[4.3] IC and its supporters were caught off guard by the barrage of criticism levied at

Kony 2012. Some, such as Ethan Zuckerman (2012), have suggested that the rapid

spread of the video was a consequence of its simplification of complex political issues,

wondering how online networks might be deployed to further complicate and nuance

the frames that it proposes. As Civic Paths researcher Lana Swartz (2012) suggests,

IC focused more on having their media be spreadable (widely circulated) rather than

drillable (open to deeper investigation). For example, before Kony 2012, few IC

supporters were encouraged to actively seek out more information about the Lord's

Revolutionary Army, the militia that Kony heads. Instead, they were generally content

with carefully replicating the accurate but somewhat simplistic narrative they received

through IC's media. Fans of many media franchises have sought to drill deeper into

their content worlds, trying to encapsulate everything that was known about what

happened on the island in Lost or expanding the story line through fan fiction writing

projects. In this way, fandom's search for hidden depths in seemingly simple texts

offers an alternative model for how a group like IC might achieve the more nuanced

framing Zuckerman sought and might give their rankandfile members greater skills

at parsing competing truth claims made about what is happening on the ground in

Uganda.

[4.4] In our call for submissions, we set out to understand how the imaginative

practices supported by fandom, at times facilitated by digital media, may inform civic

and political mobilization and how we may rethink our understanding of engagement in

the civic and political spheres through the lens of fandom. The articles included in this

issue not only exceed these objectives, but they also point to the extreme timeliness

of this endeavor. From undocumented superheroes to humanitarian assistance in the

name of Harry Potter, fandom clearly has a lot to teach us about activism in the age of

social media and participatory culture.

5. Acknowledgments

[5.1] Based at the University of Southern California, the Media Activism and

Participatory Politics Project (MAPP) is part of Civic Paths Project

(http://civicpaths.uscannenberg.org/). The project gratefully acknowledges support

from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Youth

and Participatory Politics (YPP) and the Spencer Foundation.

[5.2] We thank the authors in this issue, whose original work makes TWC possible;

the peer reviewers, who freely provide their time and expertise; the editorial team

members, whose engagement with and solicitation of material is so valuable; and the

production team members, who transform rough manuscripts into publishable

documents.

[5.3] The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in an editorial capacity: Henry

Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova (guest editors); Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson

(editors); Anne Kustritz, Patricia Nelson, and Suzanne Scott (Symposium); and Louisa

Stein (Review).

[5.4] The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in a production capacity: Rrain

Prior (production editor); Beth Friedman, Shoshanna Green, and Mara Greengrass

(copyeditors); Wendy Carr, Kristen Murphy, and sunusn (layout); and Kallista

Angeloff, Amanda Georgeanne Michaels, Carmen Montopoli, and Vickie West

(proofreaders).

[5.5] TWC thanks the journal project's Organization for Transformative Works board

liaison, Francesca Coppa. OTW provides financial support and server space to TWC but

is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially

independent.

[5.6] TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead,

as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 10:

Katherine Chen, Bertha Chin, Matthew Costello, Ashley Hinck, Ian Hunter, Alex

Jenkins, Jeffrey Jones, Rachael Joo, Deborah Kaplan, Flourish Klink, Michael Koulikov,

Bingchun Meng, Christopher Moreman, Nele Noppe, Amy Shuman, Fred Turner, Emily

Wills, and Ethan Zuckerman.

6. Note

1. These quotes are excerpted from interviews carried out by Arely Zimmerman for the

Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics Project between December 2010 and July

2011. Institutional review board approval was secured for this research.

7. Works cited

Andrae, Thomas. 1987. "From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of

Superman," in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, edited by Donald

Lazare. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Appelo, Tom. 2011. "Superman Renounces US Citizenship, as Warners, DC Comics

Bids for Global Audiences." Hollywood Reporter, April 28.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heatvision/supermanrenouncesuscitizenship

as183347.

Dayan, Daniel. 2005. "Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics,

Audiences and Publics." In Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters

for the Public Sphere, edited by Sonia Livingstone, 43–76. London: Intellect.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Theory

Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and political participation

Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Fan activism lies at the intersection of cultural and political

participation. The study of fan activism can inform our understanding of

contemporary collective action more broadly. We suggest four key areas for

analysis: the relationships between cultural and political participation; the tension

between participation and resistance in the context of fan activism; affect and the

role of content worlds in civic and political mobilization; and evaluation of the

impacts of fan activism. By drawing on work across several disciplines including

media studies and social movement literature, the analysis of fan activism through

these lenses offers insights for theorizing contemporary cultures and modes of

collective action.

[0.2] Keywords— Affect; Civic engagement; Consumer citizenship; Content worlds;

Evaluation; Fandom; Narrative; Participatory culture; Social movements

Brough, Melissa M., and Sangita Shresthova. 2012. "Fandom Meets Activism:

Rethinking Civic and Political Participation." In "Transformative Works and Fan

Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue,

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0303.

[1.1] Fan and consumer activism are more visible than ever before, and the lines

between these and traditional civic and political activities are blurring in today's

increasingly "participatory" media and entertainment landscape. How might research

on fandom and participatory cultures inform our understanding of contemporary forms

of civic and political action? As we considered responses to this question across various

disciplines, we confronted some recurrent themes and debates about how fandom and

participatory entertainment cultures influence and at times reshape our understanding

of civic and political mobilization.

[1.2] First, we explore the intersections of cultural and political participation; second,

the tension between participation and resistance in the context of fan activism; third,

the role of affect and of content worlds in mobilizing civic participation; and finally,

how to assess the impact of fan activism or fanlike mobilizations. We argue that these

four areas of analysis not only help us to further theorize fan activism, but also

highlight several ways in which the study of fan activism can inform theorizing of

contemporary civic and political action more broadly. Throughout, we emphasize the

applicability of existing scholarship on contemporary social movements—a body of

work that has been underutilized in fan studies—for the analysis of fan activism.

Conversely, we urge social movement scholars to explore the fertile but understudied

terrain of fan and fanlike forms of civic and political participation.

2. Setting the stage: Key concepts and definitions

[2.1] Fans are typically understood to be individuals who engage deeply with, and

often assert their identity through, popular culture content. Fan activities commonly

include writing or producing popculture related content such as fan fiction or remixed

videos ("vids"), selfpublishing analyses of media content, roleplaying, and organizing

conventions or other fan group activities (Hellekson and Busse 2006; Jenkins 1992).

Groups of individuals constitute a fandom through interestdriven affiliations, forming

a sense of collective or subcultural identity around shared tastes.

[2.2] Traditionally, activism is understood to be intentional action to challenge

existing hegemonies and provoke political and/or social change. Fan activism,

however, has most often been associated with active fans lobbying for a contentrelated outcome, such as a program staying on the air (Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston 1975; Scardaville 2005), the representation of racial or sexual minorities

(Garber and Paleo 1983; Lopez 2011), or the promotion of social themes in program

content (Ross 2008). Earl and Kimport (2009), for example, defined fan activism as

being "not about the mix between political concerns and culture but rather action that

looks like political activism but is used toward nonpolitical ends" (221). Such a

definition seems increasingly problematic, given the porous boundaries between

cultural and political concerns, as well as the overtly political orientation of many fan

activist campaigns today.

[2.3] Fan groups may organize around realworld issues through extended

engagement with and appropriation of popular culture content. Fan activism can thus

also be understood as fandriven efforts to address civic or political issues through

engagement with and strategic deployment of popular culture content. Such efforts to

change the status quo are "often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan

practices and relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular

and participatory culture" (Jenkins 2012).

[2.4] This is not new; there have been several historical instances in which fans used

fandom as a resource or springboard for civic and political action. In Uranian Worlds

(1983), Eric Garber and Lin Paleo note that several of the early pioneers of the 1950s

homophile movement met through fandom. Fan groups have also historically mobilized

around charity causes, but very few of these efforts are well documented in the

academic literature. A more recent example is fans of Joss Whedon and the canceled

TV show Firefly (2002–3), who continue to gather every year to organize "Can't Stop the Serenity," a fundraiser for the women's rights advocacy organization Equality

Now. Contemporary fan activism is increasingly prolific and diverse in its forms and

tactics, and a clearcut distinction between fan activism and realworld activism

remains elusive. We thus use the term fan activism broadly to incorporate the range of

intentional actions by fans, or the use of fanlike strategies, to provoke change.

[2.5] Despite the growth of fan studies in recent years, few analyses have considered

fan activism and its relationship to civic participation, with notable exceptions, such as

van Zoonen (2005) and Burwell and Boler (2008). Here, we also use the term civic

participation broadly to include activities including civic engagement, traditional

political action, and various forms of activism in order to capture the range of

manifestations of fan activism.

[2.6] As a form of participatory culture, fan activism is a rich site for exploring

contemporary dynamics of civic participation. There are varied notions of what

constitutes a participatory culture; that of Henry Jenkins—which emerged from work in

fan studies—includes relatively low barriers to entry, artistic expression, informal

mentorship, sharing of one's creations, and a sense of community (Jenkins et al.

2006). The behaviors and skill sets typical of popular media fan cultures—

appropriating and remixing content, developing communication infrastructures and

practices within fan communities, online networking among groups with shared

interests, selfpublication in dialogue with popular content worlds—are increasingly

relevant to contemporary modes of collective identity formation (note 1).

[2.7] On the one hand, we have fans or audiences collectively mobilizing for political

and social goals. Some of these mobilizations have been prompted by specific

historical events, as in the case of fans of the Roswell television show using existing

online fan forums and repertoires from the show to debate and collectively mourn the

9/11 terrorist attacks, and to organize charitable contributions (Stein 2002). Others

are more sustained efforts to mobilize fans toward a variety of civic actions, as in the

case of the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA). The HPA is a USbased nonprofit organization

that works "for human rights, equality, and a better world just as Harry and his friends

did" (http://thehpalliance.org/whatwedo). Inspired by Dumbledore's Army in the

Harry Potter narratives, the HPA taps fan community practices to run advocacy and

activist campaigns through a decentered network of paid and volunteer staff and local

chapters. The HPA builds on active and creative engagement with the Harry Potter

content world, connecting this content to social justice aims in the real world, such as

fair trade and marriage equality. The HPA has also motivated some nonfans to join

their collective actions. (For more on this case, see Jenkins 2012 and KliglerVilenchik

et al. 2012.)

[2.8] On the other hand, we see activists (fan or other) reconfiguring pop culture

content for specific political goals, as in the example of socalled Avatar activism. In

these cases, indigenous and Palestinian rights groups draw on imagery from James

Cameron's 2009 Hollywood scifi blockbuster about the Na'vi, an aboriginal population

on the utopian moon of Pandora whose existence is threatened by exploitative

colonizers from planet Earth. Reallife rights groups have used Avatar' s imagery and

tropes to attract mainstream media attention. For example, protesters in the West

Bank village of Bil'in dressed as the Na'vi; covered with blue body paint, they

approached an Israeli military barricade, where they were subjected to a tear gas

attack. Photographs and video of the protest were then circulated online, catching the

attention of news media outlets.

Bilin Reenacts Avatar Film 12-02-2010 By Haitham Al Katib

Video 1. "Bilin Reenacts Avatar Film 12022010 By Haitham Al Katib."

[2.9] The cameras present at the protest reveal the mediated (and remediated)

nature of this event. As Simon Faulkner describes, "Organisers of the Avatar

demonstration in Bil'in aimed to produce strong images that would have an impact

upon those who saw them and would attract the attention of a much wider audience"

(2010). Such a deployment of popular culture helped draw mass media attention to a

wellknown and protracted campaign, combating media fatigue by offering new,

visually striking imagery linked to a recent global entertainment media event. Mark

Deuze describes a similar case from Orissa, India, where indigenous antimining

advocates appealed to international support by relating their struggle to Avatar in an

ad placed in Variety, a Hollywood entertainment magazine; a CNN reporter

subsequently dubbed the campaign's success an "Avatar victory" (Deuze 2010, 7).

Avatar activism is not an example of fans mobilizing as activists, but rather of activists

using fanlike tactics, including appropriation and remixing of pop culture content, to

provoke dialogue and mobilization. These fan and fanlike activities raise the decadesold debate about the politics of culture and what 'counts' as a political act.

3. Intersections of cultural and civic/political participation

[3.1] Although increasingly contested, political participation in modern democracies

has traditionally referred to those actions and associations that seek to directly

interact with institutions of the nationstate and its electoral processes. In political

science, the concept of political participation is typically linked to government

institutions, confining it to a narrow definition of citizenship and the ways individuals

and groups may access or enact political agency. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, for

example, note that "political participation affords citizens in a democracy an

opportunity to communicate information to government officials about their concerns

and preferences and put pressure on them to respond" (1995, 37).

[3.2] However, scholars across several disciplines have argued that informal, cultural

engagement (or cultural citizenship) may also be usefully analyzed for forms of

political participation (Burgess, Foth, and Klaebe 2006; Cohen 2010; Jenkins 2006;

Levine 2007; Livingstone 2005; Pettingill 2007; Bennett, Freelon, and Wells 2010;

Amadeo, Andolina, and TorneyPunta 2010; HigginsD'Allessandro 2010). Over the

last several decades, younger generations in particular have become civically and

politically engaged in new and different ways, related less to electoral politics or

government or civic organizations and more to personal interests, social networks, and

cultural or commodity activism (a form of protest that is typically levied against

private companies rather than governments). These modes of political participation

are often enacted through informal, noninstitutionalized, nonhierarchical networks in

and around the Internet (Bennett 2008; Ito et al. 2009; Jenkins et al. 2006; Kahne,

Feezell, and Lee 2011). They are political insofar as they aim to influence or change

existing power relations.

[3.3] Analyses of social movements in the last half century show a wellestablished

trend toward culturally defined solidarity as opposed to traditional forms of politically

defined solidarity through parties, trade unions, or interest associations, and largely

characterized by more flexible forms of organization (Touraine 1985; Melucci 1996;

Castells 1997) . Alain Touraine (1985), who offered one of the first and most influential

discussions of the changing characteristics of social movements in postindustrial

society, articulated a shift from a sociopolitical form of collective action (that

traditionally sought greater access to, and/or transformations of, the state in response

to labor and economic problems) to more sociocultural movements. Touraine argued

that the "new" social movements are struggles waged over—and through—"symbolic

goods, that is, of information and images, of culture itself" (774).

[3.4] This shift toward culturally defined solidarity does not, however, represent a

detachment from the political. Central examples of new social movements, such as the

feminist and environmental movements of the late 20th century (Castells 1997), are

political in nature and have entailed both formal and informal political participation,

shifts in relations of power, and changes in public policy. Thus, defining political

participation as explicitly linked to legislative processes or traditional political

institutions alone obscures the role of culture in social and political change. What is the

significance of social movements engaging with pop culture iconography to struggle for

power and change? And how can we better understand why fandom may motivate

fans—and sometimes even nonfans—to organize and take such action?

[3.5] In the political science of modern Western democracies, the public sphere is

seen to provide the crucial space for political debate (Habermas 1989; Fraser 1990;

McIntosh and Youniss 2010). From a different angle, media studies and analyses of fan

cultures have considered whether participative audiences constitute publics. Lisbet van

Zoonen (2005) argues that the positioning of "audiences and publics, fans and

citizens" as fundamentally dissimilar is not "tenable" because it assumes that politics

and culture exist in completely separate spheres (56). Daniel Dayan (2005, 44) has

argued that too often the notion of publics is conflated with "the dominant model of

political publics," but he observes that political publics are often intertwined with

"identityseeking" or "textoriented" publics (note 2). Both of these latter forms of

publics may describe fandom, which often engages actively, critically, and collectively

with popular culture. Traditionally, audiences were conceived as passive receivers or

consumers of content (a notion the field of fan studies has contested), while publics

were construed as active citizenry. Although not all audiences are fans, Dayan argues

that "even the crudest of quantitative audiences"—audiences understood as

aggregates of individual viewers—"share at least two characteristics with publics":

[3.6] 1. Like that of publics, the experience of audiences involves a

dimension of imagination, concerning the others who share with them a

given participative frame…or whom they join in "audiencing."

[3.7] 2. Like that of publics, audiences embody a fundamental dimension of

social experience: collective attention, "watching with." (2005, 55)

[3.8] As Dayan, Sonia Livingstone, and others have shown, audiences can and do

turn into "'issue publics'…linked to the political" (Dayan 2005, 54; Livingstone 2005).

In fact, "Publics must always have been audiences. In the political domain, they stop

being audiences when their concern for an issue prevails over their engagement with

the narrative that calls for it. It is this concern for—and focusing on—an issue that

constitutes an audience into a public" (Dayan 2005, 57). Dayan observes, however,

that for an audience to become a public, they must go public, announcing their

relation to a particular issue and performing as a collective public. Thus, the HPA

moves from audience to a public by going public with a collective identity formed not

only around the Harry Potter content world but also—crucially—around realworld

issues.

[3.9] Fans and fan activists, like other publics, may also offer a counterframe to

narratives consumed by audiences (Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston 1975; Russ

1983; Jenkins 1992; Radway 1991; BaconSmith 1992; Hellekson and Busse 2006).

The example of Avatar activism illustrates this dynamic; the film's depiction of the

struggle to resist colonization on the fantastical moon Pandora is repurposed (and

remixed as a YouTube video) to represent Palestinian activists' struggles in the West

Bank. The coverage of this case, combined with other reports of indigenous rights

campaigns using Avatar, fueled international public debate about the narrative merits,

contradictions, and potential impacts of the film for indigenous rights and

environmental activism (Wachman 2010; Barrionuevo 2010; Heath Justice 2010; Lee

2010). Dayan's analysis suggests that when fans publicly and collectively offer a

counterframe to a narrative that is tied to a particular issue or problem, they are

acting as a political public.

[3.10] Ross (2008) and others have documented fan organizations and practices as

spaces of political debate. In Convergence Culture (2006), Jenkins argues that when

there are low barriers to entry, popular culture and its surrounding participatory

cultures (including fandom) can function as spaces where civic skills may be

cultivated. Of course, fan communities, like others, are also susceptible to the

homogenizing of views that may preclude, or even at times silence, others. What is

most relevant here, however, is that fan communities often form around content

worlds that may not be explicitly political in nature, but that can offer resources or

spaces for political engagement.

[3.11] Exploring the relationship between audiences and publics can thus help clarify

how fan activism moves between the two. Fan or pop culture engagement can be

productively analyzed as both a potential space for developing civic skills, and a

catalyst for change. However, we may risk diluting our notion of the political to a point

that makes it difficult to debate the merits of different strategies and tactics for civic

participation, and difficult to focus on their material (not just cultural) outcomes.

Framing all acts of engagement with popular entertainment as political acts can have a

depoliticizing effect and limit analytical and tactical advancements. Yet privileging a

purist view of politics over one that embraces people's dreams, desires, and

consumption of popular culture may lead "to hypocrisy and selfdeception and a

politics obsessed with purity and authenticity" (Duncombe 2007, 76). The quality of

civic participation is not inherently compromised by a critical engagement with

commercial pop culture. Perhaps, as van Zoonen (2005), and J. K. Rowling (2008)

herself suggest, such critical engagement can help us "imagine better."

4. (Fan) activism: Acts of participation and/or resistance?

[4.1] Activism is often understood to be a resistant practice, resisting or pushing

back against a hegemony in order to provoke change. Thus, the recent discourse of

participatory culture in the new media space and the longer history of fan participation

in pop culture suggest a possible contradiction in the term fan activism. How is it that

fans can both participate in a commercial pop culture space, and at the same time

resist or attempt to change the status quo within or through the same hegemonic

space? When and how does commercial consumption become civic or political

participation?

[4.2] A large body of scholarship, particularly since the 1970s, has analyzed "culture

that is used, consciously or unconsciously, effectively or not, to resist and/or change

the dominant political, economic and/or social structure" (Duncombe 2002, 5; see also

Hall and Jefferson 1990; Hebdidge 1979). Manifest in many forms (for example,

remixing to produce a counternarrative), cultural resistance is positioned in opposition

to the dominant culture but may draw on its resources in the formation of what

Duncombe (2002) calls a creative free space where ideas, particularly political ideas,

may be fleshed out and practices tested and implemented—and civic skills may be

cultivated.

[4.3] In contrast, more recent scholarship (particularly in media and fan studies out

of the United States and Europe) has emphasized the paradigm of participation. A

participatory culture has been characterized as fostering collaborative processes

enabled through horizontal modes of communication (Jenkins et al. 2006). In this line

of thinking, horizontal collaboration can foster critical engagement with popular culture

because it shifts subjects from passive consumers to active participants who make

decisions that influence their fan communities, and in some cases the content worlds

in which they are engaged.

[4.4] This body of work has been critiqued for underemphasizing structural

inequalities in the political economy of the entertainment and telecommunications

industries (Andrejevic 2007; Fuchs 2011) and obscuring forms of resistance aimed at

shifting power relations more radically (note 3). Indeed, the recent literature on

participatory culture in the United States has focused primarily on participation in

mainstream entertainment spaces rather than alternative activist practices; this area

merits further attention. However, binary thinking that positions participatory cultures

in opposition to cultural resistance is problematic (Jenkins, Ford, and Green

forthcoming). Decades of cultural studies have shown examples of resistant practices

within or through commercial spaces; the commercial/noncommercial dichotomy is

often too simplistic to be analytically useful.

[4.5] The field of fan studies has, since its inception, made important interventions at

this junction. Studies of the genre of slash (Doty 2002; Busse 2006; Alexander and

Harris 1998), which centers on homoeroticism between fictional characters, have

argued that fan appropriation of content is itself a form of resistance to

heteronormativity (not to mention copyright law). Lori Kido Lopez's (2001) study of

Racebending.com (http://www.racebending.com/) offers a recent example of a fan

driven critique of hegemonic whitewashing casting practices and unequal racial

representation in Hollywood cinema. Racebending.com is a fan effort to protest casting

decisions for the film version of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2010), in which white

actors were cast in several Asian character roles. Although the fans did not succeed in

reversing the casting decisions, Lopez (2011) argues that their protests helped

promote dialogue about whitewashing in Hollywood's casting practices and critically

reframed public perception of the film beyond The Last Airbender fan base.

[4.6] Recent cultural studies on commodity activism also offer some important

insights. Roopali Mukherjee (2011), for example, analyzed Kanye West's music video

indicting human rights abuses in the international diamond trade, tracing the tensions

of this activist stance coming from a hiphop celebrity whose very success and artistic

style is enmeshed in a culture of bling. She discusses the troubled history of the

African American community's relationship to consumer citizenship, from exclusion

from the market to strategic attempts to access power through marketbased

practices, including boycotts and buycotts. As the closing caption of West's music

video implies ("Please purchase conflictfree diamonds"), this form of commodity

activism is squarely situated within a notion of consumer citizenship, in which political

agency is seemingly enacted through consumption choices.

Kanye West - Diamonds From Sierra Leone

Video 2. Kanye West's "Diamonds Are from Sierra Leone."

[4.7] Critics have argued that consumer citizenship is emblematic of neoliberal

political culture, characterized largely by the privatization of government services and

shrinking of the liberal welfare state. Consumer citizenship may be increasingly

normalized as the primary mode of access to political agency while obfuscating

traditional civic responsibilities and structural issues of inequality (Mukherjee 2011;

Cohen 2003; Cronin 2000; García Canclini 2001). Rather than dismissing commoditybased forms of activism, however, Mukherjee argues that such cases "allow us to trace how neoliberal citizens actualize their political subjectivities, not through rejections of

commodity culture, but rather, from within circuits of consumption and exchange"

(2011, 7). Commodity activism thus complicates our understanding of resistance,

forcing us to consider "civic politics in the neoliberal era" as possibly "enabled by, and

nurtured within, modes of consumer citizenship" (ibid. 9, 16).

[4.8] Fan activism makes sense in such a context; social movement scholarship has

shown that the form a collective action takes often reflects the culture and structure

that are its target of change (Della Porta and Diani 2006; Juris 2004). Put another

way, "In a world where the importance of corporations is increasingly prominent in

daily life, studying fan activism offers one window into the private power dynamics of

corporatecivil contests" (Earl and Kimport 2009, 239).

[4.9] Fan participation in and through commercial entertainment spaces is not

predetermined to be resistant or complicit—in fact, it is often both—but its political

significance lies in part in the changes in relations of power that may occur through

such participation. In industrialized democracies of the Global North, we can

understand power as circulating primarily through discourses and networks (Castells

2009; Foucault 1980). In that case, the political potential of participatory

entertainment cultures lies in the ways cultural codes and discourses are contested

and remixed, as well as the ways in which the resulting content is consumed and

reconfigured as a resource for mobilization. In other words, we need to pay attention

to how particular actors construct, use, and circulate their voices through the

production or reproduction of cultural content, as well as whether and by whom

content is consumed and engaged. Fandom has historically grappled with the problem

of voice as consumers asserted agency over media content in an attempt to be heard

by other fans and by the content producers. How to move from having a voice within a

subculture to being heard more broadly in civic and political spaces is a central

challenge for all activists, and examples like Avatar activism and the HPA offer

strategies emerging from fan and fanlike practices.

[4.10] In a fragmented cultural and political context, where politics is no longer

played out primarily through institutional affiliations, we thus arrive at an expanded

understanding of participatory entertainment cultures as spaces that may support, and

at times even encourage, grassroots activism and civic participation. The HPA

exemplifies this possibility. It was mobilized by drawing on the Harry Potter narratives:

the bestselling book series and films released by Warner Bros., a subsidiary of Time

Warner—the world's largest media conglomerate. Yet in their fight against media

consolidation, which they describe as "fighting for what Harry, the Order of the

Phoenix, and Potterwatch did not have: the right to a free press" (note 4), the HPA has

confronted the very system that has so successfully produced and distributed the

Harry Potter content worlds. This example illustrates the fluidity—and potential

contradictions—of fan activism, in which networked activists strategically draw

resources from and at the same time fight against structures of commercial pop

culture. HPA's work may point to a deeprooted allegiance to narratives rather than to

the commercial structures that circulate them; it certainly illustrates the complex

relationship between resistance and participation in contemporary forms of fan

activism. The content worlds created, maintained, and contested through the telling

and retelling of narratives play a key role in this complex relationship.

5. Content worlds: Questions of affect, collective identity, and

authenticity

[5.1] Is buying a conflictfree diamond because of a hiphop video really activism? Is

protesting whitewashing casting decisions activism? What is authentic activism? Does

it need to look like the highrisk, disciplined actions of Martin Luther King Jr. and the

Greensboro Four's civil rights struggles to be taken seriously, as Malcolm Gladwell

(2010) has suggested?

[5.2] Duncombe (2007) argues that taking activism too seriously can be a pitfall; the

tendency of progressives in particular to insist on the logical and rational as the most

legitimate mode of persuasion overlooks the ways play, performance, spectacle, and

affect motivate civic action. Alberto Melucci argues that individuals mobilize for social

change only when their affective and communicative needs, as well as their needs for

solidarity, coincide with the collective's goals; these are fundamental to the

development of collective identity and subsequent collective action (1996). Engaging

affect is thus central to the process of changing society's values, beliefs, and cultural

patterns (Melucci 1996; Castells 2009). Melucci further argues that social change

entails struggles over the cultural codes through which social meaning is produced,

maintained, or changed. Social movements challenge dominant codes and discourses

(and ultimately the legitimacy of existing social configurations of power) by producing

and diffusing alternative codes, such as new ways of living and new forms of language.

[5.3] Even as the opportunities to challenge codes through usergenerated content

networks grow, the inability to achieve visibility in the mass media can still obscure a

group's cause, even—and especially—in today's fragmented mediascape (Thompson

2005; Castells 2009). Recent examples of activism mobilized in large part through

usergenerated content platforms and social networks illustrate the ongoing

importance of the interplay between social and broadcast media to attain mass

visibility and influence public opinion. In the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street

movements, for example, usergenerated material provided crucial content for

national and international broadcasters, which in turn was vital to the visibility and

spread of the movements as well as subsequent shifts in public discourse. Content

produced by members of the Occupy movement has frequently remixed pop culture

tropes (Trope and Swartz 2011). Although pop culture codes may not always play a

role in such mobilizations, they can help draw attention to the campaigns or

movements and fuel collective identity formation around shared social meanings. Fan

culture offers a history of appropriation and critical engagement with pop culture that

could inform broader activist strategies toward increased visibility and collective

identity formation.

[5.4] Most important, perhaps, is what might be learned from fan cultures about

storytelling and the use of content worlds to prompt participation. Dayan writes,

"Fiction turns into a political force by providing scripts for action" (2005, 53); he sees

dramaturgy and performance as key components in the conversion of an audience into

a public. Other contributions from media and cultural studies have debated the role of

fantasy and cultural engagement in helping to inspire civic participation (Fiske 1989;

Hartley 2008; Radway 1991; Jenkins 2006; Duncombe 2007). John Street articulates

the connection between entertainment, content worlds, and politics thus: "Politics, like

popular culture, is about creating an 'audience,' a people who will laugh at their jokes,

understand their fears and share their hopes. Both the popular media and politicians

are engaged in creating works of popular fiction which portray credible worlds that

resonate with people's experiences" (in van Zoonen 2005, 59). Fandriven civic

participation, fueled by affective engagement in content worlds, offers overt examples

of such linkages and how storytelling and other fan practices may scaffold mobilization

for realworld action.

[5.5] Fan culture also asks us to consider not just storytelling but transmedia

storytelling as a catalyst for collective identity formation and mobilization. Transmedia

storytelling is "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed

systematically across multiple delivery channels to create a unified and coordinated

entertainment experience" (Jenkins 2007). Transmedia storytelling has proliferated

throughout the entertainment industry, but it has also been taken up as an activist

strategy. Lina Srivastava has defined transmedia activism as creating "social impact by

using storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share assets and create

content for distribution across multiple forms of media to raise awareness and

influence action" (2009) (note 5). Avatar activism is an obvious example where

transmedia storytelling is taken up by activists to strategically borrow, remix, and gain

visibility across media platforms; in such cases, it is both activists using social media

platforms and the mainstream media that move the story content across platforms.

Future research on fandom and fan cultures could help further elaborate the

possibilities (as well as the challenges) of transmedia activism.

[5.6] Although this focus on storytelling is by no means new and has been addressed

in the social movement literature (Poletta 2006), the centrality of content worlds to

fan cultures pushes us to rethink storytelling as a collective activity in which

individuals and groups contribute to the telling, retelling, and remixing of stories

through various media platforms. In doing so, they help shape the contours of content

worlds that may serve as affective resources and organizing structures for the

mobilizing of collective action. At the same time, this focus on narrative reminds us to

remain watchful of the ideological and structural hegemonies that these content worlds

may perpetuate. What, for example, do we make of Palestinian activists dressed as

blue Na'vi drawing international press coverage by engaging iconography from a film

critiqued for its problematic treatment of colonialism (Žižek 2010; Heath Justice

2010)? A noncritical romanticizing of appropriation ignores the complexity of the

cultural politics and histories of pop culture imagery in relation to realworld injustices.

6. Evaluating the impact of fan activism

[6.1] How do we understand the effects of contemporary fan and fanlike activism?

Do we value change at the individual level, or change at the community or societal

level? In reality, the lines between these are often blurry, and change occurs in

complex, nonlinear ways. To complicate matters further, social change is sometimes

measured as an aggregate of the individual, as in the case of Robert Putnam's muchdebated Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).

That is, change may be viewed from a more distributed perspective, in which

individuallevel change aggregates to broader societylevel change (that is, the sum of

individual parts), or from a more communitarian perspective, in which the social

change occurs through the interaction of a group, as in Pierre Levy's (1997) collective

intelligence model. Although political participation as it was traditionally conceived can

be relatively easily documented through statistics such as voting trends (an aggregate

of individual actions), this broader, more nuanced understanding of political

participation requires different approaches to evaluating impact.

[6.2] Fandom is characterized by what Ito et al. (2009) would label as interestdriven

participation, where participation is prompted and structured by specialized interests

and activities. The quantitative study by Kahne, Feezell, and Lee (2011) makes an

important link in measuring the potential correlation between youths' participation in

online, interestdriven cultural activities and their civic engagement; they argue that

such interestdriven activities can "serve as a gateway to participation in important

aspects of civic and, at times, political life, including volunteering, engagement in

community problemsolving, protest activities, and political voice" (20). Although the

study of Kahne, Feezell, and Lee includes traditional measures of civic and political

activity, the findings suggest that in order to capture the range of modes of youth civic

engagement, we need to look at spaces and forms of participatory culture.

[6.3] We thus suggest that fan activism necessitates an exploratory move away from

traditional frameworks of assessment. The broader understanding of civic participation

allows researchers the space to identify modes of engagement that are more

organically based on actual practices, rather than grafting a traditional model onto

them (Pettingill 2007). We must also consider where groups and their members place

value in terms of their impacts; a participatory culture should not be evaluated solely

through nonparticipatory means (see Bennett 2008). For example, in asking how HPA

encourages civic participation, we must also take seriously the organizing that

happens within the practices that define the broader Harry Potter fandom; these may

include the discussions, creative production, and collaborative efforts around sites like

MuggleNet (http://www.mugglenet.com/) and The Leaky Cauldron (http://theleaky

cauldron.org/), the Wizard Rock scene, the Quiddich tournaments, and annual fan

conventions. We may consider these modes of participation as possible spaces of

collective identity formation and mobilization that are supported by fan cultures, and

seek out the insights that these social and cultural formations offer to analyses of

contemporary civic participation.

[6.4] Wellman (2001) has introduced the term networked individualism to "describe the hybrid quality that combines the communitarian nature of community with the

'strength of weak ties' which [are] found in social networks" (Burgess, Foth, and

Klaebe 2006, 6). Networked individualism may be used to characterize both fan

cultures that organize around a shared interest (increasingly online) and contemporary

activist mobilization (Castells 2007). In this sense, some forms of contemporary civic

participation may increasingly exhibit characteristics common to fan culture; both are

adapting in similar ways to new capacities offered by digital media. It is ever more

common for collective identities of fan groups to emerge through online interactions

with strangers, sharing, remixing, and debating content worlds (Hellekson and Busse

2006); the same may increasingly be said about contemporary mobilizations. Although

some (like Gladwell) bemoan "weak(er)tie" activism (note 6), we might instead

consider whether fandom and online participatory cultures facilitate a flow between

networked individualism and collective action—that is, from individuated participation

to a collectivity or a public.

[6.5] Fan activists may have no other social tie but their shared interest in a

particular content world, around and through which they come together, interact, and

develop a sense of collective identity that may then be mobilized toward collective

action. Melucci's (1996) analysis of collective identity formation in social movements

suggests that preexisting affective communities (for example, fan networks) can play

an important role in provoking participation in a movement, particularly when dealing

with networks of loose affiliations.

[6.6] But how sustainable is activism that relies on the appeal of everchanging pop

culture content, trends, and online networks? As Jenkins (2012) explains, HPA is

working toward the longerterm sustainability of the organization through crossfandom alliances in preparation for the decreased visibility of Harry Potter now that the last film in the series has been released. In this case, longerterm, realworld

campaigns are driving alliances between different fandoms and linkages across

different content worlds; an area for future study is to explore how and to what effect

fan activists traverse distinct content worlds. In contrast, the case of Avatar activism

raises the question of how to think about continuity in a context where immediate

visibility was the primary objective of the use of pop culture (note 7). Together, these

cases illustrate that pop culture may be utilized to provoke shortterm or immediate

actions, while at other times, content worlds are engaged in extensive and

multifaceted ways to move toward ongoing civic engagement. The intended life span

of fan or pop culture activist campaigns must be taken into account when evaluating

their effectiveness.

[6.7] The importance of incorporating participatory approaches to understanding and

evaluating fan activism, the complexity and nonlinearity of social change, the

proliferation of new modes of organizing through online platforms, and the

particularities of different fan cultures all suggest the need for casebased studies to

enhance our understanding of how fan cultures may inform, influence, and help to

mobilize around political and civic action. The four areas of analysis presented here

may be productively applied to future studies to further theorize fan activism and

other forms of contemporary civic action. Such studies may also want to consider

Dayan's (2005, 52–53) framework for analysis of six key features of public action:

performance (broadly defined, and connecting the public to the public sphere); styles

of interaction (or "manners" of performing as publics); reflexivity (selfawareness

needed to define the community); commitment (definition of what it means to be a

member); issues (addressing defined problems); and stability (a certain sense of

continuity). There is clearly much work to be done.

7. Conclusion

[7.1] Work across several scholarly fields permits us to identify productive points of

tension and debate that may inform future research on civic participation through fan

and fanlike pop culture engagement. We organized these points into four thematic

areas: intersections of cultural and political participation; the relationship between

participation and resistance in the context of fan activism; the role of affect and

content worlds in mobilizing civic participation; and issues of evaluating impact. These

are key areas for future analysis of fan activism and civic participation.

[7.2] We have noted some increasing similarities between fan cultures and

contemporary mobilizations; the modes and structures particular to fan cultures may

inform our analyses of contemporary civic action more broadly. The study of social

movements, a body of work that has rarely been taken up in fan studies, can help us

to think about visibility and the relationship between affect, cultural codes, and

collective identities in the mobilization process. Across the literatures and cases

reviewed, we saw the significance of content worlds and storytelling (including

transmedia storytelling) in the development of collective identity and the formation

and mobilization of publics. We problematized the false dichotomies of commercial

versus political (or activist), and participation versus resistance. At the same time, we

cautioned against framing all acts of engagement with popular entertainment as

political acts; not only could this have a depoliticizing effect, but it also limits analytical

advancements based on the specificities of particular pop culture and fan activist

tactics. We thus call for further casebased studies as a next step toward more

nuanced understandings of how fan cultures may mobilize around political and civic

goals. Finally, we challenged the shortcomings of conventional measures of civic and

political participation and emphasized the need to situate impact studies of fan

activism within a participatory framework more appropriate to the participatory

cultures that support it.

[7.3] Future research should consider emergent (as well as existing) modes and

structures of engagement in fan activism, such as how content worlds may serve to

bridge networked individualism and collective action. There is a critical need for

transnational analyses of fan activism. Although our examples here contain

transnational elements, we have not considered the specific dynamics of

transnationalism in relation to fan and pop culture activism. There is also a clear bias

toward Western popular entertainment in our examples, which could be greatly

improved—and perhaps called into question—through comparison with cases of non

Western fan activism. Finally, in our review of the literature, we found little in the way

of direct critiques of fan activism, perhaps because it is a relatively new topic of study

and has yet to be seriously engaged by scholars outside of the field of fan studies.

[7.4] We close with a provocation about the analytical boundaries of fan activism: At

what point does the concept of fandom become too diluted to be analytically useful?

Just as we may risk diluting the notion of the political, so too we risk diluting the

notion of a particular cultural formation—fandom—that fans have long struggled to

have valued on its own terms.

8. Acknowledgments

[8.1] We thank Henry Jenkins, Zhan Li, Nina O'Brien, Liana Thompson, Neta Kligler

Vilenchik, and Arely Zimmerman for their feedback on previous drafts of this article.

We also gratefully acknowledge support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur

Foundation Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP).

9. Notes

1. We define content worlds as the narratives and practices shared by the members of a particular audience or community. In the case of fandom, content worlds refer to

both the popular culture content and to the individual and collaborative creative

expressions produced by the fan community.

2. Dayan defines taste publics as "generally focused on works, texts, or programmes;

the performance of these publics is generally 'verdictive' (evaluative)." He contends

that "'identity publics' (such as those of music, games or sports fans) display their

response to games or performances in order to endow themselves with a visible

identity" (2005, 54–55).

3. In other literatures, such as the field of participatory communication in Latin

America, participation is often understood as a counterhegemonic practice through

which marginalized communities become agents of change in their communities. This

field has not, however, considered participatory culture in commercial contexts in the

ways discussed here. For a historical review of the participatory paradigm as a

resistant practice in Latin America, see Dagron and Tufte (2006).

4. For more information about these campaigns, see http://www.theleaky

cauldron.org/2010/11/1/harrypotterallianceslaunchesdeathlyhallowscampaign

and http://stopbigmedia.com/potterwatch.

5. See also "Transmedia Activism: Basic Framework" at

http://transmediaactivism.wordpress.com/thebasicframework/; for further discussion

of some of the potentials and risks of transmedia mobilization, see ConstanzaChock

(2010).

6. In a widely debated article published in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell (2010)

argued that social media, as platforms built around weak ties, "seldom lead to highrisk activism," which he implies is more valuable.

7. Faulkner (2010) discusses the opportunities and objectives of instant visibility in

Avatar activism. For a further discussion of the notion of flash fandom and its primary

objectives of visibility, see Mehta (2010).

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Theory

"Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance

Henry Jenkins

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Fan activists have struggled to defend series from cancellation, defend

themselves from cease and desist orders, promote alternative representations, and raise money

for charity. Building on this background, this article examines how the Harry Potter Alliance

encourages young people to speak out as fans on a broad range of human rights and social justice

issues through what the group's leader, Andrew Slack, calls "cultural acupuncture." The group's

practice of mapping the fictional content world onto realworld concerns helps empower young

people to become civicly engaged and politically active.

[0.2] Keywords— Civic engagement; Star Trek; Youth

Jenkins, Henry. 2012. "'Cultural Acupuncture': Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance." In

"Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova,

special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0305.

1. Introduction

[1.1] The teenage girl fan of Madonna who fantasizes her own empowerment can

translate this fantasy into behavior, and can act in a more empowered way socially, thus

winning more social territory for herself. When she meets others who share her fantasies

and freedom there is the beginning of a sense of solidarity, of a shared resistance, that

can support and encourage progressive action on the microsocial level.

—John Fiske, Reading the Popular (1989)

[1.2] By translating some of the world's most pressing issues into the framework of

Harry Potter, [the Harry Potter Alliance] makes activism something easier to grasp and

less intimidating. Often we show them fun and accessible ways that they can take action

and express their passion to make the world better by working with one of our partner

NGO's [nongovernmental organizations].

—Andrew Slack, Harry Potter Alliance (2009)

[1.3] Written two decades apart, these statements by Fiske and Slack illustrate shifts in how fan

activity connects the popular imagination and realworld politics. Both claim fandom's "sense of

solidarity…[and] shared resistance" empowers individuals to make decisive steps toward collective

action. Fiske sees fandom as an informal set of everyday practices and personal identities, while

Slack describes organizations with institutional ties to NGOs. In Fiske's view, participants' fantasies

shape how they see themselves and the world, while Slack describes a conscious rhetorical strategy

mapping fictional content worlds onto realworld concerns, what he calls "cultural acupuncture."

Slack notes how dispersed members of fannish communities are connected into a networked public

capable of coordinated action.

[1.4] While Fiske's concepts of resistance, fan discrimination, and semiotic productivity shaped

[1.4] While Fiske's concepts of resistance, fan discrimination, and semiotic productivity shaped the early evolution of fan studies, his claims that fan participation might lead to enhanced political

agency and civic engagement have been less explored. Nonetheless, they seem to offer a starting

point for more contemporary work on fan activism. Twenty years ago, the relationship between the

micropolitics of everyday life that Fiske describes and the macropolitics of public policy was the

subject of debate between critical and cultural studies. Jim McGuigan (1992), for example, singles

out Fiske's claims about Madonna fans as indicative of a tendency to substitute meaningmaking for

"material" politics. Adopting a position closer to Fiske's own, David Buckingham (2000, 29) warns,

"'Micropolitics' should not come to be seen as a substitute for 'macropolitics.' On the contrary, the challenge is surely to find ways of building connections between the two." Slack offers us a much

more fully articulated theory of how fan activism can bridge the micro and macro, one tested by

the Harry Potter Alliance's successful mobilization of fans in human rights campaigns.

[1.5] Fiske's Madonna fans, however farfetched his claims may have seemed at the time, were

among the forerunners of Third Wave feminism, much as Riot Grrls moved from being fans of

popular music to producers of their own DIY culture (Conti 2001). The Riot Grrls performed as fans,

as cultural producers, as activists, and as ideological critics, helping to map potential links between

these roles and activities. Third Wave feminism has, in turn, provided models for subsequent forms

of fan activism. For example, Clan PMS and the Game Grrls movement challenged hurtful gender

stereotypes in computer games and the surrounding culture (Jenkins 2000). The Sequential Tarts

(DeVries 2002) confronted representational and retail practices hostile to female comics readers. In

both cases, participants' claims of fan status gave them credibility for critical interventions focused

on pop culture industries.

[1.6] Some might still dismiss these activities as not fully political, in that they direct their

energies at changing corporate practices rather than governmental policies. Yet attempts to shape

policies, institutions, and values are increasingly recognized as political even if they are not directly

tied to parties or governments. Lizabeth Cohen (2003) argues that throughout the 20th century,

many groups—among them, women and racial and ethnic minorities—have sought to reform or

transform dominant practices through coordinated efforts as consumers. In the digital world, the

forums for expressing political concerns, and the policies and infrastructures shaping our capacities

to do so, are controlled by private interests. Our political struggles often take place through

languages and contexts heavily shaped by commercial culture, making fan and consumer activism

central to contemporary social movements.

[1.7] A striking feature of postmillennial politics is the ways that pop culture references are

shaping political rhetoric and movement practices, while at the same time, as Earl and Kimport

(2009, 223–25) suggest, the characteristics of social and political movements are "perpetual" and

"ubiquitous" features of everyday lives. Accordingly, fan activism has moved from a crisis response to, for example, program cancellations into a consistent, ongoing engagement with realworld

concerns.

[1.8] For the purposes of this discussion, "fan activism" refers to forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared

interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and

relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture. I

am describing as "civic" those practices that are designed to improve the quality of life and

strengthen social ties within a community, whether defined in geographically local or dispersed

terms. As we seek to better understand the logics of fan activism, we may need to explore points of

terms. As we seek to better understand the logics of fan activism, we may need to explore points of overlap between it and other, closely related forms of cultural politics. How, for example, might we

describe groups that deploy practices from participatory culture, seek to construct their own media

content worlds, and adopt a more playful approach to activism, but do not originate in a preexisting

fan community? Or how might we characterize efforts to mobilize specific images from popular

culture within more conventional partisan or activist campaigns? (See Brough and Shesthrova

2012.)

[1.9] Following a brief history of fan activism, I will explore the Harry Potter Alliance, a sustained

effort to mobilize a network of fans of J. K. Rowling's fantasy books around an array of different

issues and concerns, ranging from human rights in Africa to rights to equal marriage, from labor

rights to media concentration and net neutrality. My focus will be on the HPA as an organization,

addressing its tactics, rhetoric, and underlying theory of cultural activism, rather than on how

individual members develop greater agency and efficacy (see KliglerVilenchik et al. 2012). The

HPA embraces a politics of "cultural acupuncture," mapping fictional content worlds onto realworld concerns. A content world is the network of characters, settings, situations, and values that forms

the basis for the generation of a range of stories, in the hands of either a commercial producer or a

grassroots community. So the content world around Harry Potter includes characters such as Snape

and Dumbledore, settings such as Hogwarts, situations such as sorting of students into houses by

the Sorting Hat, and values such as friendship and maternal love, any or all of which can be used to

generate new narratives or to tap into the meanings associated with the original stories. What

Slack calls cultural acupuncture is a means of deploying elements of the content world (and their

accumulated meanings) as metaphors for making sense of contemporary issues. The HPA speaks of

the "eighth book" in the Harry Potter series (which canonically has only seven) to describe how

participants extend the story through their choices and practices as fan activists.

2. A brief history of fan activism

[2.1] Fans have often entered civic discourse when they assert their collective rights as the most

active and engaged segments of the media audience. The fan identity is often an embattled one,

and efforts to save shows from cancellation or to rally support for a film project have helped to

cement social ties between fans, define their shared interests, and shape their public status. The

1969 effort to "save Star Trek, " led by Bjo and John Trimble, was the defining early example of fan activism (Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston 1975). Having run the art show at the annual World

Science Fiction Convention for more than 15 years, the Trimbles were deeply immersed in fandom's

infrastructure, practices, rhetoric, and values (Trimble 1999). Through ties to Gene Roddenberry

and his longtime secretary, Susan Sackett, the Trimbles identified strategies for intervening in

NBC's decisionmaking process to ensure the series's survival. Bjo Trimble's "Do's and Don'ts of

LetterWriting" (n.d.) still informs more recent "save our show" campaigns. The spread of these practices across different fan communities illustrates a complex, interlocking history, with fans

forging collective identities sometimes around specific texts and sometimes around genres or

subgenres. The resulting structure has sustained itself over decades of shifting tastes; its traditions

are handed down to subsequent generations. Such a structure means that fans of a particular

franchise have a more extensive set of allies for more localized campaigns through crossfan

alliances—fandom's latent capacity.

[2.2] More recent campaigns innovate practices designed for an era of networked communication.

[2.2] More recent campaigns innovate practices designed for an era of networked communication.

For example, fans of Stargate SG1 responded rapidly to news of the series' cancellation (Jenkins

2006b). Affiliated Web sites included sophisticated analyses of how networks make decisions about

shows and provided arguments in Stargate's favor, contact information for key decisionmakers

and a range of potential tactics to gain their attention, and, perhaps most significantly, sample

letters in multiple languages. Stargate's declining ratings in the United States were not matched in other markets, and thus its fans sought to mobilize international affiliates to keep the series in

production. In another case, the campaign to save Chuck used social media to get supporters to

buy footlong sandwiches from Subway, a series sponsor (Seles 2010). Subway's increased

sponsorship, inspired by this show of support, tipped the scale for Chuck's renewal.

[2.3] Whether such efforts constitute activism by traditional political criteria is an interesting

question. Political scientists recognize some forms of cultural activism, such as rallying to protest

budget cuts for public broadcasting, to protect local arts institutions, or to save public landmarks.

Functionally, fan attempts to protect texts they see as meaningful represent similar efforts to shape

the cultural environment, though they rarely get taken seriously in literature about activism,

suggesting a residual distinction between high and low culture. Gene Roddenberry's efforts to link

science fiction with a utopian and humanist philosophy, which included support for racial and

gender equality (Fern 1996), helped fuel the Save Star Trek efforts. Martin Luther King Jr. allegedly urged Nichelle Nichols to remain on Star Trek because Uhura's presence on the bridge was a

statement that his dream might be realized. Nichols in turn redirected support for Star Trek to

promote female and minority participation in NASA's manned space program. Barbara Adams, an

alternative juror in the 1996 Whitewater trial, made fan activism more visible when she wore a Star

Fleet uniform into the courtroom, citing Star Trek's idealism as an alternative set of virtues against

which to position the trial's legal and political struggles.

[2.4] Andrew Ross (1991) recounts how science fiction fan organizations such as the Futurians

and the Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction functioned in the 1930s and

1940s as spaces for debating radical political ideas, recruiting fans into larger labor and social

movements, and paving the way for more socially conscious forms of science fiction. The femaleled fandom of Star Trek was closely affiliated with larger movements to promote feminist themes through science fiction (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995) and discussions of the Vulcan philosophy of

"Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" anticipated more recent fan debates about the genre's representation of racial diversity (such as the extended online discussion within the science fiction

community which became known as "Racefail '09"). These recent debates have spawned activism

around the "whitecasting" of genre films (Racebending.com) and the formation of an alternative

press focused on publishing genre fiction by people of color (Verb Noire) (Klink 2010).

[2.5] Such utopianism also empowered a group of queer fans, the Gaylaxians, to organize their

own letterwriting campaign to get a gay or lesbian character added to Star Trek: The Next

Generation (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995, 237–66). While the first letterwriting campaign partnered

with Roddenberry against the networks, the Gaylaxians put pressure on Star Trek's producers to

remain true to Roddenberry's ideological commitments, seeing the inclusion of samesex couples as

following the same logic that had led to the inclusion of female officers and a multiracial crew. The

Gaylaxians sought to reach queer youth at risk because of our homophobic climate, as does Dan

Savage's more recent It Gets Better campaign. The producers dismissed the Gaylaxians as

"activists" or "interest groups," but they asserted their status as "fans" with a deep investment in Star Trek. This rhetorical move hints at fans' sense of entitlement, based on their emotional

Star Trek. This rhetorical move hints at fans' sense of entitlement, based on their emotional engagement with and extended support for "their" series. These fans, collectively and individually, defined themselves in opposition to commercial interests while supporting the values embodied

within these content worlds, even against the worlds' own producers.

[2.6] By the time these fan groups had defined an issue, identified decisionmakers, developed

tactics, and educated and mobilized supporters, they had done all of the steps required for

activism. Those who participated in such efforts had built the infrastructure and acquired the

personal and organizational skills to take meaningful action. Those who succeed in such efforts

might also find their civic voices and be more likely to take such actions in the future. In

Entertaining the Citizen, Liesbet van Zoonen concludes that fan practices embody, "in abstract terms, the customs that have been laid out as essential for democratic politics: information,

discussion, and activism" (2005, 63). All of this suggests that fandom may represent a particularly

powerful training ground for future activists and community organizers.

[2.7] Other wellestablished forms of fan activism center on efforts to resist censorship or to

defend participatory practices against threats from commercial rights holders. Muggles for Harry

Potter was organized by the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and

the Electronic Frontier Foundation in response to efforts by the Christian right to ban Rowling's

books from schools and public libraries. Alternatively, Defense against Dark Arts arose when

Warner Brothers sent takedown notices to fan Web sites the studio claimed infringed on franchise

materials, and the group helped to reshape the company's policies for dealing with fan participation

(Jenkins 2006a). Both efforts moved from a desire to defend fan practices toward a more critical

perspective on constraints on participatory culture, from specific crises to a critique of current

intellectual property regimes. The Organization for Transformative Works, which publishes

Transformative Works and Cultures, represents a concerted effort by fans to defend participatory

culture, including by developing new platforms for distributing fanproduced materials outside the

commodity logic of Web 2.0 and new academic and legal defenses of fan cultural practices.

[2.8] As this brief account suggests, fan activism includes many different kinds of mobilizations,

some directed at promoting the interests of the fan community (lobbying to protect series from

cancellation, organizing against censorship or cease and desist orders), some involving struggles

over representation (such as the Gaylaxians' efforts to get a queer character on Star Trek), and

some involving commenting on public policy (whether Adams's personal statement or the HPA's

collective action). All tap into fandom's communication infrastructure and social networks, and all

deploy fictional content worlds and fan rituals, practices, and rhetoric to motivate participation.

[2.9] John Tulloch (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995, 143–72) characterized Doctor Who fans as a

"powerless elite," who cannot influence the decisions that most impact their cultural pursuits, but who exert considerable discursive power in shaping the popular memory of favorite texts. Fans

leverage that discursive power to extend their voices beyond their own community, forming

alliances with other invested groups, attracting mainstream coverage, and increasing their

persuasiveness. Lori Kido Lopez (2011) reaches a similar conclusion in her account of

Racebending.com, an organization launched to protest the "whitecasting" of characters presumed

to be Asian when the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender was made into a liveaction

feature film: "Some of the organization's strongest and most effective tactics rely on the skills

developed as members of the fan community: honing their arguments through community

discussions, producing and editing multimedia creations, educating themselves about every facet of

discussions, producing and editing multimedia creations, educating themselves about every facet of their issue, and relying on their trusted networks to provide a database of information."

3. Enter the Harry Potter Alliance

[3.1] The experience of reading, debating, performing, and rewriting Harry Potter has been

shared by many in the millennial generation (Anelli 2008). Rowling's stories of the boy wizard, the

remarkable school Hogwarts, and the battle against the Dark Lord became global best sellers.

Emerging alongside the popular embrace of the Web, Harry Potter fandom has developed new

media platforms and practices (Scott 2010). The community was among the first to use podcasting

and blogs, to develop beta reading practices to improve fan fiction, to distribute mp3 files (such as

those of Wizard Rock) through social networking sites, and to use machinima production practices

to construct fan vids. Over the coming decade, Harry Potter fandom will function as the feeder for

many subsequent fan communities, much as Star Trek fandom modeled Baby Boom fan practices

and politics. The Harry Potter Alliance needs to be understood as yet another example of innovative

practices emerging from this fan community.

[3.2] Started by Andrew Slack, a twentysomething trained community organizer who has a

background in working with troubled youth, the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) is fan activism on a

previously unimagined scale. The group currently has more than 100,000 members in more than

70 active chapters across the world, organized and mobilized by Slack and his 40person staff, both

volunteer and paid. The group collaborates with more traditional activist and charity organizations,

such as Doctors for Health, Mass Equity, Free Press, The GayStraight Alliance, and WalMart

Watch. When the HPA takes action, the results can be staggering: for instance, it raised $123,000

to fund five cargo planes transporting medical supplies to Haiti after the earthquake. Its Accio

Books! Campaign has collected over 55,000 books for communities around the world. HPA

members called 3,597 residents of Maine in just one day, encouraging them to vote against

Proposition 9, which would deny equal marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples. Wizard Rock the

Vote registered more than a thousand voters.

[3.3] Fan communities have long supported favorite charities, including efforts on behalf of the

homeless (popular among fans of Beauty and the Beast), the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS

Foundation ( Starsky and Hutch), and Equality Now and Kids Need to Read ( Serenity and Firefly fans, known as Browncoats). Fans of a particular franchise often choose to support specific causes

because they perceive them as tied to the theme of the franchise or because key actors or

producers are involved. The HPA links members to a range of such charity and relief efforts, but it

also promotes activism around structural changes. As Slack explains, "We do want people to both

volunteer with people at a local AIDS clinic as well as advocate for better treatment of AIDS victims

in Africa. We want our young people tutoring underprivileged kids and helping them read, getting

them engaged in the Internet and learning those things, but then also challenging the rules of the

game that are making it possible for kids to go without food" (Jenkins 2009).

[3.4] Running the HPA from his living room in Somerville, Massachusetts, Slack is a charismatic

leader who inspires his volunteer army and parttime paid staff, but also embraces more dispersed

and decentralized power structures that allow members a greater voice in the organization's

decisions. Local chapters participate in national campaigns but also initiate their own activities,

which reflect their own agendas (veterans' rights, say), and solicit participation by other chapters.

The HPA's regular online exchanges become places to negotiate the group's sometimes competing

The HPA's regular online exchanges become places to negotiate the group's sometimes competing priorities. Unlike most activist groups and charities, the HPA is not defined around a single mission:

rather, it embraces a flexible framework inspired by Rowling's content world, enabling it to respond

quickly to any crisis or opportunity and to its dispersed members. This mixture of strong

leadership, dispersed membership, social networks, and flexible structures informs many

contemporary forms of activism, ranging from the US Tea Party movement to youth uprisings in

the Arab world. The Harry Potter Alliance demonstrates how the pop culture worlds central to

fandom offer particularly rich resources for supporting collective action and reaching young people

who have not yet embraced political identities.

[3.5] Among Slack's first moves was to join forces with prominent fans, directly courting Wizard

Rock stars, podcast producers, fan fiction editors and writers, highprofile bloggers, and convention

organizers. Paul DeGeorge, who, together with his brother Joe, fronts Harry and the Potters, was

an early and important HPA supporter, recruiting other performers to participate in Wizard Rock the

Vote, Rock Out against Voldemedia, and other HPA campaigns (Scott 2010, 263–64). Paul

DeGeorge helped spearhead the Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club

(http://www.wizardrockclub.com/), which for 2 years raised money for literacyrelated nonprofits

by offering members exclusive CDs by groups such as the Whomping Willows, the Moaning Myrtles,

Tonks and the Aurors, Danny Dementor, MC Kreacher, and the Shrieking Shack Disco Gang. Many

groups wrote songs tied to specific HPA campaigns; the HPA uses their concerts as major recruiting

sites.

[3.6] While Slack was relatively new to fandom, support from other prominent fans helped to

establish his credibility and broaden his reach. In July 2007, the group worked with the Leaky

Cauldron, one of the most popular fan news sites, to organize house parties around the country

focused on increasing awareness of the Sudanese genocide. Participants listened to and discussed a

podcast that featured realworld political experts such as Joseph C. Wilson, former US ambassador

to Gabon, and John Prendergast, senior advisor to the International Crisis Group, alongside

performances by Wizard Rock groups. While some fans contested his allegiances, Slack's own

mastery of the Harry Potter texts helped overcome any lingering perceptions that he was an

"outside agitator," a concern echoing the reality of Communist Party interventions in the science fiction fan world in the 1930s.

[3.7] Instead, Slack worked within the structures of fandom, using such things as the House Cup

competition. Hogwarts is organized around four houses, Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw, and

Hufflepuff, each of which embodies different ideals and virtues. Harry Potter fans deploy many

different "sorting" mechanisms to place members into appropriate houses, and many feel a strong

sense of identification and affiliation with their house. (I am, for the record, a loyal member of the

House of Ravenclaw.) The HPA recruits highprofile heads for each house who encourage members

to take action for the cause. (Ravenclaw's house has been headed by Evanna Lynch, the actress

who plays Luna Lovegood, the bestknown Ravenclaw character, and by young adult author

Maureen Johnson.) For example, Wrock4Equality was a House Cup competition, where members

earned points for each person they contacted in the effort to rally voters against Maine's

Proposition 9. Such structures respect things fans value, even as leaders sometimes nudge them

beyond their comfort zones as budding young activists.

[3.8] The HPA materials are not always as polished as those of some other activist groups, who

work with professional media makers and consultants. Rather, the HPA embraces fandom's own

DIY ethos, lowering barriers to participation by respecting the work of novices and amateurs. Many

DIY ethos, lowering barriers to participation by respecting the work of novices and amateurs. Many of the HPA's most effective videos simply depict students, in their bedrooms, speaking directly into

the camera. The HPA has formed a strong partnership with the video blog community Nerdfighters,

whose capacity to mobilize its members was a key factor in the HPA's success in a 2010 Chase

Manhattan Bank online competition. Other HPA videos, such as a campaign supporting workers'

rights that depicted Harry's battles against the Dark Lord WaldeMart, involve broad parodies of the

Rowling content world.

4. Imagine better

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Video 1. J. K. Rowling, 2008 Harvard graduation talk.

[4.1] Speaking at the 2008 Harvard graduation, J. K. Rowling told a generation of young students

who had come of age reading her books, "We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all

the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better." Neither a

generic celebration of the human creative capacity nor a simple defense of bedtime stories,

Rowling's talk describes how her early experiences working with Amnesty International shaped the

books. Linking imagination to empathy, she calls out those who refuse to use their imaginations:

[4.2] They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience,

never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They

can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts

to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

[4.3] Rowling's speech has become a key source of inspiration for HPA members: her notion of

the socially engaged imagination connects their love of her content world with their own campaigns

for social justice. Slack has named a recent initiative to forge partnerships between the HPA and

other fan communities Imagine Better.

[4.4] Rowling's call to "imagine better" could describe a range of movements that are embracing

"a politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and

associations; a politics that tells good stories" (Duncombe 2007, 9). Zoonen (2005, 63) has

similarly questioned the divide between the affective commitments of fans and the cognitive

processes associated with active citizenship: "Pleasure, fantasy, love, immersion, play, or

impersonations are not concepts easily reconciled with civic virtues such as knowledge, rationality, detachment, learnedness, or leadership." For Duncombe, the way forward bridges this divide by

means of "ethical spectacle" (124–75), public performances that are pleasurable, participatory, and playful, yet also confront reality. Whereas Mark Dery (1993) described 1990s cultural and political

movements as "jamming" dominant culture, Duncombe alternatively suggests that activists surf the

popular imagination, hitching themselves to Hollywood's publicity to reach a larger public.

[4.5] Slack describes this new form of activism as "cultural acupuncture." Writing in the

Huffington Post, he explained,

[4.6] Cultural acupuncture is finding where the psychological energy is in the culture,

and moving that energy towards creating a healthier world…We activists may not have

the same money as Nike and McDonald's but we have a message that actually means

something…What we do not have is the luxury of keeping the issues we cover seemingly

boring, technocratic, and inaccessible. With cultural acupuncture, we will usher in an era

of activism that is fun, imaginative, and sexy, yet truly effective. (2010)

[4.7] Recognizing that the news media was more apt to cover the launch of the next Harry Potter

film than the genocide in Darfur, Slack saw the HPA as a way to identify key cultural pressure

points, thus redirecting energy toward realworld problems. Pinning political and social causes to

Harry Potter works because this content world has a large following, is familiar to an even larger

number of people, has its own builtin mechanisms for generating publicity, and is apt to attract

many subsequent waves of media interest. Harry Potter constitutes a form of cultural currency that

can carry the group's messages to many who would not otherwise hear them and that channels our

emotional investments. Fans' previous attempts to tap the power of source material have been

primarily focused on the source's power as a shared reference point within the fan community

itself, whereas Slack's notion of cultural acupuncture also recognizes and seeks to deploy the larger

public's investments in these popular media to get under people's skin and prod them to political

action.

[4.8] Unlike some political groups that dismiss popular culture as "bread and circuses" and

"weapons of mass distraction," the HPA respects fans' existing emotional investments, seeing them as deeply meaningful and also as potential motivators for political change. Moving beyond fantasy,

the HPA educates its community about issues it should be concerned about, returning to the

content world for powerful analogies. In that sense, we might draw parallels between the ways that

the HPA taps the Harry Potter mythos and the ways, say, that the civil rights movement of the

1960s deployed Biblical allusions, such as the Promised Land and the River Jordan, that were

familiar to its churchgoing supporters. Fandom is not a religion and does not depend on literal

belief, but it recognizes the power of great stories to move hearts and minds. Catherine L. Belcher

and Becky Herr Stephenson's 2011 book, Teaching Harry Potter, describes how a range of

educators have offered their students ways into Rowling's content world that reflect their lived

experiences as undocumented immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, specialneeds kids, and so

forth, seeing it as offering many potential identifications and messages. Fandom represents a space

where shared allusions become socially and politically meaningful.

[4.9] Cultural acupuncture inspires civic participation by mapping content worlds onto realworld

problems. Writing for In These Times, Slack describes Harry Potter in terms that resonate post–

9/11:

[4.10] Imagine a world faced with unpredictable attacks that are carried out by a cultlike network. Led by a charismatic figure that is rarely ever seen or heard from, this network continues to claim responsibility for heinous acts that include random

kidnappings, the destruction of bridges and mass murders. Stateless and living among

the masses, its members have become so hard to track down that the government is at a

loss. Officials have begun to focus more on the image of "looking tough" than on creating

real safeguards to protect its citizens. The world has become haunted by fear. (2007)

[4.11] Against this backdrop of Death Eater terrorists, bungling or manipulative government

officials, a deceptive press, and repressive school authorities, Rowling tells how one young man

organized his classmates into Dumbledore's Army, a loosely organized activist group, to go out and

fight evil—sometimes working alone, sometimes collaborating with adult groups such as the Order

of the Phoenix, but always carrying much of the burden of confronting Voldemort and his minions

(Slack 2010).

[4.12] Slack argues that the Harry Potter books take young people seriously as political agents

and thus can inspire youth to change the world:

[4.13] Young people are depicted in the books as often smarter, more aware of what's

happening in the world, than their elders, though there are also some great examples

where very wise adults have mentored and supported young people as they have taken

action in the world…We are essentially asking young people the same question that Harry

poses to his fellow members of Dumbledore's Army in the fifth movie, "Every great

Wizard in history has started off as nothing more than we are now. If they can do it, why

not us?" This is a question that we not only pose to our members, we show them how

right now they can start working to be those "great Wizards" that can make a real

difference in this world. (Jenkins 2009)

[4.14] James Paul Gee (2007, 45–70) argues that games are effective tools for mobilizing

learning because they offer their players clearly defined roles and goals, offering compelling

identities and new epistemic perspectives, the capacity to act in meaningful ways, and clear paths

to success. The HPA similarly offers its participants roles within largerthanlife campaigns, roles

that Slack sees as echoing the power of myth as described by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung:

"What if we gave our teenagers the opportunity to imagine themselves as the heroes that they

have grown up watching, rather than treating their precious minds as nothing more than a way to

line the pockets of some CEO?" (Slack 2010). The HPA's playful deployment of terms like

"Voldemedia" and "WaldeMart" maps the personalized embodiment of evil in the content world to an expanding understanding of realworld harms. Consequently, the HPA allows its young members

to know who they are as activists, what they are fighting against, and what they are fighting for, all

key steps toward sustaining social change.

5. Battling the Muggle mind-set

[5.1] For the HPA, overcoming the "Muggle mindset" and releasing the power of fantasy

represent vital first steps in becoming an activist. When many Harry Potter fans think of Muggles,

they think first of the narrowminded Dursley family, who keep Harry locked away in the cupboard

under the stairs out of fear of and embarrassment about his magical capacities. Harry is literally

closeted at the saga's start and emerges as a key political figure by the series's conclusion—a

closeted at the saga's start and emerges as a key political figure by the series's conclusion—a classic comingout story. Building on Rowling's depiction, the HPA depicts Muggles as embodying

racism, sexism, and homophobia, as seeking to constrain cultural diversity through shame and

fear: "The 'Muggle Mindset'…that pervades our culture is unimaginative and twodimensional. It is a

system based on fear that sets normalcy as one's aspiration" (Slack 2007). The HPA uses the

elastic concept of the "Muggle mindset" as an allpurpose signifier for those forces that resist social justice, including many that are the targets of other kinds of activism, such as conformity,

commercialization, authoritarianism, and the politics of terror. The term "Muggle mindset" is as loose and as encompassing as, say, "neoliberalism" or "dominant ideology," and, like them, it links structures of belief, power, and action. In challenging the Muggle mindset, the HPA is able to link

the personal and the political in ways inspired by feminist and queer activist groups. The Muggle

mindset is, of course, a simplification of the more complex representations of the politics of

diversity within the Harry Potter books themselves, given the degree to which Rowling criticizes the

Wizarding world for its own insensitivity to "mudbloods" and the rights of House Elves, the ways

she uses S.P.E.W. (the Society for Protection of Elfian Welfare) to spoof certain forms of student

activism, and the ways Dumbledore himself defends the rights of Muggles (Carey 2003; Horne

2010).

[5.2] In their final struggles with Voldemort, Harry, Hermione, Ron, and their classmates had to

seek out and destroy seven Horcruxes, magic objects of supreme evil containing hidden fragments

of the Dark Lord's soul. In the months leading up to the release of the final movie, the HPA

launched an ambitious campaign identifying and directing its collective energy against seven realworld Horcruxes. Some, such as the Starvation Wages Horcrux, called attention to global human rights issues; HPA members pursuing this Horcrux sought to get Warner Brothers to commit to

license Harry Potter candies only to fair trade companies. Others represented concerns in young

people's lives. For the Dementor Horcrux, the HPA partnered with Reachout.com, an online support

group for teens considering suicide: "Like Harry, many of us may feel debilitated by the dementorlike experiences of anxiety, depression, low body image, and lots of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that knock us off balance" (Harry Potter Alliance 2010a). The Body Bind Horcrux helped

members push back against distorted body images, while for the Bullying Horcrux the HPA joined

forces with the GayStraight Alliance to battle homophobia in schools. Its efforts against bullying

included both collecting signatures for the Make It Better Oath and making phone calls to voters in

Rhode Island to urge them to support an equal marriage initiative there. Some of the HPA's

Horcruxes required concerted efforts on a national scale, while others encouraged personal

reflection and localized action. While critics might see such short, focused efforts as token gestures,

the overall Horcrux campaign was designed to help participants to understand the links between

campaigns for social justice and the internalized fears and anxieties that block many from taking

meaningful action. The Horcruxes were pedagogical devices helping participants see themselves

and the world differently, much like the preparation Hogwarts students underwent prior to their

final confrontation with the gathering forces of evil. They were intended less to create immediate

fixes than to map the terrain upon which social change must take place.

[5.3] As they battle the Muggle mindset, HPA members often draw sage advice from Hogwarts'

headmaster, Albus Dumbledore. A 2009 campaign asked members to wonder, "What would

Dumbledore do?" Slack refers often to the Dumbledore Doctrine, a loose set of ideas drawn from

the books:

[5.4] [Dumbledore] discusses how prevailing ideas of racial superiority for fullblood

wizards must be transformed into curiosity and interest in people's differences. Half

wizards must be transformed into curiosity and interest in people's differences. Halfgiants, like Harry's friend Hagrid, shouldn't have to hide their identities. House elves in servile positions must be allowed freedom and respect. Indigenous populations, like the

Centaurs and Merpeople, must be treated with the reverence and fairness they deserve.

And unconventional marriages, such as the one between Lupin, the werewolf, and Tonks,

the fullblood witch, should be welcomed so long as they bring more love into the world.

(2007)

[5.5] The Dumbledore Doctrine provides a launching point for the group's efforts to support

legalizing gay marriage, because they see the acceptance and embrace of diversity as core values

in the Harry Potter narratives. Slack sometimes compares Dumbledore with realworld political and

philosophical leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Dalai Lama, on the

basis of their shared philosophies of tolerance and social justice. Some HPA members challenge this

tendency to read Dumbledore as the moral center of the books, arguing that Dumbledore's motives

are not always pure or wise. Other critics have questioned whether the books offer a consistent or

progressive focus for fan activism, pointing out that, like many other popular texts, the Harry

Potter franchise is a contradictory blend of progressive impulses and retrograde elements. Such

debates about character morality reflect fandom's existing interpretive practices, sustaining fan

engagement as new members offer their own insights into core ethical and psychological dilemmas.

Should fan activism in the future be understood as acting on a shared set of ideologies and dogmas

that shape how fans read the world, or can we imagine a kind of politics that builds on the ongoing

debates fans have over how to interpret and how to evaluate the characters, actions, and values

depicted in a favorite text?

6. Empowering youth

[6.1] While the Harry Potter Alliance is open to members of all ages, the group has focused its

energies on attracting young people who have grown up reading the books and on helping them

find a path toward political engagement. According to HPA chapter coordinator Sara Denver (pers.

comm., July 2011), of the organization's 98 chapters, 24 are hosted by high schools and 33 by

colleges and universities, suggesting strong student representation in the group. An informal

survey conducted by Ben Stokes of the University of Southern California's Civic Paths research

group found that the median age of members is 21, again suggesting a strong youth focus, which

has also been borne out by the Civic Paths team's fieldwork and qualitative interviews with 27

members of the Harry Potter Alliance. The fieldwork provides rich examples of young people who

have assumed leadership roles in the organization and who have come to embrace activism as a

result of the HPA's rhetoric and practices. (For more on this fieldwork, see KliglerVilenchik et al.

2012.)

[6.2] In starting with a fantasy about youth empowerment, the HPA addresses many prevailing

concerns about young people and civic engagement. Current scholarship (Gibson 2003; Bennett

2008; Wattenberg 2008; Buckingham 2000; Levine 2007) suggests that young people are rarely

addressed as political agents, that they are not invited into the political process, and that they are

not consulted in the political decisionmaking process, whether local, state, national, or global.

Existing literature suggests that young people are most apt to become politically involved if they

come from families with a history of citizen participation and political activism, if they encounter

teachers, especially in the civics classroom, who encourage them to reflect on and respond to

current events, if they attend schools where they are allowed a voice in core decisions, and if they

current events, if they attend schools where they are allowed a voice in core decisions, and if they participate in extracurricular activities and volunteerism that gives back to their community. Most

forms of activism reach the same core group of participants, who already are politically engaged,

and redirect them toward new issues. But the HPA is targeting young people who are engaged

culturally, who may already be producing and sharing fan culture, and it helps them to extend their

engagement into politics, often deploying existing skills and capacities in new ways. Kahne, Lee,

and Feezell (2011, 2) discovered that involvement in online networks focused around shared

interests (fandom, for example) also shapes political identities: "online, nonpolitical, interestdriven activities serve as a gateway to participation in important aspects of civic and, at times, political

life, including volunteering, engagement in community problemsolving, protest activities, and

political voice."

[6.3] As researchers such as David Buckingham (2000) have long argued, young people often feel

excluded from the language and processes of adult politics. In most cases, they are not invited to

participate; their issues are often not addressed; and the debates are framed in a language that

assumes familiarity with debates and policies. By contrast, the HPA's "cultural acupuncture"

approach is imaginative and playful, offering an alternative set of metaphors and analogies that are

already part of young people's lives, much as Fiske understood fans as transforming mass media

content into "cultural resources" for critiquing the dominant order (Jenkins 2011, xxx–xxxi). The HPA embraces grassroots appropriation as a way of generating a new vocabulary for talking about

political change.

[6.4] HPA leaders and members may object to Fiske's characterization of such practices as

"resistance" (Jenkins 2011, xxxiii), since they see themselves as building on the framework

Rowling, herself a human rights activist, provided. Nevertheless, they do prioritize the struggle for

social justice ahead of those commercial motives that shape Warner Brothers' management of the

Harry Potter franchise, as is made clear by the HPA's November 2010 campaign to encourage the

studio to contract with candy companies that observe fair trade policies. The effort defines HPA

members as fans of the franchise and as consumers likely to buy affiliated products, but also

mobilizes contentworld expertise to challenge studio decisions:

[6.5] When Hermione Granger discovers that the food at Hogwarts, chocolate included,

is being made by house elves—essentially unpaid, indentured servants—she immediately

starts a campaign to replace exploitation with fairness…In Harry Potter's world, chocolate

holds a unique place: it is a Muggle item with magical properties. Chocolate is featured

prominently throughout the books as a powerful remedy for the chilling effects produced

by contact with dementors, which are foul creatures that drain peace, hope and

happiness from the world around them…It is doubtful that chocolate produced using

questionable labor practices would have such positive effect, both in Harry's world and

ours. (Harry Potter Alliance 2010b)

[6.6] Rather than seeing the licensed candies as mere commodities, the HPA evaluates them

according to their meaningfulness in the content world and then links their "magical" powers to the ethics of how they are produced and sold: "As consumers of Harry Potter products, we are

interested in supporting and purchasing products that are true to the spirit of the Harry Potter

franchise." Throughout its campaign, the HPA holds open the prospect of a meaningful collaboration

with corporate interests, but it also pledges to use boycotts and buycotts against the studio and its

subcontractors.

subcontractors.

[6.7] In The Future of Democracy, Peter Levine argues, "There are limits to what adults and

institutions can accomplish, given the opacity of youth culture and young people's resistance to

being manipulated. Therefore, it is important that young people themselves have the skills and

values they need to make their own sphere as constructive as possible" (2007, 76). In some ways,

fan activism flies in the face of Levine's claims: fandom has historically been a space where youth

and adults work together, outside of the hierarchies that shape relations at school or home,

because of their shared interests and mutual passions. Strikingly, though, Slack and many of the

other core HPA leaders are in their 20s and early 30s, closer in age to the young activists than their

parents and teachers, though experienced enough to mentor them and to help negotiate with more

adultcentered organizations.

7. Beyond the Potter franchise

[7.1] The HPA has long hitched its campaigns to the release of the books and, more recently, the

release of the feature films. Such moments offer a window of visibility as the news media goes into

a feeding frenzy around all things Harry. For example, the HPA drew coverage from mainstream

media outlets through a bit of imaginative (if geeky) street theater, staging an epic battle between

the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix in New York's Columbus Circle tied to the 2010

release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. These releases also represent moments

where new fans discover the series and old fans renew their commitments.

[7.2] With the 2011 release of the final feature film, then, the HPA's leadership faces a crisis of

sustainability. Will what they have built over the past 5 years function in the absence of new waves

of media attention? Many fan communities—including those centered on the Star Trek franchise,

Doctor Who, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Firefly—have sustained creative energy and social ties over a decade or more of lapses in commercial output, although they have often

retrenched, growing smaller but more intense, and taking greater ownership over the content

world. Yet an activist group, by its very nature, needs to reach beyond its own community if it

wants to make a difference. So, under the banner "Imagine Better," the HPA is now seeking to

forge alliances with other fan communities (for Firefly, True Blood, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and Glee, among many others). But, as it does so, it may need to disconnect its goals and practices

from the specifics of the Harry Potter content world. How far can it go, and remain Dumbledore's

Army?

[7.3] One factor working in its favor is that many fans are nomadic, moving across content worlds

and sometimes genres in the course of a lifetime in fandom. Many fan conventions are organized

around broader generic rather than franchisespecific categories—and some of these, such as slash,

originate from fan reading and production practices rather than industry discourse. So perhaps the

HPA's core themes can be grafted onto a broader range of popular myths that may also motivate

young people to take political action. Linking together Harry Potter and Twilight seems, on the

surface, a smaller step than bringing in Glee fans, since they are both fantasy worlds rather than

mundane ones, but to see them in this way is to focus on only one dimension of these franchises,

and not necessarily the one most relevant to fans. Perhaps further expansion will result in

innovations in new media platforms and practices, new issues and tactics for reading and

responding to realworld problems through acts of collective imagination. What happens next will

tell us a lot about how much we can abstract from the HPA model to forge new theories of youth

tell us a lot about how much we can abstract from the HPA model to forge new theories of youth and civic engagement.

[7.4] My focus here has been on the processes of cultural acupuncture, deploying popular culture

metaphors and analogies to refresh political rhetoric. In the case of the HPA, such metaphors

remain closely linked to fan culture. But what happens when fandom incubates new discursive

frames that feed back into mainstream politics? For example, Whitney Phillips (2009) has written

about how 4Chan, a controversial online community that started as a place to discuss manga and

anime, has deliberately generated memes and spread them across the Internet. Among them, she

argues, was the Obama Joker imagery deployed in the Tea Party's campaign against "Obamacare."

Or consider how undocumented youth, organizing in support of the DREAM Act, have claimed

Superman as another "illegal alien" who has nevertheless contributed to truth, justice, and the

American way (Zimmerman, n.d.).

[7.5] Such efforts deploy pop icons, already holding affective power, to grab media and public

attention. (See Brough and Shresthova 2012.) Such efforts defamiliarize the issues and offer a

welcome sense of play and pleasure to struggles for social justice. As the Joker might put it, "Why

so serious?" Writing about this larger movement to integrate pop culture and politics, John Hartley

claims, "While it may not look very much like the Habermasian public sphere, it is clearly attracting

the attention of those who are notoriously hard to reach by traditional technologies of citizenship"

(2012, 147). Such efforts rely for their success on general knowledge rather than fan expertise:

they deploy aspects of popular culture texts familiar even to those who have not encountered them

directly.

[7.6] Fan activism pushes deeper, dealing not with isolated references but with the full content

world, recognizing and rewarding fans who know more and imagine better. Certainly, some of the

HPA's allusions are widely recognized—Dumbledore's Army, perhaps—facilitating meaningful

partnership with nonfan organizations that value the creative energy the Harry Potter books

unleashed. Yet, as fan activists, the HPA members mobilize obscure characters and events, even

quoting specific dialogue, and thus reward fan mastery. Fan activism works because of its

fannishness. This fannishness extends beyond specific ways of reading texts to specific forms of fan

participation (including cosplay, Wizard Rock, fan fiction, and fan vidding), some of which may look

strange outside the community. But each contributes to fandom's ability to organize and mobilize

quickly, to frame issues and educate supporters, to get the word out through every new media

platform and channel. This ability is what ultimately distinguishes fan activism from more casual

deployment of pop culture references.

8. Acknowledgments

[8.1] This essay was informed by the ongoing conversations of the Civic Paths Research Group in

the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, University of Southern California, and by

the MacArthur Network on Youth and Participatory Politics. Our research on fan activism has been

funded by the Spencer and MacArthur Foundations.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

Experiencing fan activism: Understanding the power of fan activist organizations

through members' narratives

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Fan activism, forms of civic engagement and political participation growing out

of experiences of fandom, is a powerful mode of mobilization, particularly for young people.

Building on 40 interviews with members of two organizations representing different configurations

of fan activism, this article discusses three emerging elements that are key to the experience of

membership in such groups. We suggest that the strength of fan activist groups builds on

successfully combining these elements: two that are common to fandom, shared media

experiences and a sense of community, and one that is traditionally ascribed to volunteerism and

activism, the wish to help.

[0.2] Keywords— Activism; Civic engagement; Fandom; Harry Potter; Invisible Children; Kony

2012; Politics; Youth

KliglerVilenchik, Neta, Joshua McVeighSchultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama. 2012.

"Experiencing Fan Activism: Understanding the Power of Fan Activist Organizations through

Members' Narratives." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0322.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In both general and academic discourse, there is a concern about young people's apparent

disconnection from public life. Young people, in this view, spend most of their time with media or

on the Internet, rather than being involved in their communities, helping others, or creating

political change (e.g., CIRCLE 2003; Galston 2001). Increasingly, however, scholars show that

younger generations tend toward new forms of civic and political engagement, ones that are

closely tied to their personal interests and social networks (Bennett 2008; Ito et al. 2009; Jenkins

et al. 2006; Kahne, Lee, and Feezell 2011). According to this approach, popular culture and

participatory culture, rather than being causes of disengagement, serve as resources around which

young people come together and are mobilized to social action.

[1.2] Bringing together the worlds of entertainment and politics is a key venture of the work of

Liesbet van Zoonen. In her book Entertaining the Citizen (2005), van Zoonen lays important

ground in suggesting analogies between fandom and citizenship. She claims that many activities of

fans—intensely investing in the text, discussing and deliberating about the quality of the text, and

proposing and discussing alternatives to it—also underlie thriving democratic politics. How, then,

she asks, could the emotional investment of fan communities be harnessed toward citizenship?

What, in short, can politics learn from fandom?

[1.3] Fan activist groups present an excellent embodiment of van Zoonen's theorization. In the

past, scholars have used the concept of fan activism as a response to the allegation that fans are

merely the passive recipients of media. Indeed, fan studies literature shows numerous accounts of

merely the passive recipients of media. Indeed, fan studies literature shows numerous accounts of

fans' collective action around their areas of passion, including elaborate campaigns to protest the

cancellation of their shows or to fight for their right to participate in the shaping of their content

worlds (Jenkins 2012). While these examples clearly show fans as active participants within their

cultural worlds, we propose to take the concept of fan activism further, to include the way powerful

investments in popular culture can mobilize explicit civic or political participation.

[1.4] Our understanding of fan activism is one that brings together elements from fandom with

elements that have traditionally been attributed to volunteerism and activism. While van Zoonen

theorizes what the marriage of fan communities and politics may look like and how this

combination may fuel participation in civic life, we identify groups that embody this hybrid and

ask, how are fan activist organizations uniquely positioned to recruit young people into civic life?

How do they sustain members' participation and involvement? How do they create shared—and

exclusive—identities for members? And what may account for their success in mobilizing young

people to civic action?

[1.5] We answer these questions by focusing on the experiences of members in two

organizations, each representing a different configuration of fan activism. On the basis of

interviews and ethnographic research, we find three common elements of experience in members'

narratives, and we suggest that they may be common to many manifestations of fan activism:

shared media experiences, a sense of community, and a wish to help. Through these elements, we

seek to show how fan activism successfully builds on two experiences that are at the heart of

fandom, shared media experiences and a sense of community, and augments them with an

element traditionally attributed to the worlds of volunteerism and activism, the wish to help.

2. Case studies and method

[2.1] Jenkins (2012) defines fan activism as "forms of civic engagement and political participation

that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans, often

conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and relationships, and often framed

through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture" (�1.8). We present two case

studies, one that clearly embodies this model, and another that questions its boundaries.

[2.2] The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) was established in 2005 by activist Andrew Slack. Inspired

by the student activist organization Dumbledore's Army in the Harry Potter narratives, the HPA

uses parallels between the fictional content world and the real one as an impetus for civic action. It

claims to mobilize over 100,000 young people across the United States—mostly, but not

exclusively, Harry Potter fans—to work for diverse causes including literacy, equality, and human

rights. Building mostly on volunteer staff members and a network of local chapters, the HPA has

run a variety of campaigns, raising impressive amounts of money and achieving a number of civic

and political goals. As the organization builds heavily on the preexisting community of Harry Potter

fandom and uses the story world as an impetus for social action, its work clearly meets Jenkins's

definition of fan activism.

Figure 1. The home page of the HPA Web site. [View larger image.]

[2.3] Invisible Children (IC) describes itself as a movement built around a movie. Invisible

Children: Rough Cut documents the longrunning civil war in Uganda, particularly focusing on the

hardships of child soldiers conscripted into the Lord's Resistance Army. The movie is told through

the viewpoints of three young Southern California film students, Laren Poole, Jason Russell, and

Bobby Bailey, who produced the film themselves. In response to its success, the three filmmakers

established Invisible Children (IC), dedicated to "us[ing] the power of media to inspire young

people to help end the longest running war in Africa" (http://www.invisiblechildren.com/whatwe

do). IC's campaigns have recently focused on raising awareness of the war in Uganda and urging

the US government to pass the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda

Recovery Act, which was achieved in May 2010. IC now focuses on longterm development in

Uganda as well as creating infrastructure in the Congo. Relying extensively on innovative media to

promote its goals, IC claims to reach hundreds of thousands of young Americans through

screenings and local clubs, encouraging them to become politically aware and to take political

action, as well as mobilizing them to raise money for the movement.

[2.4] IC requires us to stretch our understanding of fan activism farther than the HPA. Rather

than building on popular culture texts and an existing fan community, this organization was

created with an activist goal and has, almost inadvertently, built a fanlike public around its selfproduced documentary media. Yet IC members, as the organization acknowledges, in many ways resemble fans: they share an enthusiasm for the media, an avid knowledge of its narratives, and a

wide range of practices of collective consumption and production around IC media products.

Rooted more integrally in the world of nonprofits, IC offers an intriguing comparison to the HPA, as

the two organizations represent different interrelations of fandom and activism.

Figure 2. The home page of the Invisible Children Web site. [View larger image .]

[2.5] We have acquainted ourselves with these organizations in several ways. In addition to

following their media, conversing with their leadership, and conducting participant observation at

some of their public events, we conducted 40 semistructured interviews in 2010–11 with members

of the two organizations. The interview protocol and process have been approved by the

institutional review board at the University of Southern California. Interviewees were given an

information sheet explaining the goals of the study and gave verbal consent to be interviewed and

information sheet explaining the goals of the study and gave verbal consent to be interviewed and recorded. Interviews were conducted both in person and through audio and video conferences, and

lasted between 45 and 90 minutes. Interviewees were asked how they came to be involved with

the organization and what role they played in it, as well as how they perceived it. Interviewees

were initially suggested by the organizations, with additional interviewees recruited through

snowballing. They include rankandfile members, but our sample skews toward members with

higher levels of involvement: volunteer staff members (for the HPA), roadies and interns (for IC),

and local chapter organizers and club presidents.

[2.6] The remainder of this article is structured around the three emergent elements of

experience: shared media experiences, a sense of community, and the wish to help. These

elements help us to understand the power of fan activism in recruiting members, sustaining their

involvement, and creating shared identities.

3. Connecting around shared media experiences

[3.1] Kathy (note 1), 24, grew up as a "theater kid and a bookworm." She had read the Harry Potter novels as a young adult and was drawn in by the realness of the characters. After college, she became an active "spectator" of the online fandom: "I was basically just an online lurker who was obsessively checking." She encountered the HPA on Harry Potter fan sites, "but it took a very long time before I actually volunteered." Volunteering for the HPA was her first step into any form of civic engagement: "I didn't know social activism. I didn't care about social activism. I came to it from Harry Potter fandom." For her, joining the HPA was a way to keep her investment in the content world alive: "I was so invested in these characters…

when the books were finally over, there was nothing to do. I couldn't give that up yet. I wasn't ready. So I joined this community that was also just as invested and wanted to really use that investment towards good things. I was like, good, I can be a part of this at least. It was still Harry Potter." Today, Kathy is a full-time member of the HPA, holding a key position in envisioning its current activities and future directions.

[3.2] As Kathy's narrative exemplifies, fan activist groups recruit through the power of the media

experience that their members share. This is true of both IC and the HPA, though they rely on

different forms and genres of media.

[3.3] For the HPA, the media experience is one emanating from mainstream culture. The Harry

Potter franchise is an extraordinarily successful transmedia phenomenon. HPA members, like

members of the fandom, often pride themselves on being "original" fans of the series, tracing their involvement to the release of the first book, or having bought British editions prior to their US

release. While the movie series has brought a significant increase in the Harry Potter fandom,

involvement with the narrative is tiered, with book readers deemed by many members of the HPA

to be the more "authentic" fans. Despite these subtle demarcations of status within fandom, a

shared acquaintance with and, generally, passion for the world of Harry Potter builds significant

common ground between members of the HPA. This world offers them a language, one that may

mark off those who do not share the same acquaintance with the text (the word "Muggle" is

already common knowledge, but acquaintance with "S.P.E.W." may be more limited) (note 2), an

elaborate set of metaphors, and a common worldview.

[3.4] We're all bonded by our weirdness. It's kind of unspoken. We like different things

than the public, we talk about different things on Saturday nights. Different from what

you might say is "normal." We don't really need to talk about it, because we all

you might say is "normal." We don't really need to talk about it, because we all

understand. (Kristina, HPA staff member)

[3.5] These shared experiences and shared perspectives, common to experiences of fandom, are

mobilized by the HPA in connecting stories from the content world to realworld issues. Andrew

Slack, founder of the HPA, sees the world of Harry Potter as a deeply political one, where

questions of social justice, equality, and freedom are key. He claims that any realworld problem

can be "mapped onto it" in a process he calls "cultural acupuncture" (see Jenkins 2012), channeling passion for the text toward passion for social issues. The links between the content

world and the realworld issues the HPA engages with are not limited to the rhetoric of the

founder. HPA members take on the metaphor, creating their own connections between the social

issues they engage with and characters, terms, and themes from the magical world:

[3.6] We like to link everything back to Harry Potter. We have to get a little creative

sometimes, but we can still link. We were trying to get involved in some environmental

issues so we called it herbology, and with animal things we call it "care of magical

things." (Davia, HPA chapter organizer)

[3.7] Unlike the HPA, Invisible Children is itself the creator of its members' media experience.

The organization describes its mission as inspiring young people to end the war in Africa by using

film and media storytelling. As an organization centered around media production, and building on

the founders' strong identification as filmmakers, IC focuses on artistic values. Attention to

production is very evident in IC's media products, which include documentary movies, trailers and

short films, music mixes, podcasts, and apparel (while the HPA produces its own media as well,

they generally do not involve very elaborate production). These media are key tools for recruiting

members and raising awareness of the IC movement.

Figure 3. IC roadies, as depicted on the IC Web site. [View larger image.]

[3.8] One way IC distributes its media and, through it, raises awareness is through screenings.

IC screenings are 1.5–2hour events, led by IC roadies: volunteer staff members who spend 3

months on the road, holding up to three screenings a day in different venues. In screenings,

roadies supplement the media with their own experiences, but it is usually the ICproduced movies

that most resonate with IC members over time. Members speak of these movies—particularly the

first one, Invisible Children: Rough Cut—as having an almost magical effect on their worldview:

[3.9] They showed me the film and I remember being so floored, like, "I cannot believe

that this is going on" and "why have I never heard about this." I remember something in

me shifted that night. (Ruth, IC intern)

[3.10] Most IC members consider the main strength of the movie to be the feeling of

[3.10] Most IC members consider the main strength of the movie to be the feeling of

identification it allows with its protagonists—the three filmmakers and future IC founders, young

people not much older than themselves, who go out to Uganda, encounter a social issue, and

launch a movement:

[3.11] The movie is just very raw, and it's—even though they were older than me they

were kids, and you see these kids just go, they see something, they run into a problem

and they're like, OK, now we have to fix this problem. (Beth, IC intern)

[3.12] IC media play an important role in creating IC members' shared identity. This is evident in

the way members ritually ask each other to tell their "IC story"—meaning how they first came to

see Rough Cut:

[3.13] We've all heard people's IC story on how they first watched the documentary.

"What's your IC story?" And then you tell how you got involved. (Jade, IC intern)

[3.14] By connecting members through the content world of its media, IC—while not a

preexisting fandom—creates fanlike affiliations between its members. IC media are key not only as

entry points into civic engagement, but also because they sustain action by creating shared

collective identities. The organization's "media savvy," which members identify as unique, has an important role in creating IC's selfperceived image as a young, hip nonprofit:

[3.15] It has a lot of a younger feel to it. Last spring I interned at [a traditional

nonprofit], and you can definitely tell that the people who work here are a lot younger,

they are a lot more mediasavvy than a lot of the orgs. They draw in a different crowd

than a lot of organizations; other orgs draw large donors and we are staffed by young

people, we focus on young people and we realize that young people can make a

difference if they're really passionate about it. (Jade, IC intern)

[3.16] For both IC and the HPA, then, shared media experiences play significant roles, both in

recruiting young people into the organizations and in sustaining membership by creating shared

(and exclusive) identities for participants. For the HPA, it is a fictional story world that creates

strong bonds between members, a shared worldview from which to launch social action. Using

metaphors from the story world further helps channel passion toward realworld issues. IC, on the

other hand, recruits members to social action through the power of its independently created films,

as well as sustaining members' perception of the organization as cool through the hipness of its

media.

4. Building on existing communities and creating new community

experiences

[4.1] Dave is an intern at IC, creating short videos in the production department. He first saw Rough Cut in high school, at a screening organized by a friend. He and his friends "just didn't know what to do, because before that we were never really exposed to anything like that." While attending a private, Christian-oriented college, he encountered IC again: "Somebody at our college was interested in Invisible Children, so they got a copy of the film and showed it, and then it kind of pushed the Global Night Commute (note 3) at our school." Through IC events at his college, Dave met good friends who became his

roommates. After college, he contemplated his opportunities. He had applied for an IC internship before and hadn't been accepted, but he was encouraged by a friend on Facebook to apply again—this time successfully. Dave enjoys attending the same church as several IC members, and he sees his faith as underlying his social action. He feels that his sense of

community has broadened through IC. It includes not only fellow IC members, but also the Ugandans whom they are helping. "Even though I haven't met anyone from Uganda, I feel like they're kind of my extended friends now. I care about them—not just a far-off 'Oh, I want everybody to be okay,' but I really feel somewhat connected."

[4.2] Dave's story introduces some of the means by which fan activist groups use existing

community structures as a recruitment base. Dave's involvement in IC relied on repeated exposure

to it through friends. He did not become instantly hooked; instead, it took several rounds of

involvement with others in his community, and their continual encouragement and support, for

him to become a committed member. While the HPA and IC build on different kinds of preexisting

communities, both create a new sense of community for their members, one that is broader and

more inclusive of those outside of previous community configurations.

[4.3] IC's main recruitment and awarenessraising structure—roadie tours—significantly builds on

preexisting communities, networks, and institutional affiliations. Roadies hold screenings mostly at

high schools, colleges, and churches, with most recruitment relying on local members. IC's

recruitment efforts benefit from this format in several ways: institutions provide physical

structures in which to hold screenings, harness the networks of their members to promote the

event, and also ensure that attendees at a screening share a common ground (e.g., high school

students, or members of a certain church). Within this structure, most members hear about

screenings through personal networks and arrive at them with friends. Sharing the powerful

experience of watching Rough Cut or other IC movies with friends can inspire groups toward

further action, while building on strong preexisting relationships:

[4.4] A ton of people from my school wanted to do something after they saw the

documentary, and [the Global Night Commute] was a perfect action step, so we all did

that. Afterwards we wanted to do something more. We formed a club around that at our

school. I went to a Christian college, so it was a really good community, we all knew

each other really well, and it wasn't like we'd only meet and talk about what to do. We

prayed for Uganda and we prayed for each other. (Don, IC roadie)

[4.5] In Don's retelling, there is a form of collective action: "we" participated in the event, "we"

wanted to do more. This "we," however, is still a rather limited one, denoting a group of close

friends at a Christian college. Those who get more deeply involved with IC often come to see their

community as defined more broadly, to include the Ugandan people. Janelle, an IC intern, is one of

the few IC members who have visited Uganda. She says of her trip,

[4.6] It was such an eyeopening experience. You put faces to the people you're

helping; it's not just helping others but building friendships and exchanging. It was

definitely what [the Ugandans] were giving, they were giving to us as well, [we were]

learning from their culture. (Janelle, IC intern)

[4.7] IC leadership repeatedly declares that the organization's relationship with the Ugandans is

one of friendship and mutual learning, not only onedirectional aid. This view is strongly echoed by

members, who repeatedly express affiliations with the people of Uganda, whom they have never

met.

[4.8] The existing community on which the HPA builds is mostly that of Harry Potter fandom. This

immense fandom is a relatively young one, both because the books are aimed at young people and

immense fandom is a relatively young one, both because the books are aimed at young people and

because youth are more able than ever before to participate in fandom online, from their own

bedrooms. Furthermore, it is an extraordinarily creative fandom, with a wide range of activities

(note 4). Throughout our research, we have witnessed fans producing fan fiction, fan art, musical

theater, a play, and an opera, as well as a new sport (Quidditch). As in these other outlets for fan

creativity, HPA members' sense of community is closely tied to their shared identity as Harry

Potter fans. Previous works on fan communities have shown how cultural references create

affiliations among people who are otherwise strangers (Hellekson and Busse 2006), or, in Bury's

terms (2005, 215), how they enable connections with "likeminded others":

[4.9] Being there [at a fandom event] and getting involved in HPA was this bizarre,

almost homecoming, feeling. All were there because all are excited and passionate about

the same thing. Just to be able to cut loose and not worry about anything, knowing

you're among a group of friends. (Jessie, HPA staff member)

Figure 4. HPA members at LeakyCon 2011, a fanorganized Harry Potter convention. [View larger

image.]

[4.10] By building on Harry Potter fandom, the HPA thrives on a preexisting shared identity and

sense of community among many of its members, due to their passion for and engagement around

a shared text. The HPA goes further, in utilizing the institutional structures of the fandom. Harry

Potter fandom has a strong online base, centering on established online sites like the Leaky

Cauldron and MuggleNet (see Anelli 2008), as well as various offline sites. For the HPA, these

sites serve as a recruiting base. Ashley and Millie, who opened a new HPA chapter, posted a

message on their Leaky Cauldron page, reaching potential HPA members in their area. Joanne,

who works at a Harry Potter theme store, hands out HPA flyers to interested customers. Wizard

rock musicians, who play Harry Potter–themed music they have written themselves, are a longstanding ally of the HPA, offering their nationwide tours as venues for HPA recruitment.

[4.11] HPA members and staff are widely nationally dispersed. Staff members, almost all of

whom are volunteers, do the majority of their communication online, through emails, video

conferences, social networking sites, and shared documents. The HPA's physical headquarters

amount to the founder's living room, and many staff members and chapter organizers know each

other only online. Carrying on most of their communications from their homes, with little facetoface contact, confronts members with challenges:

[4.12] It's really hard being online. I didn't realize how hard it would be. You don't see

any people a lot of the time, and things can be lost in translation, like tone, and sarcasm

any people a lot of the time, and things can be lost in translation, like tone, and sarcasm

cannot come through. (Kristina, HPA staff member)

[4.13] In such an environment, creating a sense of community takes on increased importance.

The HPA deals with this on two levels: through extensive online communication and through offline chapters. Chapters embody the local component of the HPA. Organized around schools, colleges, and local communities, chapters start with the initiative of a local chapter organizer and

are sustained through the ongoing efforts of chapter members, and particularly of chapter

organizers. The HPA offers chapter organizers various online resources, as well as sending them a

weekly email newsletter (called Galleon Day, after the currency in the magical world), updating

them on news, ideas for activities, and upcoming campaigns. This online support system is

designed to compensate for the lack of physical contact, as well as take into account that most

chapter organizers are young people who have never before started a civicminded group:

[4.14] There is a lot of support through phone conferences and online systems…First of

all, this is new and it can be hard for people to come into a new leadership position and

[be] trying to get things organized, and also because what we do is so different. (Carrie,

HPA staff member in charge of chapters)

[4.15] Like IC's local club structure, the HPA's chapters enable locally based action, while

providing the support of a national network. Relations between the local and national

organizations, however, are not always seamless. At times, chapter organizers may feel pressed

by "national HPA" to maintain high levels of engagement. Chapter organizers may also feel

tensions between the national campaigns and those that their local members initiate. In spite of

these challenges, however, chapters are an invaluable component of the HPA's structure and, for

many members, they are the key point of identification:

[4.16] HPA for me is definitely the local one that I'm part of. [National HPA is] basically

an email for me. But the local chapter is a lot more than that because I [can put] faces

to it and it's people that I know, and two of my closest friends are the organizers. (Maya,

HPA member)

[4.17] Maya's involvement serves as an example of local chapters widening the HPA's scope

beyond the fandom. While she read the Harry Potter books and liked them, she does not consider

herself a fan, and her main reason for joining the HPA was her friendships. Still, she finds that the

HPA gives her the opportunity to engage with issues that are important to her, with people she

feels close to, and under the facilitating umbrella of a national organization. Through local chapters

and personal networks, the HPA broadens its community beyond fans.

5. Wanting to help: Narratives of altruistic desire and self-transformation

[5.1] Beth, an IC intern, is an international relations major. Her role at IC includes updating the organization's Web site with news on the war in Uganda: "I write a peace and conflict update every week…the latest info that we can find on where the LRA is, attacks, legislative news." Retelling her experiences with social justice work, Beth describes herself as originally an apathetic, selfish kid (though her family had always been involved in aid in Africa). In high school, she went with a friend to a Christian youth group, where Rough Cut was shown by a youth pastor. She describes watching the movie as a formative moment, an embarking on a journey of engagement in activism: "I guess it affects everybody differently. For me there was no way I could do anything else. I couldn't go get a white-collar job…I don't even remember what other selfish tracks I was on." The movie opened her eyes to the world of nonprofits, and she began researching them online. She became engaged

on." The movie opened her eyes to the world of nonprofits, and she began researching them online. She became engaged with the student antigenocide organization STAND and is now the president of its local chapter. Through her work with STAND she reconnected with IC. Today, she sees no other option for herself but being involved in activism: "That life to me just seems like the kind of life everyone should live, a life where you're not doing something only for yourself; whatever you're doing is putting something back into the world."

[5.2] The two elements of experience that we have so far described, shared media experiences

and a sense of community, are ones that are at the root of fandom. The broad wish to help, on the

other hand, may be seen more specifically driving volunteerism and activism. Fandoms have

unquestionably always involved a significant component of helping others: teaching other

members about resources and tools, giving feedback on others' fan fiction, offering personal

support and even charitable donations. In our case studies, however, we see a different discourse

about helping others, one that is often expressed in terms of social justice or equality. The key

difference in this discourse is its outward focus, its concern for those who aren't part of the

narrowly defined community, as well as some participants' desire to create structural social

change. The motivations for this wish to help are also distinctive, many times involving perceptions

of one's own good fortune versus the hardships of others, or a feeling of obligation to do good in

the world, whether due to upbringing, political views, or faith. While the wish to help has been

found in members of both groups, it is expressed very differently.

[5.3] As Beth's story shows, IC members' wish to help is often expressed within a narrative of

selftransformation. In this narrative structure, IC members often describe their "former selves"—

who they were before joining IC, in contrast to who they are today. Beth describes her former self

as apathetic and selfish, in many ways echoing prevalent stereotypes about disengaged youth. In

her narrative, watching the IC movie represents a lifechanging turning point. Her wish to help,

then, seems to have been created at that moment of, in her words, "understanding that there's

more to life than the mall."

[5.4] These narratives by members are extremely powerful. Yet certain elements raise doubt

about whether seeing Rough Cut created an altruistic drive where none previously existed. Digging

down deeper reveals that many IC members (though not all) had been previously socialized to

social justice–oriented values and practices. For example, while Beth understates the significance

of her parents' involvement in aid in Africa to her own activist desire, research shows that parental

modeling is a key variable predicting youth civic engagement (Andolina et al. 2003). Other

members say that their wish to help predated their exposure to IC. For Dave, for example, it is

rooted in religious belief:

[5.5] Jesus said true religion is looking after orphans and widows in the time of their

distress, and so I think that's, like, kind of the foundation. (Dave, IC intern)

[5.6] However, even when altruistic desire exists, many members say that finding ways to get

meaningfully involved is a challenge. Many traditional activist organizations, like the Peace Corps,

offer limited possibilities for youth under 18 and often require extensive volunteer commitments.

Other organizations may offer young people ways to become involved, but are perceived by them

as oldfashioned and outdated, "charities run by middleaged women" (Edie, IC intern). A key

strength of fan activist organizations, then, is offering young people actionable steps, concrete

channels through which to express a preexisting activist desire, while doing this in a young, hip

environment:

environment:

[5.7] I had been trying to find ways that I could get into volunteering or working to

become part of a more global community. I saw the screening and they were in the

process of trying to get the bill passed and they were encouraging us to talk to senators

to hold a meeting, a cool way that you guys can make a big change, and so I got really

involved from there. (Tina, IC roadie)

[5.8] [IC] still has a youthful, hip vibe; everyone in the boardroom is 30 years and

younger. I guess it does have that work and fun, complete great intertwining of it. One

example is my supervisor, one of the most brilliant men ever, but so young—works until

he goes to sleep, but also brings in Nerf guns. (Janelle, IC intern)

[5.9] Wanting to become involved, but not knowing how, was a prevalent theme among HPA

members as well. At a wizard rock concert, for example, a young woman enthusiastically signed

the contact list of the local HPA chapter, explaining, "I always wanted to volunteer, but I never

knew how." Narratives of selftransformation from apathy to engagement, however, are less

common among HPA members. Instead, they express their wish to help in terms that are much

less dramatic. Darlene, for example, explains that the mission of the HPA for her is

[5.10] um..."to decrease world suck"...that's pretty much what every single thing we

do comes down to. (Darlene, HPA member)

[5.11] "Decreasing world suck" is a phrase that derives from a close ally of the HPA, the

Nerdfighters. This online group describes itself as made up of nerds who "fight to increase

awesome and decrease suck" (http://nerdfighters.ning.com). While "decreasing world suck" is not the formal mission statement of the HPA, its flexibility fits nicely with the HPA's involvement with a

variety of issues. HPA members build on founder Andrew Slack's mapping of the story world onto

realworld dynamics, but they do so in a way that is flexible enough to mobilize action around

various causes. In this way, HPA members derive solidarity from a shared media experience, but

they also creatively map this shared experience onto a multiplicity of problem spaces. For many

members, this flexibility is a point of attraction:

[5.12] We don't have a specific set of goals, we're not a green org, we're not

specifically political, we don't have one cause other than a general one: to help people

and become better people ourselves. That's what I like about it, we're not locked into

one thing. (Maya, HPA member)

[5.13] The HPA's wide range of issues also offers multiple points of entry for members, who can

bring causes they feel strongly about into the scope of collective action. This may happen

nationally, but more often locally. Joanne, for example, is strongly connected to soldiers' and

veterans' causes, as both her father and grandfather were in the military. In addition to her

chapter's key areas of action, she initiated a project of sending packages of supplies and gifts to

soldiers: "With HPA, anybody can propose an idea and we put it out there."

[5.14] The empirical debate on whether today's youth are engaged in or disengaged from public

life is widespread (see Bennett 2008). Whether connected or disconnected to empirical reality,

young people too are aware of prevalent stereotypes of apathetic youth, and react to them in their

narratives. Countering these stereotypes, however, members of both the HPA and IC manifest a

wish to help, whether it was triggered by exposure to the organizations or predated it. Part of

wish to help, whether it was triggered by exposure to the organizations or predated it. Part of these organizations' strength is in giving young people with a wish to help actionable steps to do

so. To comprehensively understand how this mobilization succeeds, we will now examine how the

three elements of experience intersect.

6. The power of fan activism

[6.1] The three elements of experience we have discussed—shared media experiences, a sense

of community, and the wish to help—emerged as we talked with members of IC and the HPA about

their experiences. We did not begin by assuming that they were either defining characteristics of

fan activism or a formula explaining why it may succeed. Yet, in their interrelations, they may

show how fan activism successfully brings together elements of fandom with elements traditionally

ascribed to activism.

[6.2] Building on numerous works of fan studies scholars, we argue for a view of fandom as a

social, active experience. In the conclusion to Textual Poachers, Jenkins (1992) offers a framework for reconsidering fandom, seeing it as a mode of reception, a set of interpretive practices, a base

for consumer activism, a form of cultural production, and an alternative social community. Two

decades later, the experiences of members of the HPA and IC reflect these possibilities. Of the

three elements of experience presented in this article, shared media experiences and a sense of

community have been shown to be particularly rooted in broader worlds of fandom. Within fan

studies, these elements of experience have been found to bring people together, create shared

identities, and often encourage collective action and production around shared areas of passion.

[6.3] Activism is traditionally understood as action geared toward social change. Within the

elements of experience described here, an activist desire is mostly reflected in the wish to help. In

members' narratives we witness a strong commitment to working for social justice through social

action. Both organizations perceive themselves as activist groups, though their activist stance

often takes the form of a somewhat broad notion of "changing the world in small ways that

hopefully will spread like ripples" (Maya, HPA member). For many members, this reflects how their

generation believes change can be achieved, though they are aware this belief is often perceived

as naive by members of their parents' generation, whom they see as more skeptical or cynical.

[6.4] Taken together, these three elements of experience help us understand some of the shapes

of fan activism, as well as highlight its strengths. Fan activism can be understood as embodied in a

community, created and maintained around shared media experiences, that channels members'

wish to help toward social action (and sometimes even creates it). In doing so, fan activist groups

bring together the power of fandom to connect, engage, and mobilize its members and an explicit

civic goal toward which this energy and enthusiasm are channeled. They thus answer the question

posed by van Zoonen (2005, 66) of "whether and how politics can borrow from the elements of

popular culture that produce these intense audience investments, so that citizenship becomes

entertaining." The answer to the "whether" question, we claim, is yes. One possible answer to the

"how" question is through the interrelation of the three elements of experience described here.

These can help to explain fan activist groups' success in mobilizing young people through different

configurations of experiences from fandom and activism.

[6.5] The HPA, a classic case of fan activism, builds on an existing fandom, one that already

thrives on media experiences and a sense of community that its members share around a common

text. The organization channels these powerful experiences in inspiring its members to social action around a variety of different causes. Members' wish to help may come from different

sources, but it may also be created through their involvement with the organization.

[6.6] IC stretches our definitions of fan activism, as it developed not from a fan community but

from a specific activist cause. The organization's selfcreated media create powerful experiences

that members come to share. For some members, these media inspire a wish to help; for others,

this wish may be rooted in previous experiences. A sense of community is then built around these

media and the organization itself, allowing IC to successfully mobilize young people to action.

[6.7] Through these elements, as well as through their use of preexisting structures and offering

of actionable steps, these organizations successfully merge the worlds of fandom and activism,

creating a space for young people to become involved in social action, in an environment that feels

inherently theirs. In the context of prevalent discourses about youth disengagement, organizations

like the HPA and IC provide encouraging contrasts, pointing to the ways in which many young

people in fact devote significant amounts of their time, money, and energy to social causes they

strongly believe in, while doing so within environments of passion and belonging. Further research

will help us understand how the elements we identified may translate to other contexts in young

people's lives, including, but not limited to, explicit political participation.

[6.8] A key question that may arise regarding fan activism is to what extent participation in such

groups represents members' first experience of civic action, or whether these are the same

participants who would be active in other civic groups. In their quantitative research, Kahne, Lee,

and Feezell (2011) found that interestdriven online participation was a significant predictor of civic

participation, even when controlling for parental civic participation. While we cannot generalize

from our limited data, we found that for about a third to half of our interviewees in both

organizations, their involvement was their first experience of civic participation. These are

significant numbers. The literature on young people's civic engagement often raises concerns that

participation is determined largely by parental or school socialization (e.g., Andolina et al. 2003).

Those who do not benefit from this socialization may remain outside of the loop of political life.

Through its elements of experience, fan activism enables new and multiple points of entry into

political life, by linking civic engagement to fandom and other forms of participatory culture.

[6.9] Some caveats need to be added to this optimistic picture. Although IC and the HPA work for

social justice, the lack of ethnic and socioeconomic diversity among their members is troublesome.

Like other nonprofit organizations, these groups rely on members' volunteering of their time and

efforts in ways that may exclude youth coming from less affluent environments, and increasing

member diversity is one of the challenges these organizations face. A second challenge is that of

sustainability. Presently, both organizations are facing situations that drive them to evolve. As IC

matures and institutionalizes, there is concern about how to maintain young people's sense of

identification with the organization, which for many was based on the representation of the

founders as young, inexperienced students who set out to reach a goal. As IC plans future action

in central Africa, as well as increasingly promoting American youth engagement in general, the

organization aspires to maintain the enthusiasm of its members. For the HPA, the release of the

last Harry Potter movie in July 2011 brings with it questions about the future of the fandom, and,

by inference, the future of the organization. In an attempt to remain relevant, the HPA has

partnered with over 20 other fandoms to launch a new movement called Imagine Better. This

movement will face the challenge of continuing social action while broadening the scope of the

movement will face the challenge of continuing social action while broadening the scope of the community and the variety of content worlds inspiring it. We continue to follow these organizations

as they face these challenges, which will impact not only IC and the HPA but also the shapes of fan

activism.

7. Addendum: Prefiguring Kony 2012

[7.1] Since this article was completed, Invisible Children has come to the foreground of attention

with the release of its halfhour documentary video, Kony 2012, through YouTube on March 5,

2012. This video was astonishingly successful in the scale and speed of its spreadit received

800,000 hits online in the first 24 hours of its release and then reached an unbelievable 112

million views in 6 days, becoming the fastestspreading video of all time

(http://corp.visiblemeasures.com/newsandevents/blog/bid/79626/UpdateKonySocialVideo

CampaignTops100MillionViews). Along with its astounding spread, the video received harsh

criticism for both its content and the nature of Invisible Children as an organization (see a key

critique by Ethan Zuckerman: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/unpacking

kony2012/). A more extensive overview of the debate over the campaign was compiled by Zhan

Li and Rhea Vichot (http://henryjenkins.org/2012/03/a_brief_outline_of_kony_2012_a.html).

KONY 2012

Vid 1. Kony 2012.

[7.2] We argue that at least one of the key themes of the debate around this videothe role of

young people as civic actorsis prefigured in the analysis of experiences of IC members found in

this article. Much of the debate around young people's involvement with Kony 2012 revolved

around issues of slacktivism (that is, easy and thus meaningless forms of social action). However,

approaching it from the context we describe in this article sheds a different light on the debate.

[7.3] For most of its viewers, Kony 2012 was their first encounter with Invisible Children.

Academics and nonprofit practitioners who reacted to it online were perplexed by the

organization's use of storytelling and film to portray human rights abuses in Africa, but most of all,

they were amazed by the attention the video received, most of all by American youth. In its first

days after its release, the video was most popular with 13 to 17yearold Americans

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9134431/Kony2012Statsbreakdownoftheviral

video.html). These young viewers were not only the most active in spreading the video to their

video.html). These young viewers were not only the most active in spreading the video to their

own social networks, but they were also the ones signing up to participate in action on the ground,

joining Facebook group pages for IC's Cover the Night event planned for April 20, 2012. Gilad

Lotan's analysis of the spread of the video online highlights the importance of preexisting networks

that actively shared the video (http://blog.socialflow.com/post/7120244932/datavizkony2012

seehowinvisiblenetworkshelpedacampaigncapturetheworldsattention). These are the

members of Invisible Children who have been active with the organization for years, just like the

members interviewed in this article, who felt part of the Invisible Children community and were

committed to its cause. The role of these active preexisting members was largely overlooked in the

debate around the video. The reactions of new young viewers, however, were key to bringing the

video beyond its existing supporters. Many commentators tried to understand what it was about

Kony 2012 that propelled young people to action, but we can learn from the interviewees in this

article who talk about identifying with the young protagonists and about the trendy feel of the

movies. The members we interviewed describe watching previous IC movies as a lifechanging

moment that may start a trajectory of civic involvementthough we call to read these statements

within more complex narratives of increasing engagement over time.

[7.4] Although we end our article with optimism about the potential of fan activist groups to

mobilize and engage young people, Kony 2012 also presented some of the challenges that this

genre of activism may face. From interviews we held with several youths in the weeks after Kony

2012, we learned that the harsh critiques launched against Invisible Children quickly dampened

the enthusiasm of many of its new supporters. Young people who saw the movie and who were

moved and felt propelled to action, just like the interviewees in this article, were quickly called to

question their own excitement and even criticize it as premature. For some young people, this may

have led to engaging with the war in Africa or with other social issues through other means;

however, many others preferred to disconnect themselves from the cause altogether, thus

obstructing the potential mobilization process we describe.

[7.5] At least some of the critique around Kony 2012, we argue, can be read as a policing of the

boundaries of social action, and what it should look and feel like. Many of these critiques claimed

that social advocacy should be left to expertsto politicians, to "serious" NGOs, to erudites.

Although some of the criticism was undoubtedly unique to Invisible Children, fan activism, which

calls for a different genre of activism that is playful, imaginative, social, and fun, may encounter

similar critiques in the future. Kony 2012 thus powerfully exemplifies the power of fan activism

while presenting a cautionary tale about some of the harsh reactions with which it may be met.

[7.6] For a more thorough linkage of Kony 2012 to the themes raised in this article, see

http://henryjenkins.org/2012/03/why_youth_are_drawn_to_invisib.html.

8. Acknowledgments

[8.1] Research for this article was supported by the Spencer Foundation and the Annenberg

Project for Online Communities. The authors thank members of the Civic Paths team at the

University of Southern California, and particularly Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, for their

role in the research and helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

9. Notes

1. All interviewee names, except the names of founders, are pseudonyms.

1. All interviewee names, except the names of founders, are pseudonyms.

2. Muggles are nonmagical people; the term is widely used in all Harry Potter media. S.P.E.W. is the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, an organization mentioned in Harry Potter and the

Goblet of Fire that did not appear in the movie series.

3. The Global Night Commute, held on April 25, 2006, was an event in which youth spent the night in city center parks to show support for the "night commuters"–Ugandan children who congregated

in town centers to avoid being conscripted into the Lord's Resistance Army.

4. As one of our reviewers helpfully pointed out, fans' artistic creativity often engages with issues of social justice. For example, slash fan fiction may be used to articulate sexuality and address

queer representation in mainstream texts. See, e.g., Tosenberger (2008).

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Galston, William. 2001. "Political Knowledge, Political Engagement and Civic Education." Annual Review of Political Science 4:217–34. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.4.1.217.

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Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Ito, Mizuko, et al. 2009. Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning

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Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.

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Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Theory

Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral

connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter

Alliance

Ashley Hinck

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has invited thousands of Harry

Potter fans to view politics and activism through the lens of Harry Potter. HPA

members have signed petitions, sent letters, made videos, and raised money in

efforts to affect laws and public policies. These activities circulate and operate within

the public sphere through an engagement with others. If we are to consider the

political actions of fans, we must consider how fans insert arguments into the public

sphere, constitute publics, and ultimately assert their own public subjectivities. By

drawing on social movement and public sphere theory, I first develop the theoretical

concept of the "public engagement keystone." I conceptualize the public

engagement keystone as a touch point, worldview, or philosophy that makes other

people, actions, and institutions intelligible. Next, I use the case of the HPA to

demonstrate how the Harry Potter story operates as a public engagement keystone,

opening the door to public subjectivities on par with the healthy public formation of

John Dewey, Doug McAdam, or Peter Dahlgren. I offer an interdisciplinary approach

to how fandom encourages and invites civic engagement. By doing so, public sphere

theory can better account for a wider variety of types of civic engagement, including

fandom activism.

[0.2] Keywords— Activism; Fandom; Public sphere

Hinck, Ashley. 2012. "Theorizing a Public Engagement Keystone: Seeing Fandom's

Integral Connection to Civic Engagement through the Case of the Harry Potter

Alliance." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and

Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0311.

1. Introduction

[1.1] The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has invited thousands of Harry Potter fans to

view politics and activism through the lens of Harry Potter. HPA members have signed

petitions, sent letters, made videos, and raised money in efforts to affect laws and

public policies. The HPA, founded in 2005, has conducted 25 social justice campaigns

and boasts 120,000 members. In a single campaign to end the genocide in Darfur, the

HPA donated more than $10,000, helped collect 7,500 petition signatures, mailed

postcards to President Obama, and increased total phone calls made to 1800

GENOCIDE by more than 50 percent. During an auction to raise money to help

respond to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the HPA donated more than $123,000 to the

nonprofit organization Partners for Health. The HPA donated more than 55,000 books

to nonprofits in the Mississippi Delta and a youth village in Rwanda. Last year, the HPA

won the Chase Community Giving contest, in which the HPA beat out more than

10,000 other charities to receive the most votes, earning a $250,000 grant from JP

Morgan Chase ("HPA 5 year Anniversary BLOWOUT" 2010; "Success Stories" 2010;

"What We Do" 2010).

[1.2] The HPA invites members to engage in very traditional expressions of

citizenship: petitioning, donating money, sending letters to government

representatives, and so on. Yet these traditional expressions of citizenship are still met

with skepticism by scholars of civic engagement because they are done in the name of

Harry Potter, instead of solely in the name of duty to one's country or ideological

commitment to a political party. While fandom scholars might immediately recognize

the connection between fandom and politics, Buckingham (2000), Gray (2006), and

Marcus (2002) have all shown that those outside of fan studies have questioned the

legitimacy of entertainment media's role in citizenship and civic engagement. It seems

scholars of civic engagement, politics, and communication are still hesitant about

young people blending the Democratic Party with Harry Potter. In online discussions of

the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning and quoted in Civic Life

Online, David Buckingham raises such questions. Thinking specifically about the Daily

Prophet, a Harry Potter fanoperated newspaper, Buckingham wonders whether some

examples of fandom activism are better characterized as media engagement than civic

engagement (Bennett 2008, 4).

[1.3] In some ways, Buckingham is right. Most studies of fandom activism examine

how fans mobilize themselves to defend their media text (Jenkins 1992; Harris and

Alexander 1998). The studies that consider political or social issues focus on personal

transformation rather than mobilization (Jenkins 1992; Radway 1991; Enstad 1999).

That is, they consider how media texts offer fans a more manageable arena to

reconsider social and political issues within a personal context. Few studies have

considered the intersection of the two: largescale mobilizations of fans that also affect

political institutions. This is the kind of action Buckingham might more readily

characterize as civic engagement because of its mobilization of citizens of the polis and

success in impacting deliberation within the public sphere (Bennett 2008, 4). The case

of the HPA offers fandom scholars an opportunity to consider how fans affect the

public sphere, and thus how fandom can be integrally connected to public

engagement. If we are to consider the political impact of fans, we must consider how

fans insert arguments into the public sphere, constitute publics, and ultimately assert

their own public subjectivities.

[1.4] Here I take up the question of how fandoms and their fan groups become

publics—groups of people who affect and act within the public sphere. When it comes

to public engagement, fan groups can operate in much the same way the Democratic

Party might. Political party affiliations, neighborhood membership, and civic

organizations are the traditional building blocks of citizenship. These institutions and

memberships help individuals view themselves as citizens or members of a public,

meaning that individuals view themselves as having a stake in public life, politics, and

the lives of people around them. Fandom can function similarly, as a way to come to

see oneself as a member of the public, capable of civic engagement.

[1.5] To understand how fandom can be integrally connected to public formation, I

examine the HPA, a nonprofit organization that uses parallels between Harry Potter

and the real world to do social justice activism. I use the HPA to demonstrate how

Harry Potter opens the door to public subjectivities on a par with the healthy public

formation described by John Dewey, Doug McAdam, or Peter Dahlgren. By drawing on

social movement and public sphere theory, I develop a theoretical concept of the

public engagement keystone. I conceptualize the public engagement keystone as a

touch point, worldview, or philosophy that makes other people, actions, and

institutions intelligible. I argue that the HPA uses the Harry Potter story as a public

engagement keystone to invite public formation in three ways. First, the HPA invites

its members to insert arguments into the public sphere through institutional and

expressive actions and discourse. Second, I argue that the HPA public engagement

keystone enables the HPA to invite its members to cultivate public subjectivities,

making public engagement newly intelligible to Harry Potter fans. Third, the HPA

privileges discursive engagement by establishing an ethic of action that must be

performed within the public sphere. Ultimately, this project brings together literature

on fandom and literature on the public sphere to consider how fandom encourages,

invites, and demands civic engagement.

2. Locating the public sphere in fandom activism scholarship

[2.1] Fan studies has grown into a robust field as scholars engage in key debates,

including concern with studying both individual fans and fan communities, considering

both fans and fan texts, finding fandom underground and in the mainstream, and

studying fans for the sake of studying fans and to better understand other aspects of

our social, political, and mediated lives (Hellekson and Busse 2006; Busse and Gray

2011; Sandvoss 2003, 2005; Gray 2006; Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2007; Fiske

1992; Jenkins 1992). Key among these classic debates is fandom's relationship to

social and political activism.

[2.2] Two areas of scholarship consider how fandom extends to the real world

through activism: media as cultural resources and fan mobilization through media

engagement. First, many scholars have considered how the texts of fandoms become

cultural resources available to fans, allowing fans opportunities to redefine themselves

and their social roles (Dell 1998; Enstad 1999; Radway 1991). Texts provide the

cultural resources with which to examine difficult social and political questions in a

more manageable context. For example, Henry Jenkins (1992, 82) explains that within

Star Trek fandom, fans may consider discrimination or favoritism as they ask why

Uhura has not been promoted but Chekov and Sulu have, and now each commands his

own ship. In a similar vein, Nan Enstad (1999) argues that workinggirl novels

provided the cultural resources needed for women workers to reimagine themselves as

both workers and ladies at the turn of the 20th century. Such reimagination made

factory strikes for fair working conditions possible. Texts become cultural resources

that can work against established orders and systems, offering a means to reconsider

contested social and political questions, and allowing fans to redefine themselves.

[2.3] Fandom scholars have also documented instances when fans organized

themselves and took collective action to protect their fandom texts. In Textual

Poachers, Jenkins (1992, 28–33, 120–51) explores the case of the television show

Beauty and the Beast (1987–89), in which fans mobilized to convince producers to

return the show to the air after it was canceled. Other scholars have also paid close

attention to media engagement by considering case studies focused on returning

television shows to the air (Scardaville 2005; Harris 1998; Menon 2007; Earl and

Kimport 2009). Even case studies about fan activism in sports focus on engagements

with media industries, either in marketing or broadcast choices (Rowe 2010; Muller

2007). Fandom scholars have yet to consider how and why fans engage in collective

action that affects political institutions.

[2.4] Fans are certainly well equipped for such activism. Liesbet van Zoonen (2005,

61–62) points out that fans already excel at the kinds of activities citizens engage in

as part of democratic participation, such as deliberation, consensus seeking, and

information filtering, as a part of involvement in a fan community's fan fiction

practices. Henry Jenkins makes a similar point: "The political effects of these fan

communities come not simply through the production and circulation of new ideas (the

critical reading of favorite texts) but also through access to new social structures

(collective intelligence) and new modes of cultural production (participatory culture)"

(2006, 257). Van Zoonen and Jenkins are right to point to skill sets, organizational

structures, and production practices that extend fandom to democratic participation.

But even with these skills in place, not all fans choose to participate in public

engagement. Public engagement continues to decline even as fandom activity

continues to increase (Earl and Kimport 2009, 220–21; Bennett 2008; Coleman and

Blumler 2009; Benkler 2006). Thus, fandom scholars are confronted with a number of

questions: What encourages some fans to translate their fandom activities to civic

engagement? How do some fans decide to engage in expressions of citizenship? How

do fans come to see themselves as citizens? Ultimately, how do fans form publics that

affect the public sphere?

[2.5] Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989)

sparked an onslaught of academic scholarship on the public sphere. In this seminal

book, Habermas advanced a notion of the public sphere as a discursive arena in which

all citizens are free to rationally discuss public issues. He based his conceptualization

on the coffeehouses and salons of Europe in the 18th century as places where citizens

could come together to discuss issues of public concern. For Habermas, the public

sphere is where deliberation between citizens occurs. This deliberation produces public

opinion, which then influences the state.

[2.6] Despite the criticisms of Habermas's public sphere for its problematic

exclusions and rational bias, Fraser (1992) argues that Habermas's conception of the

public sphere is too useful to abandon. Fraser argues that scholars ought to articulate

a new kind of public sphere, and he begins that articulation by conceptualizing the

public sphere as composed of multiple publics. Since Fraser's initial critique,

scholarship on the multiplicity of the public sphere through consideration of

counterpublics has exploded, developing a robust area of research into the many

publics and counterpublics of the public sphere (Felski 1989; Asen 2000; Brouwer and

Asen 2010; Fraser 1992; Goodnight 1982; Hauser 1997; Warner 2002; Asen and

Brouwer 2001).

[2.7] Coming to see oneself as a political subject means seeing oneself as a member

of the citizenry, addressed by the government, and included as a member of the

public. Being a political subject means being able to participate in the public sphere by

contributing arguments and deliberating with other political subjects. Arguing that

scholars should understand citizenship as a process, Dahlgren advances the theoretical

concept of a civic culture as "a way to conceptualize the factors that can enhance or

impede political participation—the enactment of citizenship understood as forms of

social agency" (2005, 157). Citizens are social agents, Dahlgren posits, because of

cultural factors. This perspective emphasizes the process of becoming a citizen

through a cultural practice that involves values, affinity, knowledge, identities, and

civic practices. Citizenship might be conceptualized as public engagement that results

from understanding oneself as a public subject. In her study of 19thcentury

antislavery petitions signed by American women, Susan Zaeske (2002) emphasizes

that subjectivity is a process. Women signed petitions to pledge support for freeing

black slaves, but through the process of signing petitions, they began to see

themselves as political subjects and as citizens (Zaeske 2002, 148).

[2.8] Building on earlier fan studies of fan identities, Matt Hills (2002) and Cornel

Sandvoss (2005) shift fan studies' focus toward conceptualizations of fan

subjectivities. Sandvoss (2005) argues that the fan text is an extension of the self,

and through selfreflection between the fan and the object of fandom, the fan forms a

subjectivity. Hills (2002) critiques implicit subjectivities found in fandom scholarship,

arguing that fans' struggles to explain their process of becoming fans violates values

of rational, comprehending subjects. By employing a suspensionist position that

refuses to pronounce fandom as good or bad, fan studies scholars can begin to

consider "what fandom does culturally rather than how fandom can be fitted into

academic norms of 'resistant' or 'complicit' readings" (Hills 2002, xiii). Ultimately,

Hills's emphasis on fan cultures "obliges us to consider the creative spaces of fans as

subjects with psyches as well as members of 'interpretive communities'" (Hills 2002,

xiii–xiv). Hills's and Sandvoss's conceptualizations focus attention on fan subjectivity,

but a kind of subjectivity that is neither public nor political. To understand how fans

come to see themselves as citizens, we must examine how fans constitute emerging

publics that act in the public sphere.

3. Methodology and texts

[3.1] I use the HPA as a case study to start to reconsider our understanding of

fannish activity as beyond traditional conceptualizations of public engagement.

Founded in 2005, the HPA is a nonprofit organization that seeks to engage in social

justice activism, using parallels between the real world and Harry Potter. The HPA has

engaged in campaigns that support fair trade, workers' rights, samesex marriage, and

literacy, among others. Calling itself "Dumbledore's Army for the real world," the HPA

tasks itself with carrying on Dumbledore's mission by waking up governmental bodies

to injustices around the world. Among the HPA's more than 25 campaigns, I focus on

the their first Darfur campaign because it was the HPA's first major campaign, setting

a precedent for later social justice campaigns. The 2007–8 Darfur campaign consisted

of blog posts and two podcasts, through which the HPA asked its members to contact

government representatives, post photographs and videos to raise awareness, and

raise money for Civilian Protection, a nonprofit organization that works to protect

women in Darfur and civilians in Burma ("Success Stories" 2010; Harry Potter Alliance

and PotterCast 2007).

[3.2] In December 2007, the HPA joined STAND, a student branch of the Genocide

Intervention Network, for their annual STANDFast project. Participants in the project

chose to give up one luxury item for a week, then donated the money they saved to

STAND. The donations went to protect civilians in Darfur by providing alternative fuel,

thus relieving refugees of the need to abandon the relative safety of refugee camps to

collect firewood. HPA members gave up luxuries like morning coffee, books, and movie

tickets, and donated the money they had saved (note 1). During the 2008 Summer

Olympics in China, the HPA asked its members to not support Olympic sponsors who

were implicitly funding the genocide in Darfur through overseas investments. While the

campaign formally ended in 2008, the HPA continues to post blog entries updating its

members on the situation in Darfur.

[3.3] For most HPA members, the Darfur campaign was their introduction. As its

inaugural campaign, the HPA articulated its mission, ethics, and policy goals for Harry

Potter fans for the first time. The HPA's first podcast introduced the Darfur campaign

and the HPA. The podcast was titled "Becoming Dumbledore's Army: Harry Potter Fans

for Darfur" and was broadcast as a special edition of PotterCast, one of the most wellknown Harry Potter fandom podcasts. News outlets have long served an important role in fandom, in the form of fanzines (Lewis 1992, 22, 212–15) and now in the form of

podcasts as well. Indeed, podcasts are characterized by an amateur aesthetic and low

cost of production (Sterne et al. 2008), making them an ideal media form for many

fandoms.

[3.4] The HPA's project was well received, with the first podcast being downloaded

more than 120,000 times, a surprising and encouraging number for the fledgling

nonprofit organization. The podcast features HPA staff members and Harry Potter

fandom celebrities, as well as guest speakers like State Department ambassador Joe

Wilson, MTV news journalist Jennifer Vineyard, former official for the Clinton

administration John Prendergast, and peace activist Dot Maver (Harry Potter Alliance

and PotterCast 2007). For this article, I focus on the first Darfur campaign podcast,

which I downloaded through the iTunes directory and analyzed as a transcript.

4. Theorizing public engagement keystones

[4.1] Through its rhetoric, the HPA invites Harry Potter fans to participate in public

engagement, in many ways targeting the generations of youth that have been most

criticized for political apathy (Bennett 2008). In this section, I explore how the HPA is

able to construct an environment that invites fans to see themselves as citizens and

political subjects. First, I link multiple theories of the formation of publics by turning to

John Dewey, Peter Dahlgren, and Doug McAdam's explanations of the most basic

requirements for healthy public formation. Second, I advance a theoretical

conceptualization of the public engagement keystone.

[4.2] Peter Dahlgren, a media and communication scholar, argues that in the process

of becoming citizens, anchoring is necessary. Dahlgren explains the "key assumption

here is that a viable democracy must have an anchoring at the level of citizens' lived

experiences, personal resources, and subjective dispositions" (2005, 158). Philosopher

John Dewey (1954) shares with Dahlgren a similar affinity for anchoring individuals in

community, though Dewey does so by emphasizing the importance of the local. For

Dewey, the local is the instantiation of community, and as such involves communality,

free and full communication, intimacy, and shared knowledge. These aspects of

community are what give way to a shared sense of commitment and a recognition of

direct consequences, both of which are requirements for wellfunctioning publics

necessary for democracy. For Dewey, these characteristics rise out of everyday

interaction—interaction that is face to face and makes a community a community. This

common, regular interaction grounds or anchors the community and allows a public to

come into existence. Without such grounding, cultivation of a public is not possible.

[4.3] Sociologist Doug McAdam (1986, 1988) makes a similar claim. McAdam

examines volunteer applications submitted for participation in Freedom Summer, a

summerlong effort organized in 1964 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Commission (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (CFO), in which

mostly white, Northern college students traveled to Mississippi to register black voters

and run citizenship schools. McAdam argues that both the applicants who followed

through and participated in Freedom Summer, and the applicants who were accepted

but withdrew, demonstrated similar levels of commitment to the ideology of SNCC,

CFO, and the broader civil rights movement. The difference between the two groups

was not the strength of ideological belief, but rather the strength of ties to the

organization, other applicants, and other civil rights activist events and groups.

McAdam explains, "An intense ideological identification with the values of the

campaign acts to 'push' the individual in the direction of participation while a prior

history of activism and integration into supportive networks acts as the structural 'pull'

that encourages the individual to make good on his [or her] strongly held beliefs"

(1986, 87–88). For McAdam, it is the intensity of the anchoring in a network or

community that helps an activist move from passive belief in a social movement

project to action.

[4.4] I wish to link the perspectives of anchoring, grounding, and strong ties by

developing a theoretical conceptualization of the public engagement keystone. For

Dahlgren, Dewey, and McAdam, anchoring and grounding are necessary starting

points for an emergent public. Linking Dewey's grounding, Dahlgren's anchoring, and

McAdam's strong ties under a single theoretical conceptualization offers three

advantages. First, the development of the public engagement keystone helps us

understand scholars like Dahlgren, Dewey, and McAdam as having similar projects.

These scholars discuss similar concepts, though with different emphases and different

terms. Bringing their concepts together under a single term clarifies scholarship in the

field. Additionally, the varied research that can be seen contributing to a

conceptualization of a public engagement keystone makes it a particularly rich

theoretical concept for use in future scholarship.

[4.5] Second, the development of the public engagement keystone as a theoretical

concept better allows scholars to talk across disciplines about public engagement.

Fandom scholars cannot talk about fandom's public engagement as being anchored in

the local in Dewey's sense. However, we might say that both Harry Potter and local

communication serve to anchor an individual, offering the possibility for public

formation. A term that encompasses the local, an anchor, and strong ties would allow

sociologists, fandom scholars, political scientists, rhetoricians, and others to more

easily talk about the process of public formation. Third, this term would allow scholars

to better account for a wider variety of public formation. Fandom need not be an

unusual exception to traditional public formation. By developing the theoretical

conceptualization of the public engagement keystone, I seek to place fandom on par

with the local as a legitimate method to healthy public formation.

[4.6] I conceptualize a public engagement keystone as a touch point, worldview, or

philosophy that makes other people, actions, and institutions intelligible. A public

engagement keystone accomplishes two things. First, it provides an orientation by

metaphorically grounding and anchoring an individual. By theorizing a public

engagement keystone, one can understand how an individual might be anchored in a

local community like Madison, Wisconsin; anchored in a lived experience of racial

oppression; or anchored by a philosophical framework like Catholicism. In each

instance, the public engagement keystone serves to orient an individual by providing a

way to understand others, and consequently a way to engage the public.

[4.7] Second, individuals strongly and intensely identify with a public engagement

keystone. We can contrast the individual who has a philosophical framework of

Catholicism but does not act upon it with another person who shares the same

Catholic philosophical framework and feels compelled to act according to it, perhaps

volunteering at his or her church's soup kitchen. The first person might adhere to the

beliefs inherent in the ideology but only passively believe them, and would not identify

strongly with them. The second person would strongly identify with the beliefs and

therefore would feel compelled to act. Strong identification combined with a lens that

makes other things intelligible creates an anchoring public engagement keystone.

[4.8] Taking my cue from Dewey, Dahlgren, McAdam, and others, I argue that public

engagement keystones are necessary to cultivating publics. The HPA's traditional civic

actions would have us predict that the HPA is grounded and anchored in a public

engagement keystone because HPA members seem to be performing citizenship

through public engagement, yet the HPA cultivates citizenship activities through

nontraditional means—that is, through the use of a fictional story. By developing a

theoretical concept of the public engagement keystone, I try to place fandom activism

within the context of broader political activism. In this way, we might understand

fandom activism not as an unusual departure from traditional public formation, but

rather as an expected part of citizenship on par with more traditional public

formations.

[4.9] How does the HPA invite formation of a public? First, the HPA frames its Darfur

campaign as requiring public engagement, requiring members to insert arguments into

the public sphere. Second, the HPA invites its members to come to see themselves as

public citizens able and obligated to participate in public engagement. Here, I argue

that the HPA deploys the Harry Potter story as a public engagement keystone, helping

Harry Potter fans come to see themselves as public subjects that allow and require

action within the public sphere. Lastly, I argue that the HPA constructs a broader ethic

for its members that is grounded in practices of public engagement and necessitates

performance within the public sphere.

5. Harry Potter fandom takes on the functions of a public

[5.1] The HPA invites Harry Potter fans to engage in activities beyond the regular

purview of fandom by asking fans to sign petitions and send letters to government

representatives, among others. These actions require HPA members to function as a

public—that is, HPA members begin to address other citizens on public issues with the

possibility of shifting public opinion and institutional actions at the governmental level.

The HPA's podcast invites members to insert arguments into the public sphere through

two types of actions and discourse: institutional and expressive.

[5.2] The institutional acts the HPA staff members invited Harry Potter fans to

engage in are some of the most readily recognized and longestablished forms of

public engagement: petitions and letters sent to government representatives. First,

through the use of petitions, the HPA asked Harry Potter fans to help stop the flow of

money that enabled the Sudanese government to enact genocide (Harry Potter

Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 10) (note 2). Fans were invited to sign a petition to pressure Fidelity to change its holdings of some Chinese oil companies. The HPA also

asked Harry Potter fans to pressure their government representatives to take action.

One way to do that was to call 1800GENOCIDE, an antigenocide hotline that

connected callers directly to their representatives in Congress and provided callers

with updates about the situation in Darfur and related legislation (Harry Potter Alliance

and PotterCast 2007, 2). The HPA also encouraged its members to educate themselves

on how their elected government representatives stood on the issue of Darfur by going

to DarfurScores.org (http://darfurscores.org/). This nonprofit organization assigned

each member of Congress a letter grade depending on his or her stance on Darfur. The

HPA encouraged individuals to send their representatives a letter praising them if they

had a good score and asking them to change their stance if they had a poor score

(Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 11). To further affect political institutions,

the HPA asked its members to submit a YouTube video of a question for the July 23,

2008, primary debate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination (Harry Potter

Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 13). All of these actions placed arguments about ending

the genocide in Darfur into public spaces where these arguments might circulate

further, might be noticed by other citizens and thus affect public opinion, and might

directly affect political and social institutions through government leaders. By inviting

Harry Potter fans to engage in activities that meet the functions of publics, the HPA

invited fans to begin to form a public.

[5.3] In addition to utilizing traditional tactics to affect political and social

institutions, the HPA also asked its audience members to engage in expressive and

creative acts, demonstrating support and expressing their political position and

identity. These creative acts were both public and political, placed in public spaces

easily accessible to many and political in their overarching message. As additional

messages inserted into the public sphere with the potential to affect public opinion,

these expressive acts further bolstered the function of Harry Potter fans as a public.

On the Darfur podcast, the HPA asks fans to post videos as part of 24 Hours for

Darfur, a project that sought to create a 24hourlong video composed of many

individual video testimonials of citizens expressing their support for ending the

genocide in Darfur. The HPA encouraged fans to "dress wizardly," sing, or rap (Harry

Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 6). Guest speaker Joe DeGeorge from the band

Harry and the Potters says, "Have fun, express yourself, and post it at 24 Hours for

Darfur" (Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 6). As a publicly accessible Web

site, 24 Hours for Darfur offers another avenue for Harry Potter fans to pledge support

for intervention in the Darfur genocide and to ask other individuals to join them, thus

potentially influencing public opinion and government representatives. Additionally,

Andrew Slack, the Harry Potter Alliance executive director, asked fans on the podcast

to post photos on CNN.com's Harry Potter edition of IReporter. CNN's IReporter asked

Harry Potter fans to submit their photos and videos as IReporters and to "show their

love for all things Harry Potter" (Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 14).

However, Slack asked fans to show their Harry Potter love while also holding signs that

said "Save Darfur." CNN's IReport offered the chance for HPA members to insert their

arguments into the public sphere through traditional mass media messages that

circulate through the public sphere. While CNN's goal may have been to cover Harry

Potter fans, CNN's call opened up the opportunity for Harry Potter fans to ask CNN's

viewers to "save Darfur."

[5.4] By asking fans to post videos and photos, write to their elected officials, and

sign petitions, the HPA invites Harry Potter fans to function as a public by inserting

arguments into the public sphere. But how does the HPA help fans come to see

themselves as public subjects, capable of inserting arguments into the public sphere?

How are fans invited to see themselves as public subjects capable of public

engagement and obligated to take action? In the next section, I argue that the Harry

Potter Alliance invites public engagement through the use of a public engagement

keystone.

6. Emerging as a public through the use of a public engagement

keystone

[6.1] For the HPA, the Harry Potter story operates as a public engagement keystone,

opening up possibilities for fans to see themselves not only as fans, but also as public

subjects. It is through the deployment of a public engagement keystone that the HPA

is able to transform the Harry Potter Alliance members into an emerging public. The

HPA draws on Harry Potter as a public engagement keystone by first orienting the

Harry Potter fan to Darfur activism, then using the Harry Potter story as a lens, and

next pushing fans to take action because of intense identification.

[6.2] In its podcast, the HPA invites Harry Potter fans to view the world in terms of

Harry Potter equivalents or parallels. These parallels orient Harry Potter fans. Andrew

Slack, HPA executive director, explains that the HPA seeks to fight "the Dark Arts in

the real world by using Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore as role models" (Harry

Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 1). Here, Slack invites Harry Potter fans to follow

the examples of Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore, acting as Harry and Dumbledore

might if they were here in the real world. The characters of Harry Potter and Albus

Dumbledore become comparisons, touchstones, or anchors for Harry Potter fans. Since

news coverage of the Darfur genocide was somewhat sparse at the time of the

podcast, the revelation that genocide was occurring could easily have been jarring.

With so much new information and such a large, distant, and amorphous problem, it

can often be difficult for citizens to determine where to start. Slack addresses this

problem by using Harry and Dumbledore as anchors to provide a familiar starting point

for Harry Potter fans. From there, HPA members can better grasp the problem and

consider what actions to take. As anchors, characters like Dumbledore and Harry help

fans orient themselves to other people and situations.

[6.3] These figures orient fans to the problem by offering an anchored starting place,

but also provide a lens through which to view the problem. The HPA deploys the Harry

Potter story as a public engagement keystone, which functions to make the problem of

genocide intelligible to Harry Potter fans. At the beginning of the podcast, Andrew

Slack says, "And what better way to send Harry off in his journey to destroy each

Horcrux than in joining him in our global fight to destroy the Horcrux that is genocide

once and for all, for the people of Darfur, and for the memories of all those who have

been affected by genocide" (Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 1). Here, Slack

reframes genocide as a Horcrux. By viewing the Darfur genocide through the lens of

Harry Potter, it becomes clear that, like Horcruxes, the Darfur genocide is one of the

biggest problems in the world, a problem that demands immediate action.

[6.4] The Harry Potter public engagement keystone makes not only the problem

intelligible, but also the solution. Near the end of the podcast, Slack says, "When we,

like Harry was in Dumbledore's office at the end of The Order of the Phoenix, get tired

of being human, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are right there in the Gryffindor common

room inside of us. Playing Wizard Chess, conspiring, laughing, and ready to take on

the Dark Arts whatever it takes. Let's join them in that fight together, with our

greatest weapon, love" (Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 15). Here, Slack

articulates action as the solution, rejecting apathy. Slack responds to concerns that

Harry Potter fans may feel as if the problem is too large, that they cannot make a

difference, that the problem is so overwhelming it is better to ignore it. Through the

Harry Potter public engagement keystone, Slack invites fans to respond to the

overwhelming problem of genocide in the same way that Harry, Ron, and Hermione

responded to the Dark Arts. While fans may not have cared much about the problem

of Darfur before listening to the podcast, Slack asks fans to view themselves as Harry,

Ron, and Hermione, who took action even when it was hard, even when they were

tired, even when it was dangerous. Through this lens, the solution to the problem of

the Darfur genocide is to take action, rather than wait for others to step in. By serving

as a lens through which to view public issues (both problems and potential solutions),

the Harry Potter story serves as a public engagement keystone in the HPA's podcast

rhetoric.

[6.5] The intense identification with the Harry Potter text and its characters grounds

Harry Potter fans and pushes them not only to recognize what actions to take, but also

to take those actions. When Slack asks fans to see themselves as Harry, Ron, and

Hermione, he draws upon an intense identification fans have with the Harry Potter

characters and a strong desire to be like those characters in particular ways. For HPA

members, it is desirable to follow in Hermione, Ron, and Harry's footsteps. At the

same time, it is problematic to be aligned with Lord Voldemort and his Horcruxes. HPA

members come to the podcast with a strong judgment that Lord Voldemort is bad.

When HPA staff align the genocide and Lord Voldemort, HPA members are faced with a

choice of choosing not to participate in public engagement actions against genocide

and thus be like Lord Voldemort, or to participate in public engagement and thus work

against evils like Lord Voldemort. This intense identification with the Harry Potter

public engagement keystone pushes fans to engage the public.

[6.6] The HPA deploys the Harry Potter story as a public engagement keystone,

using Harry Potter as a starting point, a lens, and a source of intense identification to

make public engagement intelligible and immediate to Harry Potter fans. So far, I have

demonstrated how these functions of a public engagement keystone apply specifically

to the case of the Darfur campaign. However, the HPA also deploys Harry Potter as a

public engagement keystone in its broader mission. As a social justice organization,

the HPA advances a particular ethic, or right way to act. I argue first that the HPA

develops an ethic of discursive engagement through the use of a public engagement

keystone. Next, I argue that this ethic is inherently political and public. If we

conceptualize public engagement as deliberation, discussion, and talk with other

people, the HPA's ethic is inextricably bound to ethics of public engagement. The HPA

ultimately calls on its members to engage in citizenship through discourse and talk,

achieved through translating Harry's duels with enemies into discursive engagement

with citizens. Such an ethic places the HPA's actions firmly in the public sphere.

7. An ethic of discursive engagement

[7.1] The HPA constructs an ethic of speaking out through the use of the HPA public

engagement keystone, one that takes discursive engagement as its central theme. The

HPA calls itself a Dumbledore's Army for the real world. In the Harry Potter books,

Harry forms a student group called the Defense Association when Professor Umbridge

forbids students from learning defensive magic. When Umbridge finds out about the

secret group, she uses it as an excuse to remove Dumbledore from his position as

headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Dumbledore had been

speaking out against the Ministry of Magic, the government in the wizarding world.

The Ministry of Magic had been reassuring the citizens that Lord Voldemort, a powerful

and evil wizard, had not been regaining strength. Dumbledore was attempting to

convince the public that Lord Voldemort had returned. Dumbledore was correct and

Voldemort had indeed returned, but the Ministry refused to admit they failed to keep

Voldemort at bay. The Ministry removed Dumbledore from his post at Hogwarts to

silence his embarrassing accusations. Harry, Ron, and Hermione took responsibility for

picking up where Dumbledore left off and transformed their Defense Association into

Dumbledore's Army. As members of Dumbledore's Army, these students trained

themselves in defensive magic in preparation for Voldemort's return, and they

continued to work to wake up the ministry and the public to the truth of Voldemort's

rise to power.

[7.2] In the podcast, the HPA explains that "we're gonna be talking about ways today

that we can be like Dumbledore's Army, who woke the world up to Voldemort's return,

and wake our ministries, our businesses, and our world to ending the genocide in

Darfur" (Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 1). The HPA takes "waking up the

world" as its mission. This is at its core a discursive mission, one defined through

communication and awareness, rather than fundraising goals or policy changes. The

HPA explains they are "dedicated to spreading our love and fighting the Dark Arts in

the real world" (Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 1). Here it becomes clear

that discourse that wakes up the world is needed to fight the Dark Arts in the real

world: social injustice. The HPA recasts Harry's violent fights and wizarding duels as

discourse. Speaking out is what it takes to carry on the mission of Albus Dumbledore

and Harry Potter.

[7.3] The HPA's ethic of speaking out rejects apathy disguised as neutrality. Silence

is compliance with the corrupt Ministry of Magic and Lord Voldemort's supporters. An

ethic of speaking up requires regular performances, takes work, and is an

accomplishment. Slack draws attention to Harry's choice to locate and destroy each

Horcrux and explains that Harry recognized that the right path was the hard path.

Slack says, "And in these dark and difficult times, where choices between what is right

and what is easy continue to emerge, we have the opportunity to let our light shine"

(Harry Potter Alliance and PotterCast 2007, 14). Slack frames the public engagement

of Harry Potter fans as neither automatic nor easy. Rather, performing the ethic of

speaking out through public engagement is most important in the most difficult times.

The HPA constructs an ethic of discursive engagement through the Harry Potter

fandom public engagement keystone.

8. Conclusion: Theorizing many kinds of citizenship

[8.1] I link multiple perspectives on how publics emerge through my advancement of

a theoretical conceptualization of the public engagement keystone. I argue that the

public engagement keystone offers an orientation to individuals, which makes

consequences, problems, and people intelligible, and offers an anchor, which provides

a reason or justification for action. By linking Dewey's grounding, Dahlgren's

anchoring, and McAdam's strong ties, the public engagement keystone better accounts

for a variety of public engagement activities in a variety of contexts. Importantly, it

allows fandom scholars to place civic engagement done in the name of Harry Potter

next to civic engagement done in the name of loyalty to a political party. This will, I

hope, allow fandom scholars to better enter the conversation on public engagement,

providing us with a more sophisticated vocabulary that translates between 1960s civil

rights action and 2007 Harry Potter campaigns.

[8.2] A more expansive conceptualization of a public engagement keystone might

open up other cases in which people have found reasons to participate in public

engagement beyond political party membership or social movement involvement. If

we search for other public engagement keystones in media texts, lived experiences,

and beyond, we might find innovative public engagement. This becomes an important

task for public sphere and fandom scholars in an era when civic engagement is often

said to be declining (Coleman and Blumler 2009; Benkler 2006; Bennett 2008).

Perhaps fandom activism as public engagement done in the name of a media text does

not operate as far beyond the conventions of traditional public engagement as some

like to think.

9. Acknowledgments

[9.1] I thank Jonathan Gray, Kyra Hunting, Rob Asen, Rob Howard, and Anne

Szczubelek for their valuable insights. Research was approved by the University of

Wisconsin–Madison's institutional review board.

10. Notes

1. It is important to note that giving up one's morning Starbucks coffee was the

primary example offered by STAND and the HPA of the kind of luxury individuals could

give up. Both STAND and the HPA operate on the assumption that many of their

members have such luxuries to give up, restricting participation in the campaign to

middle and upperclass individuals with disposable income.

2. All page numbers cited for the HPA podcast refer to page numbers in the printed

transcript. The transcript had a total of 16 pages.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Theory

The German federal election of 2009: The challenge of participatory cultures in political campaigns

Andreas Jungherr

University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany

[0.1] Abstract— Increasingly, political actors have to act in online communication environments. There they meet overlapping networked publics with different levels of participatory cultures and varying expectations of participation in the (re)making and coproduction of political content. This challenges political actors used to a topdown approach to communication. Meanwhile, online users are increasingly politically involved as legislatures all over the world become more active in regulating communication environments online. These new political actors often share participatory practices and have high levels of new media skills. Now they are challenged to adapt these bottomup participatory cultures to the traditional political environment. This paper examines these adaption processes by examining three examples from the campaign for the German federal election of 2009. These examples include the attempt of Germany's conservative party (CDU) to encourage their supporters to adapt participatory practices, the German Social Democrats' (SPD) topdown production and distribution of online content that mimicked the look and feel of usergenerated content, and the bottomup emergence of political flash mobs.

[0.2] Keywords— Angela Merkel; Flash mob; Germany; Networked publics; Online campaigning; Participatory culture; Politics;

Remix; Transformative work

Jungherr, Andreas. 2012. "The German Federal Election of 2009: The Challenge of Participatory Cultures in Political In

"Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0310.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Increasingly, traditional political actors have to adapt to new communication environments on the Internet, and the evergrowing popularity of Web 2.0 services forces politicians to rethink their traditional topdown communication approach (Lilleker and Jackson 2010). The wellpublicized online activities of Barack Obama's presidential campaign of 2007 and 2008 served as an international reference point, after which no major international campaign could afford not to be present on Web 2.0 services (i.e., social networking sites, online video sharing sites, or microblogging services). On these social media channels, politicians did not meet a passive audience eager to receive political messages on one more communication channel. Instead, they met with networked publics, recipients demanding the possibility of active participation. "Now publics are communicating more and more through complex networks that are bottomup, topdown, as well as sidetoside. Publics can be reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception" (Ito 2008, 2f.).

[1.2] Often these networked publics share participatory practices and skills that enable them to adapt original communication objects (for example, images of politicians, audio files of speeches, or campaign videos) and create transformative works that build on existing works but add another layer of meaning to the object (for example, for satirical purposes). These practices and skills can be collected under the term participatory cultures. Analytically, these phenomena have been addressed in three different literatures: the technological and business literature on the development and use of Web 2.0, the legal literature on the creation and licensing of transformative works, and the culture studies literature on the constitution of the participatory cultures producing these objects.

[1.3] This (re)making or coproduction of political communication objects provides a challenge for political campaigns. On the one hand, campaigns have to engage networked publics so that their members choose to participate through the (re)making or coproduction of political communication objects. Failing this, the campaign will seem out of touch with online culture and fail to authentically communicate on the Internet. On the other hand, campaigns have to find moderate approaches to dealing with the often satirical communication objects produced by supporters and critics that more often than not seem to come straight from negative campaigning handbooks.

[1.4] It's not only traditional political actors who have to adapt, but also members of networked publics who have to learn how to deal with the sudden presence of politicians and campaign operatives in their communication environments. It is far from clear how participatory cultures manifest themselves in political contexts. The ironic nature of most political remixes and the often ephemeral nature of ad hoc political participation through online channels prove to be a challenge for the sustained political engagement of participatory cultures (Coleman and Blumler 2009, 137f.).

[1.5] Traditional political actors react differently to the challenges of these new communication environments. Some encourage their offline supporters to become increasingly vocal online and engage with and learn from online publics (section 4). Some adopt the look and feel of online objects in official campaign material in an attempt to appeal to online publics (section 5). The case studies selected for this paper will show that these approaches do not necessarily result in stronger political engagement by online

publics and even risk alienating them. In Germany, the growing presence of political actors in online environments also led to a politicization of the—up until then—apolitical publics. Section 6 illustrates their challenge to move beyond the original Internetenabled ad hoc participation to a sustainable contribution to the political process.

[1.6] The first two cases show that it is not enough for traditional political actors to mimic participation practices online to mobilize support by online publics; political actors have to learn from participatory practices of online publics and help their supporters to adopt them. The final case also shows that online publics have to do more than just stage original ad hoc spectacles to sustainably participate in the political process. This paper argues that both traditional political actors and politicized online publics have to seriously engage with the participatory practices of their new environments, instead of simply mimicking or ridiculing them. For traditional political actors, these are online communication spaces. For online publics, this is the traditional political process.

2. Participatory culture and transformative works

[2.1] The term participatory culture was originally developed in culture studies to offer an alternative to the concept of the largely passive media consumer (Jenkins 2006, 1). The concept emphasized cultural settings in which avid users of popular culture (i.e., TV series, films, or books) started to create transformative works (e.g., remixes of images or audio files) or narratives that build on elements of popular culture (e.g., fan fiction). Legal studies defined these objects as usergenerated content that coproduces or (re)makes transformative works by adding a new layer of meaning to an object. (For a more extensive discussion, see Tushnet 2008.) These practices have led to an uneasy relationship between producers of original popular culture and that part of their fan community eager to engage with their work on an active and creative basis, namely, through the creation of objects and narratives based on elements of these original works (Jenkins 1992; Jenkins 2008a). Jenkins and colleagues defined participatory culture as "a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another" (Jenkins 2009, 1).

[2.2] This definition contains two important elements of participatory culture. On the one hand, we have the necessity of a fairly permissive approach by copyright holders and creators of original material (i.e., products of popular culture or objects of political communication) toward transformations of their work by fans or political activists. This point is made more explicit by Jenkins when he defines participatory culture as a "culture in which fans and other consumers are invited to actively participate in the creation and circulation of new content" (2008a, 331). On the other hand, the definition emphasizes necessary cultural skills in a community that enables participation, be it participation in popular culture or civic participation.

[2.3] Participatory cultures were thriving well before the Internet. Still, the Internet and its facilitation of the creation, remixing, and distribution of textual, audio, or video content through Web 2.0 services made participatory cultures and their output more prominent. The growing adoption of Web 2.0 services has led to a higher visibility for objects produced in the context of participatory cultures. Suddenly the technology is available to facilitate the easy coproduction and sharing of content with diverse networked publics. This function was already apparent in Tim O'Reilly's mission statement for Web 2.0, which he said would provide an "architecture of participation" (O'Reilly 2005). Web 2.0, which began as technology to revive fledgling online business models, became the technology readymade for participatory cultures. In the words of David Gauntlett, "the popularity of Web 2.0

is especially significant here, as easytouse online tools which enable people to learn about, and from, each other, and to collaborate and share resources, have made a real difference to what people do with, and can get from, their electronic media"

(2011, 13).

[2.4] It is not surprising then that forms of expression common for participatory cultures (i.e., remixes of audio, video, or image files) have become widely associated with Web 2.0 usage practices. This is why participatory cultures have become increasingly relevant in the discussion of political participation as politics moves onto Web 2.0 services, dominated by communication practices established by participatory cultures.

3. The Internet in the campaign for the parliamentary election in Germany of 2009

[3.1] To understand the significance of the election year 2009 it is important to understand Germany's political system. Germany is a federal republic consisting of 16 states. Elections on the state level strongly influence the process of policy making on the national level, since representatives of the state governments are involved in all national legislation that also concerns the states (Schmidt 2007, 196–208). State elections are also important since they are often read as indicators of the public's satisfaction with the work of the party governing on a national level (Decker 2006). The state elections directly preceding a general election receive a lot of attention as commentators try to predict the results of the general election based on the results of recent state elections.

[3.2] German general elections follow the voting principle of personalized proportional representation. All parties that are able to gather more than 5 percent of the vote send representatives to parliament. The exact number of these MPs is determined by a

complicated formula based on the percentage of votes a party could gather and the number of districts candidates of a party could win in direct competition (Schmidt 2007, 48ff.). This system leads to a situation in which parties with a simple majority of votes are still not able to form a government but depend on coalitions with one or two parties with smaller vote shares. In Germany this leads to a party system in which five political parties manage to regularly win enough votes in federal and state elections to send representatives to the respective parliaments. More importantly, the 5 percent limit is sufficiently low that new parties regularly form and attempt to gain enough votes to enter parliament. In Germany the dominating parties are the Christian Democrats (CDU), a conservative party that headed a coalition government from 2005 to 2009 under chancellor Angela Merkel; the Social Democrats (SPD), a centerleft party that from 2005 to 2009 was the junior partner in a governing coalition with the CDU under vicechancellor FrankWalter Steinmeier; the Liberals (FDP), a smaller party that runs largely on a platform of economic liberalism and lower taxes; the Green Party (Bündnis90/Die Grünen), a progressive party running largely on a platform of civil rights and ecological conservation; and the Left (Die Linke), a party running on a socialist platform.

[3.3] From 2005 to 2009, Germany was governed by a coalition of the Christian and the Social Democrats under the leadership of chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and vicechancellor FrankWalter Steinmeier (SPD). This construct, the coalition of the two parties with the highest vote share, is called a grand coalition and only arises if none of the big parties (CDU or SPD) is able to form a governing coalition with one of the smaller parties (FDP, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, or Die Linke). Historically, grand coalitions are very rare. In 2009 this led to an unfamiliar situation for the campaigners. Angela Merkel and FrankWalter Steinmeier were the heads of a successful coalition government while at same time they were directly competing against each other on the campaign trail. This put the SPD in a complicated position. On the one hand they had to argue in favor of a policy change through a change in government, but on the other hand they were not able to attack the work of the preceding government too harshly, since they were actively involved, if only as a junior partner, in the governing coalition. This situation led to a campaign that many commentators saw as lacking in drama and fire. The campaign of 2009 ended with heavy losses in vote share for both coalition partners (CDU and SPD) but offered the possibility for the CDU to form a coalition government with the Liberals (FDP) under the leadership of Angela Merkel without the participation of the SPD (for a more detailed discussion, see Saalfeld 2011).

[3.4] In late 2008 and early 2009 at least one group was not daunted by the expectations of an uneventful campaign. The advocates of online activism and online campaigning were riding high. The campaign for the 2009 general election was destined to have a strong online component—of this, pundits were certain (BITKOM 2009). The online success of Barack Obama's recent bid for the US presidency was fresh in the minds of German journalists and politicians. In late 2008 and early 2009, German campaigners and online cognoscenti focused on how the upcoming campaigns could use the Internet and learn from Obama (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2009; Reichart 2009).

[3.5] It wasn't only the media and campaigning professionals who were ready for an online campaign. By 2009 the Internet had been widely adopted in Germany. In 2009, the ARD/ZDF Online Study found that 64.7 percent of all Germans 14 years or older had used the Internet within the last 4 weeks. This was up from 56.7 percent in 2005, the year of the last general election (van Eimeren and Frees 2009, 335). This shows that the potential for political content reaching a wide audience online had risen. Also the Allensbacher Computer und TechnikAnalyse (ACTA) found that 55 percent of all Germans aged 14 to 64 years used the Internet to search for political news (Schneller 2009, 7). This shows that the Internet was an important news source for Germans during the campaigns in 2009. Still, when asking about the interest in actively participating through creating and posting content on the Web, Busemann and Gscheidle found that only 31 percent of all German Internet users 14 years or older were heavily or moderately interested (2009, 357). So, while in 2009 the Internet was used by a majority of Germans to gather information about news and politics, only a much smaller group was interested in actively producing content themselves.

[3.6] The political campaigns of 2009 were at least partially judged by the German media on how well a political party or candidate seemed to be doing online. One criterion of the online performance of a given party was the number of supporters a candidate or party could collect on various social networking sites. Another indicator was the online activities of the supporters of a given party or candidate (Fischer and Voß 2009). This proved a challenge for the big parties, CDU and SPD. German Internet usage statistics are heavily skewed in favor of young users, especially for the use of social networking sites and the willingness to use Web 2.0 services with participatory possibilities (van Eimeren and Frees 2009; Busemann and Gscheidle 2009). The challenge for the CDU and SPD was that the statistics on the age of their party members are also heavily skewed but in favor of older members. In 2009 the average age of members of the CDU and SPD was 58 (Niedermayer 2011, 20).

[3.7] One of the most intensively covered elements of the campaigns of 2009 was the emergence of the German Pirate Party.

The party had originally been founded in 2006 in the wake of the appearance of the Swedish Pirate Party. In the first years the party promoted similar topics as its international counterpart: modernization of copyright laws, leniency towards file sharers, stronger privacy laws, and—specific to the German context—stronger limits for data retention by the state (for the origins of the German Pirate Party, see Bartels 2009; Blumberg 2010). Until early 2009 their success was moderate; in February 2009 the party had 870 paying members. The summer of 2009 brought the party a massive increase in membership. From February 2009 to the end of 2009 the membership stats jumped from 870 to 11,400 (Shinta 2011). What happened?

[3.8] One important reason for the sudden increase in support for the Pirate Party lay in the strong opposition among online users to the socalled Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. In the spring of 2009 Ursula von der Leyen, minister for family, seniors,

women, and youth introduced a law to allow German authorities to block Web sites that offered child pornographic content. This initiative met with heavy resistance by German Internet users, who objected because of the perceived threat of a censorship infrastructure that in their view was introduced by the proposed law. The activists used online tools to organize their protest. Their activities clustered mainly around the term zensursula, a word combining the German word for censorship (Zensur) and the first name of the minister who originally proposed the law (Ursula). One of the focal points of the campaign against the proposed law was a popular online petition to the German Bundestag that asked to stop the law (for more details on the use of the German epetition platform, see Jungherr and Jürgens 2010). When even the highly publicized online petition did not stop the ratification of the law by the German governing parties—the Christian Democrats (CDU), and the Social Democrats (SPD)—the activists moved to a small political party supporting their position, the Pirate Party, which in turn experienced a massive membership increase and public attention.

[3.9] The contentious public discussion of the topic did for the German Pirate Party what the discussion of copyright legislation had done for the Swedish Pirate Party. Suddenly a new and highly interconnected group of citizens felt the need to get involved in politics and chose the Pirate Party as their conduit. These new members entered the political arena with high ideals, but, more importantly, they also brought cultural skills learned in years of heavy computer and Internet use. This led to a party structure different than the established parties and also to highly transparent discussion and deliberation practices. The Pirate Party

organized their campaign activities through a public wiki (http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/). In this wiki they documented the events of the campaign, organized public rallies, media reactions, and political positions. In addition to this tool they also used a public message board (http://forum.piratenpartei.de/) for the public discussion of issues as divergent as "funding, how to learn from

Obama" (forum.piratenpartei 2009a) and "how to use Google without feeding Google" (forum.piratenpartei 2010).

[3.10] This was the backdrop for the campaign of 2009, when the actions of three different sets of political actors illustrated the challenges and possibilities of participatory cultures for traditional political actors and activists.

4. CDU: The challenge of encouraging participation from the top down

[4.1] In early November 2009, Joe Rospars, while publicly reminiscing at the Personal Democracy Forum Europe in Barcelona on his experiences as New Media director for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, pithily summed up the problems of participation from the political operative's view: "The bottom up stuff needs to be enforced from the top down" (Campbell 2009).

If you replace the word enforced with the word encouraged you find a statement that seems to reflect the experiences of CDU

campaigners during the runup to the general election of 2009.

[4.2] As shown in section three, the CDU faced the challenge of encouraging their members to actively participate in political discussions or events online. The CDU tried actively encouraging supporters to remix selected official campaign materials, thus taking the role of the permissive producer of content, which is a vital element of participatory cultures. The material the CDU

operatives deemed the most promising basis for remixes was the official campaign song. This choice proved both optimistic and wrong.

[4.3] The campaign song is a timehonored tradition in German politics. While there is no accounting for taste, the Christian Democrats like their campaign songs custom made. These songs more often than not tend to be objects of ridicule for political opponents, but they are a common feature in CDU campaigns from the state level up to the federal. For the 2009 campaign, the CDU asked Leslie Mandoki, a successful German pop producer, to compose the campaign song (CDUTV 2009). The launch of the campaign song was heavily covered by the press (Steinbach 2009) and the German blogosphere. In the blogs the reactions proved to be mostly critical and usually came with a heavy dose of ridicule (Haeusler 2009a).

[4.4] The campaign published the song in different formats, invited their supporters to use a specifically prepared version of the song as the basis for remixes, and invited them to email these remixes to the campaign (teAM Deutschland 2009a). This invitation was for the most part ignored. Although a few CDU supporters produced usergenerated content during the campaign, specific remixes of the campaign song did not prove to be their object of choice. Was this because no CDU supporters were interested in participating in the online campaign? Another episode from the campaign proves this hypothesis wrong.

[4.5] Starting in July 2009, the CDU campaign started to contact its supporters on the campaign Web sites, social networking platforms, and newsletter, asking them to be part of "Germany's Biggest Supporter Poster" (teAM Deutschland 2009b).

Supporters were asked to send in profile pictures so they could be included in a massive collage of CDU supporters exhibited in Berlin during the last weeks of the campaign (teAM Deutschland 2009c). Roughly 4,500 supporters reacted to that invitation by uploading their portraits (teAM Deutschland 2009d). This campaign element turned out to be highly successful. This shows that CDU supporters were indeed using online tools to interact with the campaign and were even willing to lend their own faces to the campaign.

[4.6] These two examples illustrate the nature of the CDU online supporter community. On the one hand we have a highly successful call for participation that asked supporters to send in digital portraitpictures for inclusion in a campaign poster. This form of participation demands the conviction to offer their picture for a political advertisement, but it doesn't require strong new media skills such as the ability to edit videos, to alter images, or to remix audio tracks. The success of this campaign element

shows that during the campaign of 2009 there was a strong group of CDU supporters online who were willing to support the campaign. On the other hand we have the invitation by the campaign to remix their campaign song, which was largely neglected.

This would have been a form of participation that demanded a relatively high level of new media skills, especially in the form of video editing and audio remixing. Clearly these skills were in low supply among the CDU supporters who, only a few days before the remix call, had supported the campaign through uploading their portraits (for a more detailed discussion of the CDU social media campaign, see Jungherr 2012).

[4.7] This episode illustrates two aspects of participatory cultures in political contexts. Even if a political actor chooses to enable the (re)making and coproducing of political content, this does not automatically lead to active participation. This echoes recent articles that show that the mere possibility of participation does not necessary lead to widespread participatory practices (Carpentier 2009; Nielsen 2011). Online participation requires the encouragement of political actors and their permissive stand on the creation of transformative works based on their original materials, the motivation of networked publics to participate in the first place, and the presence of a new media skill set among their members that enables the (re)making and coproducing of content. If political actors want to encourage "the bottom up stuff...from the top down," to paraphrase Rospars again, they have to be very conscious of these factors.

5. SPD: The look and feel of participation

[5.1] Seventeen days before the German general election of 2009, a new campaigner entered the political arena. From September 10 onward, Charles Montgomery Burns, proud owner of the Springfield nuclear power plant and recurring character on the popular TV show The Simpsons, appeared on online campaign posters next to Angela Merkel. Instead of the official CDU

campaign slogan "Wir wählen die Kanzlerin" (We elect the chancellor), the slogan read "Wir wählen die Atomkraft" (We elect nuclear power) (Richel 2009a).

[5.2] This poster remix was an obvious riff on the Christian Democrat's stance on nuclear power, which was a point of contention during the campaign. While the CDU was supporting nuclear power as a bridge technology that would ensure the German energy supply until a time when regenerative energy sources would be able to replace it, the Social Democrats and the Green Party emphasized the necessity for Germany to abandon nuclear power at a fixed date in the near future. This question historically was one of the most emotionally discussed fault lines in German politics. After heavy antinuclear protests in Germany from the late 1970s through the 1990s and a relative lull during the coalition government of Social Democrats and the Green Party, the issue made a sudden reappearance in the last weeks of the campaign for the general election of 2009 (Lee 2009). Three days after a large demonstration of antinuclear protesters in Berlin, Montgomery Burns made an online appearance seemingly in support of the CDU's stance on nuclear energy.

[5.3] At first glance, one might take the Merkel/Burns remix as an example of "Photoshop for Democracy" as understood by Henry Jenkins (Jenkins 2004, 2008a, 2008b). Jenkins described the potential of reaching an apolitical generation with a mix of political images and pop culture references that would register with people otherwise uninterested in politics: "Citizens are taking media into their own hands, producing new works made up of fragments of political and popular culture. And people are circulating them well beyond their immediate circle of friends as a way to both share a good laugh and exchange thoughts about pressing issues" (Jenkins 2004).

[5.4] Jenkins emphasizes the role of participating citizens in the creation of remixes. This is where the Merkel/Burns remix clearly diverges. The Merkel/Burns remix appeared first on a Twitpic account. Twitpic is an online service that allows users to upload images, which then can easily linked to by the user's Twitter feeds. The owner of this specific account was Mathias Richel, who during the campaign of 2009 worked for the German advertising agency Butter. Butter was one of the agencies that worked for the campaign of the Social Democrats, the party directly in competition with the CDU and Angela Merkel. Richel himself worked from the party headquarters of the SPD in Berlin. Thus, the appearance of the Merkel/Burns remix was not the product of the lone "communications guerillo" imagined by Umberto Eco, "patrolling" the semiotic wastelands of German campaign communication (Eco 1967, 144). Instead, appearing on the personal account of a wellconnected campaign staffer, the Merkel/Burns remix was an attempt at political guerilla marketing. What at first seems like the subversion of the political process is thus simply a case of the mainstreaming of culture jamming by a traditional political actor imitating visual style and communication conventions. In doing this, the political actor either was trying to appeal to the taste of network publics or imply the creation of this communication object by participating activists. What looks like grassroots usergenerated content is in fact negative campaigning straight down from the top. This resembles trends in marketing: "Similarly, marketing and advertising, so responsive to each shifting tide in public behavior and whim, sniff out trends and mimic styles from the counterculture even as they seek to reign in [ sic] and channel these viral energies in ways that consolidate the corporate bottom line" (Russell et al.

2008, 71).

[5.5] In the words of Mark Dery, "the look and feel of culture jamming, at least, have been appropriated by the mainstream, tirelessly promoted...and hijacked by guerrilla advertisers to ambush unsuspecting consumers" (2010).

[5.6] The Merkel/Burns remix is an example of a traditional political actor trying to adapt to communication conventions of the new online environment by producing objects that mimic styles of participatory cultures. What appears to be the transformative

work of activists comes, in fact, right out of a campaign operative's playbook. The SPD's reference to the TV series The Simpsons might echo its politics "of comic criticism" (Gray 2006, 146), in which parody provides a check for political discourses and institutions (ibid., 150). Still, this was not the only pop culture reference in remix materials originating from the party headquarters. There were remixes featuring Darth Vader, a villain from the Star Wars franchise (Richel 2009b), and the '90s rapper Marky Mark (Roter September 2009). The association of Angela Merkel and Montgomery Burns did not represent a conscious association with The Simpsons' politics of criticism; rather, it seemed to have originated in something much simpler: the visual similarity of Angela Merkel's characteristic triangular hand position with that of Montgomery Burns. The Merkel/Burns remix hit a nerve and started to spread through the Germanspeaking Internet. The picture appeared on online message boards and blogs, it was distributed on Twitter, discussed in the media, and even found an offline incarnation in the town of Dortmund as a remix of a reallife CDU campaigning poster upon which the head of the CDU's leading candidate, Angela Merkel, was replaced by the head of the Simpsons character (PC Action 2009).

[5.7] A few days after posting the image, Mathias Richel started posting photographs of a printout of the original remix with buttons documenting the accumulated clicks the image received on his Twitpic account (Richel 2009c). The campaign was attempting to document a seemingly viral distribution phenomenon. To demonstrate the cultural awareness of the campaign, it was seemingly not enough to create communication objects in the style of countercultural objects, but the creators also attempted to create a mode of distribution commonly associated with successful usergenerated content. This conscious attempt to create buzz around objects produced by the campaign can also be seen in the reactions by campaign staffers to public critique of this approach. A post by Felix Schwenzel on his blog wirres.net led to a highly contentious discussion between him and Mathias Richel on the nature of legitimate viral distribution as opposed to staged viral distribution of campaign content (Schwenzel 2009). This reaction echoes concerns of fan communities who felt exploited when the grassroots marketing techniques of media companies adopted the look and feel of their practices (Pearson 2010; Scott 2009). This shows that political and corporate actors have to tread lightly and avoid the impression of simply manipulating online publics by pandering to their communication practices.

[5.8] In the preceding two sections we have seen two different attempts by political actors to react to the challenges of acting in communication environments associated with participatory cultures. The CDU tried to encourage its supporters to voice their support in forms common to participatory cultures but failed to lay the foundation of necessary cultural skills and participatory practices among its supporters. The SPD campaign chose a different approach. Professional campaigners, conscious of the success of political remixes during US campaigns, chose to adapt the format for the German context. With this approach, the SPD

campaign succeeded in creating an iconic image that was widely popular well beyond the campaign of 2009. But how did existing participatory cultures in Germany choose to participate during the campaign of 2009?

6. Yeaahh! Participation from the grassroots

[6.1] On the evening of September 18, 2009, nine days before the federal election, the chancellor and leading candidate for the Christian Democratic Union, Angela Merkel, stopped in Hamburg for a routine campaign event. At this point, the political parties in Germany were headed into the final stretch of an uneventful campaign. An audience of roughly 2,000 had turned up to hear Merkel speak. Among the usual crowd of supporters, interested passersby, and protesters was a small group of roughly 30 people.

Some of them were carrying signs on which the word "Yeaahh" was printed or handwritten. They also carried camcorders. These were not members of a political party or part of a specific group of activists. The reason they turned up was a comment to a blog post.

[6.2] A few days previously, the German Twittersphere had been abuzz with a picture posted on the photosharing site Flickr.

Flickr user spanier had posted a photograph of a CDU campaign poster advertising the event in Hamburg. On the poster someone had scribbled the words "Und Alle so: Yeaahh," which roughly translates as "And everyone goes: Yeaahh" (spanier 2009). Soon German bloggers were commenting on the picture and its parody of the campaign (Urban Art Blog 2009; Walter 2009). On his blog Spreeblick, Johnny Haeusler asked his readers (tongue firmly in cheek) to explain why the remix was funny to them. In the following days, over 250 commentators reacted (Haeusler 2009b). Some commenters saw the humor in the juxtaposition of the enthusiastic word "Yeaahh" with the unemotional and highly pragmatic public persona of Angela Merkel (saripari 2009; Andreas 2009). Others saw the humor in the juxtaposition of the word "Yeaahh" and the ritualized context of a campaign event (Martin 2009). Thus, the reactions on the blog indicate a mixture of motives. On the one hand, there is the personal opposition against Angela Merkel and the CDU, while on the other hand we find a critique of the language of campaigning. These reactions were soon to reach a much wider audience than the readers of Spreeblick. One of the commenters on the blog suggested starting a Yeaahh flash mob at the campaign event (Edgar 2009). The idea caught on and soon people had created a song (Haeusler 2009c), a printable sign (Weltregierung 2009), and the flash mob was on.

[6.3] On September 18, the flash mobbers were not prominently positioned. Between them and the stage stood a large group of Merkel supporters and antinuclear protesters who opposed the CDU's stance on nuclear energy. From the stage, the white Yeaahh signs disappeared among the orange signs of CDU supporters and the red and yellow antinuclear flags. Once Angela Merkel started her stump speech, the 30 people suddenly became active. After every one of Merkel's sentences they loudly shouted

"Yeaahh" and shook their signs; however, at the campaign event in Hamburg this had little influence.

[6.4] Only a few hours after the event, the first videos of the flash mobs appeared online (TerminatorX120 2009;

undallesoyeaahh 2009; HeyeDigitalLab 2009). Shortly after, one of these videos (TerminatorX120 2009) was picked up by the online news service Spiegel Online, one of the most widely read online news platforms in Germany (Reißmann 2009). Just one day after the video was embedded in the post on Spiegel Online, the video had been seen by over 200,000 Internet users, swiftly making the video into one of the most popular online objects of the campaign. The video was shot by a small camcorder positioned directly between the flash mobbers. Viewers of the video got the impression that the venue was full of flash mobbers and that their Yeaahhs had drowned out Angela Merkel's speech. From then on, the debate was not about what happened in Hamburg, but on the appearance of the event in the videos and the blogged recollections of some of the participants (Park 2009;

Plastikstuhl 2009; Haeusler 2009d). Only a few days later, Yeaahh flash mobs appeared at Merkel's campaign stops in the towns of Mainz and Wuppertal. Five days after the first Yeaahhs in Hamburg, one of the leading TV news programs featured this "entirely new form of political protest in Germany" (Tagesthemen 2009), and Germany's leading newspapers printed pieces on the Yeaahh flash mobs (König 2009; Bingener, Veser, and Wagner 2009). What had started as a gettogether of a small group of protesters in reaction to a photograph of a sarcastic scribble on a campaign poster had become a recurring phenomenon at CDU campaign events and a major news story.

[6.5] The participants in the flash mobs had various reasons. Some said they came to protest against Angela Merkel and the CDU, others said they had come because it was fun, others wanted to comment on offline politics through the use of "Internet humor" (Tagesthemen 2009). Common to most of these explanations was the claim that the meaningless word Yeaahh was the only possible reaction to a campaign dominated by sound bites free of real political discussion.

[6.6] From the start, the Yeaahh flash mobs were not affiliated with any political party. It was an idea that was clearly motivated out of protest against Angela Merkel; however, if one takes the rhetoric of the protesters seriously, the flash mobs were directed against her in her role as a leading German politician and not against her as the CDU's leading candidate. And although the opposing parties did their best to promote further flash mobs at CDU events, it seems the Yeaahh flash mobs were a phenomenon born outside of traditional party politics. In their coverage, the media connected the flash mobs to the Pirate Party. This might be reasonable, since the flash mobs clearly attracted supporters of the Pirate Party. This is hard to quantify, but discussions on the Pirate's message board dealing with the flash mobs showed strong support among supporters of the Pirate Party for the idea (forum.piratenpartei 2009b). Still, this support was not universal. Critical voices objected to a naive support of the Yeaahh flash mobs since this would endanger the Pirate Party's attempt to be seen as a serious actor in German politics (forum.piratenpartei 2009c).

[6.7] The story of the Yeaahh flash mobs resembles the Candlelight Protests in South Korea in early 2008, although on a much smaller scale. In the spring of 2008, South Korea saw massive protests with over a million participants. Large numbers of the protesters were teenagers, especially teenage girls. One of the sources of the protest was online forums dedicated to the boy group Dong Bang. Just as the Yeaahh flash mobs started in reaction to the discussions in the comment section of the blog Spreeblick, so the Candlelight Protests gained their initial momentum in the discussions among the Dong Bang fan community. In discussing the Candlelight Protests, Mimi Ito (2009) addresses this dynamic: "The lesson here is that you should never underestimate the power of peertopeer social communication and the bonding force of popular culture. Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and ultimately, to mobilize."

[6.8] The peertopeer communication among the readership of Spreeblick much more closely resembles the concept of participatory culture as defined by Jenkins and colleagues (2009, 5), than the party structures of CDU and SPD. There were low barriers to participation in expression and engagement, in this case attendance at one of Merkel's campaign stops and the hearty exclamation of the word "Yeaahh." The flash mobbers also supported each other in the distribution of videos and other objects—

printable Yeaahh signs (Weltregierung 2009), Tshirts (http://undalleso.spreadshirt.net/de/DE/Shop/Index/), songs (Haeusler

2009c), and blogposts documenting the various flashmobs (Park 2009; Plastikstuhl 2009; Haeusler 2009d). The microblogging service Twitter proved for this community not only an effective distribution channel for these objects but also an easy way to give and receive feedback.

[6.9] The flash mobbers chose irony as a form of political expression. They were voicing ironic support for a political stump speech they felt did not address issues but only contained hollow rhetoric. Their reception shows the dangers of irony in the political discourse. While the media were quick to report on the flash mobs and even declare them a new form of political activism (Tagesthemen 2009), nearly all reports ended with a critique of the seemingly simplistic and empty formula with which the flash mobbers were reacting to Merkel's speech (König 2009; Bingener, Veser, and Wagner 2009). The CDU's public reaction was probably more hurtful to the flash mobbers. While Angela Merkel started to greet them at the events as "her friends from the Internet" (Sittner 2009), the campaign started to link to Yeaahh videos from the official campaigning blog with the encouraging statement "great, that's what we think" (teAM Deutschland 2009e). For the final public event of the campaign, the CDU even printed Yeaahh posters in the campaign's design and handed them out to supporters. This appears to be a textbook example of Henry Jenkins' cautionary remarks on the use of irony in political discourse:

[6.10] These citizens have increasingly turned towards parody as a rhetorical practice which allows them to express their scepticism towards "politics as usual," to break out of the exclusionary language through which many discussions

of public policy are conducted, and to find a shared language of borrowed images that mobilize what they know as consumers to reflect on the political process. Such practices blur the lines between consumers and citizens, between the commercial and the amateur, and between education, activism and entertainment, as groups with competing and contradictory motives deploy parody to serve their own ends. (Jenkins 2008, 293)

[6.11] The flash mobs of 2009 clearly illustrate the potential of networked publics whose members share participatory cultures.

Add to that a skill set of online tools and a sudden igniting spark, and you get a creative reaction to "politics as usual." Still, there is always the danger that the spark remains just that. After the federal election, the Yeaahh flash mobs disappeared from the political scene as quickly as they had appeared. It remains to be seen if participatory cultures in Germany help activists organize political participation that goes beyond ad hoc protests around shortterm issues.

7. Participatory cultures in German politics

[7.1] During the campaign of 2009, political parties in Germany faced for the first time the challenge of adapting their topdown communication strategies to the new Web 2.0 environment. They had to find ways to engage with participatory practices widely associated with this communication environment. But not only traditional political actors had to learn. Newly politicized networked publics also faced the challenge of entering the political arena, starting with the public debate about the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz and a few months later during the campaign for the general election. Their examples illustrate the challenges of adapting topdown communication practices to an environment dominated by participatory cultures, as well as the challenge of channeling bottomup participatory practices into the traditional political process.

[7.2] Traditional political actors tried to adapt by either encouraging their supporters to participate through the (re)making and coproduction of campaign materials or by providing content themselves that mimicked the look and feel of usergenerated content. New political actors entered the public sphere because of their ability to spontaneously organize around seemingly marginal topics and manifest their protest in original ways offline. The success of these approaches was mixed at best. This shows that if traditional political actors are serious in encouraging more citizen participation online, they have to move beyond merely imitating or paying lip service to participatory practices online. Instead, they have to adapt to the participatory practices of successful online publics while remaining aware of the cultural skills and communication practices of their supporters. It is necessary to ensure the campaign can interact adequately with its supporters. Sudden calls for participation will probably go unheeded if political actors do not invest the time and resources to establish participatory cultures among their supporters well before a campaign.

[7.3] The Yeaahh flash mobs illustrate the promise and limits of participatory cultures engaging with the traditional political process. The flash mobbers were able to quickly organize and mobilize a large, disparate group of people through the shared use of online tools and shared participatory practices. The flash mobs quickly gained public attention and were widely commented on by the established media. But this attention came at the price of heavy critique of their rhetoric and their incoherent message.

Consequently, the Yeaahh flash mobs dropped from view once Election Day had passed. This case shows that it is not enough for online publics to gain shortterm public and media attention for their causes. If they want to influence politics in the long run, they have to adapt to the traditional forms of political participation and take them seriously.

[7.4] The German campaigns of 2009 proved to be laboratories of convergence. Traditional political actors tried different approaches to act in a new communication environment while nontraditional actors tried to adapt to the political arena. Like any learning process, this process is ongoing. Time will tell if and how these actors continue this process.

8. Acknowledgments

[8.1] I want to thank Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Harald Schoen, and Darren Lilleker, who commented on earlier versions of this paper. Their questions, comments, and advice helped me to develop the article to its present form.

[8.2] During the campaign for the state elections in Hessen, January 2009, the author worked for the CDU online campaign webcamp09 in Wiesbaden. During the campaign for Germany's general election in September 2009 the author worked for the CDU

online campaign in the party headquarters in Berlin.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Theory

Wonder Woman for a day: Affect, agency, and Amazons

Matt Yockey

University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, United States

[0.1] Abstract— In this paper, I consider the ways in which the feminist utopian

ethos of Wonder Woman, as defined by her creator, William Marston, has been used

to actualize reallife social change. Specifically, I examine fan Andy Mangels's

creation of Wonder Woman Day, a charity event held annually at a Portland,

Oregon, comic book store to raise funds for local domestic violence programs. I look

at how an affective bond with Wonder Woman informs and guides an affective

attachment to one's local and national communities, actualizing the utopian promise

of self, commodity icon, and America. These utopian iterations are primarily defined

by a celebration of pluralism, and thus Wonder Woman is used to validate the

inherent pluralism of the self in relation to society, an empowering strategy for all

consumercitizens.

[0.2] Keywords— Consumerism; Feminism; Nostalgia; Utopia

Yockey, Matt. "Wonder Woman for a Day: Affect, Agency, and Amazons." In

"Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita

Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0318.

1. Introduction

[1.1] From 2006 to 2010, Excalibur Comics in Portland, Oregon, hosted Wonder

Woman Day, an annual charity event that, in its five years, raised over $100,000 for

local nonprofit organizations serving victims of domestic violence. Conceived and

organized by Portlandbased writer Andy Mangels, Wonder Woman Day confirms the

utility of mass culture and of the arena of public consumption for civic engagement.

Most importantly, Wonder Woman Day is an ideal vehicle by which fans participate in

the circulation of affect as a form of capital, collapsing the boundaries of citizen and

consumer. Wonder Woman's ethos of "loving submission" symbolically embodies the

conflation of affect and agency determined by participation in a collective utopian

fantasy. Wonder Woman Day allows fans to recirculate this affective agency,

confirming what Sara Ahmed calls the "very public nature of emotions" and "the

emotive nature of publics" (2004, 14). Wonder Woman Day indicates that emotion

gains in both emotive and commodity power the more it is circulated; thus this

charitable event mirrors the affective power of mass culture texts beloved by fans.

Central to this circulation is the figure of Wonder Woman as a conduit for compassion

that critiques hegemony. Fans' compassion for domestic violence victims informs a

utopian desire to change social norms that is authorized by Wonder Woman. Affect is

thus a guiding agent in the process of moral regeneration, symbolically linking fans to

a comparable impulse felt by superheroes. That fans do this through the figure of

Wonder Woman, the ideal utopian female superhero, realizes Lauren Berlant's

observation that "to feel compassion…is at best to take the first step toward forging a

personal relation to a politics of the practice of equality" (2004, 9). Further, Wonder

Woman Day confirms Spinoza's assertion (2000, 164) that emotions circulate between

bodies and determine what those bodies are capable of. Importantly, then, Wonder

Woman Day bonds the consumercitizen to absent, yet present bodies: those of

domestic violence victims and that of Wonder Woman. In doing so, it sustains an

affective circuit of reciprocal meaning among all three, cementing the link between

public and private, affect and agency.

[1.2] Wonder Woman was the creation of Dr. William Moulton Marston, a Harvardeducated psychiatrist who, under the pen name Charles Moulton, conceived of a female superhero who, in his words, was

[1.3] psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I

believe, rule the world. There isn't love enough in the male organism to run

this planet peacefully. Woman's body contains twice as many love

generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male. What woman

lacks is the dominance or self assertive power to put over and enforce her

love desires. I have given Wonder Woman this dominant force but have kept

her loving, tender, maternal and feminine in every other way. (Daniels 2000,

22–23)

[1.4] Debuting in All Star Comics no. 8 (cover dated Dec. 1941–Jan. 1942), Wonder

Woman was unique among the nascent army of superheroes in that she was conceived

in these expressly politically utopian terms. Like most superheroes of this period, she

was recruited for the war effort, and her gendered utopian vision was instantly

conflated with a comparable utopian mission for America. While in her first appearance

America is described as "the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women,"

this is clearly a utopian ideal that the nation falls short of fulfilling. This failure is

confirmed by the very presence of a Wonder Woman: her essential difference from

nonsuperheroic American women is a reminder of the need for not simply gender

parity but, according to Marston, female hegemony. In a November 11, 1937, article

in the New York Times, Marston said that "the next one hundred years will see the

beginning of an American matriarchy—a nation of Amazons in the psychological rather

than physical sense" (Daniels 2000, 19). Yet his own utopian vision is frequently

betrayed by the politics of the time and the conservative nature of World War II mass

culture. For example, the cover of Wonder Woman no. 7 (winter 1943) (figure 1)

features the words "For President" below the masthead and shows Wonder Woman

stumping on the campaign trail, accompanied by the text "Wonder Woman 1000 Years

in the Future!" If the readers of Wonder Woman were allowed to imagine Marston's

matriarchal utopia, it was a dream circulated through the familiar mechanisms of

democratic politics (conflating essential American institutions with this feminist

fantasy) and safely deferred to a distant future rendered as mythic as Wonder

Woman's Amazonian past.

Figure 1. Wonder Woman campaigns for a utopian dream.[View larger image.]

[1.5] Importantly, the cover image of Wonder Woman as a presidential candidate

features both men and women in the cheering crowd, confirming Marston's insistence

that his vision of a matriarchal society is aimed at both male and female readers. So is

the governing conceit that Wonder Woman exports from Paradise Island and that

informs Marston's utopian vision. As Wonder Woman's mother, Queen Hyppolyta,

explains in Wonder Woman no. 29 (March–April 1948), "The only real happiness for

anybody is to be found in obedience to loving authority." Submission to a loving

matriarch provides the affective structure to Marston's articulation of what he termed

"women's values," which he wished to mobilize against patriarchal power. This defining

political platform has been vital to an understanding of Wonder Woman in the decades

following Marston's tenure as her writer (he died in 1947). While many writers for DC

Comics have drifted far afield from Marston's conception of the character (typically

reducing her to standard male superhero fisticuffs or, in one glaring instance,

removing her power altogether), others have recognized her primary appeal as a

progressive figure. George Perez, a selfdescribed feminist who wrote Wonder Woman

from 1987 to 1992, has said that he primarily considered her "a peace character"

(Daniels 2000, 169). As Marc Edward DiPaolo notes, "cultural critics…have asserted

that Wonder Woman should ideally promote peace over war, feminism over

conservatism, and multiculturalism over American Imperialism" (2007, 152). As

Mangels puts it, "When I look at Wonder Woman…I'm seeing a woman that's powerful,

a woman with a sense of truth and grace to her. Her message was always about

accepting everybody as equals and about making the world a better place" ("World of

Wonder").

2. Wonder Woman and me: The bond(age) of affect

[2.1] One of the most significant, and controversial, aspects of Marston's Wonder

Woman stories was their emphasis on physical bondage as a trope of the social

submission he advocated. Wonder Woman is rendered powerless when tied up or

chained by a man (much as she once lost her powers at the hands of a male writer).

Wonder Woman is defined by her voluntary submission to the will of her mother and,

in order for her utopian social vision to be realized, requires the willing submission of

the masses. Significantly, Wonder Woman must also submit to the will of the state, an

act she performs through the power of affect. That is, she wholly gives herself over to

America's fight for freedom against the Axis in her origin story in large part because

she falls in love with Steve Trevor. Marston removes the threat that this defining

action might have on Wonder Woman's feminist agency by rendering Trevor

essentially impotent. Wonder Woman is never compromised by her love of Trevor, only

motivated by it, and it never supersedes her pursuit of freedom and equality for all.

[2.2] Wonder Woman's performance of submission is a model for readers, as it

reconciles the essential tension of American identity between the individualism

celebrated in American culture and the submission to authority required by the state.

Further, fans perform this reconciliation in the process of consuming Wonder Woman

texts, as well as participating in Wonder Woman Day, for these activities require the

consumercitizen both to submit to the machinations of mass culture and to engage in

the public sphere by advocating social change. The affect that defines this participation

allows consumercitizens to confirm their individual subjectivity and retain a sense of

agency within these structures. Importantly, comic book writerartist Phil Jimenez,

who worked on Wonder Woman from 2000 to 2003, modeled this response himself

during his tenure on the title. Jimenez confesses that his lifelong attraction to strong

female superheroes was largely based on his gay identity: "My favorite characters

were almost always women…[such as] Wonder Woman…I believe it's because these

women were strong, powerful characters and the objects of desire of men. As a gay

teen, that's what I wanted to be" (Kim 2002, 66). Jimenez translated his affective

fandom into an affective assertion of his own identity once he was a professional in the

comic book industry: "I came out in the back of a comic I wrote and drew as a tribute

to my first boyfriend, the man who hired me at DC Comics, Neal Pozner. I got the

most incredible response—literally hundreds of pieces of mail from gay readers."

[2.3] This illustrates how fans' utopian desires directly inform their attraction to

certain characters and confirms that both Wonder Woman's gender and her

antipatriarchal origins make her available for these perpetual progressive readings.

According to Cornel Sandvoss, "As fantasies are a simultaneous form of externalization

of internal desires and internalization of external texts and images, there is no simple

starting or end point of fantasies in a primal scene or in external objects, or in the

fan's self" (2005, 79). Since fantasy is produced at the nexus of text and reader, it is

not surprising that Mangels turned to Wonder Woman as a means of addressing the

issue of domestic violence. Importantly, in doing so, Mangels attempted to duplicate

Marston's addressing of both males and females regarding the transcendent power of

matriarchal authority. The underlying nostalgia that informs Mangels's use of this

character further conflates mass culture with individual subjectivity and experience, for

Mangels is inspired not only by Marston's original vision for Wonder Woman but by his

own affective childhood memories. In explaining why he decided to launch Wonder

Woman Day, Mangels says, "I loved and identified with Wonder Woman since I was a

child, both in the comics and the TV show. And I had a strong mother figure who

enabled me to be very cognizant of the power of what women could be. I was born in

1966, so this was during the Equal Rights Amendment. This also relates to my gay

identity. Wonder Woman represents love and equality for everyone" (pers. comm.). He

goes on to note that he chose to use Wonder Woman to promote domestic violence

awareness because it is an issue that "affects everyone, but especially women,

children, and the disenfranchised," which, he says, allowed him to address the same

kinds of social issues that Wonder Woman contends with. He wanted to raise money

for domestic violence programs that provide services for both genders, in addition to

shelters serving only women, again aligning himself with Marston's utopian vision of

gender inclusiveness.

[2.4] Mangels's narrative of his own affective fan and family histories partially

mirrors the background of Wonder Woman (who was also strongly influenced by her

mother) and explicitly places them within a national historical context of progressive

politics. That the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified only confirms the

ongoing need to promote a combination of progressive feminist politics and Marston's

vision of matriarchal authority for all. Thus Mangels's own utopian expression of

Wonder Woman sees all of us, regardless of gender, race, class, and sexuality, as

potential Amazons. Yet, while Mangels's utopian project for Wonder Woman Day is

genderinclusive, like the comic books, he cannot escape the gender politics of the

everyday. So the broad perception of domestic violence, in line with Marston's

conception of Wonder Woman, is that men are the problem. Like Marston, Mangels

positions himself as an antinormative, masculine authorizing agent, mitigating the

implicit critique of masculinity but still locating social problems primarily within the

domain of patriarchy. Mangels also draws parallels between himself and Marston,

noting that, like Marston, he lives a nonheteronormative lifestyles (Marston was in a

polygamous relationship through most of his adult life). Through the mass culture

fantasy text of Wonder Woman, nonnormative subjectivities of consumer and producer

are conflated, suggesting that such synthesis is an ideal strategy for social change.

[2.5] Like Marston's, Mangels's utopian vision of American society can accommodate

(and, in fact, requires the accommodation of) lifestyles outside of the heteronormative

standard, and such lifestyles are authorized through loving submission to matriarchal

authority. This is implicit in Mangels's reflections on his personal background and his

attraction to Wonder Woman (performing a kind of submission to the authority of the

matriarchal commodity icon). Significantly, his utopian social vision as mediated

through Wonder Woman is reinforced by sentiments shared by primary contributors to

the metatext, further aligning consumer and producer affect. Lynda Carter has said of

the character she played on television, "She was never against men, she was just for

women." Commenting on the fact that Wonder Woman was never portrayed as a

victim, she observes, "I think that's part of the empowerment, and it's also the secret

self, the archetype that appeals to gay and lesbian men and women, that there's a

secret self that is waiting to be unveiled, that is powerful and won't ever be a victim…

I'm such a champion of civil liberties for the gay and lesbian population, like I am for

women and being able to choose…Anything that is trying to take away personal

freedom is not a very good thing. It's not what the nation is about" (Carter 2009).

Tellingly duplicating the condensation of character and actor so often performed by

fans, Carter aligns her own political subjectivity with the Wonder Woman ethos,

affirming a sense of self and national identity through the blurring of boundaries

between fantasy and reality as mediated by the mass culture text. Mangels confirms

Carter's observations regarding gay fans and Wonder Woman in an interview with

comic book writerartist and historian Trina Robbins: "The concept of a secret identity

is significant to the appeal of super heroes to gay readers…It hides from the world the

best attributes of the characters, the thing that makes them different from the norm,

but also better" (Robbins 2008, 89). Robbins concludes that Wonder Woman is

threatening to heterosexual men for the same reasons she is attractive to gay men:

not only is she physically powerful, but she also chooses to use her powers in

nonviolent ways. Thus Wonder Woman herself literally and figuratively contains the

aggression of patriarchal authority, embodying the utopian ideal that gay fans such as

Mangels so strongly identify with. By extension, she also reveals the "secret identity"

of America itself: the progressive, utopian possibilities hidden in its very origins.

[2.6] Mangels notes that his Mormon upbringing taught him that "if you take care of

your community, it will take care of you" (pers. comm.), yet he turns to mass culture,

not the church, to actualize this ethos. Implicit in this turn is the Mormon Church's

stand against homosexuality, indicating that the ideal way by which Mangels could

reconcile his Mormon principles regarding the community and his sexuality is to turn to

Wonder Woman as a socially progressive ideal. This underscores the most radical

aspect of Marston's conception of Wonder Woman, for if, as DiPaolo notes, "Wonder

Woman fights for America because America fights for women's rights around the

world" (2007, 155), then one is compelled to admit that the nation has failed to

achieve this goal and that patriarchy has to be replaced with matriarchy in order to

achieve it. At her essence, then, Wonder Woman is the progressive embodiment of

America as a redeemer nation. The early issues of the comic book expressly conflated

her World War II narratives with biographies of prominent women in a regular feature

titled "Wonder Women of History." This celebration of important women throughout

history offers a counternarrative to the prevailing historical record, which emphasizes

the accomplishments of men to the near exclusion of women. Therefore, in enacting

the role of redeemer nation, fighting for women's rights throughout the world, Wonder

Woman also necessarily serves as a redemptive figure for America itself.

[2.7] In November 1977, a National Women's Conference (designed in part to

celebrate International Women's Year) was attended by 20,000 delegates in Houston,

who came together "to debate and pass resolutions on subjects as varied as daycare

financing, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment" (Stanley 2005). During the

conference Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan, the first Southern AfricanAmerican

woman elected to the House of Representatives, opined, "No one person has the right

answer. Wonder Woman is not a delegate here" (ibid.). Her observation in this context

confirms that a progressive social vision requires the ideal of Wonder Woman, even

and especially when that ideal is not realized. The obverse to Jordan's statement is

that an incipient Wonder Woman resides within all of the delegates in attendance,

otherwise the very goals of the conference—to advance women's equality—would be

impossible daydreams ("A thousand years in the future!"). The event's articulation of a

public sphere is validated by the presence of congresswomen and its sponsorship by

the federal government. In fact, the conference was the result of President Ford's

1974 executive order to create a National Commission on the Observance of

International Women's Year "to promote equality between men and women" (Freeman

n.d.). Significantly, the conference as originally proposed by Representative Bella

Abzug was to be held during the nation's bicentennial year, timing designed not just to

highlight the compatibility of feminist causes with defining national values, but to insist that those values would remain a utopian dream until women were accorded equal

status as citizens. Thus a kind of futurist nostalgia, in which the delegates to the

conference referenced the Constitution as a defining text for the nation's future,

underscores the mission of the conference and further indicates the resonance of

Wonder Woman as a commodity figure suspended in a dynamic, yet static, middle

ground between the past and the future.

[2.8] Perhaps the most significant strategy by which the seemingly impossible future

ideal of Wonder Woman can be realized is a turn to the past and the affective power of

nostalgia, a turn to history's wonder women in order to inspire women in the present.

The superhero is a commodity signifier strongly linked to childhood, and while the

visual and narrative excesses of the genre speak directly to the affective capacity of

childhood play, the superhero also speaks specifically to the transcendent agency of

imagining a new social self. This imagining is the most directly useful function of the

superhero in adulthood. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem expresses this in her own

reflections in the 1970s on her relationship to Wonder Woman and in her response to

alterations to the character at that time. In 1968, in an effort to rejuvenate sales of

the Wonder Woman comic book, DC Comics took the controversial step of stripping

Wonder Woman of her traditional costume (replacing it with contemporary mod

fashions) and removing her powers. Writer Denny O'Neil reflects, "I saw it as taking a

woman and making her independent, and not dependent on super powers. I saw it as

making her thoroughly human and then an achiever on top of that, which, according to

my mind, was very much in keeping with the feminist agenda" (Daniels 2000, 126).

Not surprisingly, feminists like Steinem strongly disagreed, seeing this corporate

maneuver to boost sales as yet another example of masculine authority containing the

perceived threat of female agency. In fact, since Marston's death, Wonder Woman had

been increasingly altered to conform to a more traditional concept of femininity.

Through the 1950s she became more romantically interested in Steve Trevor and even

required his rescue on occasion (reversing the dynamic Marston had established

between them). Also, during this period the feature "Wonder Women of History" was

replaced by "Marriage à la Mode," documenting wedding customs around the world

(ibid., 102).

[2.9] All of these containment strategies are directly addressed by the cover of the

debut issue of Steinem's Ms. magazine (July 1972), which features a largerthanlife

Wonder Woman in her original costume, striding down a street and swatting aside a

fighter jet while an army tank fires on her (figure 2). Her stance against obvious

symbols of patriarchal military power is reinforced by a billboard that proclaims "Peace

and Justice in '72." Under the Ms. masthead a banner reads "Wonder Woman for

President," which, linked to the billboard message, asserts (in contrast to the cover of

Wonder Woman no. 7) that the dream of a female president can and should be a

reality in the present. The cover is a direct response to the deferral of matriarchal

authority for a thousand years and a strong refutation of masculine modes of agency,

as well as a direct reclamation of Marston's Wonder Woman. Tellingly, in the same

year that Ms. debuted, Ms. Books published an anthology of 1940s Wonder Woman

stories that further exploited the nostalgic power of the original concept of Wonder

Woman in order to reclaim the character from her thencurrent diminution at the

hands of DC Comics. Steinem provides introductions for all of the stories in this

volume and, like Mangels many years later, she asserts a proprietary claim on what

she considers to be the character's essence by turning to affective childhood

memories. In the anthology Steinem recalls her "toewriggling pleasure" as a child

reading about "a woman who was strong, beautiful, courageous, and a fighter for

social justice." Expressing her own wishful thinking, Steinem promises the return in

the contemporary comics of "the original Wonder Woman— my Wonder Woman"

(Marston 1972, n.p.). This return to the past is presented as the necessary means to

achieve social progress in the present as circulated through individual affect and

memory. Steinem enacts the primary strategy of returning to a childhood subjectivity

in which the child as consumercitizen has the social agency to imagine a more

progressive America.

Figure 2. A Wonder Woman for a new era.[View larger image.]

[2.10] As Sara Ahmed observes, a memory "can be the object of [one's] feelings in

both senses: the feeling is shaped by contact with the memory, and also involves an

orientation towards what is remembered" (2004, 7). In the case of Steinem and

Wonder Woman, the initial memory (the utopian point of origin of the consumercitizen's political consciousness) and all subsequent contact with it are mediated by the auratic object, in this case Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s. Of course, that first

contact is already disciplined according to ideology: we learn how to react to

something before we ever see it. This discipline informs competing notions of

American identity: both conservative and progressive readings of the nation are

grounded in its imagined (fantasized) origin, which is then used either to valorize this

past as an ideal to be returned to or to argue that the ideals of the nation have never

been realized but can and should be.

[2.11] When a mass culture sign such as Wonder Woman is so strongly linked to a

contested understanding of national ideals, the fluidity of her signification makes her

accessible both as a commodity and as a progressive symbol. Thus the consumercitizen has a "memory" of her before there is a contact event to remember. She is an imagined subject before we ever encounter her; thus the object is always working as

part of an imaginary, never separate from it. As an idealized figure defined by visual

and narrative excess, the superhero is particularly available for this mediation of

internal fantasy. Fans like Steinem have an affective memory of Wonder Woman as a

feminist icon, however qualified her feminist agency may be in postMarston comics.

This indicates the significant degree to which superhero texts rely on narratives of

emotion. Typically in the genre the primary affective modes are a mixture of fear,

anger, and awe at threats posed to society and the superheroic response that society

necessarily produces. Marston's Wonder Woman is again unique in that her narratives

rely much more on the more accessible affective power of love than on these

masculineoriented emotional tropes. The emotional valence of commodities confirms

what Ahmed (2004, 13, 90) calls an object's "stickiness," which is "an effect of the

histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs." This can also be characterized

as the superhero's resonance or aura, produced in the history of affective exchange

between superhero texts and fans. Therefore, not only are Wonder Woman texts

diegetically defined by the affect of love, but so too is the consumercitizen's

relationship to (and memories of) the commodified icon. When it is linked so intimately

with childhood (as Steinem and Mangels testify), we see that the loving memory is

directed equally at one's childhood self, indicating the utility of the mass culture object

as the mediating device between internal subjectivity and exterior social agency,

between the private self and public culture, between the past, the present, and the

future. This mediation facilitates the creation of Wonder Woman Day as a public

response to the private, hidden traumas of domestic violence.

[2.12] The affectivity of the superhero genre serves as a bridge between individual

and collective, materializing and asserting emotional ties that bind. We "imagine" (per

Benedict Anderson's concept of the nation as an imagined community) how and why

we respond affectively to a text as others do, or as we think they should.

Consequently, Mangels's project depends upon a particular orientation to what is

remembered that conflates mass culture, civic identity, and personal memory and is

substantiated by the affirmation of shared affect in the moment of the event. Wonder

Woman Day, then, is equally about domestic violence victims, Wonder Woman, and

fans. Wonder Woman Day becomes the latest iteration of a progressive American

dream, linking the individual consumercitizen to the public sphere via the affective

commodity object. This redeemer nation myth that so strongly defines American

identity is significant, given that Mangels's devotion to the character originates during

perhaps the most prominent period of mainstream feminist visibility, the early to mid1970s. Thus his fan agency is born in an affective moment of political agency (the continued national push for ratification of the ERA in 1976) that also links the

consumercitizen to two other determinant events: the nation's bicentennial and the

debut of the Wonder Woman television show. The symbolic rebirth of the nation on its

birthday and of Wonder Woman in this fresh television iteration informs the symbolic

rebirth and transformation of Mangels into a politically conscious consumercitizen. As

with the unrealized progressive vision of the Equal Rights Amendment, and consistent

with the necessarily open textual nature of Wonder Woman as a mass commodity,

Mangels must make his own subjectivity available for renegotiation and

transformation.

3. Wonder Woman to the rescue

[3.1] Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication, to the innermost ears

of the wishful self.

—William Marston (Daniels 2000, 11)

[3.2] Sensation Comics no. 15 (March 1943) featured a public service announcement

about infantile paralysis from the March of Dimes that was composed as a comic book

story. In the onepage narrative, Queen Hyppolyta observes Wonder Woman "in the

man ruled world" carrying a sick child to a hospital, where the little girl is placed in an

iron lung. Wonder Woman explains to her mother that "Americans celebrate their

president's birthday by giving parties to raise money for this tremendous work!"

Hyppolyta responds, "That's wonderful! You must help!" Later Wonder Woman

receives an urgent message on her "mental radio" from Steve Trevor: "Calling Wonder

Woman! My desk is swamped with letters asking for your picture! Do your fans think

I'm a photographer? You answer them!" Wonder Woman exclaims, "Mother, an idea!

I'll give my picture to every child who sends me a dime for the president's birthday

fund!" The PSA offers "every boy and girl in America" an "autographed" picture of

Wonder Woman when they send in a dime that will be donated to the March of Dimes.

This PSA articulates and directs the nexus of consumerism, fan affect, and

compassionate citizenship through the figure of Wonder Woman. Authorized by her

mother and inspired by consumer demand, Wonder Woman intertwines the already

conflated events of the president's birthday and the charity drive with her own

commodity status. The result is a "personalized" commodity (Wonder Woman's

ostensible autograph, an externalization of internal fantasy) that confirms the fan's

affective attachment to Wonder Woman and compassionate agency as an American.

[3.3] This very reflexive condensation of consumercitizen subjectivity via Wonder

Woman reflects a trend to reconcile the responsibilities of citizenship with the role of

consumer in this relatively new era of mass culture. As Lizabeth Cohen observes, by

the late 1930s it was generally held by manufacturers, economists, and the

government that the buying power of consumers would not only bring the US out of

the Depression but also preserve American democracy (2003, 20). Thus the act of

purchasing a Wonder Woman comic would reflect and confirm the rhetorical value of

the superheroine as a defender of American values (which this process increasingly

defines according to freemarket capitalism and consumerism). The New Deal desire to

boost consumer demand was equated with "the enhancement of American democracy

and equality" (55), and this intersection of consumer and citizen agency was only

amplified with the advent of World War II. According to Cohen, "To ensure the speedy

arrival of…[a] postwar utopia of abundance, patriotic citizens were urged to save today

(preferably through war bonds) so that they might become purchaser consumers

tomorrow" (70). Again, citizenconsumer subjectivity coalesces via the figure of the

superhero and in the consumption of superhero comic books, which frequently

featured characters urging readers to buy war bonds. In Wonder Woman no. 2 (fall

1942), for example, Wonder Woman exhorts a crowd to "buy war bonds and help

America banish war forever!" Civic duty is conflated with Wonder Woman's nonviolent

rejection of all war, not simply an embrace of victory in the present one, thereby

directly refuting the strategies of patriarchy by which recurring war coheres the

nationstate. The lowcost purchase of superhero comic books allowed consumers to

buy into the fantasy of American exceptionalism and triumphalism over the Axis, the

Depression, and the aggressive nature of masculine politics. Wonder Woman thus

serves as an indication of the utopian affect that is to follow victory over these

elements.

[3.4] While postwar consumption attempted to fulfill "personal desire and civic

obligation" (Cohen 2003, 119), the inherent tension between these two positions

became progressively apparent. Wartime hegemonic values were increasingly

challenged by a rising tide of cultural pluralism that was facilitated by the very

machinations of mass culture that had done so much to promote this hegemony. Thus,

as Cohen notes, "It was no accident that the rise of market segmentation

corresponded to the historical era of the 1960s and 1970s…where people's affiliation

with a particular community defined their cultural consciousness and motivated their

collective political action" (308). As is evident on the cover of Ms. no. 1 and in DC's

nonsuperheroic Wonder Woman, the identity politics of this period informed the

reception of Wonder Woman from the late 1960s through the run of the television

show (which aired from 1975 to 1979). From these two examples we can see how

commodity culture could be appropriated for overt political agency and that such

agency was resisted by the corporate gatekeepers of hegemonic values. The irony

here is that the use of Wonder Woman as a feminist icon is thoroughly consistent with

Marston's conception of the character, while DC Comics' radical revision of her in 1968

contradicts it.

[3.5] By 1973 DC had brought Wonder Woman somewhat closer to her origins,

returning her powers and costume. Following Denny O'Neil's problematic claim that

taking away Wonder Woman's powers made her a more powerful feminist icon, her

final nonsuperpowered appearance, in issue no. 203 (Nov.–Dec. 1972), bore the cover

blurb "Women's Lib Issue," suggesting that, according to DC, feminism and

superheroines could not coexist. In 1981, under the guidance of publisher Jenette

Kahn (note 1) and with the support of Steinem, DC acknowledged the character's

fortieth anniversary by establishing a Wonder Woman Foundation, "dedicated to

advancing the principles of equality for women in American society" (Gloria Steinem

Papers). Kahn said that the awards granted by the foundation "are unique. They are

the only financial awards given to women over forty, the only awards that honor inner

growth and richness of character" (Daniels 2000, 151). The creation of this foundation

was also integrated into the narrative of Wonder Woman no. 288 (February 1982),

where it served as Wonder Woman's motivation for changing her costume (yet again),

replacing the gold eagle emblem on her chest with a gold double W (that still

resembled an eagle, emphasizing the intimate relationship between commodity and

national iconicity). The foundation is thus conceived of as both a variation in the

commodity icon and a means of civic engagement, both for Wonder Woman in her

diegesis and for fans who are affectively incorporated into the project of the reallife

foundation. Again, civic engagement (for the first time aligning fan and Wonder

Woman with an expressly feminist cause) overlaps with mass culture production and

consumption.

[3.6] While the Wonder Woman Foundation no longer exists in either the comic

books or reality, it remains the defining utopian ethos behind the revised costume that

is still used today, confirming the power of externalized fantasy. In Wonder Woman

no. 5 (May 2007), Wonder Woman assists a shelter for domestic violence victims that

was founded by women inspired by her to take control of their lives. The inherent

instability of Wonder Woman, crystallized by her costume changes and mutable

relationship to Marston's concept, indicates not only her function as a commodity that

is constantly altered to renew market interest, but her availability for fan appropriation

for social critique. The tension between producers and consumers informs Paolo

Virno's concept of the multitude as a political designation separate from state

authority. Virno presents the concept of the multitude in response to the concept of

"the people," a notion of a national collective cohered by a homogenizing affiliation

with the state. Conversely, according to Virno, the multitude "signifies plurality—

literally; being many—as a lasting form of social and political existence, as opposed to

the cohesive unity of the people. Thus, the multitude consists of a network of

individuals; the many are a singularity" (2004, 76). The concept of the multitude calls for the deconstruction of the binaries of public and private and of the collective and the

individual that the state is invested in. Turning to Marx, Virno goes on to assert that

because it is "difficult to separate public experience from socalled private experience…

even the two categories of citizen and of producer fail us" (24). Because mass culture has routinely conflated the roles of citizen and consumer, the division between

consumer and producer is equally untenable. Since consumption cannot be articulated

effectively as an exclusively private experience, the space in which it occurs or is

recirculated is of primary importance. This allows us to understand more completely

the significance of holding an event such as Wonder Woman Day at a comic book

store, for, as Virno argues, the "'publicly organized space'…mobilizes political

attitudes" (63).

[3.7] By choosing to hold Wonder Woman Day at Excalibur Comics, Mangels confirms

the retail site as a primary locus of socialization and fantasy. He chose this particular

store because it is coowned by a woman (Debbie Fagnant, a Wonder Woman fan

herself) and because, according to Mangels, the event "meant something to the people

involved" (pers. comm.). Public affect as a mode of civic engagement is authorized by

this structuring context of the comic book store charity event. Wonder Woman Day

therefore validates the call in the 1940s and 1950s for a condensation of consumer

and citizen identities. Wonder Woman Day becomes an explicitly progressive

expression of this condensation, indicating that mass culture and progressivism are

compatible when the intersection between production and consumption cultures is

negotiated by the utopian expressions of fans. By choosing a retail space as the site

for a charity event, and by using a comic art auction as the primary means of raising

money, Mangels reifies the progressive redeemer spirit of Wonder Woman, realizing

the potential for social agency that is embedded in fandom, a group that has been

stereotyped as lacking such agency.

[3.8] This agency is publicly performed as transformation, making visible the secret

"super" identity of the self, the comic book store, and the nation. Just as Wonder

Woman assumes the everyday guise of Diana Prince but reveals her true identity at

times of crisis, fans confirm their authentic supercitizen selves through their

participation in Wonder Woman Day. Diana Prince's transformation into Wonder

Woman is a visual embodiment of the moral values that already define the subjectivity

of the consumercitizen. Thus it is not coincidental that cosplay is a central ingredient

of Wonder Woman Day. The transformation of the store and the self as a means of

affirming the values represented by Wonder Woman reflects Virno's belief that a moral

self is central to the political subject's identity. According to Virno, the ultimate place

of refuge is "the moral 'I,' since it is…there that one finds something of the noncontingent, or of the realm above the mundane" (2004, 31). Thus, for a day, consumercitizens are given the opportunity both to retreat symbolically into the

discrete public space of the comic book store/charity event and to actualize social

agency for the improvement of society. In the same manner that Superman retreats to

his Fortress of Solitude and Batman to the Batcave, fans go to Excalibur Comics on

this day to reaffirm the values that equally guide their consumption and their

citizenship by embedding themselves in a space defined by fantasy and its separation

from the everyday. The result is a twofold affirmation of a utopian vision for both

society and oneself, for, as Virno says, "The feeling of the sublime…consists of taking

the relief I feel for…refuge and transforming it into a search for the unconditional

security which only the moral 'I' can guarantee" ( ibid. ). Tellingly, this process

duplicates the dynamic that is at play within the domestic violence shelters the event

was designed to support, further aligning both domestic violence victims and their

supporters as citizens.

[3.9] Through the politicized physical site of commodity and affect exchange (the

Excalibur Comics shop), fans assert the moral I as an extension of the authorizing

figure of Wonder Woman, confirming the inherent meaning of both self and commodity

figure, as well as the desired meaning of the nation. The moral I is realized by

transcending the adultchild binary that typifies superhero fandom, an affirmation of

both the morality and play that ideally define a child's subjective relationship to

superhero texts (figure 3). The moral condensation of consumerism and state

authority (itself a kind of utopian realization) is further confirmed by the fact that,

beginning in 2007, Portland mayor Sam Adams officially proclaimed the day of every

one of Mangel's events to be Wonder Woman Day for the city. In 2010 he declared,

"The City of Portland recognizes that all residents of the State of Oregon should be

able to embrace true equality for everyone, truthfulness, strength, safety, dignity, and

peace" (http://www.womenofwonderday.com/WWDay5/WWDay5.html). This state

project is consistent with the aims of the organizations that Wonder Woman Day

supports. For Wonder Woman Day 4 in 2009, Amy Williams, director of development

for the domestic violence agency Raphael House of Portland, issued this statement:

"One of the most amazing things about Wonder Woman is the way that her appeal and

message cross the traditional lines of generation, gender, race and class. Our vision at

Raphael House is to engage this entire community in nonviolent living, and being part

of this event is an annual step toward realizing that vision"

(http://prismcomics.org/display.php?id=1804). Thus we see that the shelter, the city,

and the comic book store are extensions of the home as the site of both play and

moral education, with Wonder Woman and fan subjectivity the governing forces at the

heart of this intersection.

Figure 3. Reifying utopia, Wonder Woman Day 2008.[View larger image.]

[3.10] As Sandvoss confirms, "Fandom best compares to the emotional significance

of the places we have grown to call 'home,' to the form of physical, emotional and

ideological space that is best described as Heimat" (2005, 64). On Wonder Woman

Day, Excalibur Comics emphasizes its capacity as Heimat, a morally safe space in

which the marginalized qualities of comic book fandom are reconceived as vanguard

qualities; the margin that comic book superhero fans occupy is at the forefront of

society, not the sidelines. Therefore, if Heimat is "an extension of one's self, and the

self [is] a reflection of place and community" (65), then Wonder Woman Day not only

asserts an ideal utopian self for the fan, but also defines that self as a critique of social

failures. Thus, the remediation of the comic book store as a charity gathering is a

reconfiguration of Wonder Woman's feminist utopian home, Paradise Island. In the

"simultaneously projective and introjective relationship between fan and object" (81)—

in dressing as a superhero or purchasing original Wonder Woman art donated for

Wonder Woman Day—fans confirm their latent superheroic qualities and productively

attach themselves to "dominant social, cultural, economic and technological systems"

(82). Such fan activities thus become modes of mastery and control over mass

culture, society, and self simultaneously.

[3.11] The basis for this exchange between consumercitizens and the commodity

icon is compassion, which, according to Lauren Berlant, "implies a social relation

between spectators and sufferers" and the obligation "on the spectator to become an

ameliorative agent" (2004, 1). Berlant recognizes the inherent critical qualities of

compassion, noting that a "national dispute about compassion is as old as the United

States and has been organized mainly by the gap between its democratic promise and

its historic class hierarchies, racial and sexual penalties, and handling of immigrant

populations" (ibid). This gap is what motivates Mangels's desire to make Wonder

Woman Day a familyfriendly event and to work for a cause that touches victims of

both genders and of all races, classes, and sexual orientations. During the Cold War,

the rise of group identity politics was regarded as a direct threat to traditional

concepts of liberty that saw it as an affirmation of individualism and not, paradoxically,

collectivism. The tension between individualism and the nation is mediated by the

power of mass consumerism as a means of expressing individual rights and identity

within a broader collective framework defined by the shared values of capitalist

democracy, values that are necessarily opaquely defined. Importantly, it is affect that

both sustains and glosses over the tension between these ideological positions. The

exercise of rights is an affective demonstration; we "know" how valuable our rights are

(what they affectively "mean") according to how strongly we feel about them. The

essential difference between the conservative and progressive ends of this

demonstration is the difference between the masculineinflected affect that so

commonly defines the superhero genre (the reactionary affects of fear, anger, and

awe) and the feminineinflected affect of love that Wonder Woman interjects into this

milieu.

[3.12] The difference between these two affects is, in other words, the difference

between the power of love and the power of aggression. According to Ahmed,

"Through love, an ideal self is produced as a self that belongs to a community; the

ideal is a proximate 'we'" (2004, 106). We see this love at work in the diegesis

Marston created for Wonder Woman: the utopian space of Paradise Island is not

simply a refuge from the world of men but an affirmation of the moral I, bonding

Amazons according to the affect of love. We further see it in fan devotion to Wonder

Woman or a particular artist, so that the love for an original sketch that a fan might

bid on on Wonder Woman Day becomes, by extension, an expression of love for

people (domestic violence victims, other fans) and spaces (the comic book shop, the

city, the nation). As Ahmed says, to love an object is to love oneself, and "such a love

is about making future generations in the image I have of myself and the loved other…

which can be bestowed on future generations" (129). When the object being loved is

Wonder Woman, the inherent pluralism of America is celebrated. As Ahmed points out,

from the perspective of multiculturalism, "difference is now what we have in common…

you must like us—and be like us—by valuing or even loving differences" (138). Central

to this love are the liberating capacities of Wonder Woman as a fantasy expression of a

utopian American society defined by submission to loving authority. As Mangels says,

"Superheroes can inspire, can raise consciousness, and can offer hope. Comic book

fans can change the world" (pers. comm.).

4. Notes

1. Kahn served variously as publisher, president, and editor in chief of the company

from 1976 to 2002, the first woman to occupy any of these roles for a major comic

book publisher.

5. Works cited

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press.

Berlant, Lauren. 2004. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. New York:

Routledge.

Carter, Lynda. 2009. "Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman, Gay Rights, and her New

Album." Interview by Sarah Warn. After Ellen, June 3.

http://www.afterellen.com/people/2009/6/lyndacarter.

Cohen, Lizabeth. 2003. A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in

Postwar America. New York: Vintage.

Daniels, Les. 2000. Wonder Woman: The Complete History. San Francisco: Chronicle.

DiPaolo, Marc Edward. 2007. "Wonder Woman as World War II Veteran." In The

Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic

Books, Film and Television, edited by Terrence R. Wandtke, 151–73. Jefferson, NC:

McFarland.

Freeman, Jo. N.d. "The National Women's Conference in Houston, 1977."

http://www.jofreeman.com/photos/IWY1977.html.

Gloria Steinem Papers, 1940–2000. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,

Northampton, MA.

Kim, Chuck. 2002. "Drawn to SpiderMan." The Advocate, May 14, 66.

Marston, William Moulton. 1972. Wonder Woman. With an introduction by Gloria

Steinem and an interpretive essay by Phyllis Chesler. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and

Winston.

Prism Comics. 2009. "Wonder Woman Day IV: October 25th AllAges Events Benefit

Oregon and New Jersey Domestic Violence Prevention Agencies."

http://prismcomics.org/display.php?id=1804.

Robbins, Trina. 2008. "Wonder Woman: Queer Appeal." International Journal of Comic Art 10 (2): 89–94.

Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. 2000. Ethics. Edited and translated by G. H. R. Parkinson.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stanley, Alessandra. 2005. "TV Review: 'Sisters of '77': A Trip Back in Time, to 1977,

in Search of Feminism's Glory Days." New York Times, March 1.

Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary

Forms of Life. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

"World of Wonder." Fanatical, episode 10. March 6, 2007.

http://www.fanatical.tv/episode10.html.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

Fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms in K-pop fandom

Sun Jung

National University of Singapore, Singapore

[0.1] Abstract— Korean popular music (Kpop) fandom may serve as a case study to

identify both cynical and utopian views of fans' participatory Net activism by addressing

three key aspects: fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms. Fancom (fan

company) in the Kpop scene refers to the way fans systematically manage their own stars.

These notions of assertive fancom practices address how fans actively participate in

sociocultural events such as fund raising, donating to charity, and volunteering in

emergency situations. This management may take another turn, however: antifandom

surrounds Kpop star Tablo, signifying cybervigilantism of sinsang teolgi (personal

information theft), a term referring to the online activities of a group of netizens who seek

to expose the personal details of perceived wrongdoers by publishing them online as a form

of punishment. The Tablo case revitalized public concern over privacy and the security of

personal information in the digital era. Finally, Othering mechanisms in participatory online

Kpop fandom display a strong sense of nationalism and even racism, as demonstrated by

responses to antiKorean rhetoric posted on the MySpace page of Kpop idol JaeBeom. This

highlights the relationship between participatory Net activism and nationalistic sentiment

active within Kpop fandom. Some Kpop fan practices may have negative connotations, but

by engaging with specific civic issues and social events, participatory fan practices

encourage people to interact, discuss, and challenge conventional discourses, which may

lead to new forms of social action.

[0.2] Keywords— Antifandom; Fancom; JaeBeom; JYJ; Korean popular culture; Tablo;

TVXQ

Jung, Sun. 2012. "Fan Activism, Cybervigilantism, and Othering Mechanisms in Kpop

Fandom." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita

Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0300.

1. Introduction

[1.1] On June 10 and 11, 2011, SM Town Live in Paris was held at the Le Zénith de Paris

concert hall in France. Five Korean popular music, or Kpop, bands from the SM

Entertainment stable—TVXQ, SNSD, Super Junior, f(x), and SHINee—held their first concert

in a European city and attracted more than 14,000 fans from across Europe. Initially, SM

scheduled only one show on June 10. When the tickets to the first concert sold out in 15

minutes, hundreds of French fans performed a flash mob dance outside the Louvre Museum

in protest, and SM soon announced a second concert. New media technologies drove fanbased Net activism via fan pages on Facebook and Kpop channels on YouTube, mobilizing fellow fans and promoting the event. The success of the French fans' protest for the SM Town

Live in Paris concerts indicates the power of participatory online fandom in the Kpop realm.

This example also demonstrates how new media technologies enable efficient

communications within the Netactivist movements of fans, which can influence industry

decision making. As such, participatory fan activism is a visible aspect of Kpop.

[1.2] In the realm of Kpop, Net activism is also evident from the ways in which the fan

groups participate in sociocultural events such as fundraising, donating to charity,

volunteering in emergency situations (such as the Taean oil spill in 2007 and the Indonesian

tsunami in 2004), and protesting media reform laws and media entertainment policies to

protect the rights of young artists. This is not a phenomenon specific to Kpop alone, as

demonstrated by the fan activism surrounding Western artists such as Lady Gaga and her

relationship to gay rights, and U2's role in antipoverty campaigns. However, in the case of Kpop fan activism, the fans, not the stars, initiate fundraising and charity events; fans donate the money raised under the name of their chosen stars. Fans practice such activities not only

for local charities, but also as a way of promoting their stars. Each Kpop fan group thus

functions more like an informal promotion company (note 1). Although there are certainly

Western instances of music fandom where a similar bottomup fan activism may be identified

(for example, Tori Amos's fan community often mobilizes around issues surrounding sexual

violence), in Kpop, this is the norm rather than the exception. Kpop fandom offers an

example that uniquely emphasizes the fan groups' initiatives, as well as their active and

collective involvement in online activities, the result of the nation's high Internet usage.

[1.3] According to Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index, published on June 1, 2011, in

terms of Internet traffic, South Korea consumes 33 gigabytes per month per person, which is

three times higher than France (11 gigabytes), which is in second place ( Economist 2011).

Extremely high rates of Web user participation are the driving force behind Net activism

within Kpop fandom. In the case of idol group fandom, the fan base is assertive and

devoted; further, it functions as a collective whole, and via these coordinated movements, it

supports the current popularity of Kpop in Korea and beyond. Idol music and stars are the

most crucial elements of current Kpop, and idol fandom is contradictorily immersed in the

chosen stars. Some fans demonstrate hostile attitudes to any deviation from their vision of

their favorite stars; they are dedicated solely to "protecting their stars themselves no matter

what" (Kim 2011b). Cultural critic Kim JakGa contends that the power structure of idol

fandom can be as authoritarian as that of political groups, and that fan community leaders

are privileged, wielding certain special powers, such as the ability to communicate with their

chosen idol directly (2011b). On the basis of the accumulated rules and customs within a

strict power structure, Kpop fans can collectively act in their star's interests. Fans now hold

enormous potential to influence the decisionmaking processes within the entertainment

industries, and digital convergence technology explicitly drives this participatory fandom.

[1.4] This emerging phenomenon is best supported by Henry Jenkins's notion of fan

activism in the era of digital convergence (1992, 2006). Avid fans often participate in various

fanrelated activities, contributing to help to keep programs on the air, films at the box office,

and celebrities in the news. More active fans have even had an impact on the outcome of

television series and film because ultimately they have power as a consumer force (Jenkins

1992). Fans have become more aware of what goes into the decisionmaking process in

cultural productions such as soap operas, and the Internet has greatly affected the way fan

feedback has been managed within soaps (Scardaville 2005, 884). Within the Web 2.0

environment, fan activism is becoming a key method of expressing grievances within popular

culture fandom (Earl and Kimport 2009, 220), and fans believe that speaking as a group

amplifies their voices (Scardaville 2005, 889).

[1.5] It is important to note, however, that participatory fan activism does not always

necessarily have a positive impact. Many complex aspects of fans' collective Net activism are

present, as exemplified by online Kpop fandom. Their contradictory participatory activities

can influence decisionmaking processes and create multiple narratives. Kpop fandom

represents shifts in Webbased communication paradigms in the global cultural industry

regime. Three aspects of participatory Kpop fandom are found online: fan activism,

cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms.

2. Fancom: Fan activism

[2.1] Online fandom often represents a bottomup participatory culture, enabling the

transition to a more fluid, affective, and democratic media industry environment. Yet it also

shows the ways in which fans are not always openminded about knowledge that the Internet

provides about their beloved cult object. As an anonymous mob armored in sometimes willful

ignorance, they can be as oppressive as corporate media. Some critics and commentators

have coined the term fancom to describe this new form of assertive bottomup fan activity in

the Kpop realm. The term, a shortened version of "fan company" (Im 2007; Kim 2010),

demonstrates how fans now consider their stars to be subjects whom they keenly manage

and systematically guide, which is different from the preexisting notion of fandom that

emphasizes the ways in which fans adore and worship their stars. It is now a common

practice for fan groups to circulate press releases about their star's recent activities, such as

a new album release or movie launch.

[2.2] Fans also often conduct charity activities by using their star's name. A Japanese fan

community for UKnow Yunho (a member of the idol boy band TVXQ) donated ￦10 million

(US$8,700) under his name to an orphanage in Kwangju, Korea. When UKnow Yunho took a

role in the musical Goong, his fan groups from various countries also sent rice sack (known

as Dreame, literally "dream rice") mockups to congratulate him on his musical theater debut instead of sending standing wreaths (figure 1). Later, 3.15 tons of rice were sent to various

welfare facilities in the country in his name (Choi 2010). It is now a common practice among

Kpop fans to send Dreame mockups to show their support for their stars rather than

sending flowers. This activity has become a representative form of fan activism in Kpop

fandom; once largely driven by consumer desires, fan culture has become socially aware.

Many types of fandom now concentrate on public welfare and social issues in Korea. These

newly emerging fancom practices are driven by concerns and needs directly linked to the

social welfare realm, and they reflect how some fandomled campaigns transform Internet

cultures, making attempts to bring netiquette and a broader social civility to Internet culture

at least partly successful. The fastgrowing online fan community environment and its

connectedness enhance such fan activism.

Figure 1. Dreame mockups in front of the venue of the musical Goong. [View larger image.]

[2.3] Some fan communities are more efficient and well connected than others in regard to

practicing fancom activities. For instance, in 2007, Kpop singer and actor Rain's

multinational fandom produced a promotional poster for his film, I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK.

Fans flew to the Berlin International Film Festival, where Rain was a guest, and distributed

the posters to the international media as well as to general audiences in Berlin (Im 2007).

The dynamic collaboration system behind such promotion is established among fans with

professional careers, such as Web designers and magazine editors. Many of these belong to

the 30plus age bracket (often called "aunty [ imo] fans"), who are able to shoulder the

financial burdens (Im 2007; Kim 2011c). Another driving force is advanced new media

technologies, which allow fans to be both consumers and producers, thus fulfilling Alvin

Toffler's (1980) prediction about the rise of prosumers and Henry Jenkins's (2006) notion of

convergence culture. Rain's international fandoms also often organize charity events. For

example, on May 6, 2008, Rain's Singapore fan club held a charity gala premiere of Speed

Racer, his Hollywood debut film. The fans raised and donated US$2,500 to the Singapore

Disability Sports Council in Rain's name, demonstrating fan collective sociocultural

awareness.

[2.4] Participatory fan activism is also visible in the ways in which fans have intervened with

the business decisions of their stars' management companies, even influencing the shift of

the media environment. The most notable example is the way in which TVXQ fans collectively

and professionally reacted to the group's disbandment. On July 31, 2009, three members of

TVXQ—Hero Jaejoong, Micky Yoochun, and Xiah Junsu—filed a lawsuit against SM

Entertainment, their management company since their debut in 2004 (note 2). The three had

applied for provisional disposition of their 13year contract with SM, saying it was too long

and unfair, to which the court ruled in partial favor, stating that SM could not interfere with

their individual activities. This led to an immediate halt of their activities as a fiveman band

in Korea, and a halt a few months later in Japan. The three then formed a new group called

JYJ. After giving a series of soldout concerts in Japan (including a Tokyo Dome concert in

June 2010), JYJ made their US debut, produced by prominent US musicians Kanye West and

Timbaland. Meanwhile, SM countersued the three singers in midApril 2010 in a lawsuit worth

US$2.2 million in damages for the agency and for the two remaining members (UKnow

Yunho and Max Changmin). About 2 years later, the now twoman TVXQ released their new

album Why? (Keep Your Head Down)—a move that implied the official split of TVXQ.

album Why? (Keep Your Head Down)—a move that implied the official split of TVXQ.

Crucially, it was not only TVXQ who split up, but also their fans, who were now divided as

well. As outraged fans of both TVXQ and JYJ mobilized, they actively participated in

simultaneously protecting and promoting their preferred stars, driven by the rivalry between

them.

[2.5] The participatory fan practices of these two fan communities clearly demonstrate how

fan activism stimulates the both positive and negative effects of creating balanced Webbased communications in the cultural industry regime. The key function of TVXQ fandom is to maintain the existing fandom by supporting the remaining two members and acknowledging

this reformed twoman band as the complete TVXQ. In doing so, the priority has been to

protect the two remaining members from rumors about their supposed betrayal of the other

three members, as well as from suggestions that they received preferential treatment by SM

for doing so. TVXQ fans have argued that the real reason for the split was the greed of the

three members who left the band: "JYJ attempted to exploit the fame of TVXQ to promote a

questionablequality cosmetics company which JYJ themselves had invested in" (see

http://blog.naver.com/qlajdhqk and http://blog.naver.com/earth7769). Similar quotations appear across numerous Web sites, including DC Inside and Daum. Through indepth analysis

of various documents such as reviews of court hearings and interview clips of the members in

the past, TVXQ fandom has tried to prove how JYJ left the band because SM did not authorize

a deal they had made with a cosmetics company. Their collective fan activism is evident from

the fan blogs and Web community forums, which were filled with archival databases in which

fans created massive catalogs of multimedia audiovisual files to document the case. Fans also

analyzed court judgments, and they even created a Web dictionary to explain newly coined

terms related to the case. The fans' participatory analysis has added an extra dimension to

the case.

[2.6] JYJ fandom demonstrates the power of fan activism more explicitly. Emphasizing the

significance of "emotional attachments and passions" of fans in fan cultures, Jason Sperb

highlights how these attachments become especially crucial "when dealing with politically

charged texts" (2010, 29). Because the JYJ fans understand the case through the political

framework of unbalanced conflicts between a gigantic media conglomerate and powerless

artists, their attachments to and passions for JYJ have become even stronger. According to

Earl and Kimport (2009), as fans become more active and outspoken, fan protests are

becoming an increasingly common way to express grievances, leading fans to ardently adopt

protest tactics when they have concerns that they want to express. By examining how the

four institutionalized tactical forms—petitions, boycotts, letter writing, and email campaigns

—are used in the realm of fan activism, they argue that these political protest methods cross

the boundaries of traditional political discourses and now allow pop culture fans to make

claims and to affect decisionmaking processes (Earl and Kimport 2009). JYJ fandom also

used these institutionalized protest methods by, for example, boycotting SM products. JYJ

fans engage in three distinctive strategies of activism: online petitions, a bus advertising

campaign, and Internet TV.

[2.7] As soon as the JYJ members filed the lawsuit, many JYJ fandoms, both inside and

[2.7] As soon as the JYJ members filed the lawsuit, many JYJ fandoms, both inside and

outside Korea, formed a group called People Who Are Against SM's Unlawful Contract. The

group circulated a petition online that addressed how the 13year contract was unfair and

against human rights laws—an argument that other TVXQ fan groups had not adopted. They

submitted a petition containing signatures of over 121,000 fans both on and offline to

various governmental and nongovernmental bodies, including the Seoul Central District

Court, the Fair Trade Commission, the National Human Rights Commission, and the Korea

Consumer Agency (Kim 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). The petition reignited the ongoing debate

over socalled slave contracts in the Kpop industry, which drew huge media attention to the

conflict; most media outlets used the term "slave contract" in their headlines (Jeon 2010;

Khan 2010; Park 2009; Segye 2009; SBS News 2010; MBC News 2010; VOP 2010). When

the Seoul central district court ruled in favor of JYJ on October 27, 2009, with the partial

acceptance of the exclusive contract suspension request submitted by the trio, the

progressive online newspaper Oh My News reported, "It is a victory for fandom" (Kim 2009c).

From the beginning of the lawsuit, SM stressed that public focus on slave contracts or human

rights was not the issue; instead, the case centered on a breach of confidence due to JYJ's

financial involvement with the cosmetics business. TVXQ fandom expressed disappointment,

particularly regarding progressive media reports that portrayed the trio as representatives of

the working class. These fans argued that the claims were in fact absurd, as JYJ left TVXQ for

no other reason than greed, even though they had already earned a tremendous amount of

money. In any case, the JYJ petition has become a significant milestone in the Kpop history

as many Kpop entertainment companies, including SM, as a result of the court order, had to

modify their exclusive contracts, including longterm contract periods, the penalties for

breach of contract, and unilateral decisions on schedules.

[2.8] Another progressive media outlet, Sisain, reported, "JYJ have struggled since leaving

SM Entertainment, as the latter wields enormous power within the industry," questioning

whether SM blocked the trio's TV appearances (Ko 2011). Likewise, JYJ fandom accused SM

of blocking the trio's ability to pursue their careers in both Korea and Japan, and such beliefs

inspired them to wield their collective power. They organized direct mailings to mainstream

broadcasting companies, and they circulated countless online petitions to save JYJ. A leading

progressive newspaper, the Hankyoreh, reported this as "aunty fans' counterattack against

the cruel entertainment authority" (Kim 2011c). In order to promote their stars by

themselves, fans planned and carried out a bus advertising campaign from January 27 to

February 26, 2011. A total of 120 buses carried a supportive message for JYJ that read, "We

Support Your Youth" (figure 2). Over 11 days (January 14–24, 2011) of fundraising, 9,817

fans collected more than ￦158 million (US$141,000), including international donations. It

has been reported that the financially stable aunty fandom at its center enabled such a costly

campaign (Kim 2011b). The JYJ bus project, which was followed by a second advertisement

campaign in the Seoul subway stations from March 7 to April 6, 2011, opened up the new era

of Kpop fancom where fan activism became more assertive, more efficient, and larger in

scale.

Figure 2. A bus with a JYJ advertisement campaign message. [View larger image.]

[2.9] This fan activism reached its apex with the launch of an Internet broadcasting service

wholly dedicated to JYJ. On March 4, 2011, JYJ fans launched the Internet TV site

ilovejyj.com (http://ilovejyj.com) to promote JYJ's releases and activities. The site moderators first started an online café (that is, an Internet forum) at Naver, an influential

portal Web site in Korea that launched its café service in 2003. There they translated JYJ

news into Japanese, Chinese, and English, and uploaded and shared JYJ videos and other

media content. They soon launched the first fanoperated Internet broadcasting service in the

Korean media industry, which demonstrates how grassroots media and fandom can now wield

power as great as that of the mainstream corporate media. Upon its launch, many

progressive media outlets, including Sisain and the Hankyoreh, highlighted how fandom had

created a direct communication channel between artists and audiences by way of fighting

against the socalled tyranny of the corporate power. The second day after its launch,

ilovejyj.com broadcast a video clip of many celebrities sending their congratulations.

Ironically, this included the rightwing politician Jeon YeoOk, known for her strong stance

against social minorities such as women, members of the working class, and those with

limited educational backgrounds. Many fans criticized the inclusion of this controversial

political figure, and the moderators of the Web site soon posted an apology on their site and

then stopped the entire service.

[2.10] This incident reignited debates surrounding the progressive media's discussion of

JYJ's slave contract lawsuit case, in which they created a distinct dichotomy between JYJ as

poor artists and SM as a tyrannical entertainment corporation. In an interview with the

Hankyoreh, the leader of JYJ Internet TV stated, "This JYJ case reminded me of the 1980s,

the era when we were fighting for democracy." She then added that the trio helped her to

reconnect to the spirit of seeking freedom, justice, and human rights (quoted in Kim 2011c).

Similar articles suggest that vigorous fan activism has, with the help of progressive media

outlets, assisted in the creation of JYJ's new image as democratic activists who supposedly

represent a neglected and marginalized group. After Jeon's interview aired online, however,

Web users on various online forums reinvigorated discussions about the absurdity of

promoting JYJ through the politically powerful images of progressive democratic activists

(note 3). Some Internet users have suggested that the power of obsessive fandom fabricated

false activist identities around JYJ, resulting in a bizarre scenario where fandom itself

rerepresented JYJ as a marginalized group. To highlight this point, one user posted two

paradoxical news articles, one containing an interview with a fan saying, "To help JYJ who are

paradoxical news articles, one containing an interview with a fan saying, "To help JYJ who are suffering from the financial struggle, I often go to Yoochun's mother's ice cream shop to give

them some business" (Kim 2011b), and the other describing how Yoochun bought his brother

a US$120,000 BMW to congratulate him on his acting debut (Kim 2011a).

[2.11] The continuing lawsuit between SM and JYJ is mirrored by their fans' participatory

Net activism, which promotes and protects their stars (both TVXQ and JYJ), and which is

becoming increasingly dynamic and innovative. The assertive Net activism of JYJ fandom

began a new era of participatory fan culture in Korea and elsewhere. Nevertheless, it also

shows an unavoidable limit: blind fan activism, which often focuses on the ostensible

phenomenon only, can create a mythical binary of the good "us" and the evil "them" while ignoring the ambiguity that could be derived from the insertion of political and capitalist

variables. An important question thus arises: is JYJ fan activism really revolutionary bottom

up Net activism, or is this carefully designed and manipulated topdown training? (note 4).

The rivalry between TVXQ and JYJ fan communities and their interactive fan activism

represent the ways that fans' Net activist practices can create multidimensional Webbased

communications, which can be contradictory. Yet such interactions can eventually allow

heterogeneous perspectives in the realm of Korean popular culture.

3. Sinsang teolgi: Cybervigilantism

[3.1] Fan culture has been criticized for what some media culture critics deem to be the

Internet's tendency to encourage obsessive behavior, even paranoia. Such negative

connotations of Net activism often manifest through Web users' collective vigilantism. One of

the most notable examples is the notorious Ok TaecYeon blood letter case. In November

2009, a teenager posted an image of a love letter that she had written in her menstrual blood

to a member of idol boy band 2PM on DC Inside. The note reads, "Ok TaecYeon, you can't

live without me" (Son 2009) (note 5). When netizens expressed doubt about the veracity of

her extreme behavior, the girl uploaded another photo as proof: a bloody pair of panties.

After the posts appeared, Korea's netizen detectives rushed to expose the identity of this fan.

Within a matter of hours, angry Internet users (exhibiting a collective will to discipline this

fan's transgressive expression of desire) had located her home page on the social networking

site Cyworld, which they publicized, inviting others to add vicious comments. The fan offered

a hasty apology, particularly to fellow 2PM fans and the pop idol himself, and stated that she

had not meant to garner such controversy: she was not a stalker but rather a selfconfessed

obsessive fan. Oktaekyeon saengri hyeolseo (Ok TaecYeon menstrual blood love letter)

became the most searched term for a few days on Naver, a Korean portal Web site. As the

deluge of hateful remarks continued, the fan threatened her attackers with a lawsuit.

[3.2] There were several bloodrelated copycat cases in the following months, and each

time, fellow fans and netizens discovered and publicized the posters' personal information

online. By using simple clues like email IDs, netizen detectives worked together to expose

perceived wrongdoers to publicly punish them on the Web in a practice known as sinsang

teolgi (personal information theft). DC Inside (http://www.dcinside.com) in particular has

become a notorious mecca of sinsang teolgi. DC Inside is much like the controversial English

become a notorious mecca of sinsang teolgi. DC Inside is much like the controversial Englishlanguage image board site 4chan (http://www.4chan.org): both have been closely linked to Internet subcultural movements and Net activisms, and both have been responsible for the

formation and popularization of a number of Internet memes. The controversial hacking

group Anonymous finds their roots in 4chan, and many of their activities have received great

media attention, including Operation Avenge Assange, where the group took credit for

attacks on Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal after these bodies severed business ties with

Wikileaks. Anonymous can be understood from a Korean perspective as pyein, and DC Inside

members have appropriated the term, whose literal meaning refers to an invalid or to an

individual whose failures have left him or her dejected. But in Korean Internet culture more

broadly, pyein refers to those who are enthusiastic (sometimes to an obsessive degree) with

particular cultural products or phenomena (Lee 2005, 311) (note 6). Some highly skilled pyein can reportedly uncover crucial data about a target within minutes; they are respected

as gosu (masters) by their fellow payeins. The connectivity inherent to social networking

services such as Facebook and Twitter has made these practices easier than ever before, as

Web users can pilfer more detailed and sensitive personal data via advanced search tools.

Analyzing the practices of the Korean digital generation within the framework of a society

composed of munhwa bujok (cultural tribes), Lee DongYeon emphasizes how DC Inside has

emerged as a new cultural phenomenon leading Net activism (2005, 70). As displayed on DC

Inside, pyein culture shows the possibility of empowering grassroots mediadriven Net

activism by encouraging users to participate in various sociopolitical campaigns, such as

public protests about the Iraq war and the movement against the impeachment of South

Korean president Roh MooHyun in 2004 (Lee 2005). Indeed, although the DC Inside

community evinces progressive characteristics, the appropriation of the term pyein highlights

ambiguities: media and cultural critics have chastised the DC Inside community for

inappropriate and obsessive Internet use, which is often exemplified by collective online

vigilantism.

[3.3] Cheong and Gong examine the recent Chinese cybervigilantism phenomenon renrou

sousuo (human flesh search) to investigate "how emerging media have been appropriated for

online searches to hunt for personal information about social deviants to restore public

morality" (2010, 2). Their findings suggest that the identification of corrupt officials and

circulation of their private data online amplified attention on their abuse of power and

pressured the authorities toward greater accountability. Although they emphasize the ways in

which cybervigilantism reinvigorates legal justice or public morality, they ignore how

cybervigilantism can also actively violate basic privacy rights. One example is the Kim Bu

Seon sex scandal in Korea. Actress Kim BuSeon confessed to having sex with an unidentified

married lawyer turned politician who was the same age as her immediately after the 2007

presidential election. In the report, the actress said she decided to come forward about the

matter because she felt unduly manipulated by him, alleging that "he was using his power to

harass her" (Lee 2010c). On the basis of the information given in the story, netizen

detectives on DC Inside were able to identify a politician and posted his personal details on

various Web sites, and they requested a public apology from the politician. Kim BuSeon soon

said that he was not the politician she had had an affair with, but netizen detectives'

vigilantism continued. Pyein culture's vigilantism, inherent in sinsang teolgi, has triggered

vigilantism continued. Pyein culture's vigilantism, inherent in sinsang teolgi, has triggered debates concerning new media communication and privacy issues.

[3.4] The case of the Kpop artist Tablo presents a concrete example of how sinsang teolgi

is used for antifandom. Korean Canadian Daniel Lee, who goes by the stage name Tablo, is

the leader of popular hiphop group Epik High. Tablo has become popular not only because of

his musical talent, but also because of his educational background: he received

undergraduate and MA degrees with excellent grades in three and a half years at Stanford.

Soon, suspicious netizen detectives created debate over the legitimacy of his impressive

educational credentials. Netizen detectives claimed to uncover flaws in his story, arguing that

the academic transcripts that he released to prove his attendance at an elite university were

fabricated, and they responded repeatedly to Tablo's attempts to confirm the truth with

charges of coverup and conspiracy. In October 2010, a police probe concluded that Tablo's

academic credentials were indeed authentic, and 14 of those who had posted defamatory

comments were referred to prosecutors on libel charges.

[3.5] This incident has become a model case of antifandom in the Kpop scene. Antifandom,

according to Jonathan Gray, is "the realm not necessarily of those who are against fandom

per se, but of those who strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid,

morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel" (2003, 70). Tablo's antifandom is somewhat

different from the usual antifandom in the popular culture realm. Lee DongYeon has stated

that Tablo's antifandom reacts not against his musical talents and tastes, but seeks ethical

honesty and justice from both him and society in general (2010a). The antifandom

movement originated in several postings on DC Inside's Epik High gallery (community),

where the probability of Tablo's impressive academic achievements was questioned.

Responding to those accusations, many gallery pyeins began posting audiovisual evidence

that appeared to clash with Tablo's claim. For instance, there are many video clips posted

where Tablo says, "I was teaching English for one year in Korea," with some netizens arguing

that the period overlaps the time he was supposed to be studying at Stanford. In May 2010,

some of those antifans launched an Internet community called We Request the Truth from

Tablo ( Tajinyo). By using every possible channel and tool, Tajinyo members practiced

thorough sinsang teolgi of Tablo. His life was placed under a microscope, and the smallest

biographical details faced close public scrutiny. When considering fandom research as

studying interactions that occur between text and audience, the antifandom concerning Tablo

and the minute details of his life online warrants critical attention because his entire life

became the text to be analyzed, from his high school photos to his Twitter comments. As the

investigation continued, the initial controversy surrounding his educational background

expanded and encompassed equally important issues, such as nationality laundering (a term

widely used in Korea to describe the practice of changing nationalities for any unlawful

reason), financial corruption, military service evasion, and accusations of plagiarism. Some

members even inferred a connection to an international cartel of academic certificate brokers.

The official members of Tajinyo reached up to 180,000, and some antifans created YouTube

channels and promoted their beliefs through various fanmade videos (note 7).

Video 1. AntiTablo channel on YouTube, TheSurgeryFevers

(http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSurgeryFevers).

Video 2. AntiTablo channel on YouTube, Thagoora.

[3.6] On October 8, 2010, MBC, one of the three major broadcasting services in Korea,

broadcast a program called Tablo Goes to Stanford. The producer, Jeong SeongHoo, stated

that they made the program from a neutral position to discover whether Tablo had graduated

from Stanford, and to consider why the current online antiTablo movement was problematic

(quoted in Lee 2010b). Despite her claim, many netizens questioned whether it focused too

closely on the negative aspects of Internet culture and Net activism. One netizen wrote,

"MBC, from a biased subjective perspective, portrayed the majority of netizens as stupid

blind maniacs." Another netizen said, "The program shows no intention to deliver Tajinyo's point of view and even from the beginning it started from their preestablished conclusion

which is that this bunch of netizens are religious fanatics" (note 8). Son GyeongJae, a professor at Kyung Hee University, stated, "It is not the Internet, but the people who misuse

professor at Kyung Hee University, stated, "It is not the Internet, but the people who misuse it that are problematic…Thus we need structural and contextual approaches and

interpretations to understand such a social phenomenon" (quoted in Im 2010).

[3.7] What is the particular social context in Korea that drives such a phenomenon? At the

core of the Tablo case lies Korea's notorious academic elitism. Chang SiGi, a professor at

Dongguk University, has stated that Korea's modern education system (which is rooted in the

American system) is heavily driven by ranking (of both students and universities), and

eventually turns people into slaves of power and capital (2011). Korea's academic elitism

hands graduates of prestigious universities the best opportunities, regardless of actual ability.

Those from prestigious foreign universities in particular can enjoy special attention, and Tablo

has benefited from these biases. At almost every media event, his Stanford master's degree

was mentioned in tones of awe and praise. His academic background enabled him to gain

more recognition compared to artists who have similar skills and talents. Antifans therefore

often argue that "because of his lies, many talented artists have suffered. By emphasizing his

prestigious university background, Tablo snatched the potential opportunities of other artists

who are more talented than him" (http://cafe.naver.com/tajeenyo). This rationale only

highlights the reality of Korean society, where such excessive academic elitism is ardently

practiced and broadly encouraged, particularly in the media.

[3.8] Another contextual factor is the widely spread distrust of governmental authorities,

including the police and the prosecution as well as media authorities. Unusually for Kpop

fandoms, 70 percent of the members of Tajinyo are over 30. As the backbone of society, they

are the generation that, on the basis of their established social experiences, attempts to

maintain justice when facing social problems (Lee 2010a). Their antifandom thus reflects

their desire to uphold social justice, as they do not trust social authorities. According to

psychiatrist Lee HongShik, "As we can see from the example of the Cheonanham report,

people have a profound mistrust of the government, and the Tablo case suggests that such a

lack of faith is a widespread tendency in this society" (quoted in Baek 2010) (note 9). It has

also been claimed that some of these celebrity fakediploma scandals (like the Shin JeongAh

case) may have stimulated collective mistrust in the public (Baek 2010).

[3.9] Tablo's antifandom reflects not only the dark side of Net activism, but also the dark

side of Korean society itself. Although the original Tajinyo has disappeared, there are various

new Web communities where thousands of netizens continue to look for the truth of the Tablo

case, and where they also demand clarification on many other sociopolitical issues (note 10).

Starting from obsessed cybervigilantism, this antifandom went through a process of clashing

and merging with different opinions from many citizens and media, until it finally expanded

its concerns to embrace wider sociopolitical issues. This transition should be understood not

as an aberration of religiousstyle fanaticism, but as an ongoing negotiation between social

injustice and Net activism. The second and the third Tajinyos signify the ways in which Net

activism—whether such activism is considered positively or negatively—continuously creates

different opinions and concerns through which citizens can interact directly with sociopolitical

representatives. Computermediated communications allow these citizens to easily express

grievances that may be due to the biased sociopolitical system. Through assertive fan (or

antifan) activist movements, fans create new modes of Web communication channels that

antifan) activist movements, fans create new modes of Web communication channels that

can easily reach not only the industry, but also politics itself.

4. "Korea is gay": Othering mechanisms

[4.1] Online Kpop fandom often demonstrates Othering mechanisms of online participatory

Net activism through displays of a strong sense of nationalism and even racism. The Othering

mechanisms refer to the ways that certain online user activities—often represented by some

extreme Kpop fan practices—can demonstrate nationalistic sentiments embedded in Korean

society more broadly. Such nationalistic activities typify the negative aspects of Net activism

within the Kpop realm. For example, in January 2011, a netizen posted a petition to eject all

Chinese idol stars currently working in Korea. This act was criticized by a majority of netizens

in the same community, and the petition was soon canceled.

[4.2] The Tablo antifandom also pertains to these Othering mechanisms. Along with the

education certificate controversy, the nationalitylaundering and military service evasion

accusations are also significant issues in the Tablo case. Some antifans argue that Tablo

laundered his nationality and obtained Canadian citizenship to avoid serving in the Korean the

military. On March 10, 2011, a news article appeared on Naver entitled "Tablo, After

Education Controversy, Now Preparing Comeback?" (Kim 2011d). Within a few hours, the

article attracted more than a hundred netizen responses, many of which suggested that "a

Canadian should go back to his own country." A netizen remarked, "Even though he hasn't

done anything illegal, what he has done and is doing is morally corrupt because he enjoys all

the rights making a lot of money in this country and still evades serving the army which is

the key national duty that all Korean men should do." According to the conscription policy in

Korea, all ablebodied men are required to serve a mandatory 21 months of military service.

Because issues related to serving military duty are always sensitive in Korea (especially

among young men), those who try to avoid military service are harshly criticized (note 11).

Koreandescent celebrities who hold foreign citizenship are often at the center of fierce

discussion, and JaeBeom (former leader of idol boy band 2PM) is one of them. Holding

foreign citizenship is a doubleedged sword in the Korean entertainment industry; as a result

of the exotic image of "the foreigner," it often allows an express path to becoming a star, but

it can be turned into a dangerous label that is also "foreign" at any moment.

[4.3] In September 2009, JaeBeom's MySpace controversy swept Korea, which was

triggered by his statement that "Korea is gay…I hate Koreans." The word gay is often used in the United States (primarily by adolescents) to defile and degrade someone, and it has a

negative connotation demonstrating a homophobic assumption that "gay is bad." The Korean

media and other netizens responded passionately, generating news articles and blog postings

that included many criticisms of JaeBeom's arrogant "American" behaviors. According to PD

Note (an influential current affairs program in Korea), more than 760 on and offline news

articles were produced in the first 4 days, and as a result, only 4 days after the comments

were first revealed, JaeBeom left the group and flew back to his hometown of Seattle in the

United States (cited in Hong 2009). Of the 760 articles, 330 were intensively published in the

6 hours between the announcement of his leaving and his actual departure (Hong 2009).

6 hours between the announcement of his leaving and his actual departure (Hong 2009).

There were various fan activities on and offline asking JaeBeom to come back. Fans from

all over the world made and uploaded a series of flash mob videos on YouTube; they put up a

sky banner saying, "J. What Time Is It Now?" above his house in Seattle; and some even

placed newspaper ads (figure 3). Consequently, 9 months later, he returned to the Kpop

scene. Social media–empowered international fandom enabled his comeback, as cultural critic

Kang MyeongSeok remarked: "YouTube was a bridge between JaeBeom and his fans" (cited

in Ko 2010). Although he has come back, this incident revealed how participatory Net

activism can create a fiercely nationalistic sentiment that easily reinforces Othering

mechanisms in the Kpop realm. It is ironic that both social media and online participatory

Net activism were behind both ousting him from the country and supporting his comeback.

For 2PM - 1:59 Time Stop Flash Mob by Malays...

Video 3. "For 2PM–1:59 Time Stop Flash Mob" by Malaysia Hottest (2009).

Figure 3. Ad that "Missy USA Hottest," 2PM's Korean American fan group, released to Korean

American community newspapers requesting JaeBeom's comeback. [View larger image .]

[4.4] JaeBeom was strategically included in the group mainly because of his transcultural

Korean American identity, which is now a common practice in the Korean entertainment

industry to target the global market (Jung 2011, 78). Such practices reflect the transcultural

cosmopolitan desires of the industry, which are concerned with the transgression of

boundaries and markers between the familiar "I" and strange "Others" (Stevenson 2003, 5).

However, instead of transgressing cultural boundaries, the practices are often in the mode of

simply Othering, exoticizing, or even fetishizing such transcultural pop products. A clear

simply Othering, exoticizing, or even fetishizing such transcultural pop products. A clear

example of this is the way in which the local media highlighted JaeBeom's foreignness while

repeatedly focusing on his Englishlanguage ability and his cultural origin as a Bboy (breakdancer) from Seattle. In many television game shows, the hosts have often randomly asked him to speak English as a sort of parlor trick, while other guests look on admiringly. His

speaking English is considered a special skill in the Kpop industry, stemming from Korea's

obsession with Englishlanguage education (note 12). Like Tablo's "Stanford grad" label, his

"Seattle Bboy" label and his fluent Englishlanguage skills enabled him to gain relatively

higher recognition than other idol wannabes. He has addressed this fact himself, noting that

"everyone thinks i'm like the illest rapper wen i suck nuts at rappin…so dass pretty dope…

haha" (from his MySpace comments, at http://www.myspace.com/parkjaebeom). Despite his rapping ability, which he said "sucked," he could still become a popular idol, maybe because

of his extra talent: speaking fluent English. In other words, his ostensibly superior (stemming

from his foreignness) yet fetishized transcultural identity has been constructed by Korea's

popular industry system within its Englishcrazed sociocultural contextual environment.

[4.5] The MySpace controversy articulates a different, yet just as deeply embedded,

method of Othering as it marginalized him as an arrogant American who mocked the entire

Korean nation. This sudden shift shows how a strategically constructed transcultural identity,

largely driven by the industry's globalization desires, can easily be deconstructed by fiercely

nationalistic Net activism. This deconstruction demonstrates clear Othering mechanisms. It is

significant to note when and how the positive foreignness of JaeBeom turned to a negative

strange Otherness. As soon as he said " Korea is gay," he located himself outside the circle of uri nara saram (literally, "our country's people"). Normally, Koreans like to use the term "our"

instead of "my." For example, uri eomma (our mom) is said instead of nae eomma (my mom), even where there are no other siblings. The Korean people's sense of collectivism is

already a wellknown national characteristic and is often discussed around a discourse of

"weness." In this sense, by using the term Korea instead of uri nara (our country), ironically, JaeBeom has Othered his fellow Koreans first; he has become Othered while he has Othered

Korea. From that moment, his American identity overpowered his Korean one, and he

became an arrogant American boy who, from the perspective of Korean netizens, was

backbiting uri nara and uri nara saram. Ever since the incident occurred, I have often

speculated whether Korean netizens would have been as angry if he had said, " Uri nara is

gay" instead of "Korea is gay."

[4.6] JaeBeom is still a target for blunt nationalistic online comments from netizens, such

as "serve the army" or "go back to your country." Netizens, especially young men, are

disturbed by the ways in which celebrities seem to be exploiting all the benefits of being

Koreans (such as earning a lot of money in the Kpop industry) while claiming a foreign

identity to avoid fulfilling their national duties. Ironically, the highly praised and strategically

promoted transnational attributes of Kpop idols can be shifted to disturbing attributes that

represent a hypocritical double standard. The JaeBeom case demonstrates that rapid shifts

can be mobilized by the Othering mechanisms of Net activism, and that this Net activism is

largely contradictory. There is also a strong sense of collectivism active within both the nation

largely contradictory. There is also a strong sense of collectivism active within both the nation and the Netactivist movements themselves that propels such contradictory Net practices.

[4.7] This contradiction can be identified as stemming from the fact that it was the fans'

Netparticipationempowered action itself that facilitated JaeBeom's return. While in Seattle,

JaeBeom posted a video clip of himself performing B.o.B.'s hit American pop song, "Nothing

on You," and within a day, the clip attracted over 2 million hits. Various online fan

communities from across the world collectively and systematically worked together to boost

the hit count to make JaeBeom popular online. Other clips of JaeBeom performing Bboy

dance moves with his crew have also gained popularity on YouTube. Certainly the

effectiveness of the participatory fan activist practices cannot be doubted: it was soon after

these videos gained attention on YouTube that many multinational media outlets were able to

identify both JaeBeom's popularity and his commercial potential. Sidus HQ, one of the major

entertainment companies in Korea, launched negotiations on the basis of this online fandom,

thus marking JaeBeom's return to the industry. While the Othering mechanisms may

indicate a largely negative, even blindly nationalistic, aspect of Net activism, such conflicting

participatory fan interactions can influence the decisionmaking processes and potential

outcomes of the cultural industry itself. These can be both positive and negative, and are

fundamentally diverse. In Kpop, Net activism can therefore be understood as a continuous

negotiation between contradictory views and concerns, where fans' participatory interactions

can potentially lead to new forms of social action that can enable contradictory yet more

democratic Net communications.

5. Conclusion

[5.1] As a result of the rapidly increasing diffusion of digital technology at a mass level,

there have been various modes of planning and coordinating sociopolitical activities at the

organizational, institutional, and individual levels. The Internet forms a participatory Web

space, "free from centralised control with intrinsically empowering characteristics—costless,

spaceless, timeless," and such a decentralized mass communication environment reinforces

people's participation in decision making (Gibson, Rommele, and Ward 2004, 1). Case studies

in Kpop the domain center around fan activism, cybervigilantism, and Othering mechanisms

to demonstrate the contradictory characteristics of fan activity that may influence both the

positive and negative decisionmaking processes of consumers and the Kpop industry as a

whole. Such contradictions reflect the complex sociocultural contextual circumstances of

Korea, in which participatory Net activism enables unique Webbased interactions and

communications, and eventually creates diverse voices and opinions around the Korean

cultural entertainment realm. Although Kpop fans' online activities often create a nuisance,

they also engender meaningful and deliberative conversation across different societal groups

and enable the construction of multiple perspectives.

[5.2] This is visible in recent events and Kpop fans' responses to them. A massive 8.9magnitude earthquake hit the Pacific Ocean near northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, causing widespread damage to the entire nation. Soon after the earthquake, a TVXQ fan

gallery on a major news portal, Daum, started a thread to suggest collecting aid for the

gallery on a major news portal, Daum, started a thread to suggest collecting aid for the earthquake victims in Japan. One fan posted, "They have given so much wonderful support to

TVXQ so far. I want us to give the support back to them." This simple thread had the

potential to spark a significant social movement. Although some online fan practices may

have negative connotations, by engaging with specific civic issues and social events,

participatory fan activism encourages people to interact, discuss, and challenge conventional

discourses. These interactions may lead to new forms of social action that enable a complex

and continuing negotiation between social injustice and Net activism. As is evident from these

case studies, digital technology–empowered fan activism has become a key force in

producing and circulating not only media content, but also public opinion. Popular culture

fandom may have once been in the margins of the media industry and in society's shadows

more generally, but the emergence of digital technology has allowed it to rise as a key player

in the industry and as a constructive social agent in Korean society and elsewhere.

6. Acknowledgment

[6.1] This work was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship at the School of

Communication and the Arts at Victoria University.

7. Notes

1. There is a Western counterpart to these informal promotion companies. Street teams are a

promotional tool often used by entertainment companies and record labels to promote new

albums and artists. The street team members often consist of fans of artists. Unlike in Kpop

fandom, fans involved in street teams are usually hired and organized by media

entertainment companies.

2. Since their 2004 debut, TVXQ (discovered and managed by SM) has arguably been one of

the most successful Kpop acts in Asia, with reportedly the largest fan base (over 800,000) in

the world. Enjoying great success in the Japanese music industry in particular, they became

the first foreign artist to top the Oricon singles charts six times and placed their single and

album simultaneously within the top three slots of Oricon's singles and albums chart—the

first time a foreign artist had done so in 15 years.

3. See discussions on MLBPARK, a major league baseball community forum

(http://mlbpark.donga.com/bbs/view.php?

bbs=mpark_bbs_bullpen09&idx=1132486&cpage=1&s_work=search&select=stt&keyword=JYJ);

and 82 Cook, a lifestyle community forum (http://www.82cook.com/zb41/zboard.php?

id=free2&no=689161).

4. In Kpop fandom in Korea, the word joryeonhada (train) is widely used to refer to the way the stars attract or captivate their fans through certain behaviors and activities.

5. For additional details and the image of the letter, see

http://www.allkpop.com/2009/11/2pm_taecyeon_scarlet_letter.

6. Pyein is similar to the Japanese notion of otaku.

6. Pyein is similar to the Japanese notion of otaku.

7. There were quite a few antiTablo channels on YouTube. However, after the police

announcement in October 2010 (which ruled in favor of Tablo), most of them disappeared.

One of the few channels still operating is TheSurgeryFevers

(http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSurgeryFevers).

8. These comments are netizen responses attached to Park (2010).

9. On March 26, 2010, the Cheonanham, a South Korean navy ship carrying 104 personnel, sank off the country's west coast, killing 46 seamen. A South Korean–led investigation carried

out by a team of international experts presented a summary of its investigation on May 20,

2010, concluding that a North Korean torpedo fired by a midget submarine had sunk the

warship. North Korea denied that it was responsible for the sinking. A survey conducted in

September 2010 noted that "only 32% of Korean citizens believe the government's report"

(cited in Jo 2010).

10. A few of the main ones are the Republic of Korea We Want

(http://cafe.naver.com/whatbecomes2), the Society We Respect

(http://cafe.naver.com/dreamcorea.cafe), and the Society Netizens Respect (http://cafe.naver.com/nesoc.cafe).

11. A Korean American singer, Steve Yoo (Yoo SeungJun), repeatedly said on Korean television that he would fulfill his military duty as a healthy Korean man. However, in 2002,

just before he was to be drafted, he became a naturalized US citizen. As a result, thousands

of angry Korean netizens formed a furious antifandom and circulated petitions to deport him.

The Korean government considered his action an act of desertion and deported him to the

United States, permanently banning him from entering Korea.

12. See Park and Abelmann (2004); Lee and Koo (2006); Shim and Park (2008).

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

Being of service: X-Files fans and social engagement

Bethan Jones

Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales

[0.1] Abstract— I explore the ways in which celebrity charity and fan activism can lead to civic

engagement and social change. Fan studies has moved away from the traditional view of fans as

psychologically deficient and has begun to examine resistance within the cultural productions of

fandom—fan fiction, for example, addressing gender imbalances in popular TV shows. However,

scholarship on celebrityfocused fans still retains much of the stigmatizing language that mars

early writing about fans. I examine the relationship between celebrity and fan; examine the role

celebrity plays in framing fan charity; assess how fan investment affects celebrity charity work;

and argue that fans are active participants in encouraging social awareness and charitable

giving.

[0.2] Keywords— Celebrity; Celebrity activism; Celebrity culture; Civic engagement; Fan

activism; Fan charity; Fandom; Gillian Anderson; Participatory culture; The XFiles

Jones, Bethan. 2012. "Being of Service: XFiles Fans and Social Engagement." In

"Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova,

special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0309.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Early academic work on audiences that could be considered the precursors to the

contemporary field of fan studies often focused on the deviant side of fan culture: the fan as

obsessive, lacking, and vulnerable (Horton and Wohl 1956; Schickel 1985) or the fan who,

according to William Shatner, needs to "get a life" (Jenkins 1992, 10). Work on fandom over the

last two decades has proved instrumental in moving the field away from this notion of the fan as

dysfunctional (Fiske 1989; Jenkins 1992; Hills 2002) and, as Sandvoss points out, is revealing "a

more complex relationship between fans as agents and the structural confines of popular culture

in which they operate, a relationship which cannot be reduced to one being simply a consequence

of the other" (2005, 3). But these texts primarily limit their focus to movie, TV, sports, and music

fans (Star Trek, The XFiles [1993–2002], and Madonna, to name but a few), arguing that

attitudes toward these groups of fans are changing. Much less work has been done on changing

attitudes regarding the celebrityfocused fan, and the language used to describe these fans is

often the language of 30 or 40 years ago. Chris Rojek, as recently as 2007, noted that

"relationships between fans and celebrities frequently involve unusually high levels of nonreciprocal emotional dependence, in which fans project intensely positive feelings onto the celebrity" (2007, 171) and followed this with a reference to "obsessed" fans, suggesting that for celebrityfocused fans, there is no middle ground. Lynn E. McCutcheon and John Maltby's 2002

examination of stereotypes of the celebrity worshipper further reinforces the belief that celebrity

worshippers are "foolish," "irresponsible," and "submissive."

[1.2] As a fan of The XFiles (XF), a member of XF fandom, and a participant in several Gillian Anderson–inspired groups working to raise money through engagement in fandom, I question the

readings of celebrityfocused fans as obsessive and foolish. Here, I examine how fans'

relationships with shows and stars can motivate them to seek change in the real world, and the

effect participation in fandom has had on fans' engagement with charity work. I look at case

studies of two XF fan groups, heART and Aussie XFiles Fans @ Facebook (AXF), to assess how

they encourage charitable giving among fans, examine the ways in which the role of celebrity is

used in framing the charitable efforts of fans, and assess how fan investment may affect celebrity

charity work.

2. Methodology

[2.1] I analyzed the responses I received to interviews conducted with XF fan groups, focusing

on their involvement with XF fandom and fan charity. These interviews took place via email

between October 2010 and March 2011. As a member of XF fandom, I was aware of heART and

AXF (and, indeed, was a member of their Facebook groups and followed their activities on

Twitter), and I contacted the founders of both groups in August 2010. I obtained permission from

the founders to contact members of the groups—heART via email and AXF through Facebook's

private message and group wall discussion functions—then continued my exchanges individually

with those who responded. I also examined heART and AXF's Web sites and Facebook pages, and

extracts from these are contained here. Technically, individual posts on Internet message boards

and Web site forums are considered to be within the public domain, but James E. Porter (1998)

argues that precedents for treating any and all Internet writing with integrity in research

situations must be established, and that it is methodologically valuable to treat every post as

writing and every poster as a writer. In the course of my research, I treat the use of Web sites,

Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts as I would treat the use of a personal email interview.

Sandi Hicks, Sophie G, and Roxane B all granted me permission to use their work. Each of the

fans whose responses I used in the course of this essay gave informed consent to their answers

being used, and institutional review board approval was granted for this research to take place.

3. Defining fan charity and fan activism

[3.1] One of the major problems in understanding fannish social engagement is the absence of

commonly agreedupon or conventionally used definitions of "fan charity" and "fan activism."

Both of these terms raise a number of questions about how they can be applied to acts of charity

or activism undertaken by fans.

[3.2] MerriamWebster defines charity as "generosity and helpfulness especially toward the needy or suffering" (http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/charity) and activism as "a doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition

to one side of a controversial issue" (http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/activism). But

what does the modifier "fan" bring to this definition? Simply adding the word to the sentence and describing fan charity as generosity toward the needy carried out by fans is an oversimplification

that fails to answer a variety of important questions. First among these is: what kind of fan is

being discussed? Abercrombie and Longhurst define fans as "those people who become

particularly attached to certain programmes or stars within the context of relatively heavy mass

media use" (1998, 138), yet further develop their topography to include "cultists" and

media use" (1998, 138), yet further develop their topography to include "cultists" and

"enthusiasts." Sandvoss (2005) notes that groups that from the outside appear to be casual

viewers identify as fans, while Hills (2002) observes that who or what a fan is seems to be

common sense. Further discussion of who or what a fan is falls beyond the scope of this essay,

but the term is laden with connotations and, when placed next to "charity," is perhaps not as

simple as it first seems. Further questions to consider to understand more fully what we mean

when we discuss fan charity and fan activism, and what effect each of these can have on civic

engagement, include the following: Does fan charity require a single fan acting fannishly, or a

group of fans? Do fan charities need to raise funds for organizations supported by the celebrity

they admire, or can they raise funds for any cause? Do community and communal decisions play

a part in fan charity? Should fan charity be confined to simply fans raising money, or can it

include fans donating to a fundraising event undertaken by the star they respect? What about

charitable organizations that began as fan charities but have since extended their scope and have

become registered notforprofit organizations raising funds for a variety of charities? Fan

activism has traditionally been regarded as fans acting together to extend or resurrect a group,

film, or TV show in which they have an interest. Star Trek fans' letterwriting campaign of the

1960s, for example, would be considered a case of fan activism, as would XF fans' current

campaigning for a third film. But in this case, the modifier "fan" causes more problems, as it

appears to change the definition of "activism." To anyone other than a fan of that show, a

network canceling a show is unlikely to be considered controversial. Should a broader definition of

activism, one that includes any intentional efforts to bring about change, be considered? This

would certainly apply to fans' attempts to prevent a beloved TV program being canceled.

However, I examine fan activism in the context of celebrity charity, civic engagement, and social

change, and these are important differences; there is, arguably, much more political intent in

these forms of fan activism than in the more traditional kind. In coming to a definition of fan

activism in the context of my argument, it is important to consider the following: the roles that

community and communal decisions might take in fan activism; the roles a fictional show and an

actor playing a character can have in influencing fans; and the extent to which the text can

inform fans and allow them to engage socially and politically. I argue that each term must take

into account the far more complex issues surrounding social change, politics, and fan

communities than their current definitions do.

[3.3] I define "fan charity" as a concerted effort made by a group of fans to raise money for an organization nominated by or affiliated with their fandom, and "fan activism" as fans actively

campaigning for issues nominated by or affiliated with the fandom, either through issues raised in

the text or by awareness raised by the star. Both case studies involve fans raising funds for, and

raising awareness of, charities supported by Gillian Anderson, the actress playing Special Agent

Dana Scully in XF.

4. Case study: AXF

[4.1] AXF was established as a Facebook group on April 2, 2008. Sandi Hicks discovered there

was no Australian fan base for XF on Facebook, and although she was a member of several other

communities focusing on the show, she decided to create her own. In an email interview, she

told me, "I thought that us Australians needed a space to come together and share all our

thoughts about the show, its brilliant actors and everything in between." Initially there were no

plans to undertake charitable work when the group was set up. It was intended purely to discuss

plans to undertake charitable work when the group was set up. It was intended purely to discuss

the second XF film, I Want To Believe (2008), and the majority of discussion still taking place on

the group is related to the show and its actors, rather than fundraising. Sandi said the idea to

raise money came with the announcement of Gillian Anderson's pregnancy in 2008:

[4.2] The idea came about when we were told that Gillian was expecting her 3rd child,

and I thought it would be nice for us to throw together a small fundraiser as a present

for her, rather than send her a whole heap of baby goods that she would probably

neither want or need—or to send her flowers that would just die. Sending a little over

$2000 to [Alinyiikira Junior School] is a pretty good way of saying "Congratulations on

the birth of your baby, Gillian"—we thought we'd support her favourite charity.

[4.3] Sandi raised funds by selling AXF Tshirts (figure 1), holding XF episode marathons in

which groups of fans met up to watch XF episodes and donate money, and auctioning

autographed memorabilia, donated by Anderson, on eBay.

Figure 1. Aussie XF shirt, 2009 (http://aussiexfilesfans.webs.com/apps/webstore/). [View larger

image.]

[4.4] The first fundraiser collected AU$2,036.04 (approximately $1,600). Sandi sent the money

to Alinyiikira Junior School and compiled a book for Anderson, containing photographs of fans who

had donated, a short biography, and favorite XF quotes and episodes (figure 2). In January 2009,

Sandi received a message from Anderson thanking her for the effort put into raising the money

for Alinyiikira Junior School:

[4.5] To all the girls and a handful of guys who raised money in honor of Felix's birth

—what a fantastic thing you all did putting the event together as well as the book. How

nice to be able to see the faces of those involved and to get a hint at your personalities

from the quotes you chose and admission of favorite episodes. The time and effort you

individually put in has moved me on Felix's behalf of course but on behalf of all the

young children at Alinyiikira, you cannot imagine what a difference that accumulative

effort will make in their lives. Thank you all so very much. And Felix thanks you. He told

me. (http://aussiexfilesfans.webs.com/messagefromgillian.htm)

Figure 2. AJS book, 2009. [View larger image .]

[4.6] The message from Anderson was a key factor in influencing Sandi to continue her fundraising: "Her message back after it was all said and done was the icing on the cake and made me want to strive harder and raise more money—so I decided that fundraising would become an

annual thing." Since the first fundraiser, AXF has continued to raise money for Alinyiikira Junior

School. Each year's fundraiser has seen more names from the XF community, including Chris

Carter, Frank Spotnitz, David Duchovny, and William B. Davis, contributing items for eBay

auctions. Each fundraiser has also been more successful than the last, and AXF has now raised

close to AU$20,000 (approximately $18,000).

[4.7] AXF is perhaps the example of fan charity closest to the definition I outlined earlier. AXF

raised money for charities and organizations supported by Gillian Anderson because of the impact

Anderson has had on these fans. Sandi told me she had been aware of Anderson's philanthropy

for some time, but it was through the character of Special Agent Dana Scully that she, and the

rest of AXF's members, first became aware of Anderson. Grossberg suggests that "people are

constantly struggling, not merely to figure out what a text means, but to make it mean

something that connects to their own lives, experiences, needs and desires" (1992, 52), and for

many XF fans, it was Scully who enabled them to connect to the text. Both critics and fans alike

noted Scully's scientific background, her job—as an FBI agent, she was considered a woman in a

man's world—and her strength of character, with Rumbaugh noting that "Scully is also someone

with whom women can identify as a contemporary woman who faces challenges and doubts and

who endeavours to achieve a fulfilling life" (2008, 57). Indeed, in several interviews Anderson

noted the impact Scully has had both on fans and herself:

[4.8] There was a time when I started reading the letters and people were saying,

"You saved my life," or interviewers would say that Scully was a role model for young

women…The more I started to talk about her character traits—how honest she was,

how passionate about doing the right thing—the more I took cues from the way she

handled herself. (Flaherty 2002, "Success" section)

[4.9] Scully and Anderson are cited as a role models by many of the Australian XF fans. It was

through the character of Scully that Sandi, who was bullied as a child, found someone she could

aspire to emulate. She says:

[4.10] Dana Scully to me is the perfect role model. An intelligent woman, working

[4.10] Dana Scully to me is the perfect role model. An intelligent woman, working

every day in a typically "man's" world—she's worked damned hard to be where she is

and she's someone who every young woman should aspire to be like. Strong,

determined, faithful, relentless, caring.

[4.11] The charity work undertaken by members of AXF might be considered a more traditional

form of fan charity in that they draw their inspiration from an admired celebrity. As Dyer notes,

people are interested in celebrities because of their ability to "speak to us in terms we can

understand about things that are important to us" (1986, 16); Scully, and by extension Anderson,

has been able to speak to the Australian XF fans about issues that are important to them.

Honesty, dedication, strength, and loyalty are attributes given to Scully, and Anderson, by fans.

These characteristics are important to fans, and as a result, they model themselves on or

undertake work for Scully and Anderson. Anderson notes:

[4.12] Every thought that they have about Scully or about Gillian to use initially for

their own strength is fantastic, if that's how it can be used. But the important, essential

next step is for them to find where that resonates in their own bodies, and to draw on

that which exists in themselves and not continue to think of me or the character in

order to get up out of bed in the morning. If it can be an impetus and a starting point,

then that can be incredibly healthy and a great guidelines; but there needs to be a

transition. I think that for any fan of a role model, the important thing to learn is that

they are responding to those aspects because they exist within oneself already.

(Rumbaugh 2008, 84)

[4.13] Of particular relevance in this remark is the idea that fans are responding to attributes

within the celebrity that already exist within themselves. Often, as I discuss later, celebrityfocused fans are maligned in popular discourse, depicted as isolated, foolish, irresponsible, and immature. If, however, they are responding to positive attributes that a celebrity possesses and

are able to bring those into their own lives for the benefit of themselves and others, then these

popular constructions of celebrityfocused fans become much more problematic and need to be

reexamined.

5. Case study: heART

[5.1] "Do you like art, The XFiles, and Gillian Anderson and want to support a great cause? For two weeks in June 2010 heART will auction XFiles and Gillian Anderson related artworks to

benefit Off The Street Kids—a charity aiding the empowerment of marginalised children and

young people in South Africa. Thirteen talented artists (and The XFiles fans) from around the

world have donated their original artwork for this cause" (http://heART.keyofx.org/). The opening

statement on the heART Web site clearly sets out the mission of the organization: to raise money

for a Gillian Anderson–sponsored charity by selling XF fan art to fans of the show. Roxane B was

inspired to create heART in June 2008 after attending a Scully Marathon in Paris, a fan event held

to raise funds for charities by auctioning off rare XF merchandise and other related collectibles to

fans of the show. As an art student in France, Roxane recognized the charitable potential of her

Gillian Anderson–inspired artwork. A year later, she appealed to likeminded artists—other XF and

Gillian Anderson fans exhibiting their artistic talent online—and with the help of a wellconnected

fandom network, recruited 13 artists from nine countries around the world (Italy, The

Netherlands, United States, France, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, and South

Netherlands, United States, France, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, and South

Korea). Roxane and fellow artist Sophie G developed a name, logo, and Web site, and they spent

several months preparing for the auctions and obtaining official clearance from Gillian Anderson

and their chosen charity. The crux of the project was 2 weeks of online auctions in June 2010.

Using eBay's charity branch, MissionFish, heART auctioned off 14 original artworks and raised

£650 (approximately $1,000).

[5.2] Where heART differs from AXF and a number of other fan charities is in the emphasis

placed on fanproduced artwork. Sophie, in an email interview, noted:

[5.3] The most important aspect—to me—about this charity project was, that we were

going to produce the things we were going to offer up for sale ourselves, that there was

a creative process involved…except for getting Gillian Anderson's and OTSK's approval

to raise funds this way—we were independent from those celebrities. It was our very

own, rather than "just" assembling things and organising events and auctions.

[5.4] This sentiment is echoed by several other artists I interviewed, and by quotes from the

artists given on their heART biography pages:

[5.5] Rose: I've been drawing all my life but have always seen it as something I did

for myself, not something that could help others. Knowing that something I enjoy doing

can help others is great incentive to try harder, to make the drawing look better, to

improve my techniques. (http://heart.keyofx.org/rose)

[5.6] Sarah L. Robinson: I love art and I love giving back, to be able to combine the

two and create some artwork to benefit charity is very fulfilling.

(http://heart.keyofx.org/sarah)

[5.7] Of less importance was the influence Gillian Anderson had on the artists. While they

acknowledged they were both fans of hers and XF, the prime factor in encouraging artists to

contribute was the production of fan art. Scooly notes that "I love [Gillian's] acting, but I'm a fan

of her show rather than specifically her. I would participate if it was David's, Chris', Frank's or

really anyone's, I suppose. I just wanted to draw a nice XF pic and see if someone would buy it to

help some kids. That's all, I think." Sophie agreed that Gillian Anderson was "directly linked to the creative aspect, because for me Gillian has always been somewhat of a muse," but also noted

that the bulk of previous XF fan charities relied on celebrity involvement, whether it was the stars

donating items for auction or their time at Q&A panels. That heART placed fans, as artists, in the

driving seat was, for Sophie, "my main motivation to be behind the idea 100%, and I think it's

something to be immensely proud of."

[5.8] While fan fiction is the medium through which most academics have discussed fans'

resistant reading of texts, fan art can also be considered a resistant reading of the text. Worry's

artwork (figure 3), for example, is of a very different style to that of both the show and of other

fan artists: described by many fans as cute, Worry's cartoon Mulder and Scully figures are much

more lighthearted than their depiction on the show, and Worry places more emphasis on the

relationship between the two characters.

Figure 3. Heart_worry, 2010 (http://heart.keyofx.org/index/wp

content/uploads/2010/06/artwork_worry.jpg). [View larger image.]

[5.9] Many of the pieces of art auctioned off depicted images of Mulder and Scully together,

emphasizing the shipper angle of the series (figure 4), and the artwork that depicted Gillian

Anderson illustrated her more sensual, independent side—a very different image from that which

she portrays as Scully.

Figure 4. Heart_sarahrobinson, 2010 (http://heart.keyofx.org/index/wp

content/uploads/2010/06/artwork_sarah.jpg). [ View larger image .]

[5.10] Jenkins notes, "Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and

regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can

participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths" (2006, 267). The artists

involved in heART are part of a group of fans who engage with the show and place their own

stamp on the characters and situations expressed within it. Further, they use this "textual

poaching" to appeal to other fans and to raise money for charitable causes (note 1). The

emphasis here is on fans themselves producing items that express their love of the show, rather

than their depending on receiving desirable items from official sources.

6. The role of celebrity in encouraging social engagement and the

6. The role of celebrity in encouraging social engagement and the

stigmatization of celebrity-focused fans

[6.1] The title of this essay comes from Gillian Anderson's foreword to Girl Boss: Running the

Show Like the Big Chicks:

[6.2] Be of service. Whether you make yourself available to a friend or coworker, or

you make time every month to do volunteer work, there is nothing that harvests more

of a feeling of empowerment than being of service to someone in need. (Kravetz 1999,

xi)

[6.3] The quote is one that many Anderson fans have taken to heart in becoming engaged with

raising funds for various charities. It exemplifies the impact that Anderson specifically, and

celebrities in general, can have on encouraging fans to become involved in charitable activities.

John Fiske's work on popular culture has examined the ways in which fans' attitudes to celebrities

can lead to social engagement. He argues that personas as texts matter once they are put into

circulation, and that once they are put into circulation, others can seize that text/persona as a

means to empowerment. Offering the example of the teenage Madonna fan who, "[fantasizing]

her own empowerment[,] can translate this fantasy into behaviour," Fiske suggests that stars

lead their fans into social change: "When she meets others who share her fantasies and freedom

there is the beginning of a sense of solidarity, of a shared resistance, that can support and

encourage progressive action on the microsocial level" (1989, 172). It is not only Madonna who is

able to lead fans to social engagement. Craig Garthwaite and Timothy Moore argue that "While

there have been no empirical estimates of the effect of celebrity endorsements on political

outcomes, it is clear that celebrities have the ability to influence the behaviour of their fans in

other arenas" (2008, 5). Celebrities such as Misha Collins and Lady Gaga are well known for using

their large networks of fans to promote charities, organizations, and ideas, and to convert

awareness into social change. Misha Collins, who plays the angel Castiel on Supernatural, used

Twitter to ask his followers to make a donation to aid efforts following the 2009 earthquake in

Haiti. Within 24 hours, almost $30,000 had been raised. After this, the nonprofit organization

Random Acts was created, which is supporting the reconstruction and ongoing funding of three

different orphanages in Haiti. Lady Gaga has also used her fame to encourage fans to do good

works. She partnered with Virgin Mobile on her Monster Ball tour and offered premium VIP tickets

to fans who volunteered their time to homeless youth organizations. In doing so, she and her

fans raised more than $80,000 to support homeless youths. More recently, she designed a

wristband that she encouraged fans to buy for $5 to raise money for Japan after the March 2011

earthquake there (figure 5).

Figure 5. Lady Gaga wristband, 2011 (http://www.ladygaga.com/news/default.aspx?pg=143 ).

[View larger image .]

[6.4] Fiske's work, in the context of celebrity and fandriven activism, raises some interesting

questions on the active/passive nature of fan charity. Arguing that fans seize a celebrity as a

means to empowerment suggests that the fan is a active respondent to the celebrity, making

meaning from the range of texts in which the raw materials of the celebrity appear and

considering which qualities the star has that they wish to emulate, and which to ignore. But I

would argue that while the fan is active in the sense of changing her lifestyle, attitudes, or

behaviors, the celebrity does the work of making qualities and acts such as selfsacrifice,

charitable giving, and awarenessraising acceptable; the fan follows this lead, responding to these

qualities, once those acts are given societal approval. I would argue that in the case of Misha

Collins– and Lady Gaga–driven activism, the fans take on a much more passive role. This isn't to

say that they are not involved in raising awareness of the issue; on the contrary, fans can be very

vocal: they will post to blogs and Web sites and inform friends and family members of their

favorite celebrity's efforts. But the onus is on the celebrity to organize the event and spread the

word to his or her fans. It is unlikely that, were it not for his large Twitter following, Misha Collins

would have been able to raise that much money for Haiti. It is also a result of his close

connections with Random Acts that many fans support the organization. Random Acts is currently

raising funds to build a multipurpose community center in Haiti and is offering fans who raise

more than $5,000 the possibility of working with Collins on the project. Billed as an "opportunity

of a lifetime," the chance to meet Collins or receive a gift from him (figure 6) plays a predominant

role in obtaining fan support—more so, I would argue, than the charity work itself.

Figure 6. Misha_Collins_page, 2011

Figure 6. Misha_Collins_page, 2011

(http://www.therandomact.org/wordpress/news/hopetohaiti/). [ View larger image.]

[6.5] I see clear differences between the charity work undertaken by celebrities such as Misha

Collins and Lady Gaga and that undertaken by the groups I examined here. Both AXF and heART

are examples of fandriven activism, in which fans of a show or celebrity take it upon themselves

to raise money or awareness for a specific cause. This charity work might be aided by the

celebrity, who provides items that can be auctioned (as is the case with AXF), or it might be

purely fan based, with fans producing items (as is the case with heART); but the onus is on the

fans themselves to organize, act, produce, and raise awareness. It is the dedicated fan who gains

awareness of a particular cause through her interest in the celebrity, and it then lies—at least

partly—with that fan to raise awareness within the larger community and galvanize others into

action. With more and more fan activities taking place on the Internet, this has become easier.

AXF has 293 members, all of whom can see the group's Facebook wall and be notified of

upcoming fundraisers and other points of interest. AXF has also been able to forge links with

other fan groups like XFiles News, who are able to spread the word to a wider community of

fans. These groups—although distinct entities—have also worked together on several issues

including the XF3 Army campaign, and fundraisers for Help_Haiti and X Philes for Japan.

Celebrity input to these fan groups, unlike those of Lady Gaga, is minimal. Other than liaising

with Anderson's staff to obtain approval to raise funds in her name and contacting other stars to

obtain items to auction, all of the work is done by the fans. Web site maintenance, Twitter links,

Facebook updates, calls to donate, and fundraising events are organized by oftensmall teams of

fans, who dedicate much of their free time to this activism.

[6.6] It strikes me that a further question arises here: at what point does the "fan" drop out? At what point do Sandi and others like her have a giving relationship to the school that no longer

connects directly to their fannishness? Many groups within the XF community undertake work

that has no direct connection to their fan activities. Devastating tornadoes resulted in an XF X

Phile Virtual Marathon for Joplin, MO, Tornado Victims, in which fans watched XF episodes and

donated $1 for each episode. Similarly, XF fans are currently taking part in a Virtual XPhiles

Shopping Spree, in which fans "buy" pieces of XF fandom (such as Scully's groceries from the

episode "Duane Barry" or Mulder's alien autopsy video) by donating the relevant amount to help

victims of the Japan earthquake. Neither of these communities has arisen as a result of a

celebrity's involvement in fundraising or as a direct result of the fans' engagement with XF

fandom. Rather, fandom is used simply as a vehicle to raise more money in an interesting and

innovative way. While I do not have the space to discuss this in further detail, it is an important

question to raise.

[6.7] Despite the work being done by both celebrities and fans to raise money for and bring

attention to various causes, celebrityfocused fandom is perhaps the area where stigma is the

strongest and fandom more maligned. Liesbet van Zoonen argues that "modern political discourse

constructs a vast difference between popular culture and politics" (2005, 53) and positions

audiences as fans and the public as citizens, each composed of different social formations and

identities, separate from the other. This language also highlights the divide between high culture

(art, politics) and low culture (television, the tabloid press), suggesting that politics must exist

apart from mainstream culture, and maintaining that, as the focus on celebrity falls under the

category of low culture, celebrityfocused fans are worth neither time nor study. This is further

illustrated in Nick Couldry and Tim Markham's argument that those who follow celebrity culture

"are the least engaged in politics and least likely to use their social networks to involve themselves in action or discussion about publictype issues" (2007, 403) (note 2). Recent

research also suggests that fans' tastes are linked to a class system that rewards certain kinds of

media consumption while looking upon others with disdain. In this system, fans of popular

culture, such as soap operas, science fiction, and, I would add, celebrities, are less worthy than

fans of opera or theater (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2007).

[6.8] Horton and Wohl, in 1956, described fandom as a surrogate relationship and focused on

"parasocial interactions": the illusory relationships fans form with celebrities. Joli Jensen noted that literature on fandom argues that fans "suffer from psychological inadequacy, and […] seek

contact with famous people in order to compensate for their own inadequate lives" (1992, 18).

Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth BehmMorawitz note that public

commentary on Twilight "positions girls and women as unexpected and unwelcome media fans,

and denies the long and rich history of the relationships female fans have had with media texts

and personalities" (2010, 6). That the language of 20, 30, even 60 years ago is still being used to

discuss celebrityfocused fans is worrying and points increasingly to the gendering of fandom.

Indeed, references to Twilight fans as "fevered," "hysterical," and "obsessed" mirror Victorianera gendered words like "foolish" and "submissive" used to describe celebrityfocused fans who, in popular press discourse at least, are overwhelmingly female (note 3). Many studies of fanstar

identification have focused on women's relationships with the celebrities they admire (Tudor

1974; Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs 1992; Stacey 1994), and this can contribute to the

problematic gendering of fandom, charity, and activism (note 4). Jackie Stacey's 1994 study of the place of movie stars in women's memories of wartime and postwar Britain focuses on three

key processes of spectatorship: escapism, identification, and consumption. While it may be

argued that Stacey uses these terms to rework the concepts they initially embodied (the category

of "extracinematic identificatory practices," which argues that feelings of adoration, devotion, and worship of the star as she appears on screen evolve into fan cultural activity, an area of

research largely ignored in previous studies of film reception, was developed in response to the

main body of work on cinematic identification that drew heavily on Freudian and Lacanian

analysis), their use does reflect previous scholarship on female fans who used fandom as a means

of escaping the confines of their everyday lives as housewives and mothers (Radway 1984), as

well as societal stereotypes of women as shopaholics, unable to stop consuming.

[6.9] Stacey's work, particularly her category of imitation, has been drawn on in more recent

research on fans and how they engage in more active meaning making. Gina Rumbaugh notes,

"Imitation need not be limited to singular selfimprovement [but] can move beyond the personal

to include a fan's participation in the preferred social and political activities of the admired star,

as well" (2008, 34). Rumbaugh also draws on Andrew Tudor's work, particularly his notion of

projection, which describes "the point at which the process becomes more than a simple

mimicking" (1974, 80–82). Rumbaugh notes, "Projection is a condition whereby fans take into

account how stars would behave in certain situations, and then attempt to imitate that supposed

behaviour in their own lives" (2008, 33), a point that has implications for the ways in which

fannish behavior in relation to social activism, and the gendering of fandom, can be studied. HK

says:

[6.10] I basically fell so in love with Scully that I wanted to be like her however I

could. Initially, I thought "maybe I should act!" but I realized that it wasn't acting like Scully or even being Gillian that I wanted…but being like Scully, the character herself. [I

now] work for the government in humanitarian aid…but it was the initial idea of Scully

that snowballed into getting me here. I also can't help but assume that in 12+ years,

I've also begun to embody some of the traits/influences of Scully, which could possibly

translate into fuelling this "save the world" complex I've got. I'm sure it would still be

there, regardless, but who knows what I would be up to without XF. Scully made it ok

to feel different from others and I kind of just embraced and ran with it. (interview,

March 2011)

[6.11] This could, to some extent, be considered projection. From wanting to be like Scully (and

Gillian Anderson), HK progressed to adopting a fundamental aspect of the character's identity. It

was through Scully, and imitating the behavior Scully embodied in her own life ("that she was

very smart and assertive and didn't try to hide it"), that HK moved into the field in which she now

works. However, the question must be raised of whether the notion of projection is related

specifically to female fans' adopting specific characteristics, whereas in male fans it would be

considered simply drawing on the actor as a role model. This is an important distinction. While

the processes that scholars describe do reflect the reality of how fans respond to celebrities, they

frame these processes in problematic, gendered ways. Both Stacey's work on fans of female

movie stars and Rumbaugh's analysis of Gillian Anderson as role model fail to mention male fans.

These and other approaches fail to address problems in the gendering of fandom in two ways: in

their continuing use of stigmatizing language, and in their failure to adopt a more empowered

conceptual model for why fans respond to celebrities in the ways they do. In suggesting that

female fans participate in the preferred social and political activities of the star, their agency is

removed—their reasons for participating in certain events and not others (and therefore their

opinions on politics, culture, and society) are not questioned. Fan charity, according to these

analyses of fanstar relationships, is framed in the larger context of the role of celebrity and its

construction as "the 'perfect hero,' where the star's actions serve as exemplary models for a

particular community" (Marshall 1997, 187).

7. Fan activism and celebrity charity: Working toward social change

[7.1] The case studies examined thus far clearly fall into the category of fan charity defined

earlier. Now I examine the links among fandom, fan activism, and celebrity charity, and question

how affective fan investment affects celebrity charity work. As I noted earlier, the term "fan

activism" has traditionally been associated with fans writing to save a show such as Firefly (2002–

3) from cancellation or resurrecting a show or franchise, and is much less political than the fan

activism I examine here. This more wellknown kind of fan activism is designed to secure the

continuation or resurrection of a show that fans both feel passionately about and have invested

time in, since fans who will campaign for a show's renewal are usually—though not always—the

fans who have been engaged in fandom, are active members of a community or communities,

write fan fic, or create fan videos/fan art (note 5)—in short, they are fans with a vested interest

in the show and a desire to see it continued. As a result, it appears to be much less altruistic than

the fan charity evidenced through heART and AXF, and thus it should not be described in the

same terms. Sandi notes that only roughly 10 percent of the money raised so far by AXF has

come from donations alone; the bulk of the proceeds have been raised by auctioning off XF

merchandise. Cathy O'Donnell notes that she does not see buying Gillian Anderson/XF charity items and donating money to a chosen cause as the same thing:

[7.2] I give money to my chosen charities regularly/monthly and they have nothing to

do with my fandom, they are personal causes I choose to be involved in. When I

purchase items from a charity auction it is primarily because I want the item, the fact

the money goes to charity allows me to feel better about spending the money, but I

wouldn't be giving that money to the charity otherwise […] I guess in conclusion, I bid

because I want the item, but the charitable aspect allows me to feel better about

spending the money and allows me to support the actor/show I am a fan of in a positive

way. (interview, March 2011)

[7.3] This attitude is true of many of the fans I interviewed (and my own experience of bidding

on XF items at auction), and I would consider this a form of fan charity. From the interviews I

have carried out, fan activism, in the sense I define it, is more likely to be undertaken by those

involved in the creation or daytoday running of the fan charity. Sandi has noted that almost all

of her free time is occupied with planning fundraisers for AXF, and plans are currently being

made for her to travel to Uganda in 2013 to visit the school. Sandi hopes the trip will spur on the

group's fundraising efforts and enable them to not only raise more money, but also to fund

further trips to the school to engage in some handson work in the community. This transition

from fundraising to visiting Uganda does, I believe, suggest a transition from fan charity to fan

activism. While it may fall short of campaigning for the government to invest more money in

education, or educating communities on the importance of education in enabling children to work

their way out of poverty, members of AXF traveling to another country and putting manpower

into helping a school they have previously only raised funds for is certainly more handson than

fan charity is. It is unlikely that any members of AXF would have considered traveling to Uganda

were they not involved in raising money for the school, and it cannot be denied that Anderson's

social activism has had an effect on the fans. Sandi notes that were it not for Gillian Anderson,

she wouldn't have been aware of Alinyiikira Junior School. Because Anderson—a woman Sandi

respects and admires—supported the school, Sandi felt it was a worthy cause.

[7.4] It is clear from interviews with many fans that Anderson's influence has been a positive

one and has allowed them to make changes to their own attitudes and lifestyles. Jodie Whalan

notes that "Gillian Anderson and The XFiles have been a huge part of my life since I was 14 (I'm now 29). Because I love the brilliant work of Ms Anderson on The XFiles and in movies she's

appeared in since then, I feel like I'm giving something back by supporting charities that are

founded/supported by Gillian Anderson and other stars of The XFiles. " Nicole Lynch agrees:

[7.5] Being a part of the XF community and knowing that Gillian Anderson personally

endorses various charities is inspiring in itself. Knowing that a celebrity takes so much

of her own time to assist with causes she is passionate about is very inspiring.

Personally it gives me the belief that everyone should take some time to help those who

are less fortunate or are in need. Furthermore, the general message in XF of "not giving

up" and "what can be imagined can be achieved" is especially pertinent seeing as these

fundraisers are directed towards XFiles fans. It goes to show how applicable the

messages in the show are to the causes that the group supports. (interview, March

2011)

2011)

[7.6] Specific qualities possessed by Anderson, such as her honesty, dedication, and

philanthropy, as well as the ability to think of others while maintaining a busy career and raising a

young family, have led fans to adopt similar qualities in themselves. This further allows them to

campaign for change elsewhere. More broadly, fan charity has—in the case studies I have

examined—led to a great deal of change for the organizations that received the money; they

were able to buy equipment, put up buildings, and fund research, all of which will lead to a better

quality of life for the people the organizations support.

[7.7] Turning from the ways in which fannish forms of engagement may lead to social change, I

wish to consider the ways in which affective fan investment affects celebrity charity work. The

field of fan studies has focused on the cultural productions of fandom and questions of power and

resistance visible in fan/star/studio relationships. Jenkins, for example, notes that fans are able to

regain power through the production of works such as fan fiction, fan videos, and fan art: "Fan

culture stands as an open challenge to the 'naturalness' and desirability of dominant cultural

hierarchies, a refusal of authorial authority and a violation of intellectual property" (1992, 18).

While Jenkins limits his study to the cultural productions of fans (fan fiction, fan art, etc.) rather

than examining broader fan engagement, his study is useful in examining the ways in which fans'

knowledge of and engagement with a text can enable them to examine what that text says about

mass culture and societal norms. Jenkins also argues, "One way that popular culture can enable a

more engaged citizenry is by allowing people to play with power on a microlevel […] Popular

culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture" (2006, 239). An example

of this can be seen in heART's use of fan art to raise money for a charitable cause. The

influencing factor here was less Gillian Anderson's philanthropy and more the ability to use their

skills as artists and XF fans to raise money.

[7.8] Allowing fans to play with power by reinterpreting XF—poaching aspects of the show and

its stars and representing those in fan art—and selling their productions to raise money for

charity provides fans with a means of engaging with social activism while representing less of a

challenge to the producers of XF than traditional forms of fan production—endorsed, as it were,

by Gillian Anderson. Power can also, however, be expressed in other ways. Liza Tsaliki, Christos

Frangonikolopoulos, and Asteris Huliaras note that "audiences of today are aware of the

manufactured nature of the celebrity images they consume and of the publicity machine that

engulfs these images" (2011, 9). With that awareness comes a shift in the fanstar relationship—

the star has to maintain a certain image in order to keep appealing to the fans. Fans are no

longer understood to be, as Joli Jensen notes, a "result" of celebrity "brought into (enthralled) existence by the modern celebrity system, via the mass media" (1992, 10). Rather, it is the fan

who keeps celebrities in existence through watching their movies, buying their books, and

following the magazines and entertainment news that feature them. And in order to keep the fan

interested, the celebrity must perform noteworthy acts. Asteris Huliaris and Nikolaos Tzifakis

argue that "the image of a star in a wartorn African country, surrounded by undernourished

black children and this making a nice contrast for photographers, attracts immediate attention.

Celebrity interest in Africa or in global poverty offers excellent branding opportunities" (2011,

36). Interest in Africa is also a safe bet for the celebrity who wants to retain fan support. While

fights against poverty or AIDS are political issues, they are much less controversial than US

military campaigns. Most fans would agree that global poverty needs to be eradicated; it may be

much more difficult for a fan whose brother is fighting in Afghanistan to support a celebrity's calls

much more difficult for a fan whose brother is fighting in Afghanistan to support a celebrity's calls for the US government to withdraw troops. Cathy O'Donnell says,

[7.9] It is important to me that [the money] goes to charity and to a charity I am

happy to support. For example when Gillian auctioned a meet and greet last year the

auction did not specify which charity the money would go to just that it would be a

charity of Gillian's choice. I was not happy to bid in those circumstances because I

would not want to risk my money going to a charity I disagreed with, however slim that

chance may be.

[7.10] Fans are thus able to exercise some power over the charitable campaigns that celebrities

are involved in, if only because no celebrities want to marginalize the people who have allowed

them to achieve the star status they have. Graeme Turner (2004) argues that the economy of

celebrity culture dictates that celebrities develop a strategy for building and maintaining audience

loyalty, and celebrity charity and activism could—to some extent—be considered part of that

strategy.

8. Conclusion

[8.1] I have examined how two different fan charities have been inspired to raise money for

charities supported by Gillian Anderson, and I have questioned how and why the relationship

between celebrities and fans may lead to fan activism and social change. I examined how the

relationship fans have with Gillian Anderson and XF has led to social engagement by looking at

the role of show itself, the engagement of fans through the use of fan fiction/fan art, and the role

of Gillian Anderson in inspiring fans both through her portrayal of Dana Scully and the values she

displays in her private life. I also examined some of the problems that arise in scholarship on

celebrityfocused fans, the stigma that surrounds this part of fandom, and the gendered language

still used to describe these fan practices.

[8.2] That fans can be—and indeed are—influenced by the stars they admire seems evident.

That fan charity exists, and has raised considerable amounts of money for worthy causes, can be

proven. The question of whether and how fan charity can lead to fan activism, and the effect that

activism can have on a wider social scale, is a much broader one, albeit one I have tried to

answer here. Through examining the attitudes of XF fans who have founded, contributed to, and

engaged with fan charities, I showed that engagement in fandom can lead to more broad civic

engagement. Through analyzing the ways in which celebrities undertake charity work and how

affective fan investment affects this charity work, I argued that the fanstar relationship is a more

complex one than has previously been acknowledged. Far from celebrityfocused fans being

passive respondents to the star they admire or deviant obsessives engaged in fictional

relationships with their idols, fans themselves become catalysts for change.

9. Acknowledgments

[9.1] I am grateful to the following individuals for their generosity in consenting to be

interviewed via email: Sandi Hicks, Sophie G, Roxane B, Rose, Scooly, akachan, Dana, HK, KR,

Nicole Lynch, Cathy O'Donnell, and Jodie Whalan. Thanks also to everyone who gave valuable

feedback, especially Emily Regan Wills, Lucy Bennett, and Nia EdwardsBehi.

feedback, especially Emily Regan Wills, Lucy Bennett, and Nia EdwardsBehi.

10. Notes

1. Also of interest to me, particularly in relation to the heART auctions, are the roles fans and fan

politics play in raising awareness. Worry, for example, is a big name fan in XF fandom; therefore,

not only is his artwork desirable, but he also brings a certain level of authority to the fan charity.

Several of the artists and buyers I interviewed also emphasized the importance of helping out a

friend in creating or bidding on pieces of art. Cathy O'Donnell said she "bid on the heART auctions

because I liked the pictures, but also because I wanted to support fellow fans I consider friends in

their efforts" (interview, March 2011), and Dana noted that she and Roxane had followed each

other on Deviant Art (http://www.deviantart.com/) for years. "[We] are admirers of each other's

artwork, especially our fanart for The XFiles. Rox is such an awesome artist and sweet friend and I got involved in heART because I wanted to support her in this idea she had" (interview, March

2011).

2. While I acknowledge that I focus my attention on a small group of fans, built up around a show

that is recognized for its intelligent audience, I would argue that Couldry and Markham's assertion

requires more analysis. Each of the fans interviewed had been involved in charity in some form

previously, whether through donations to charitable organizations, volunteering for local

organizations, or raising awareness.

3. While it could be argued that Twilight and XF are very different texts that are aimed at very

different audiences, and thus a study on fans' relationships to Gillian Anderson might not produce

the same results as a study on fans' relationships to Twilight stars, the same language is used to

describe both sets of fans; in addition, fans of both are positioned in media discourse as female. A

2011 Australian interview with Gillian Anderson, for example, referred to her "obsessive" and

"crazy" fans, mirroring the gendered language used to describe Twilight fans, among others

( Breakfast, ABC News, September 7, 2011).

4. I have mentioned elsewhere the gendering of fandom, but I would further argue that activism,

particularly fan activism, is also gendered female. Women's involvement in protest has often

drawn on their gendered role within families and communities, and historians such as Natalie

Zemon Davis, Temma Kaplan, and E. P. Thompson have seen women's participation in these

protests as an extension of their role in the sexual division of labor.

5. This relates to the question of how to define the term fan and the levels of fan engagement. I do not have the scope here to analyze what this may mean for fannish engagement and social

change, but I believe it is an important point that requires further examination.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

Fan action and political participation on The Colbert Report

Marcus Schulzke

State University of New York at Albany, Albany, New York, United States

[0.1] Abstract—The Colbert Report merges the increasingly popular political satire

genre with fan activism. The result is that the fan community helps to construct

Colbert's malleable character and demonstrates symbolic power through its

willingness to act. The fans are usually a nonpartisan force, acting to produce

entertainment rather than substantive political change. However, this can be

politically meaningful, as the fans' projects promote collective action, parallel

political activities like voting and protesting, and encourage critical thinking about

political information.

[0.2] Keywords— Activism; Fan community; Politics; Stephen Colbert; TV

Schulzke, Marcus. 2012. "Fan Action and Political Participation on The Colbert

Report. " In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and

Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0316.

1. Introduction

[1.1] The Daily Show and its spinoff, The Colbert Report, have become popular

sources of entertainment and political commentary for audiences around the world.

Each halfhour television program follows the same format of reviewing top news

stories and critiquing politicians and members of the media through satire. It is widely

acknowledged that these television shows and other news satire programs have

become central to American political discourse (Lewis 2006; Waisanen 2009; Day

2011), yet much of the commentary on these programs focuses on their hosts,

thereby missing the substantial role of fans. Although Stephen Colbert, the host of The

Colbert Report, plays the role of a megalomaniac who only cares about promoting

himself and his show, he encourages fans to take action as part of his fan community,

the Colbert Nation. Fans participate in the show by helping to create its content and its

host. Colbert emphasizes the fans' role not only by calling on them to act on his

behalf, but also by providing feedback mechanisms. He reports on the fans' efforts,

shows how successful his viewers can be when participating in a common cause, and

rewards their creativity by giving fan works airtime.

[1.2] Although The Colbert Report is a highly political show, much of the fan activism it promotes involves comedic projects that may not seem to have any political

relevance. Nevertheless, many of the apparently trivial displays of fan activism have

direct and indirect political relevance. Many fan campaigns parallel traditional forms of

political participation, as they require organization, cooperation to reach a common

goal, and perseverance despite setbacks. These demonstrate the power of collective

action and empower fans to participate in other events. The Colbert Report fits

Jenkins's (2006b) claim that popular culture prepares people for public life by allowing

them to express their power in small ways. As Jenkins points out, many of the

activities fans undertake are similar to forms of political participation, make use of the

same kinds of skills, and encourage the kind individual initiative and creativity that is

important for democratic participation. Fan action can also extend the scope of political

action beyond traditional forms participation in public life. Some of the Colbert Nation's

most politically significant campaigns are those in which the fans challenge information

provided by political and media authorities. Like other types of audience participation,

such as the CNN/YouTube debates, The Colbert Report provides a forum for what

Jenkins (2009) calls audience negation. This is the challenging of politicians and others

in positions of authority—an essential skill in an age when the sources of information

about politics can be as controversial as the political issues themselves.

[1.3] It is important to note at the outset that I will focus on the fan activities that

are part of the production logic of the show—those that are official activities of the

Colbert Nation and that therefore display cooperation between the host and fans, as

well as between different media. This kind of fan action, as opposed to fan action that

takes place without support from the show, is worth special attention because the

frequency and scale of the Colbert Nation's campaigns set it apart from other

televisions shows. Whatever Colbert's motives in promoting this type of fan activism—

whether his intent is to empower fans or simply to exploit their labor—the Colbert

Nation campaigns encourage fans to take an active role in producing their

entertainment. By extension, fans are encouraged to be more engaged and critical

citizens.

[1.4] After a brief overview of Colbert's character, I explain how this character is

partly created by fans' participation in the show, and I argue that this encourages fans

to take part in Colbert Nation activism. Next, I discuss the technologies and types of

interaction that make the Colbert Nation possible. The following sections will explore

three of the ways in which the Colbert Nation promotes political participation. First,

watching The Colbert Report and taking part in its campaigns demand that one

interpret Colbert's satire and the extent to which it has a partisan dimension. Second,

because many of the fan campaigns involve voting and other forms of mass action,

The Colbert Report encourages fans to take part in electoral politics. It also provides

feedback mechanisms that build a sense of efficacy, even when fans fail to achieve

their goals. Finally, the show promotes critical analysis of information and the

consideration of alternative perspectives.

2. The Colbert character

[2.1] Much has been said about the way Stephen Colbert created a character that is

pieced together from conservative commentators (Good 2010; Stanley 2007). His

similarities to Bill O'Reilly, whom he reverently calls "Papa Bear," are especially clear

and have led O'Reilly to claim that Colbert "tries to convince people that he is me"

(Gray, Jones, and Thompson 2009, 130). The relationship between Colbert and

O'Reilly was strongest during The Colbert Report's early seasons, but over time,

Colbert became a composite of several leading conservatives and of the American

conservative movement in general. Colbert has increasingly distanced himself from

any particular referent, and by doing so, he has become a less internally consistent

character. His values are incoherent and often contradictory. For example, he routinely

speaks on behalf of the common man, but he adopts an elite status when it suits his

purposes. During the segment "Colbert Platinum," he urges poor viewers to change

the channel and discusses the latest trends in ultrarich living. At other times, he

criticizes elitists on the left and their distance from "mainstream America." This kind of

selfcontradiction would be a defect for an ordinary news commentator, but it is

essential to Colbert's satire, as it allows him to depict the tensions in American

conservatism.

[2.2] The neglect for coherence has aided Colbert in representing an entire

movement rather than a single individual. By serving as a living example of the

contradictory values of American conservatism, Colbert's character is a constant

challenge to the American right. At the same time, by making his character an

incoherent mix of values, Colbert makes it easy for fans to find something to identify

with and opens the possibility that his character may be recreated in multiple ways

according to fans' interests. The incoherence of Colbert's character is therefore an

important part of facilitating audience participation in the construction of the

character. It is further encouraged by the distance Colbert maintains between himself

and the character.

[2.3] To make the selfcontradictory character seem real, Stephen Colbert is always

careful to maintain the ambiguity of whether he is speaking as himself or as his

character. Unlike Colbert, Jon Stewart's stance on the events he discusses is usually

clear. He does not avoid sharing his feelings about political controversies in a direct,

open manner; Stewart usually plays the role of a liberal commentator who relies on

common sense rather than a party line to inform his judgments (Young 2008; Baym

2005). Colbert's views, by contrast, are always hidden by the character he plays.

Viewers must struggle to distinguish the real person from the satirical composite of

American conservatism. The real Colbert reinforces the ambiguity by making it difficult

to determine when he is out of character. When he is clearly himself, Colbert usually

declines to comment on anything politically sensitive. This leaves a deep uncertainty

about the dividing line between the real person and the character, leading Baym to

argue that Colbert is a "postmodern simulation; like Ali G or Borat, he is a spectacle

created for the screen" (2007, 368).

[2.4] Gray, Jones, and Thompson go further than Baym in describing the openness of

Colbert's character, as they argue that Colbert is a figure representing an entire genre.

"Colbert embodies satiric parody. He confounds not only presidents, who tend to see

things in black or white, but also anyone seeking easy division between real and fake,

comedy and criticism, politics and entertainment" (2009, 30). This is an excellent

description, as it shifts the character production away from the individual and makes it

the embodiment of an entire genre. It also implies that there is a tremendous gap

between the real Colbert and the character he plays. Nevertheless, it is important to

recognize the role fans play in constructing the character because this is one of the

mechanisms of encouraging fan participation. Although Colbert is the one who plays

the character and who has authorial control over it, the character is inextricably linked

to the thousands of fans who take part in Colbert's campaigns and make Colbert's

cultural influence possible. Colbert called the fans to action in the show's very first

episode by stating the role he intended to give them in determining his character and

the extent to which the character and the fan community would be linked:

[2.5] This show is not about me. No, this program is dedicated to you, the

heroes. And who are the heroes? The people who watch this show, average

hardworking Americans. You're not the elites. You're not the country club

crowd. I know for a fact my country club would never let you in…You're the

folks who say something has to be done. And you're doing something. You're

watching TV. (quoted in Burwell and Boler 2008)

[2.6] Colbert's joke about watching television counting as "doing something" has

turned out to have a degree of truth. Colbert followed his mission statement by giving

his fans many ways of contributing to the show's content. He asks them to vote in

online polls, to create fan videos for the show, to support politicians, to buy books and

CDs released by "friends of the show," to donate money to charities, and to transform

the English language.

[2.7] The fan activities demanding the highest levels of technological proficiency and

largest commitments of time involve reworking the show's content. Colbert

encourages fans to write their own additions to his "Tek Jansen" stories, to make their

own versions of his portrait, and to take scenes shot in front of a green screen and use

them to create fan videos. These efforts to mobilize fans to recreate elements of the

show's content make The Colbert Report conducive to the formation of a strong fan

community. Many television programs and mass media products are hostile to fans'

attempts to make their own contributions and they challenge the fans' attempts to

rework a show's content (Jenkins 1992, 2006b). Some television programs may have

fan feedback mechanisms that erode the line between audience and the program (Enli

2009; Jenkins 2006b), but few have content that is so heavily dependent on audience

participation. The Colbert Report makes participation integral to the show.

[2.8] Although these opportunities for fan participation require technical skill, many

other forms of engagement require minimal time commitments and little specialized

knowledge. The many small participatory acts are inclusive because they can be

performed by almost any viewer with Internet access. Even the limited forms of

participation, such as voting in online polls to name things after Colbert, allow users to

make a contribution to the show and to see Colbert report on that contribution during

subsequent episodes. Barely an episode goes by without Colbert calling on his fans for

support or asking them to participate in one of his campaigns. As Burwell and Boler

(2008) put it, "It is difficult to think about the program without taking into account

fans, for the program has not only assigned its audience the role of the 'Colbert

Nation,' but has also generated a flurry of fan activity."

[2.9] Of course, the fan contribution to The Colbert Report faces some constraints.

As Julie Russo (2009) explains, when television programs encourage fans to make

their own contributions, they usually specify the form these contributions can take.

Video contests place restrictions on what content can be used or establish subject

matter boundaries. This allows television programs to retain control of how fans create

new content. When Colbert incites his fans to action, he plays the role of the agenda

setter. He rarely, if ever, restricts what fans can borrow from the show, but by setting

the goal of a campaign, he at least points fans in a certain direction. For example,

responses to his fan video contests must always incorporate certain pieces of footage

or fulfill certain functions. This leads them to have a more narrowly defined format

than fan videos that are not sanctioned by the television programs (Jenkins 2008).

Nevertheless, these contests still leave a great deal of room for fans to take personal

initiative and to respond creatively to challenges, as Colbert generally refrains from

using his role as agenda setter to predetermine the content of media produced by the

fans.

3. Modes of interaction

[3.1] The composition of the Colbert Nation facilitates its activities. Demographic

characteristics indicate that the show's fans are likely to participate in political causes

and are capable of taking the initiative when called on to take part in a new project.

One report found that advertisers specifically targeted the show because of its highly

active audience (Bosman 2007). Viewers tend to be educated and to read extensively

(Young et al. 2006). They are also technologically adept; this is among their most

important traits because most of Colbert's campaigns take place online.

[3.2] Contemporary fan activism often relies heavily on digital media (Van Zoonen

2005; Jenkins 2006a), which have introduced the possibility of political engagement

that does not require physical presence (Jones 2006). Emailing, signing virtual

petitions, and joining Facebook groups can supplement or even replace traditional

forms of social and political activism. A large body of research suggests that the

Internet may provide ways of counteracting the decline of associational life by forming

new online places where people can meet and interact (Turkle 1995; Rheingold 2000;

Jenkins and Thorburn 2004; Hills 2009; Moyo 2009; Hermes 2006; Blau 2005). For

example, Russell et al. find that as a result of the growing use of these media, "the

boundaries between producer and consumer, and between public and private, are

blurring" (2008, 43). Studies of fan communities often reach the same conclusion, as

they show that it is difficult to categorize fans as producers or consumers (Jenkins

2006b, 2007).

[3.3] Russell et al. argue that networked technologies have made a new type of

relationship possible: "The topdown, onetomany relationship between mass media

and consumers is being replaced, or at least supplemented, by manytomany and

peertopeer relationships" (2008, 43). Colbert fans' activism makes use of new

technologies to form this relationship, yet goes beyond this model. It relies on

networked technologies, but it takes place through a range of media. It is a product of

the same kind of convergence between new media and old media, as Jenkins (2009)

notes in events like the CNN/YouTube debates. Colbert fans have a manytomany

interaction with each other, a onetomany interaction with Colbert when the host

provides the background for the fan community, and a manytoone relationship with

Colbert when fans create content for the show and help to produce his character. The

Internet is the starting place for the collective and a means of creating a fan identity.

Without the Internet, fans would lack many of their avenues of expression, like the

forums of the Colbert Nation Web site and the blogs that follow the show. Most actions

performed by members of the Colbert Nation also take place online. However, the

online activities are usually closely linked to the television program, which performs an

agendasetting function and provides a common experience for fans to identify with.

[3.4] The fan community's reliance on television and networked media is worth

special attention because these media may seem to encourage passivity or minimal

involvement in political and social life. Nevertheless, the prevalence of Colbert Nation

activism online should not be dismissed as a sign of laziness. Most fan communication

is online, but whenever there is the chance to act in the real world, fans show as much

enthusiasm as when the demands on their time and energy are lower. Thousands of

fans visited his portrait at the National Gallery (Neuman 2008) and attended the Rally

to Restore Sanity and/or Fear that Colbert cohosted with Jon Stewart, demonstrating

that the fans were willing and able to engage in more traditional forms of activism that

require a more significant investment of time than online activism. Although one could

argue that much of the fan action on television is constructed or framed by Colbert,

the instances of direct action allow fans to express themselves in an unmediated way.

For example, the rally served as a forum for articulating many different political

positions; the diversity of the claims being made are evidenced by the countless

messages expressed on attendees' signs.

[3.5] Given the Colbert Nation's various modes of engagement and activism, it fits

well with Jenkins's assessment of the changing nature of consumption and the erosion

of the producer/consumer dichotomy: "In the old days, the ideal consumer watched

television, bought products, and didn't talk back. Today, the ideal consumer talks up

the program and spreads word about the brand. The old ideal might have been the

couch potato; the new ideal is almost certainly a fan" (Jenkins 2007, 361). Many

Colbert Report viewers are fans in this sense, and, as the following sections will show,

this kind of fan action can promote political engagement.

4. The partisan message

[4.1] To the extent that Colbert tries to influence America politics directly, he lends

his support to either party. He plays a megalomaniac who is far more concerned with

selfaggrandizement than with partisanship. He tends to support politicians who

appear on the show and who are friendly to his character, regardless of their party

allegiances. At times, Colbert even betrays his persona's conservative political ideology

to celebrate his personal achievements. The 2006 elections marked a turning point in

American politics, with the Democrats taking control of congress. As an

ultraconservative, Stephen Colbert should have been disappointed at the news, but

instead he celebrated. It was a loss for the Republican Party he claims to support, but

a victory for him as a commentator because all 27 members of Congress that he had

interviewed for "Better Know a District" (a segment of his show dedicated to interviews

with each congressional district representative) were reelected, along with one

challenger, John Hall, a Democrat who took New York's 19th district (Baym 2007,

359). Colbert celebrated what he claimed was the show's power over elections—the

power of fans to elect politicians who engaged with the show. In other elections, he

has followed this pattern of celebrating fans' influence over elections, regardless of

which party the winner is affiliated with.

[4.2] When Colbert mobilizes his fans, he rarely asks them to take up partisan

causes. The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear is a prime example of how fans can

take part in traditional political activism and of the nonpartisan activities of the Colbert

Nation. The rally was held on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on October 30,

2010, shortly after the more partisan rallies held by Glenn Beck and Al Sharpton.

Around 215,000 people attended the event, which was hosted jointly by Jon Stewart

and Stephen Colbert (Montopoli 2010). The large turnout made the rally a significant

event, but neither Stewart nor Colbert attempted to incite the attendees to vote for a

particular candidate or to support a specific cause (Day 2010). Stewart presented

medals of reasonableness and blamed those on the left and right equally for the rise of

extremist rhetoric. His goal for the rally was not to support a partisan agenda but to

promote a certain kind of discourse amenable to various positions along the political

spectrum. He encouraged suspicion of extremism, the end of the culture war narrative,

and more reasonable political debate. Colbert's satire involved praising irrationality

and extremism, but he, like Stewart, avoided any political party. His message of

rampant partisanship came without much explicit support for a party, politician, or

contentious issue.

[4.3] The hosts portrayed the rally as a call for more rational discourse (Tavernise

and Stelter 2010). They even risked upsetting commentators from the left by accusing

them of encouraging Americans to adopt polarizing political views. While this is a

politically relevant message, it does not in itself support either party. The fact that

such a significant gathering did not turn into a partisan event and that Colbert has yet

to use his show as a platform for any partisan cause makes it seem unlikely that he

will do so in the future. Therefore, when considering the political import of The Colbert

Report, it is important to look beyond its support for a party to the subtler ways that

fans may be empowered or encouraged to take action.

[4.4] Following from the show's ambiguity and lack of a clear partisan message, the

first form of audience participation in The Colbert Report is audience members' ability

to interpret Colbert's satire. Although most commentators see Colbert as a liberal

satirizing conservatives, fans are free to interpret him in various ways. One study

found that viewers had the same perception of whether the show was funny, but that

conservatives and liberals had much different impressions of Colbert's own political

opinions (LaMarre, Landreville, and Beam 2009). Conservatives tended to see him as

actually being conservative and only using humor to express his true feelings. Liberals

had much different reactions; they saw Colbert as he is portrayed in most

commentaries on the show—as a liberal highlighting the absurdities of extremist

conservatism. On the basis of these findings, LaMarre et al. conclude that "the

ambiguous deadpan satire offered by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report is

interpreted by audiences in a manner that best fits with their individual political

beliefs" (226). This may explain why the show has at times received harsh reactions

from those who are ostensibly the beneficiaries of an attack on conservatism. For

example, while serving as the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi

discouraged politicians from appearing as guests on the show, and it was the

Republicans, not the Democrats, who accepted him as a candidate in the 2007

primaries.

[4.5] Baumgartner and Morris (2008) argue that Colbert's message is likely to lead

viewers to become more conservative rather than exposing the hypocrisies of the

conservative position. As they explain, "Exposure to Colbert increases support for

President Bush, Republicans in Congress, and Republican policies on the economy and

War on Terror" (634). The ambiguity of Colbert's humor should come as no surprise

for scholars of fandom, as it fits with the assessments of the polysemy of popular texts

(Fiske 1989, 1991, 1992; Jenkins 1992; Barker and Brooks 1998; Sandvoss 2005),

but the polysemy is a matter of political contestation because of the show's political

subject matter. Fans' interpretive task requires that they carefully consider the

statements made by Colbert and his guests to determine what their intentions are,

what implications they have, and the extent to which they support one party over

another.

5. The audience and traditional activism

[5.1] One of the most common activities for Colbert fans is voting in elections to

name things after the host. These campaigns usually follow the same pattern: fans use

Colbert as a writein candidate in online polls to name something, then Colbert reports

on their efforts and encourages other fans to join in, and finally more fans join the

campaign while Colbert continually reports on their success. One of the Colbert

Nation's first tasks came on August 1, 2006, with the campaign to have a Hungarian

bridge named after him in an online poll. The poll was designed for participation by

Hungarians, but Colbert encouraged viewers to break the rules in order to win, saying,

"Do this as many times as you can, from multiple computers if you have to. Carpal

tunnel is a small price to pay for this gift to the Hungarian people" (quoted in Burwell

and Boler 2008). He won the election by a huge margin, and he won the second

election, which used stricter rules, as well. The Hungarian government declined to

name the bridge after Colbert, but the event demonstrated his fans' power to influence

events online, and it set the pattern that subsequent efforts would follow.

[5.2] A similar campaign took place in 2009, when NASA announced a contest to

name Node 3 of its space station. NASA provided four suggestions, but they also

allowed writeins, giving members of the Colbert Nation the opportunity to submit

230,539 votes for Stephen Colbert. The Nation won by a large margin, as the top

NASA suggestion, Serenity, only received 40,000 votes ("Oops: Colbert Wins Space

Station Name Contest" 2009). Again, the effort was unsuccessful: NASA refused to

name the node after Colbert. Still, the event provided further evidence of fans' desire

to become participants in their own entertainment and their commitment to The

Colbert Report. The objectives the Colbert Nation sets out to accomplish tend to be

relatively unimportant in themselves. The costs of losing and the benefits of winning

are usually small. However, these seemingly trivial campaigns may have indirect

benefits.

[5.3] Megan Boler has shown that online political action can have a strong positive

influence on a person's willingness to play a role in more traditional forms of political

action:

[5.4] Our survey of 160 producers evidences that 52 percent agree that,

"My online political activity has caused me to take action in my local

community (e.g., protest, boycott, etc.)." A majority, 59.5 percent, say that

"My online participation in political forums has led me to join at least one

political gathering or protest." Since becoming active online, 29.3% are

"more active in 'offline' political activities," and 63.1% "spend about the

same amount of time in 'offline' political activities." (Boler 2007)

[5.5] This indicates that fans participating in online elections and Colbert's other

campaigns are likely to become more involved in traditional forms of political action.

The naming contests should therefore be viewed as tools for building a sense of

efficacy among the fans who participate in them. Through these contests, fans are

able to experience the value of collective action and see that even a relatively small

group of people, when acting together, can influence the outcome of an election.

Although each person only makes a small investment of time to cast their votes, the

collective effort still has an appreciable effect on the outcome of the elections.

Individual efforts make the difference between winning or losing in online polls, just as

it does in elections for public office. The feedback mechanism of showing the results of

the election was itself a kind of victory, as Colbert's coverage of the campaigns

provided entertainment and encouragement to members of the Colbert Nation. Even

when their efforts are unsuccessful, fans may feel an increased sense of efficacy

because their votes are recognized by Colbert and become part of his television

program. Colbert's positive coverage of the campaigns helps to reward fans for their

efforts and to offset the discouragement fans may feel when their voices are overruled

by the contest organizers.

[5.6] As Amber Day (2011) points out, political satire programs can also promote

traditional forms of political action by encouraging audiences to become more

politically engaged. Day argues that political humor tends to be either satirical or

cynical, noting that these two forms of humor have much different implications. While

cynical humor encourages passivity and disengagement from politics, the satire of

shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report informs and entertains without

discouraging. A critical difference is that satirical humor tends to be more issue

oriented, as opposed to the ad hominem attacks of cynical humor. Cynical humor is

often directed at people; it gives the audience members a chance to feel superior to

politicians, but it comes with the high price of also making them feel detached from

the world of politics. By focusing on issues, satirical humor encourages viewers to

think critically about political issues and to laugh at them without falling into cynical

contempt for politics or politicians.

6. Everyday activism

[6.1] In addition to challenging fans to interpret the show's political satire and

empowering them to take part in traditional forms of political activity such as voting,

petitioning, and direct action, The Colbert Report promotes the expansion of the

concept of citizenship to the contestation of information. The show encourages critical

appraisal of sources of information, especially information from the experts who have

traditionally drawn the line between fact and fiction, and directs fans to take part in

determining what information is politically relevant.

[6.2] Jones (2005, 2006, 2011) argues that the nature of citizenship has changed

and that television programs like The Colbert Report are both cause and consequence

of a shift away from participatory citizenship to a citizenship defined by viewing.

Although this shift may seem to undermine democratic governance because of the

decline of the participatory element of democracy, the epistemological consequences

are highly populist and emancipatory. What Jones calls new political television—a

category that includes Politically Incorrect, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report—

plays a role in undermining the privileged positions of experts, thereby empowering

ordinary people to formulate their own opinions. On the basis of this new kind of

action, Jones concludes that "we must alter our conceptions of political citizenship as

being determined solely through traditional means, and look more carefully at the fluid

interchange of politics and culture in everyday life" (2011, 209). Similarly, Morreale

argues that on television satire programs, "discussion, dialogue, provocation, and

questioning are valued for their own sake—not because they lead to truth but because

they foster a community able to discern untruth" (2009, 121). This suggests that the

greatest political benefits for members of a fan community may be intangible lessons

and improved powers of critical thinking.

[6.3] Fans have engaged in many projects that demonstrate symbolic resistance or

questioning of authorities, such as rewriting Wikipedia pages, creating remixes of the

show's content, and propagating Colbert's neologisms or helping him to create new

ones (Engstrom 2010). The effort to change Wikipedia pages involved modifying pages

to make ridiculous false statements. This was to support Colbert's notion of "wikiality,"

which holds that truth is created by agreement and not by correspondence to fact. Of

course, the suggestion that truth is only a matter of agreement is part of Colbert's

satire; it is a critique of politicians and pundits who seem to think that their arguments

require no evidence. Many fans took up the call to action and carried out the Wikipedia

modifications. This campaign had no lasting influence on the pages—they were quickly

changed back to their original form—but it did generate media attention for the Colbert

Nation and for the concept of wikiality. Just as in the writein voting, this campaign

encouraged fan activism by giving fans a sense of power and celebrating their

collective achievements on the show. However, it also went further, as the idea of

wikiality that fans called attention to is a politically significant concept, given the

extent to which politicians and media figures take popularity as an indicator of truth.

[6.4] By extending the critique of authority and discursive practices to a broad range

of media, the Colbert Nation shows that political action can go beyond the narrow

confines of what is done by the government and by citizens on election days. In

Jenkins's terms, campaigns to contest information or the discursive strategies used for

presenting information fall under the audience's power of negation. Old media like

television can marginalize dissenting opinions by refusing to give them coverage or

directing attention away from them by framing issues in a particular way (Jenkins

2009, 190). New media, by contrast, have the power of negation: they can challenge

authorities, either directly or through humor. Jenkins generally describes this power as

something deployed by individuals who use online media such as YouTube videos. This

has the strength of allowing many oppositional voices to be heard. Although the

Colbert Nation is more uniform and follows more structured agendas, its power of

negation is felt on a much greater scale, as it comes from a network of fans acting

together. The size of the fan community and its organization allow it to have a much

stronger voice whenever its campaigns challenge politicians and media elites.

[6.5] John Hartley (2010) provides further support for the possibilities of fan action

creating a new form of citizenship. Citizenship is typically seen in terms of the right to

political participation, and perhaps also as the right to take part in contractual

agreements or the right to benefit from social programs. These conceptions of

citizenship constrain membership in the class of citizens. The borders of these types of

citizenship are usually precisely demarcated, and outsiders are excluded from their

benefits. The DIY/DIWO citizenship that is promoted by television programs like The

Colbert Report is far more inclusive, as its audience is not restricted by age,

nationality, place of birth, language, or other characteristics. Anyone with access to

cable television or an Internet connection can watch the show, communicate with

other fans, generate the show's content, and take part in the Colbert Nation's

campaigns.

7. Conclusion

[7.1] Stephen Colbert is a postmodern character who owes much to the dedicated

fan community that helps develop his identity and the content of his show. The fans

who take part in Colbert's campaigns show an enormous potential for political action,

and the actions they take often parallel political acts, even when they are apparently

trivial. Fans vote, challenge the terms of political discourse, attend events, and

cooperate to bring each of these about. The show encourages these actions by

providing fan activists with positive feedback and encouragement. The Colbert Nation

confirms studies that show that fan collectives have enormous potential for mobilizing

themselves and taking action (Van Zoonen 1998, 2004, 2005) and shows some of the

ways in which contemporary fan activism promotes traditional forms of political

engagement and the extension of political action while also providing entertainment.

[7.2] It is important to acknowledge some of the limitations on Colbert fan activism

and the challenges these raise for future research. Despite the many promising

examples of fan engagement that I have discussed, there are several constraints on

how fans can participate in the show. First, Colbert retains the largest share of

authorial control over his character. Thus far, he has allowed fans to use his name,

videos of him, and other materials related to the character to create their own media.

Nevertheless, there is always a chance that he may object to some of his fans' uses of

the Colbert character or the show's content. Because Colbert has the greatest claim to

his character, any decision he makes to exercise greater authorial control might

threaten fan activism. This would disrupt the reciprocal exchange that has

characterized Colbert fandom and would require a reexamination of the show and its

fans.

[7.3] Second, there is the possibility that fan action could be constrained by Viacom,

which owns The Colbert Report. Although Viacom has allowed fans to contribute to the

show and to create some media based on it, Viacom has also placed restrictions on

what media fans are allowed to appropriate. In 2007, Viacom forced YouTube and

other videohosting Web site to remove videos of The Colbert Report and The Daily

Show. It continues to have a strong influence on the ways fans can use content from its programs. The risk is that Viacom may further limit fan opportunities for activism.

Future research could examine the extent to which Viacom has shaped the Colbert

Nation's opportunities for activism and how fan engagement changes in response to

Viacom's ongoing efforts to protect its copyrights.

[7.4] Finally, there are some signs that Colbert may be unable to respond to his

audience's wishes in some circumstances. One of Colbert's most audacious campaigns

was the creation of the Colbert super PAC (that is, a political action committee that

permits virtually unlimited donations) in 2011. This campaign (still in process as of this

writing) presents a challenge for Colbert and his fans. Colbert created the PAC and

continually changes its legal status to demonstrate how PACs have circumvented

regulations concerning campaign contributions. He encourages fans to make financial

contributions to the PAC, which many do, but thus far, he seems unable to decide

what to do with the money. At one point he asked fans to tell him what issues they

care about, but this only led to an incoherent cloud of keywords

(http://www.colbertsuperpac.com/wordclouds/index.php). It failed to provide the Colbert super PAC with much guidance for spending the money. Managing the super

PAC may prove to be a significant challenge for Colbert, as misusing the money could

alienate fans or lead the Colbert Nation toward a different type of fan activism. Future

research should examine this unprecedented campaign once it is finished and

determine what lessons it holds for fan activism.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

Even a monkey can understand fan activism: Political speech, artistic expression, and a public for the

Japanese dôjin community

Alex Leavitt

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

Andrea Horbinski

University of California, Berkeley, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract— We examine the creation of dôjinshi works critiquing the passage of the metropolitan Tokyo ordinance Bill 156 in December 2010 as a case of fandriven political activism. Bill 156 aims to limit artistic freedom and is specifically targeted at anime, manga, and other works of visual pop culture. Fans who participate in dôjin production perform both a love for this media and an active form of citizenship that is historically fannish but transformative beyond the mere appropriation and remix of media texts. We argue that dôjin fans and works constitute a recursive public, wherein participants actively create discourse around artistic and ideological issues while engaging in added layers of discourse regarding the maintenance of their existence as a public. We examine fan discourse and dôjin works engaging Bill 156 as an object for political activism, as anime and manga otaku perform their citizenship in the wider society of Japan for their local public and for a global audience of likeminded fans.

[0.2] Keywords— Censorship; Citizenship; Dôjinshi; Japan; Manga; Nonexistent youth; Popular culture; Recursive public; Tokyo Leavitt, Alex, and Andrea Horbinski. 2012. "Even a Monkey Can Understand Fan Activism: Political Speech, Artistic Expression, and a Public for the Japanese Dôjin Community." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0321.

1. Introduction: Monkey politics

[1.1] On December 15, 2010, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly approved a bill to amend and update the Youth Healthy Development Ordinance (enacted in and amended since 1964) Bill 156—commonly known as the Nonexistent Crimes Bill. The bill regulates the sale and renting of "harmful publications" to Japanese youth: material that is "sexually stimulating, encourages cruelty, and/or may compel suicide or criminal behavior" in people under the age of 18 (note 1). In addition to other provisions

regarding mobile phone content and pornography, the bill especially requires Tokyo's content industry to regulate manga, anime, video games, and related images (except for reallife photography) that "unjustifiably glorify or exaggerate" certain sexual or pseudosexual acts, and it allows the government to regulate these images directly if they are "considered to be excessively

disrupting of social order," namely, images depicting violent acts such as rape (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010

1213/tokyoyouthordinancebillapprovedbycommittee). The bill does not affect materials already labeled as adult or explicit

but rather media marketed to general audiences, and critics have pointed out that the language of the bill is intentionally vague while overly broad, thus allowing the metropolitan government to evaluate these works and to enforce the bill as it sees fit (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20101215/fulltokyoassemblypassesyouthordinancebill).

[1.2] The draft bill's clauses concerning artistic expression generated the largest response from the Japanese public. The artistic community—in particular, celebrated manga artists and industry professionals—erupted in protest against the bill and its predicted consequences in the spring of 2010, when the draft bill was framed in terms of depictions of youth characters in creative works (note 2). Although the bill as passed in December 2010 was reframed to restrict depictions of crimes against youth characters in

creative works, the creative community's opposition has not abated. The bill is technically a local ordinance that applies only to the metropolis of Tokyo, but selfregulation on the part of the creative industry, the bulk of which is concentrated in the capital, as well as potential censorship of those companies in its jurisdiction by the metropolitan government, could have a chilling effect on the industry nationwide (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/editorial/20101228).

[1.3] We examine the passage of Bill 156 as an opportunity for political participation and fan activism in Japan. The affective community around Japanese popular visual culture consists of comic artists, animators, and editors, as well as fans of these visual works, who are known primarily as otaku. The fan activism we examine is not reflected in the appreciation and remix of a media property. Rather, the reactions to the Nonexistent Crimes Bill embody engagement with the dôjin medium and illustrate the cultural proximity of Japanese fans to the process of artistic creation (Ingulsrud and Allen 2009). Dôjinshi are a popular form of fan comic in Japan that frequently transform and/or parody professional works produced and distributed by manga and anime companies (Lam 2010, 232–34). Dôjin works, however, are not limited to comic books: they range from dôjin soft (fanmade software) like independent video games to dôjin music and photography CDs. We argue that dôjin works are important because while they transform media artifacts, they reveal cultural and political ideologies underlying the creation and distribution of fan works.

[1.4] While dôjinshi reflect a fannish impulse to reappropriate and to transform characters and worlds, dôjin works also partake of a specific economic relationship to commercial works: namely, the process of creating for fans, distributing by fans, and selling directly to fans. Stores around the country stock dôjin works alongside professional products, but periodic fan events around Japan form key sites for this secondary, facetoface market. The most notable of these is Comike, the biannual, threeday Comic Market in Tokyo that, in its 76th iteration in August 2009, attracted what was then a record 35,000 exhibitors and 560,000

attendees. While these events remain popular in Japan, many dôjin works are curated, distributed, and publicized in forums online. Additionally, dôjin creators are not necessarily amateurs. Many professional manga artists sell products—outside of their commercial contracts—in the directtofan market, often with the tacit permission of their publishers. And dôjin artists at Comike, for example, frequently have some professional industry experience (Lam 2010; ôkawa 2006). Indeed, the easy slippage in the dôjin community between professionals and amateurs, both categories being subsumed into that of fans, calls into question the very salience of the professionalfan or professionalamateur distinction (Healey 2009).

[1.5] Dôjin production is a key and active praxis within otaku subculture. For decades, otaku have been viewed purely as passive consumers of media properties, swayed mentally and sexually by voluptuous female characters (or, in the case of fujoshi—female fans of boys' love comics—male characters in homoerotic scenarios) in comics, television, and video games, creating a personal space for their consumptive pleasure (Azuma 2009; Saitô 2007; Morikawa 2003; Kinsella 1998). However, as we argue, otaku are active participants in the creation and criticism of culture and politics. Through dôjin practices, otaku perform what Thomas Lamarre describes as a "compulsive intervention into the flow of media" (2009, 148, emphasis in original). Otaku are critical viewers who obsessively deconstruct media through layers of information. Yet in creating dôjin, otaku also construct and reconstruct meaning as a public of artists and media consumers, purposefully doing so outside of the hierarchies and discipline of commercial production. As agents in that public, then, otaku transform dôjin into a form of political activism.

[1.6] To illustrate the ecosystem of dôjin works, artists, and ideologies, we adopt the concept of the recursive public used by anthropologist Christopher Kelty to describe free software developers and opensource principles. A recursive public is "a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives" (2008, 3). Dôjin creators in and around otaku subculture epitomize a recursive public: in the creation of dôjinshi and other fan products, they engage in discussions of the viability of the alternative dôjin market and demonstrations of free expression and copyright issues.

[1.7] Such dôjin practices not only rewrite popular media texts but challenge and transform statepropounded narratives of national and global politics. These acts constitute what Jennifer Chan identifies as new, postmodern forms of performative citizenship, "which does not end with the deconstruction of the networks of power behind existing metanarratives. It is centered on the production of alternatives, performed in the daily acts of activism" (2008, 14). The engagement of dôjin production with contemporary politics via its own instantiation of a recursive public constitutes a new extension of postmodern, performative citizenship into otaku subculture, specifically in opposition to narratives about youth propounded by all levels of government in Japan.

2. Regulating nonexistent crimes

[2.1] The Nonexistent Crimes Bill is largely the creation of Tokyo's conservative governor, Ishihara Shintarô, who has held the office as an independent since 1999. The text of the ordinance was drafted in spring 2010, but in the face of popular and political opposition from the centrist Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ, which currently holds a majority in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly), the bill—then popularly called the Nonexistent Youth Bill—was defeated in the assembly in June of that year. Ishihara and his allies eventually secured the bill's passage in December by incorporating many changes initially demanded by DPJ

assembly members. Its clauses soliciting voluntary selfregulation by the content industry went into effect on April 1, 2011, and its restrictions on the sale and rental of the materials in question to minors took effect on July 1

(http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20101215/fulltokyoassemblypassesyouthordinancebill;

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/editorial/20101228). The metropolitan government had already announced in April a list of

six titles that it was planning to restrict on the basis of their content, mostly manga containing depictions of incest and rape,

under the July provisions (http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20110516/1stmangatoberestrictedbyrevisedtokyo

lawlisted).

[2.2] Bill 156 is part of an escalating challenge to artistic speech and expression in manga and anime. Since the 1960s, decisions handed down by Japanese courts in cases relating to the regulation of the depiction of "sexual expression" have consistently found that "protection of public welfare through censorship of obscenity is not a violation of free expression guarantees" (Trager and Obata 2004, 267). However, lawmakers in Japan have increasingly defined the public welfare to include regulation and prohibition of the exposure and sale of sexually explicit materials to persons under the age of 18, on the grounds that exposure to such depictions constitutes a "harmful influence" that has been conflated with the legal charge of obscenity. Since 2002, both professional and dôjin creators of sexually explicit manga have been arrested and eventually fined on charges of obscenity stemming from the manga's distribution (note 3).

[2.3] Yamaguchi Itsuko identifies this increased government willingness to regulate speech of all kinds as one consequence of the advent of what she describes as "the unprecedented scale of speech on the Internet" (2002, 120). In light of uncertainty in the late 1990s over the status of cyberspace under existing legislation governing privacy and free speech, Japanese regulators have taken an increasingly activist approach to the regulation of speech both in the digital and physical spheres, transforming a de facto license for free expression into de jure regulations stipulating its scope. They have done so, moreover, at the urging of business and public interest groups, who are concerned with promoting the basic trust in the Internet necessary for commerce there and preventing the propagation of speech harmful to vulnerable societal groups in cyberspace (Yamaguchi 2002). Bill 156's regulation of crimes against nonexistent—virtual—youth, characters composed solely of images available in various physical and digital media, is both an example of the spillover effect of the regulation of speech on the Internet in Japan and an indicator of the increasing intertwinement of physical and digital commerce, whether that commerce is conducted by professionals or by fans.

3. The ecosystem of dôjin production

[3.1] Fans around the globe produce physical—and, increasingly, digital—copies of their transformative works, marketing them to other fans at cost or for minimal profit, but dôjin production has grown to occupy a critical artistic and economic niche within Japanese society. The emergence of a semicommercial mechanism and marketplace for the creation and distribution of dôjinshi within Japan has fostered a large community of artists and consumers, who participate in artistic communities both on and offline and who frequently attend fan events to sell fan and original works to their peers (indeed, dôjin means "likeminded").

[3.2] Dôjinshi have been the topic of many scholarly analyses, particularly in relation to the singular legal issues and questions about ongoing economic viability surrounding the dôjinshi market (Hatcher 2005; Arai and Kinukawa 2010). Additionally, dôjin seem to provide an unusual opportunity for female agency and artistic expression by fujoshi artists and consumers within otaku subculture (Kinsella 1998; Noppe 2009). Beyond these viewpoints, we see dôjinshi not only as transformative fan works, but also as a mode of production that allows for artistic and expressive freedom. Whether at fan events or online, dôjin provide fans with the opportunity to produce creative works outside of the commercial production process, thereby providing them a certain amount of agency in their creative expression.

[3.3] The first Comike was held in 1975, and though various other sokubaikai (fan events for buying and selling works) were also popular at the time, over the next few decades Comike grew to become the largest such event in Japan. The organizers of Comike envisioned a space without limitations on content or access; over time, dôjinshi available at Comike expanded beyond fanmade comics to include model kits, music, animation, and video games, while exhibitors increasingly came to be composed of smaller dôjin circles (rather than large groups) and attendance by consumers—who did not themselves produce dôjin works—

increased. These smaller dôjin circles are made up of artists collaborating jointly; Nele Noppe notes that while individual artists do produce dôjinshi on their own ( kojinshi), collaboration—usually within a university club—remains the norm, and the norm for circles is to market their works to the larger dôjin community (Lam 2010; Noppe 2009).

[3.4] Of course, derivative fan works sold at sokubaikai remain illegal under Japanese copyright law, and fan creators—as well as event coordinators—understand the legal juggling act that occurs between rights holders and artists. While fan works have been generally tolerated by the manga industry, for a circle to be admitted to Comike, members must submit an application form (with personal details and information about the items to be sold), so that a committee may vet each submission to ensure that no copyrighted material is being resold illegally. Also, the Doujinshi Publishers Association puts out guidelines for creators to ensure that the authors will be liable for any issues after the materials are printed (note 4). Yet with the growth of Comike and the

popularization of dôjinshi as a form of artistic expression, creators and even consumers have become embroiled in issues of copyright. Some dôjin creators remain conservative on these points, going, as Nele Noppe notes, "to great lengths in order not to draw attention from people who are not involved in dôjinshi culture and might not be understanding of its activities" (2009, 129).

Still, awareness of and involvement in copyright issues leads dôjin creators and consumers to engage in discourse about them.

[3.5] While copyright remains a critical factor for creators, concerns about free speech, freedom of artistic expression, and anticapitalist ideologies are also at the forefront of the dôjin community. Comike participants share the sentiment that dôjin works enjoy a distinct status separate from commercial works. Ian Condry (2011), drawing on research by Shichijô Nobushige concerning Comike participants' opinions about dôjinshi, notes that works from the commercial world are seen as "un dôjinlike"

( dôjinteki jaa nai) and that there is a logic of the fan art world ( dôjinkai no ronri) that opposes the economic logic of capitalism.

4. Recursive publics: Drawing dôjin, drawing out politics

[4.1] While otaku subculture has been consciously incorporated into state narratives marketing the concept of "cool Japan" to increase tourism, the ostensibly passive nature of otaku as ultraconsumers conflicts with the active process of political participation (Galbraith 2010). However, the creation of dôjin works within otaku subculture is an active form of participation in this community. Usually otaku themselves, professional creators of anime and manga frequently engage in discursive practices within their works that act as part of a larger conversation about symbolic and ideological meanings within the subculture. A public forms around discussion about otaku identity and consumer behaviors, and particularly around the exchange of information

(Lamarre 2004). Professional studios—beyond the agency of the ordinary citizen—produce media that become important artifacts within these debates. Yet dôjin production allows for a greater participation in the discourse of otaku subculture.

[4.2] The creation and circulation of dôjin works also fosters its own discourse around the production of fan works, fan identity, and the status of fans within Japanese society at large. Fans who take active roles in this discourse form a public for ideological debate. Drawing on Michael Warner's work on publics and counterpublics, Chris Kelty argues that the existence of discursive media is "not sufficient for a public to come into existence…it requires also that the public take corresponding action…the circularity is essential to the phenomenon…its reality lies in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence" (2008, 48). Besides conversations between fans in clubs, dôjin circles, and online forums, the creation of dôjin works, participation at dôjin events, and—as we explain below—political appeals through media demonstrate the active circulation that occurs within this dynamic fan public.

[4.3] The production of dôjin works for and by fan creators constitutes a public in which fans converse with one another, a space that "checks its operation through shared discourse and enlightened discussion" (Kelty 2008, 39). The ecosystem of dôjin works combines practice and ideology into what Kelty terms a recursive public. Studying free software developers, Kelty describes the two faces of a recursive public: it includes "the activities of making, maintaining, and modifying software and networks, as well as the more conventional discourse that is thereby enabled," as well as "the recursive 'depth' of the public, the series of technical and legal layers…that are the subject of this making, maintaining, and modifying" (2008, 29). The Japanese fan community as a recursive public is involved in the creation of dôjin works, but it also maintains and modifies its existence as a public through the process of creation (methods and technology for art and publication), dôjin events (and the ensuing semicommercial fan economy), and the relationships between creators and copyright holders.

[4.4] Kelty's concept of the depth of a recursive public is strikingly reminiscent of Thomas Lamarre's analysis of the superplanar image in Japanese animation, in which intervals between layers of the image are flattened so that the image itself becomes "a distributive field in which movement into depth is replaced by density of information" (2009, 133). For Lamarre, following the cultural critic Okada Toshio, otaku are people who are interested in and capable of navigating these layered images and fields of information successfully. The fan becomes "a producer, assembler, or fabricator, who engineers and navigates his or her path within the manga/anime/game world" and who is a vital part of a culture industry that moves between fan and professional production as easily as it crosses media and goods (Lamarre 2009, 185) (note 5). Such engineering is a counterpart to the ideological layering described by Kelty, and as Sandy Annett (2011) shows, fans of animation are themselves animated by the force of its moving images to perform their love for animation via fandom itself. Beyond consumption of media texts, dôjin practices allow otaku to perform what Lamarre describes as a "compulsive intervention into the flow of media" (2009, 148, emphasis in original), an intervention where fans are continuously altering the norms and terms of dôjin practice by conducting and talking about them.

[4.5] Kelty additionally posits that a recursive public is "a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives" (2008, 3). The dôjin community may criticize the limitations of the commercial market by maintaining its own fandriven economy around its products, as when fan works portray characters in sexual situations that commercial publishers would never condone. But dôjin works often sustain a symbiotic relationship with professionally produced media, occasionally even developing into bestselling franchises and entering into the professional world of editors and publishing companies (such as Hidekazu Himaruya's Hetalia! Axis Powers).

Dôjin works lend credence to alternative—and successful—forms of flexible interaction with copyrighted materials, alternatives that challenge the policies of professionals in the industry. Even companies like Gainax—whose founders started out as fans creating their own fanmade, fanmarketed model kits to fund the production of their highbudget, professional animation projects

—have attempted to supervise fan works transforming their professionally produced characters and story lines ("Hostile responses not enough in battles with infringers," Nikkei Weekly [Tokyo], December 17, 2007).

[4.6] Dôjin alternatives that critique existing forms of power are imbued with social value. Anne Allison has argued that immaterial labor, specifically in its affective form—work around information and human connection that utilizes and also produces emotional connections, like dôjinshi—has become the hegemonic form of labor in late capitalist societies, including Japan. In Allison's assessment, the global popularity of the Japanese contents industry glorifies "youthful" characteristics of immateriality

—"flexible sociality, instantaneous communication, information juggling"—in media franchises even as youth themselves are vilified for their inability to follow in their parents' socioeconomic footsteps as a result of the immaterialization of the Japanese economy (Allison 2009, 89). Rather than fulltime, lifetime employment, youth today are frequently unable to find employment that pays well enough to enable them to live outside the home, marry, and have families of their own.

[4.7] But because affective labor relies on emotions, the stuff of human connections, affective labor may subvert capitalism's tendencies toward commodification and dehumanization via the very emotional connections that affective labor creates and relies upon, particularly when, in what Allison terms affective activism, those emotional connections are used to forge a community that can sustain its members, physically as well as emotionally. Dôjin epitomize this subversive connective potential, both in terms of the commercial market and in relation to copyright. Allison asserts that as a result of the global popularity of the multimedia Pokémon franchise, for example, Pokémon, "in being productive of capital and national value, became a brand of and for Japan itself" (2009, 92). Similarly, as youth and young adults support dôjin production, a form of affective labor that generates large

sums of capital both for dôjin creators (at fan events) and for commercial rights holders (through visibility of fan works), as well as simple affective connections among members of the dôjin community, dôjin ideologies become an ideology of Japanese youth itself—values that challenge dominant societal narratives concerning the value of youth as citizens.

5. From Monkey Business to miku: Dôjin as political work

[5.1] The dôjin community has a vested interest in the political situation concerning the Nonexistent Crimes Bill, and the public attempts to influence that situation for selfpreservation as well as for activism. Bill 156 affects the existence of dôjin works and their creators—to say nothing of the artistic community at large—by regulating the sale and distribution of "harmful books" and potentially encroaching on issues of free expression that are vital to the maintenance of dôjin practice, namely in relation to regulation of the contents industry, which might police its intellectual property more strenuously to avoid repercussions under the ordinance provisions.

[5.2] While opportunities to carry out political agendas are available to dôjin artists at events like Comike, which reach thousands of likeminded individuals, the motivations of participants do not tend to promote political themes. As Ian Condry, citing Shichijô, notes, almost half of the creators polled participate primarily because creating dôjinshi and attending Comike is enjoyable (49.8 percent) or because they wish others to see their artistic work (27.1 percent). Only 8.1 percent of creators stated they participate primarily because they have a message or opinion they wish to convey (Condry 2011): creative satisfaction and expression remain at the heart of Comike.

[5.3] Though the majority of dôjinshi sold at Comike are transformative works, and most explore parodic or erotic themes, dôjin production—and fandom in general—is not always a site of resistance. Participation in fan activities is foremost an act of pleasure and celebration that may lead fans to recapitulate problematic narratives contained within the works being celebrated (Annett 2011). Still, to note that fandom does not necessarily challenge sociopolitical norms is not to reject political action as antithetical to fannish behavior. Political engagement may manifest alongside ordinary fannish participation, or certain works or people may inflect such participation with political motivations and ideologies. For example, Marilyn Ivy examines the contemporary art of Nara Yoshitomo and finds that although Nara's fans are not a priori political, through their appreciation for his work they are immersed in a parapolitics that emerges from the aesthetics and themes dominating Nara's art. His art "is based on shared affects and affections and generates forms of association and communality difficult to establish in late capitalist Japan" (Ivy 2010, 23).

Nara's work, which is not limited to Japan, brings together volunteer participants and fans into a parapolitical community; the formation of this community itself is "a form of (para)political action, one that works to produce forms of solidarity resistant to rightwing politics, the justification of war, and neonationalist movements in Japan (and elsewhere)" (Ivy 2010n27).

[5.4] Similarly, certain dôjin creators and works may bring fans together around visible (or subtextual) political issues.

Metacommentary within the dôjin public has emerged in various works, most notably the Manga Ronsô Boppatsu (The Manga Criticism War Erupts) series, where critics, editors, academics, researchers, journalists, and authors critique issues such as free artistic expression in manga, creators' rights, copyright, and the globalization of manga to further the constructive discourse around dôjin culture (http://2chan.us/wordpress/2010/01/22/c77acquisitionskindofmangaronsoboppatsuvol1/). More recently, in the months leading up to the passage of the Nonexistent Crimes Bill, many artists, creative professionals, critics, and citizens (both Japanese and international) produced information and media summarizing and critiquing the legislation

(http://dankanemitsu.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/bill156lockedtogoprimeministerexpressesconcernasfinalvotecomes

onwednesday/). Since its passage, various commercial texts critiquing the ordinance have continued to appear (note 6). In

particular, the manga publisher Shûeisha has continued to lead opposition to the bill. In a press release, a representative called the metropolitan government's stated concern for the welfare of actual youth a "pretext" for its acquiring the ability to lawfully obliterate manga that the metropolitan government couldn't stomach, and he called for readers and publishers to keep a close eye on the metropolitan government so that it does not "run wild" ( Weekly Playboy magazine Web site, July 1, 2011, the day the bill's provisions took full effect; http://wpb.shueisha.co.jp/2011/07/01/5525/). On the dôjin side, a representative of the executive

committee of the Comitia comics exhibition, a quarterannual, 1day dôjin fair in Tokyo, stated the bill forced Comitia staff members to unwillingly participate in a world they hadn't previously been connected to (i.e., politics), and—after noting their initial success and ultimate failure at making their views heard—concluded that the executive committee has no choice but to observe the government closely in the future and to protest and take concrete actions the next time regulations concerning freedom of expression are up for debate (http://blog.livedoor.jp/comitiastaff/archives/65936307.html).

[5.5] While authoritative members in the professional and dôjin realms spoke out against the legislation, some dôjin creators purposefully worked to introduce politics to the publics of dôjin events. For Comike 79 (in December 2010), a dôjinshi titled Saru de mo wakaru tojôretsu taisaku: Monkey business (An idiot's guide to Tokyo's harmful books regulation) [A counterpolicy to a metropolitan regulation that even a monkey could understand: (An idiot's guide to Tokyo's harmful books regulation)] appeared in the fan market (figure 1) (note 7). It parodies the political actors involved in the creation of the Nonexistent Crimes Bill in accordance with aesthetic tropes currently popular within otaku subculture, in the form of a bilingual comic that was marketed to an international audience of likeminded fans (including the authors of this article).

Figure 1. Cover of the Monkey Business dôjinshi. [View larger image.]

[5.6] Monkey Business consists of a comic and a few short essays created by three content industry professionals who also regularly produce fan works: Nogami Takeshi (manga artist), Suzuki Takaaki (anime script writer), and Dan Kanemitsu (professional translator). The manga follows the trio as they explain the current state of affairs regarding the Nonexistent Crimes Bill and how fans can become politically engaged to challenge the bill's provisions and fight its consequences. Monkey Business parodies the popular comedy manga Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga (EAMCDM), written by Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma from 1986 to 1988. EAMCDM follows two manga artists who want to rule Japan by creating popular manga (Aihara and Takekuma 2002, 5) that also parodies manga genres while providing tips for the reader to draw her own. Monkey Business uses the same style: the three male authors are depicted as attractive women, and male politicians are represented as seductive young women in skimpy clothing. In a nod to changing tastes within otaku subculture, the manga parodies boys' love comics as well as boys'

action manga (i.e., shônen, stylized with large muscles and bold ink lines). EAMCDM's political bent transfers cleanly over to Monkey Business—the authors want to rule the world with otaku media—but the dôjinshi creators speak of a political, global reality: Japanese popular media has taken hold of millions of international fans, and visual pop culture has become a norm in contemporary Japanese society. Indeed, the dôjinshi begins with an announcement to the community that recognizes the text's playful nature yet seriously calls readers to action: "Imagine a world where people can freely enjoy all the works they want to enjoy to their heart's content. It would be a great privilege if this book provides you some hints as to how we could make such a world a reality. Let's have fun" (Nogami et al. 2010, 3).

[5.7] Monkey Business epitomizes a discursive work within the dôjin recursive public. First, it illustrates issues relevant to otaku subculture, debating characterrelated terms like tsundere (sarcastic but fawning) and moé (cute, sexual appeal), and references manga genres that likely would fall under the purview of the Nonexistent Crimes Bill—comics featuring sexualized girls, homoeroticism, and excessive violence (Nogami et al. 2010, 10–13, 15–18, 20–25; Galbraith 2011). Additionally, at the end of the comic, the narrating characters strip to provide "fan service" for the reader—yet instead of being overtly sexually stimulating, these depictions aim to foster commonality among readers as fans who understand manga norms. While otaku subculture is not homogeneous—for instance, fujoshi (literally "rotten women") are very different fans and consumerproducers than male or female otaku— Monkey Business attempts to cater to all of its readers, even those such as fujoshi, who have kept a low profile until relatively recently (Annett 2011). Even more importantly, the dôjinshi never explains the details of the ordinance: it assumes that dôjin creators and readers, as part of this public, already immerse themselves in debates around these current events. Taken together, these elements constitute artistic trends and foster discourse within the dôjin community, unifying the dôjin public on common cultural ground.

[5.8] Second, Monkey Business deals with political issues of free speech and free artistic expression that directly impact the existence of this recursive public, particularly in response to Bill 156. The dôjinshi exemplifies engagement with the discourse of the public, with a script that deals with political action and an art style that mocks the government's legislation. In the accompanying essays, Kanemitsu even draws a parallel between the political process in government and the politics of dôjinshi: likeminded individuals coming together to work for a common goal (Nogami et al. 2010, 31). Overall, the dôjinshi frames the experience of political action from the common standpoint of the dôjin public—approaching politicians as an artist continually fails (Nogami et al. 2010, 6)—and only unity as a community, both as artists and as a generation, will bring success. "This latest battle was a case of the old values conflicting with the new values! In the near future, you and I, the younger generation will be standing in the forefront in this battle!" (Nogami et al. 2010, 28). Kanemitsu's character even calls for international recognition of the situation, heightening Japanese readers' sense of their duty to participate as citizens and to "stay diligently interested in issues like these" because international otaku are "watching us closely" (Nogami et al. 2010, 29). Ultimately, the call to political

action depends on the dôjin audience as a public, a community that actively participates rather than being mere "passive consumers" (Nogami et al. 2010, 30).

[5.9] Compared to other dôjin, the Monkey Business creators undertook an unusual promotion strategy that has greatly affected its status as an important work within the dôjin public, particularly in relation to the modification of that public's future: the creators aimed to distribute the work to the largest possible audience worldwide. Like most fanmade products, the Monkey Business dôjinshi was sold at Comike in a limited print run of about 1,000 copies, produced and distributed by Nogami's circle, First Spear, which sold out in less than 2 hours. The team quickly began a second print run of the comic, which they are selling through dôjin stores like Tora no Ana, Nogami's personal online mailing service, and commercial outlets such as Amazon.jp (http://dankanemitsu.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/thelullbetweenthestorms2011update/). Although the dôjinshi was not First Spear's most prominent entry in the official Comike catalog, Monkey Business was heavily advertised online, via art Web sites like Pixiv (to Japaneselanguage fans) and via Kanemitsu's blog (to Englishlanguage fans). In contrast to dôjin creators of transformative works, who are highly concerned with limiting the distribution of their works in order to avoid direct copyright entanglements, the Monkey Business authors were liberated by their dôjinshi's original content to promote their political agenda and to distribute their comic everywhere they can. Kanemitsu notes that they tried to keep the price as low as possible to allow

ease of access while still covering printing costs (http://dankanemitsu.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/monkeybusiness

counterattackonbill156doujinstyle/, comments). And at the end of the comic, the authors append a notice: "Taking into

consideration the contents and purpose of this book, the authors of this publication provides expressed [ sic] permission for others to reproduce, share, redistribute the contents of this publication…You are free to spread the word, but please don't rip us off"

(Nogami et al. 2010, 42).

[5.10] Such freedom to share seems antithetical to the values (and worries) of the dôjin community that inhabits events like Comike. However, Monkey Business represents another instance in which dôjin production is reproducing its ideological inclinations as a form of maintenance and modification of its own existence as a recursive public, in this case by demonstrating possibilities for distribution of dôjinshi en masse to the global public of international otaku. As creators embrace the networked potential of the Internet, dôjin production may well begin to adopt such elements of "free culture" into its practice (Lessig 2005).

[5.11] Online spaces have already emerged that dôjin artists and fans frequent to share and discuss art and media—spaces that also expand the potential and scope of dôjin publics. Platforms such as Pixiv, a Web site for artists to share pictures, and Nico Nico Douga, a video platform like YouTube, have been adopted by the dôjin community to distribute works to a massive network of users (Lam 2010, 243). Nogami used Pixiv to advertise Monkey Business to users who were following the account or looking for

related materials via tagging, as a fair number of other dôjin artists do (http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?

mode=medium&illust_id=15196677). Additionally, he also advertised the comic on his circle's Web site (http://www.shop

online.jp/nogamiwebshop) and encouraged discourse on blogs and Twitter. Again, the increased potential for visibility seems to

contradict the guiding ideology of dôjin community as a public, namely its predilection for concealment; however, most viewers who access these media and engage with artists appear to share ideologies and care for similar issues. In other words, the dôjin public has begun to extend to certain online platforms. Yet these platforms are also used as primary spaces in which dôjin publics evolve.

[5.12] For example, artists are employing Nico Nico Douga to disseminate dôjin work critical of Bill 156. On February 10, 2011, user Koushirou uploaded a video—a piece of dôjin music—to Nico Nico Douga titled "[Hatsune Miku] Hijitsuzai Seishônen Kenzen Ikusei Hô [Orijinaru—PV]" ([Hatsune Miku] Nonexistent Youth Healthy Development Ordinance [Original—PV]) (video 1). The song is one of thousands of dôjin music creations uploaded to Nico Nico Douga that have been created using Vocaloid, music composition software that pairs coded notes with audio recorded by a voice actor and feature Vocaloid's mascot cum virtual idol, Hatsune Miku (developed by Crypton Future Media Inc.). Koushirou's video, however, recontextualizes Miku as a political activist, herself a dark, unhealthy, nonexistent youth, as she sings a condescending song about the politicians who are passing legislation against the "infamous people who wear glasses" ( megane o kaketa erai hitotachi)—that is, otaku. The song describes pop culture fans' perception of politicians as people who "can't see the future, they're so befuddled by vagueness" ( mirai ga miemasen ne /

aimai subbokete). However, Miku sings—representing all "nonexistent youth" as well as her otaku creators—"We're waiting for a decision / Beautiful, idealistic / Flawless, ordinary, equal, and such / Please take care of our world, okay? / Take it!" ( ketsudan o omachi shiteorimasu / utsukushiku risôtekina / kanzenmuketsu no heihei nado tairana / bokura no sekai o yoroshiku ne / sai).

And as Miku belts out her final lyric, a viewer's added comment flashes in red on screen: "2012 Citydwellers Rebellion" ( 2012

toshi kokumin hanpatsu), suggesting an activist rallying cry for subsequent viewers. Conveniently, retailers link to commercial books explaining and criticizing the ordinance at the bottom of the video's Web page.

Video 1. "[Hatsune Miku] Nonexistent Youth Healthy Development Ordinance [Original—PV]," dôjin music video critical of Bill 156.

[5.13] Nico Nico Douga acts as a vital segment of the recursive dôjin public, as thousands of Japanese fans use the platform for the dissemination of fan works via alternative distribution methods. In particular, Vocaloid grew rapidly because thousands of producers paired their songs with videos and uploaded them to the site, letting their peers distribute them freely. And though the Vocaloid software is proprietary, its creator, Crypton Inc., allows fans to appropriate Miku for certain artistic contexts like music videos, in which the Vocaloid characters become part of an "opensource culture" model (Leavitt 2011), where dôjin production using Miku and other Vocaloid idols thrives under lenient copyright allowances. (Crypton has, however, enforced its rights in specific, though rare, circumstances.) Certain limitations within the Vocaloid software's terms of service may restrict the artistic freedom of these musicians, such as using the characters to "transgress public order and morals" (http://piapro.jp/license/pcl),

and therefore it is possible that Koushirou's criticism of Bill 156 may be deemed inappropriate and "legally" censored through a takedown procedure. As an amateur dôjin work spread within the dôjin public, Koushirou's video provides the public with further political awareness.

[5.14] While Koushirou's Vocaloid video epitomizes political action within the dôjin community, like creative production at Comike, not all dôjin works on Nico Nico Douga are inflected politically. However, the dôjin communities that emerge on platforms like Nico Nico Douga or Pixiv act as spatial extensions of the recursive public of dôjin creators and consumers, and the Internet allows for the expansion of the public as more fans discover a space for critical discussion around creative and ideological values.

These online spaces—though currently bounded by linguistic divides—further extend global anime and manga fandom and bring people from around the world into the public who are interested in the alternative ideals of the dôjin community.

6. Conclusion: Dôjin ideology and political futures

[6.1] Participation in Japanese dôjin communities epitomizes a recursive public that emphasizes discursive media in addition to action that impacts the maintenance of the public. Additionally, as we have argued, dôjin publics allow for political participation on the part of fans. Yet such participation also affects Japanese identity, because participation in these forms of alternative production and ideologies foster changes in civic engagement as Japanese grow up with these participatory practices.

[6.2] The alternatives of dôjin publics are important markers of cultural transition in postwar Japanese identity and citizenship.

Since approximately 1960, when the renewal of the USJapan Security Treaty (Anpo) brought popular political activism to its knees and inaugurated the socalled economist settlement, postwar Japanese democracy has been routinely characterized as illiberal and undemocratic. The gendered, male ideals of adult participation in Japanese society were centered around the figure of the salaryman, whose romanticized lifetime employment provided for his family, a household headed by the iconic shufu (housewife). Politics, by and large, were left to bureaucrats and career politicians, as Japan got the postwar democracy to which its citizens agreed: limited political input in return for vastly increasing economic output. Writing in 1998, Andrew Gordon termed the postwar sociopolitical order a "gyroscopic hegemony," noting that it was startlingly able to adjust itself to absorb challenges ranging from increased calls for women's right to work in the 1970s to the tribulations of the postbubble 1990s (1998, 212). In the dozen years since Gordon's analysis, the figures of the salaryman and the shufu have been, if not thoroughly discredited, then rendered far beyond the reach of many young people by changing socioeconomic forces, and the businessoriented social values described by Gordon are shifting to the immaterial labor (described by Allison) that has become the dominant form of hegemony within Japan.

[6.3] The immaterial, affective labor of Japanese dôjin practices constitute what Jennifer Chan calls "movementbased knowledge," which in her view "helps to construct new subjectivities about who the Japanese are and how they relate to others—

locally, regionally, and globally" (2008, 344). These dôjin practices resemble what Chan identifies as new, postmodern forms of performative citizenship, "which does not end with the deconstruction of the networks of power behind existing metanarratives. It is centered on the production of alternatives, performed in the daily acts of activism" (2008, 14).

[6.4] But in being an alternative to postwar Japanese social structures and values, the dôjin public inhabits a unique position. In surveying activists in nongovernmental Japanese organizations, Chan concludes that "these new subjectivities…need space in which to be expressed" (2008, 344); otherwise, they cannot emerge as alternatives. While Japanese NGOs must constantly struggle in competition with corporations and the state for adequate physical, fiscal, and ideological space, online and physical sites such as Comike, Pixiv, and Nico Nico Douga represent physical and ideological spaces constructed by Japanese fans of anime and manga, where those fans can constitute their own subjectivities and foster new forms of performative citizenship. These spaces and practices then become a networked platform for activism, and activism in the dôjin public is predicated on the claim that Japanese youth have a capacity for critical judgment about their own lives as well as their society—a capacity, as Bill McLelland notes, the authors of Bill 156 were careful to deny (2011, 8). Through engagement with metropolitan politics via the production of dôjin works critical of the Nonexistent Crimes Bill, fans directly challenge governmental narratives about youth—

namely, their purported vulnerability, naïvete, and need for government protection—and indirectly counter state narratives about capitalism as the proper basis for economic exchange.

[6.5] Conscientious participation by the members of the dôjin public in the politics of society at large is transformative, not only in terms of appropriating and reorganizing media texts but in remaking citizen identity at large at a critical moment in Japanese history. Japan—as pundits, politicians, and ordinary people have reiterated for more than a decade—is facing a deep and continuing social and economic crisis. Since the collapse of the bubble economy in 1991, economic indicators have plummeted, along with rates of marriage and childbearing even as society on the whole ages quickly. As Anne Allison points out, state narratives have tended to blame young Japanese people for their failures to find steady jobs, marry, and have children, concealing the role of macroeconomic factors in conjunction with state policies in causing those failures (2009, 90–91). Through the creation and consumption of dôjin works, however, the dôjin public and its emergent fan activism challenge the state's depiction of youth in crisis and provoke its members to take their identity as anime and manga fans into a larger public sphere that they, by constructing and performing a political identity for themselves, will transform in turn to reflect their dreams and desires (Nogami et al. 2010, 34; Kinsella 1998). Whether or not members of the dôjin public succeed in transforming Japanese democracy, they have already rewritten themselves as dôjin—and by extension, Japanese—citizens.

7. Acknowledgments

[7.1] We thank Sandy Annett, Karen Healy, and Nele Noppe for materials and comments, Toko Manabe for translation checking, and Kaichiro Morikawa for research help.

8. Notes

1. See

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%83%BD%E9%9D%92%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E3%81%AE%E5%81%A5%E5%85%A8%E3%81%AA%E8%82%B2%E6%88%90%E3%81%AB%E9%96%A2%E3%81%99%E3%82%8B%E6%9D%A1%E4%BE%8B

2. In June 2010, even nonexistent characters protested the bill: a character in the wildly popular Weekly Shonen Jump manga Gin Tama shouted in one chapter, "I object to the Ōedo Youth Healthy Development Ordinance Revision Bill!," referencing the name of Tokyo in the manga (McLelland 2011, 10).

3. In 2002, a professional creator of eromanga and his publisher were arrested for distributing obscene materials, while in 2007 a dôjinshi creator was arrested on similar charges, having violated guidelines relating to the depiction of sexual acts and genitalia

selfimposed by the dôjinshi publishers' association the month before (http://heiseidemocracy.com/2007/08/28/editorsdesk

dôjinshiobscenityandjapansimperiledfreedomofspeech/; http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20070913/obscene

mangaartistorderedtopay300000yenfine). All three were eventually required to pay hefty fines in lieu of prison sentences.

4. For instance, in 2007, the association issued guidelines pertaining to the censorship of genitalia, warnings about adult content,

and inclusion of authors' personal information in sexually explicit dôjinshi. See http://www.doujin.gr.jp/foradult.html.

5. Lamarre's description of the movement of the otaku subjectile (i.e., a subject in motion) through these fields of information is

analagous to the experience of navigating the Comike catalog, or Comike itself: it's up to the fan to decide what track to take.

6. See "Books Relevant to Tokyo Regulation" ( tojyôrei kanren tosho) at http://mitb.bufsiz.jp/ (left column).

7. The full text of Monkey Business is available at http://media.transformativeworks.org/twc/v10/monkeybusiness.pdf. This document may be reproduced, shared, and distributed as long as such activity does not result in financial or material compensation.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

"Past the brink of tacit support": Fan activism and the Whedonverses

Tanya R. Cochran

Union Col ege, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States

[0.1] Abstract— For decades, the phrase fan activism has referred almost

exclusively to television fans' efforts to save their favorite series. These campaigns—

dating at least as far back as the original Star Trek (1966–69) to the more recent

Farscape (1999–2003), Firefly (2002–3), Jericho (2006–8), and Veronica Mars

(2004–7), among others—appear effective at catalyzing fan involvement, yet are

largely ineffective at saving series. In other words, while it may achieve some

secondary, albeit significant, victories such as tighterknit relationships among fans,

fan crusading rarely seems to end with the supposed primary goal of activist labors:

more installments of the texts devotees admire and love. Recently, however, the

phenomenon of fan activism has taken on a new dimension, and scholars are

beginning to take note by asking several important questions. As Henry Jenkins

asks, how does a fan move from "participatory culture to public participation"? And

what does this move mean? As one might expect, there are many reasons for and

implications that emerge from this reallocation of such devoted attention. To explore

some of those reasons and implications, the author considers some of the devotees

of television auteur Joss Whedon, their activist efforts, and the distinct ways

Whedon inspires a politically participatory fan following. Ultimately, the author

contends that through their activism, many enthusiasts of the Whedonverses extend

the worlds of Whedon's stories by consciously constructing a sociopolitical, feminist

identity.

[0.2] Keywords—Captivity; Du'a Khalil Aswad; Equality Now; Fan activism; Joss

Whedon; Roland Joffé; WHEDONesque

Cochran, Tanya R. "'Past the brink of tacit support': Fan Activism and the

Whedonverses." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry

Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures,

no. 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0331.

1. Introduction

[1.1] April 7, 2007. The street in the Northern Iraqi town of Bashiqa fills with men,

hundreds of men on a mission, a 17yearold woman named Du'a Khalil Aswad in tow.

Their mission, they tell themselves, involves honor. The young woman's long, dark

hair obscures camera phone images and video from capturing her face in any detail.

Even though dozens of phones are flipped open to chronicle this crusade, the cameras

never frame her face, find her eyes. One wonders if any of the men circling her and

frantically waving their phones in search of a good shot ever actually look into her

face, see her eyes as she is dragged along the street and finally thrown to her knees,

shoved to her belly, and kicked to her side. One wonders if these men—in collared

shirts and khakis, sweat pants and tennis shoes, brandishing shiny, hightech

communication devices—are more concerned about the quality of the audio than the

actual sounds the woman creates, screams curdling at first but quickly fading to

whimpers. Feet fly from every direction. Eventually, her army green skirt is ripped

away, undone from the force of the kicks. A man lunges forward to cover her again, as

if her immodesty were more worrisome than the cinder block that falls from the top of

the cell phone video to finish the mob's selfimposed charge. Thirty minutes have

passed. The woman finally lays still, the pool of blood spilling from her temple several

shades deeper than her bright red sweater.

[1.2] Nothing but red.

[1.3] May 20, 2007. Joss Whedon posts to the fanrun Web log WHEDONesque. The

creator of television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Angel (1999–2004;

cocreator, David Greenwalt), Firefly (2002–3), and Dollhouse (2009–10) titles his

entry "Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten To Death" and begins with an explanation for his

visit to this particular virtual location: "This is not my blog, but I don't have a blog, or

a space, and I'd like to be heard for a bit." The hyperlinked title does not, as it might

appear to do, transport users to video footage of Du'a Khalil Aswad's killing, footage

which is still available online today; instead, it takes users to, in Whedon's words, "a

place of sanity." In fact, the link sends users to the Web site for Equality Now, a

nonprofit organization that "advocates for the human rights of women and girls around

the world by raising international visibility of individual cases of abuse, mobilizing

public support through our global membership, and wielding strategic political pressure

to ensure that governments enact or enforce laws and policies that uphold the rights

of women and girls" ("Our Work" 2011). More aptly described as persuasion than

pressure, Whedon's blog post does its own kind of work to end violence and

discrimination. After explaining what happened to Aswad the month before, Whedon

launches into a selfdescribed rant in which he unpacks misogyny, aligns the filming

and mass sharing of Aswad's death with the release of Roland Joffé's "torture porn"

Captivity (2007), and ultimately calls fans to arms: "All I ask is this: Do something.

Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded

email. Pick a cause—there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink

of tacit support to action" (emphasis added). Within moments, fans spring rather than

nudge themselves into action.

[1.4] For decades, the phrase fan activism has referred almost exclusively to

television fans' efforts to save their favorite series (for examples, see Costello and

Moore 2007; Earl and Kimport 2009; Menon 2007; Punathambekar 2007; Scardaville

2005; and Tabron 2004). These campaigns—dating at least as far back as the original

Star Trek (1966–69) to the more recent Farscape (1999–2003), Firefly (2002–3),

Jericho (2006–8), and Veronica Mars (2004–7), among others—appear effective at

catalyzing fan involvement, yet are largely ineffective at saving series. In other words,

while it may achieve some secondary, and significant, victories such as tighterknit

relationships among fans, fan crusading rarely seems to end with the supposed

primary goal of activist labors: more installments of the texts devotees admire and

love. Recently, however, the phenomenon of fan activism has taken on a new

dimension, and scholars are beginning to take note by asking several important

questions: What causes the shift from savemyfavoriteshow rallies to supportmyfavoritecharity sociopolitical campaigns? As Henry Jenkins puts it, how does a fan move from "participatory culture to public participation"? (note 1). And what does this

move mean? As one might expect, there are many reasons for and implications that

emerge from this reallocation of such devoted attention. To explore some of those

reasons and implications, I consider some of Whedon's devotees, their activist efforts,

and the distinct ways Whedon inspires a politically participatory fan following.

Ultimately, I contend that through their activism, many enthusiasts of the

Whedonverses extend the worlds of Whedon's stories by consciously constructing a

sociopolitical, feminist identity, one that moves them "past the brink of tacit support"

(Whedon 2007).

2. Whedon, feminism, and rhetoric

[2.1] Indeed, Whedon fans are not singular in their activist personality. Every year at

the fan convention Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia, Robert Heinlein enthusiasts

sponsor a blood drive (in 2011, the event collected just under 9,000 units of blood

products from 2,944 donors [Koslow 2012]). The film Trekkies (1997) chronicles the

many forms of community outreach lovers of Star Trek have engaged in for decades,

one being visits to children's hospitals in full Klingon array. Yet the similarities and

differences—Browncoats ( Firefly) are not Ringers ( The Lord of the Rings) are not

Twihards ( Twilight) are not Potterheads ( Harry Potter)—among fan communities are

significant and, therefore, worthy of examination. Just as the Harry Potter Alliance, a

civicminded fan organization, possesses the spirit of J. K. Rowling's magical universe,

so many Whedon fan activists have cultivated a distinctive character: specifically, a

feminist one. Considering the strong female characters populating the narrative

universes of Joss Whedon's series, such an assertion might not be surprising (note 2).

Whedon's creation of these strong female characters has been recognized not only by

fans, journalists, and scholars, but also by organizations such as Equality Now. Even

more, in many public forums Whedon regularly and frankly reminds his audiences that

he considers himself a feminist. The stoning of Du'a Khalil Aswad did not suddenly

prompt Whedon to seize the feminist mantle, though the occasion allowed him to

further establish his prowoman identity. Rather, Whedon's blog post demonstrates his

intrinsic understanding of the rhetorical principles exigence (felt need) and kairos

(right timing), an understanding also exhibited in a gala speech Whedon delivered a

year before Du'a Khalil Aswad was killed and Roland Joffé's Captivity was released.

[2.2] On May 15, 2006, Equality Now honored Whedon at their gala "Men on the

Front Lines." In a video recording widely circulated on the Internet, Meryl Streep offers

a brief history of Equality Now before introducing Whedon, particularly noting that the

organization was cofounded by Jessica Neuwirth, a former high school student of

Whedon's mother, Lee Stearns. Streep exclaims that Whedon's mother would be very

proud of the man he has become and the powerful, iconic female characters, such as

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he has created during his career. She also alludes to the

efforts of Whedon's fans to raise money for the organization (see especially the Web

site Can't Stop the Serenity). Though some antifans have read Whedon's speech as

insincere, Whedon's selfeffacing posturing, his humor, and his ability to capitalize on

the shared values of Equality Now and women's rights supporters render both his

delivery and content rhetorically effective—persuasive and, as a consequence,

inspiring and motivating to many audience members.

[2.3] Upon approaching the microphone, Whedon (2006) begins by both

acknowledging and deferring to the audience. He comments that he finds himself in a

room full of people with "extraordinary courage," something he says he knows a little

bit about since he once read of courage in a book. The audience responds with gentle

laughter, and Whedon summarizes that he will stick to writing, a far less difficult task.

"The most courageous thing I've ever done," he explains, "is something called a press

junket, which is actually pretty courageous, believe me, because they ask you the

same questions over and over and over and over and over and over." One of those

questions becomes the central, organizing feature of his speech: "Why do you write

these strong women characters?" Whedon begins to roleplay, putting himself in the

position of imaginary reporters and then moving back into his own skin. His first

response is sincere and patient with the question: "I think it's because of my mother,"

he responds. "She really was an extraordinary, inspirational, tough, cool, sexy, funny

woman and that's the kind of woman I've always surrounded myself with…it—it all

goes back to my mother."

[2.4] "So why do you write these strong women characters?" queries the next

invisible reporter (Whedon 2006). Whedon's strategy reveals itself this early in his

speech. He goes on to demonstrate that no answer seems sufficient, so the question

continues to be asked, and he continues to answer it. Having a strong mother and

other strong women in his life doesn't seem an adequate answer for the press. As a

result, Whedon tries angle after angle: "Because of my father [and stepfather]…they

were among the rare men who understood that recognizing somebody else's power

does not diminish your own." Same question. With a little more irritation and a little

less patience, Whedon replies, "Because these stories give people strength." Not just

women. People. Something about a lead female character, argues Whedon, opens up a

different kind of symbolic space, one in which women and men can explore emotions,

"hopes and desires," that identifying with a male protagonist does not allow. Same

question. The audience clearly receives Whedon's message as they audibly respond—

with sympathetic laughter—to the repetition of "So why do you write these strong

women characters?" Whedon uses his body to signify a change in his demeanor. He

slouches a bit, bounces on his feet, smiles, and rubs the inside of his cheek with his

tongue as he answers this fourth time: "'Cause they're hot." The audience laughs, but

Whedon gives them little time to complete their reaction. Same question.

[2.5] Whedon (2006) erupts, "Why are you even asking me this?!" Being on the

press junket, he explains, often involves doing multiple interviews in a day, sometimes

as many as fifty or more. So he intends to capture for the audience his frustration. His

frustration, however, does not come from the repetition of the question. After all, he

knows the junket well enough to expect repeats. Rather, the nature of the question

exasperates him:

[2.6] How is it possible that this is even a question? Honestly, seriously,

why are you—why did you write that down? Why do you—Why aren't you

asking a hundred other guys why they don't write strong women characters?

[For the first time during the speech, the audience explodes with claps,

whoops, and hollers.] I believe that what I am doing should not be remarked

upon, let alone honored, and there are other people doing it. But, seriously,

this question is ridiculous and you just gotta stop.

[2.7] In this scenario, though, his outburst is met with ignorant resolve: "So why do

you write these strong women characters?" (Whedon 2006).

[2.8] Gone is the good son revering his parents. Gone is the teenage fanboy

commenting on the "hotness" of his female characters. Gone is the frustrated, tired,

even irate writerdirector enduring a press junket. Here Whedon (2006) narrows to the

thesis. More than just an idea or some goal to work toward, equality is essential for

authentic living: "Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and

women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human

condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the

soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it." Consequently, Whedon

maintains, we need equality not soon but right now. As he makes a play on words that

echoes the name of the organization honoring him, the audience could have easily

read this linguistic flourish as a conclusion. But Whedon is not finished; he must accent

his central argument. Same question: "So why do you write these strong female

characters?"

[2.9] "Because you're still asking me that question" (Whedon 2006). Now he is

finished. Complimented with applause, he thanks the audience again and exits the

stage.

[2.10] In "Whedon Takes 'the Scary' Out of Feminism," Meghan Winchell (2010)

discusses how she uses the video of Whedon's "Men on the Front Lines" speech in the

context of her firstyear Liberal Arts Seminar, an undergraduate course themed

around Buffy the Vampire Slayer that hones students' critical thinking, oral

communication, research, and composition skills (78–9). As Winchell explains, she

does not begin the class by dropping the whole of feminism in students' laps (75).

Instead, she simply starts by treating Buffy (and teaching students to treat Buffy) as

seriously as any other culturally significant text. This selfdescribed "backdoor

approach" allays the threat many students—both women and men—feel when the

topic arises. Only after students have developed their own appreciation for the text, a

critical respect and even enjoyment of it, does Winchell broach feminism and Buffy as

feminist artifact. When she finally does introduce feminism, Winchell first invites

students to share their honest reactions to the word, concept, and philosophy. As she

expects, most initial responses are typical, mainstream mediadriven

characterizations: feminists are braburning, manhating single women who are

unattractive. Yet a few students inevitably also mention power, a topic perfectly

suitable to the trajectory of the class. A historian, Winchell capitalizes on her strengths

and expertise, placing Buffy in the context of both history and classic literature. For

instance, students view Buffy in light of primary documents from the Salem Witch

Trials, looking closely at cases against Sarah Good and Martha Corey. Winchell pairs

these historical texts with episode 3.11 "Gingerbread" (note 3), allowing her to

address "women's place and value within Puritan society" (76). She then invites

students to engage in discussion and analysis of the realworld and Whedonworld

events. As students exercise crosscultural, crosstemporal, and crossmedia

comparisons, they sharpen their understanding of a variety of personal and communal

women's issues.

[2.11] Only after a series of primary and secondary readings, discussions, and

projects, does Winchell share Whedon's speech for the Equality Now event, and she

shares it for the express purpose of offering a (re)definition of feminism for the firstyear seminar students. For many of them, the approach works. As they watch the speech, they record their impressions as well as words Whedon himself uses to define

strong women, terms such as sexy, tough, funny, and smart. Winchell (2010) notes

that students are especially "moved and fascinated by" Whedon's assertion that

equality is as necessary as gravity (79). If nothing else, students come away from the

speech and the class having been put on a path toward understanding more deeply

and even beginning to identify more positively with feminism. What allows them to do

so, posits Winchell, is the fidelity or "emotional realism" of Whedon's text, a realism

that resonates, often profoundly, with students' own lives (79). Through Buffy,

Whedon wins the young scholars over, making his feminist message as well as

feminism itself a whole lot less "scary." Unsolicited and years after taking the course,

Alex, a male student, reported to his former professor that the Liberal Arts Seminar on

Buffy made the tenets of feminism accessible for him. Even more, he clarifies, Buffy

"showed me the truth of feminism: how there is significant inequality and that

accepting a woman's strength does not make a man weak… [Additionally,] Whedon's

speech showed feminism as logical, moral, and sexy. It essentially showed me how

backward, wrong, and ignorant it was not to be a feminist" (Winchell 2010, 80).

[2.12] Independently, Winchell and Whedon seem intent on shaping without

dominating the ongoing conversation about equality. Both appear to desire, in

educational parlance, active and selfactualized learners, a desire aligned with the

tenets of critical pedagogy and liberatory education (see especially Freire 2006; Giroux

1997; and Shor 1992) or what some may even argue constitutes "true" education. For

instance, Maria Montessori ([1909] 2006) describes auto education as the process by

which a person, deeply curious and invested in the creation of knowledge, teaches

herself or himself through trial and error (169–73). In fact, error provides the vital

means for genuine learning. As she insists, humans are not what we are because of

the teachers we have had but because of what we have done (172). Through his

transmedia texts, Whedon articulates his agreement. In Faith and Choice in the Works

of Joss Whedon, K. Dale Koontz unwittingly echoes Montessori by asserting, "Whedon

reminds us again and again [that] it's not what we carry in our blood that makes us

worthwhile. It's what we choose to do" (2008, 189). Who we are, what we do—these

themes arrest Whedon's attention and assert themselves in his creative work.

[2.13] Winchell the professor and Whedon the artist inspire independent, critical

thinkers—students and viewers—rather than mere receptacles of popular yet logically

flawed ideas, faulty notions such as the needlessness of the contemporary feminist

movement. I understand this parallel between Winchell and Whedon as embedded

feminism. I use embedded to mean lived or embodied feminism—a belief, a value, an

ethic that translates into action or activism, however subtle or blatant the form. In

biblical terms, "you will know them by their fruits" (Matt. 7:20, NASB). The rhetorical

effect or persuasiveness of this kind of feminism occurs ethically and over time in the

form of unfolding classroom/television narratives. As much as he attempts to convince

his audience in the Equality Now address, however, Whedon is no more a mere writer

than Winchell is a mere professor; both aim at a purpose, fashion rhetorical acts. In fact, since the debut of Buffy on television, Whedon has become more visibly active in

and much bolder about politics in general (note 4) and the politics of gender equity in

particular.

[2.14] On May 20, 2007, a year and five days after his speech for the Equality Now

event, Whedon posted his entry "Let's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death" to

WHEDONesque. In the post, Whedon addresses two seemingly disparate events: the

"honor killing" of Du'a Khalil Aswad in Bashiqa, Iraq, and the advertising for and

theatrical release of director Roland Joffé's Captivity, a movie bearing the generic

marks of "torture porn," a gratuitous blend of graphic violence and sexual imagery.

Whedon's fiery appeal urges fans to intellectually as well as tangibly oppose violence

against women and any other form of gendered oppression; boycotting Captivity, is an

action Whedon alludes to but does not directly communicate. I suggest that Whedon

continues to flesh out his own feminist identity, in part established by the Equality Now

speech, by taking advantage of the kairotic moment created by the unsettling yet

rhetorically felicitous juxtaposition of the Aswad murder and the Joffé motion picture.

[2.15] After Whedon (2007) explains that he wishes to be heard, he begins his blog

post with a summary and critique of the stoning. He notes facts about the young

woman and events surrounding her death that can be confirmed from mining

newspaper articles published around the globe and archived on many Web sites: Du'a

was seventeen years old; a crowd of men, including some family members, were

responsible for her stoning; security forces were present but did not intervene; the

"honor killing" was related to a perceived religious and cultural infraction. Whedon

claims, as do many journalistic reports, that the young woman was of Yazidi descent

(note 5) and had either been seen talking to a Muslim young man or had actually planned to run away with or marry him—which has never been confirmed. There exist

some reports that she had actually converted to Islam (note 6). "That she was

torturously murdered for this [perceived transgression] is not," states Whedon, "a

particularly uncommon story." What is uncommon, he acridly stresses, is how the

world learned of the story: multiple men filmed her murder with their cell phone

cameras "from the front row" of the mob, footage that made its way to the Internet

and then to major news outlets such as CNN. As a result of this global distribution,

"now you [too] can watch the action up close." Whedon's choice of words— torturously,

front row, action—as well as his indictment of the event as voyeuristic spectacle are

foundational to what Whedon accomplishes next in the blog post: a thematic linking of

real life (Aswad's stoning) to representational life (Joffé's movie).

[2.16] Whedon (2007) prefaces his juxtaposition of the young woman's stoning and

the release of Captivity by stating that he bears "no jingoistic cultural agenda," that he

typically believes US citizens have not forgotten what was learned about the bystander

effect as a result of the 1964 stabbing death of Kitty Genovese in New York, and that

he usually has faith in Americans' adverse response to gendered violence. "We are

more evolved [than that]," he hopes. However, just before discovering the video of

Aswad, he viewed the trailer for Captivity. Viewing the trailer was not Whedon's first

encounter with the summer release, though. In a March 22, 2007, letter to the Motion

Picture Association of America (MPAA), Whedon had publicly condemned Captivity's

billboard campaign. In "Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten To Death," Whedon calls the

billboard a "concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young

woman" because the sequence of four images are labeled "Abduction," "Confinement,"

"Torture," and "Termination" (figure 1). Attempting to give Roland Joffé, the director

of the acclaimed film The Killing Fields (1984), the benefit of the doubt, Whedon

sought the trailer in hopes it would predict a "more substantial" movie than the

billboard promotions. He found otherwise and contends, "The trailer resembles nothing

so much as the CNN story on [Du'a Khalil Aswad]. Pretty much all you learn is that

Elisha Cuthbert['s character] is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and

horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is 'I'm sorry.'" At this point in

the blog entry, Whedon turns his attention to a concept and practice he claims to be

the concept and practice with which he will always wrestle: misogyny, or the hatred of

women.

Figure 1. A Los Angeles billboard advertising Roland Joffé's Captivity (Hall 2007).

[View larger image.]

[2.17] "What is wrong with women?" Whedon (2007) queries. Though further

explanation reveals his sincerity, one could easily (and some WHEDONesque members

do) read his response as glib: "Womb Envy," he answers. Yet before he arrives at that

conclusion, he first takes another opportunity to connect American media

representations of women with parts of the world typically associated with women's

oppression, places known for "sporting burkhas." In fact, he argues that in one way or

another every culture adheres to the notion that women are not only subordinate to

men but also inherently wicked. The evidence for such an idea, Whedon says, he finds

all around him—in film and television, in people's jokes, in advertising. That evidence

proposes that "women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow

morally unfinished… And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women

are, at the very least, expendable." Again, the reason for such beliefs is "Womb Envy."

From Whedon's perspective, men require women to procreate, whereas women, once

impregnated, do not require men to carry, deliver, raise, or nurture a child. Whedon

characterizes men as jealous as well as envious of women's role in the "life cycle" and

especially of their ability to "bond in a way no man ever really will." As a reaction to

their jealousy, Whedon suggests that men began to consciously or unconsciously

devalue women and anything associated with them. He admits that jealousy as a

catalyst for misogyny seems too simplistic; nevertheless, he believes it to be true:

[2.18] How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate

each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion

puts restrictions on women's behavior that are practically untenable? That

the act of being a free, attractive, selfassertive woman is punishable by

torture and death? In the case of this upcoming tortureporn, fictional. In

the case of [Du'a Khalil Aswad], mundanely, unthinkably real. And both

available for your viewing pleasure.

[2.19] Imperative to note is Whedon's conflation of the fictional and nonfictional as

well as his use of the secondperson pronoun you. In essence, Whedon positions his

readers—an audience that begins as the fanusers of WHEDONesque but quickly

becomes Internet users all over the world—as voyeurs. The question is whether or not

these voyeurs will stay immured in their passivity.

[2.20] Before Whedon (2007) elaborates on the "you" he has identified, he first

returns to selfexamination and culpability, a choice that might be read as a form of

rolemodeling for the audience. He admits that the convergence of the realworld

stoning and the fantasyworld kidnapping and torture has triggered for him a sort of

breakdown: "It's safe to say that I've snapped." At the same time, he refuses to claim

righteousness, and even confesses his familiarity with objectifying women (more on

this confession later). Still, "there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all

just take for granted." Moving from the pronoun you to I, from I to we, Whedon places his readers in the crowd of men who stoned Aswad to death, then charges himself,

and finally unites himself to his readers—many of them his fans. Now he stands ready

to make his rallying cry.

[2.21] Whedon (2007) begins his final appeal with praise and follows with selfdeprecation before making suggestions for action and ending, again, with praise. An occasional contributor to the Web site, Whedon interacts with WHEDONesque

members by soliciting their questions and answering them, posting updates on his

current work, and even stopping by to send holiday greetings. In other words, there

exists a certain level of familiarity among the WHEDONesque community and the

auteur; therefore, Whedon speaks quite intimately to them, calling them "fairly

evolved" and noting that "you may be way ahead of me" regarding the death of Aswad and its symbolic relationship to Captivity. Yet he cannot "contain my despair, for

[Aswad], for humanity, for the world we're shaping." Consequently, he explains that

the Web site he has hyperlinked to the title of his blog entry does not take a person to

the scene of a murder. Rather, the link takes a person to "a place of sanity," to

Equality Now. This organization, says Whedon, not only continues to question our

damaged world but also attempts to correct the damage (note 7). Before asking his

audience to be participants instead of observers in that damage control, he provides

them with reasons. For example, just being a decent person and feeling bad for Aswad

as well as the condition of women in our world does not solve the problem of gendered

violence. Ultimately, "true enlightened activism is the only thing that can save

humanity from itself," Whedon insists. He continues, reaching the heart of his

entreaty:

[2.22] All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out,

showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded email. Pick a cause

—there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit

support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once… Even just

learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent

eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you

would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in

Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you're all in it now.

[2.23] In a shrewd rhetorical move, Whedon (2007) punctuates his plea by

simultaneously praising his audience for what they would have done had they been

among the Bashiqa mob and pointing out that because of cell phone and Internet

technology they actually are in the crowd. Accordingly, what they "would have done"

can—indeed, must—become what they do. In closing, and contradicting a statement

earlier in the blog post, Whedon acknowledges that he has "never had any faith in

humanity." Even so, humans have a stunning capacity for growth, for creativity, for

innovation. According to Whedon, we humans are "technologically magical, culturally

diverse and artistically magnificent," ones who have paradoxically managed to

convince ourselves that women deserve to be disparaged and despised, sometimes

even destroyed. For that feat also, "we're pretty amazing." As a professional and

practiced wielder of language, Whedon recognizes the potential for good and evil

inherent in discourse. As rhetorician Krista Ratcliffe (2003) explains, "how we use

language and how languages uses us" defines the study of rhetoric. That language use

—not to tear down but to build up humanity—is what Whedon calls for in conclusion. If

we can knit a myth or grand narrative wherein women are villains, we are just as

capable of unraveling that myth and knitting a new one, with new moral fibers.

3. Fan response

[3.1] The volume of responses to Whedon's post is substantial: close to 100,000

words of text from over 200 members of WHEDONesque, responses that represent a

wide range of ideas related to issues of gender, social justice, and politics, as well as

Whedon's representations of or allusions to these same ideas in his television series,

particularly Buffy. Of course, the discussion itself can be understood as a form of

education and activism. It constitutes a rich, productive, and catalyzing dialogue

sprinkled with both debate and personal narrative and peppered with strong feelings—

some harsh, many hopeful—about Aswad's death, about patriarchy and feminism,

about Whedon and his television series, about who humans are and what we can and

should do to affect change. The comments represent more than constructive chat,

though. A sampling of replies provides evidence of action (usernames appear in bold

type):

[3.2] luvspike—I know personally how women are made to feel powerless.

While I was growing up I was abused regularly by men who were supposed

to be my protectors and most of the time I was led to believe it was my own

fault… The most important thing I can do is instill a feeling of power in my

daughter and make sure she never feels powerless. This is what we have to

really thank you for Joss, strong female role models, we need them. I don't

know how much I can do to help this cause, but I am giving $25 in the

hopes that everyone else will and then maybe we can make a difference,

even if it's just a little.

[3.3] Celina—My first impulse is to educate myself on this issue…and I'll

probably make a zine.

[3.4] rosebud81—After reading the post a few times, I felt inspired to

translate it [into] Turkish…and printed it out to give to my family… Thank

you, Joss, for your amazing post.

[3.5] Fallen—If [Aswad's death] matters at all to anyone, at least it

inspired me to do something. I'm taking the money that I had budgeted this

month to go to the movies and I'm going to donate it and watch Buffy

instead.

[3.6] Tonya—Hello all…there are two very thoughtful links I would like to

share with you… I just signed [a petition] made possible by the International

Campaign against killings and stoning of women in Kurdistan… You can also

go to…StopHonourKillings.com, sign up and help out.

[3.7] Willowy—I've written a letter to Barack Obama…another to my

Congressman, and one to my Senator.

[3.8] palehorse—I had never heard of Equality Now until I became a

member of this community, and I have sent checks to them and proudly

wear one of their Tshirts… But, as many have said here, the solution has to

do with education, education, education—with showing other possibilities,

other possible outcomes… Joss's post is on my office door now, and I hope

those students who pause to read it will be inspired to do something, as

well, to work toward something better. And it has reenergized me to do

more.

[3.9] In another post, RayHill excitedly promotes MicroPlace, a microfinance

organization. Responding to RayHill, OzLady notes that she has bookmarked the Web

site, plans to begin saving toward the cause, and will tell her "farwealthierthanIwilleverbe parents and sibling" about MicroPlace. Joining this thread, Syren shares that she previously "made a loan thru Kiva to a female entrepreneur in Mozambique.

When the loan comes back in, I'll put it right back into another entrepreneur's account.

For $25, you can make a loan that helps to change a life." This cluster of comments

demonstrates how members share ideas with each other and anyone else who might

be reading.

[3.10] Still other WHEDONesque members discuss what they already do, through

their jobs or leisure activities, to help end violence against women. In the process,

members raise awareness about available resources and creative outlets. For instance,

RazorBlade encourages her fellow fans and provides information to help them act:

[3.11] I just wanted everyone to know there are concrete ways to help

women you know who are being abused. I work for the National Domestic

Violence Hotline. We are a link to local services such as shelter, counseling

and legal assistance. We are open 24/7 and take calls from victims,

friends/family and batterers as well. Yes, we even help batterers find

appropriate services such as Batterer Intervention. And we also direct people

to their local DV agencies when they want to donate or volunteer. Donating

clothing or canned goods or some time is a great way to get involved and do

something about violence against women. Please give our number out to

your friends who need it. It's 18007997233 or TTY 18007873224. The

website is www.ndvh.org. We also run the National Teen Dating Abuse

Helpline at 18663319474 or TTY 18663318453. Their website is

www.loveisrespect.org… We hear from victims all the time and it is

surprising how even the small things like supportive listening do so much for

them.

[3.12] A range of other activities develop out of the discussion. Some members

brainstorm and begin to organize local events; others who live nearby offer

professional expertise and connections to help with promotion. Many comment that

simply reposting Whedon's appeal on their own blogs or Web sites will help "spread

the word" and serve the cause.

[3.13] Others remind the group about "Can't Stop the Serenity"—annual charity

screenings of Whedon's film Serenity in honor of his June 23 birthday—and encourage

those who haven't been involved in the past to do so now. In the summer of 2006, not

long after Whedon's Equality Now gala speech, the first fundraising screening of

Serenity occurred in 46 international cities and raised over $65,000. The following

year, only a month or so after Whedon's blog post about Aswad, the screenings

occurred in 47 international cities and raised approximately $106,000. To date, the

fanled endeavor, begun by The One True B!x, has raised over $550,000 for Equality

Now and other charities ("History" 2011).

[3.14] In addition to comments on WHEDONesque, another tangible and notable

response to Whedon's blog post on Aswad's death took the form of an anthology of

poetry, short stories, creative nonfiction, and art by dozens of contributors from

around the world. Organized and edited by Canadian author Skyla Dawn Cameron and

her staff of over twenty volunteers, Nothing But Red takes its title directly from

Whedon's blog entry. All profits from the collection go to Equality Now.

[3.15] In the foreword, Cameron (2008) explains that she grew apathetic over the

year or more it took to assemble the collection. Media attention on Aswad faded, then

stopped; no word of justice came. Cameron felt paralyzed, overwhelmed by the

gravity and scope of the effort required to change the world. Slowly, though, Cameron

changed herself: "I can't change Du'a's fate. I can't punish those responsible for her

death. I can't change the world. But I can make damn sure that at least I don't slip

into apathy—that I keep trying" (4). Then she asks readers to do the same: "make

this fight for equality about you… Start with your apathy. Start with what you are

capable of doing to help. Start with your capacity to care" (4). In other words, making

the world a better place—for women, for everyone—always already begins with

making oneself a better person. As Whedon's character Angel declares, "If nothing we

do matters, then all that matters is what we do" ( Angel, "Epiphany" 2.16).

4. Past the brink of fantastic heroism

[4.1] As this issue of Transformative Works and Cultures demonstrates, Whedon fan

activists are not alone. Rather, they represent a growing population of grassroots

media, cultural, and even sociopolitical reformers. Why, and what does this shift

mean? The same questions I pose at the beginning of this article concerning the

essence of fan activism can be used to explore Harry Potter enthusiasts. For example,

something about J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series has inspired the Harry Potter

Alliance (HPA), a fan community active since 2005 that describes itself in this way:

[4.2] The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) is a 501c3 nonprofit that takes an

outsideoftheboxapproach to civic engagement by using parallels from the

Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world

toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights. Our mission is to

empower our members to act like the heroes that they love by acting for a

better world. By bringing together fans of blockbuster books, TV shows,

movies, and YouTube celebrities we are harnessing the power of popular

culture toward making our world a better place. Our goal is to make civic

engagement exciting by channeling the entertainmentsaturated facets of

our culture toward mobilization for deep and lasting social change. ("What

We Do" 2010)

[4.3] Clearly, word choice indicates that the cofounders, Andrew Slack and Paul

DeGeorge, planned for action— mobilize, empower, act, harness, channel, change. The

emphasis on not just "doing something" but doing something for humanity, I propose,

defines the new fan activism across fandoms. Yet the phrase "by using parallels from"

suggests distinctions among fandoms as well as distinctions among fans' favored texts.

As part of its Deathly Hallows Campaign, for instance, the HPA set out "to destroy

seven real world [H]orcruxes" (note 8). Following Harry's example, the HPA chose as one of its own realworld Horcruxes the unfair, inhumane labor practices in the cocoa

industry. On November 1, 2010, HPA founder Andrew Slack (2010) sent a letter to

Time Warner requesting that all its Harry Potter chocolate products be produced "true

to the spirit of the…franchise." Drawing from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

(2003), Slack makes the parallel between the wizarding and real world explicit. He

notes that when Harry's best friend Hermione Granger discovers that meals at

Hogwarts depend on the labor of house elves, whom Slack refers to as "unpaid,

indentured servants," she promptly sets out to correct the injustice. Dumbledore

supports her efforts, admitting his own wrong: "Indifference and neglect often do

much more damage than outright dislike…we wizards have mistreated and abused our

fellows for too long" (quoted in Slack 2010). Slack goes on to entreat, "As an

organization that prides itself on bringing the message of Harry Potter into our world,

the Harry Potter Alliance feels that it is imperative that there is no 'indifference and

neglect' employed in the manufacture of chocolate bearing Harry's name." Largely a

letterwriting, petition, and boycotting campaign, the Starvation Wages Horcrux was

only one of seven realworld evils the HPA planned to target and destroy. As the

slogan of the Deathly Hallows Campaign summarizes, an echo of the HPA's main

motto, " We are the weapon" (emphasis added).

[4.4] As the case of Whedon enthusiasts suggests, some fans engage in activism as

a way to bring into the real world the ethics of the imaginative texts they love, the

ones they engage with in deep and complex ways. As a result of subtle yet significant

differences in the nature of those ethics, fans channel their activism differently in the

real world. Whereas J. K. Rowling fans may fight for fair labor practices as a realworld

extension of Harry and friends' championing of the rights of house elves, Whedon fans

may resist forms of gender oppression as a realworld extension of the "strong female

characters" Whedon has created (again, usernames appear in bold type):

[4.5] kevingann—I took a Women's Studies class this past semester

because of you [Whedon]… Your shows have helped me to accept myself for

who I am, to overcome my social problems, and to realize how the culture

locks us into gender roles, and that this needs to change…

[4.6] QuoterGal—I will be a feminist until the day I die…a fiercely

protective person to anyone and anything abused by power. But surely one

must understand that this gender inequity persists in humanity, and that it

expresses itself from the subtlest joke to Du'a Khalil's murder… Not

coincidentally, one of the things that has given me the greatest hope has

been the creation and popularity of Buffy. I know it's fiction—which is, by the

way, part of our crucial and defining mythologies—and I know it was limited

in its reach—but it was popular culture and it has clearly had an important

impact… Nothing has ever hit me quite…the way "Are you ready to be

strong?" [ Buffy, "Chosen" 7.22] and the young girl [raising] her hand to stop

her father hitting her—that was me, thirtyfive years ago, actually raising my

hand against my own father, and that was the first time I had seen my face

on TV.

[4.7] MySerenity—Before I discovered…Joss' work, I was blind to the

violence against women… The only thing I was completely convinced of at

the age of 14 was that I hated myself because I was a woman. I hated

everything about it. As a result of the mediainfluenced culture I grew up in,

I was ashamed of my own sex and desperately wished for a hero to come

and save me… And then I found Buffy… And then I found Joss Whedon… And

then I found Equality Now… And then I found myself. And I never turned

back.

[4.8] Without asking them, I cannot know if kevingann, QuoterGal, and MySerenity

consciously extend Whedon's narratives into both personal empowerment and

sociopolitical, feminist action. However, other WHEDONesque members make the

connection obvious, even citing Henry Jenkins on the topic. Yourlibrarian explains that

after reading the thread about Aswad's death, "I also read this post by Henry Jenkins

about the recent [Harry Potter] conference in New Orleans." At the end of that post,

Jenkins (2007) writes:

[4.9] Many fans just wanted to have a good time this weekend but others

were arguing that they should exploit their skills as media producers and

distributors and take advantage of their massive numbers to make a

difference in society. One could argue that this vision of fandom as a political

movement might reflect the ideological construction of the books

themselves, which encourage us to stand up for what we believe in, to

question authority, and to take strength in our own communities. It would

be interesting, indeed, if the Harry Potter books turned out to have shaped

the political beliefs of the next generation, much as they have shaped their

cultural imaginations. I told the reporter that it was no accident that the

success of the Harry Potter books has occurred primarily in a Post9/11

world and that it has paralleled the success of Rick Warren's The Purpose

Driven Life. Both books encourage us to see our lives in a larger context, to

seek out and pursue a larger purpose than our own self interests.

[4.10] Another member, gossi, agrees that there is a clear connection between Buffy

and sociopolitical action: "Art can help save the world—or at the very least shape the

world… The reason I'm here is some little show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and

the international success of that show heartens me." Sunfire joins the refrain, insisting

that fan communities absolutely "have a special kind of energy" that, when focused,

can effect change for the better. Consequently, Sunfire asks:

[4.11] What specifically can Whedon fans do to fight violence and

discrimination against women and girls? The specific mission could continue

to be supporting Serenity Now, or it could be a specific mission in support of

[Equality Now's] larger mission. A specific mission could focus and energize

things we already do as a fandom, in the same vein as Can't Stop the

Serenity. Are there other things that can complement it?…[Equality Now] has

some interesting ideas about creative ways to support their efforts. A blog

could serve as a place to share ideas and find focus, as a start. There's

definitely interest here.

[4.12] Those who study narrative confirm that stories powerfully influence us. As

psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oately (2008) maintain, "Works of imaginative

literature—stories [including film and television texts]—are one means by which we

make sense of our history and our current life and by which we make predictions and

decisions regarding our future world" (176, emphasis added). Stories help us grow emotionally and particularly develop our empathy for others and Others. In fact, "even

if a story depicts social relations that may be unhealthy or not recommended, it is not

necessarily the case that all readers will adopt this information thoughtlessly" (186).

To some degree, this point speaks to the arguments made by detractors of Dollhouse

and Buffy Season 8 (note 9). Thus, do the examples I share represent every person

who follows Whedon's work? No. Are there challenges to Whedon's professed feminism

and the feminist essence of his texts? Yes. As I argue above, however, Whedon

inspires independent, critical thinkers; contentions wrestled with on WHEDONesque

alone—only one Web space among many where followers gather—provide plenty of

evidence. For this reason, I speculate that Whedon does not expect the very fans he

urges to abandon tacit support of gender equality for deliberate action to tacitly

support him, or his texts, either (note 10). Though Whedon may be the fanboy and

creative director behind the superhero extravaganza The Avengers (2012), it still

appears that he desires—and has—admirers who willingly move beyond fantastic or

imagined heroism to realworld heroisminaction. In fact, he directly entreats them to

join him on the front lines.

5. Acknowledgments

[5.1] Early versions of this essay were presented under the following titles at the

respective conferences: "'That Makes Us Mighty': Joss Whedon, His Fans, and the

Rhetoric of Activism," Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association

(PCA/ACA) (2008); "'Past the Brink of Tacit Support': Joss Whedon and the Rhetoric of

Fan Activism," Popular/American Culture Association in the South (2010); "'Past the

Brink of Tacit Support': Fan Activism and the Whedonverses," PCA/ACA (2011).

6. Notes

1. See particularly Jenkins's book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) and the Webbased collaborative project From Participatory Culture to

Public Participation associated with the University of Southern California's Annenberg

School for Communication and Journalism.

2. A plethora of work explores the feminist nature of Buffy Summers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. See Magoulick (2006) for one of several notable challenges to

Whedon's Buffy as a feminist text.

3. On BuffyGuide.com, Fluff (1999) summarizes the episode 3.11 "Gingerbread":

"Joyce Summers joins her daughter on a nightly patrol and discovers the bodies of two

dead children. After Giles concludes that the children were killed as part of a cult

sacrifice, Joyce organizes a group of parents dedicated to ridding Sunnydale of witches

and other evildoers. Their first act is to tie Buffy, Willow, and Amy to stakes and set

them on fire, along with as many of Giles' occult books as they could get their hands

on. Giles and Cordelia rescue the girls by revealing that the dead children are actually

a demon that feeds on communal fear."

4. In 2004, Whedon sponsored a nationwide fancentric event called "High Stakes" to

raise funding for the John Kerry and John Edwards presidential campaign. It is a

matter of public record that Whedon himself contributed $4,000 to Kerry and Edwards

as well as a substantially larger amount to the Obama Victory Fund, Obama for

America, and the Democratic National Committee in 2008.

5. The Yazidi are a Kurdishspeaking yet ethnically and religiously distinct people who

reside predominantly in northern Iraq. Neither Kurd nor Arab, they practice Yazidism,

a religion composed of many elements absorbed from a variety of faiths, including

Islam and Christianity. According to Sandra Marie Phelps, for example, they "believe in

an immortal soul, in reincarnation, [and] that they are the descendants of Adam (not

Eve)" (2010, 461).

6. For a deeper discussion of the Aswad case, see Phelps's "Spectacles of Horror:

Barbarism within Civilized Reactions to Public Killings" (2008) and "The Limits of

Admittance and Diversity in Iraqi Kurdistan: Femininity and the Body of Du'a Khalil"

(2010).

7. Whedon is a member of Equality Now's Advisory Board ("Board & Staff" 2011).

8. In Rowling's fantastic world, a Horcrux is an object endowed with part of an evil

wizard's soul. Hiding these soulimbued fragments ensures immortality; as long as the

Horcruxes exist, the dark wizard lives on. Destroying the objects infused with the soul

of archnemesis Valdemort becomes Harry's singular purpose in the final book and film.

9. If Angel—the vampire with a soul—is correct that "all that matters is what we do,"

the content, the quality of what we do must also matter. Whedon himself insinuates

that "tacit support" for gender equality falls short of substantive action to achieve and

maintain it. As a result, Whedon opens his texts and himself to the critique of fans,

nonfans, and even antifans. Therefore, it seems unbalanced to tell only the story of

what many fans, fanscholars, scholarfans, and scholars consider Whedon's

remarkable rhetorical and narrative accomplishments without also giving voice to

thoughtful analyses that find feminist a misnomer for both Whedon and his texts. For

instance, to some viewers and critics, Dollhouse and the Buffy Season 8 comics pose

considerable challenges to his prowoman identity. Some of this ire even reveals itself

in the WHEDONesque responses to "Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten To Death" (e.g., see

comments by sansmercy and ScrewtheAlliance). Unfortunately, though I am very

aware of such challenges, space does not allow me to flesh them out. As a starting

point for further inquiry into Whedon as fanboy auteur and Dollhouse as antifeminist

spectacle, however, readers may find illuminating the scholarship of Suzanne Scott

(2011) and a special issue of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association

devoted to Dollhouse, an issue edited by Cynthea Masson and Rhonda Wilcox (2010).

Finally, I believe the following question deserves pursuit: Is a fanboy auteur indivisible

from his text?

10. Though for simplicity's sake I consistently refer to "Whedon and his texts" in this

article, the texts in question— Buffy the Vampire Slayer et al.—obviously represent an

artistic team effort rather than the work of one person.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

Nerdfighters, Paper Towns, and heterotopia

Lili Wilkinson

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

[0.1] Abstract— Socially and politically controlled teenagers find emancipatory

spaces in young adult (YA) literature, spaces where institutions can be challenged

and individuals can gain agency and empowerment. Drawing on Foucault's theory of

heterotopia, I examine the literary spaces in John Green's YA novel Paper Towns and

examine how Green's online social networking community Nerdfighters shares an

ideological common ground with the novel.

[0.2] Keywords— Activism; Fandom; Social networking; Young adult literature;

YouTube

Wilkinson, Lili. 2012. "Nerdfighters, Paper Towns, and Heterotopia." In

"Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita

Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0374.

[0.3] What belongs to me becomes more interesting, and more awesome,

once it also belongs to you.

—John Green, Interview with John Green

1. Background

[1.1] Young adult (YA) literature explores fictional spaces that allow the teenage

characters (and by extension teenage readers) to see the world (and each other)

differently. Readers who vicariously experience the literary heterotopia's process of

transformation and transcendence are compelled to spend more time in the fictional

world, to push the characters into new situations. This is the genesis of fan fiction: it is

a heterotopic space that is "in relation [to the diegetic text], but in such a way as to

suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that [it] happen[s] to designate,

mirror or reflect" (Foucault 1986, 25). The fans' desire is to not only extend the

diegetic heterotopia, but also to invite others to experience it with them—and it is from

this point that online networks of fans are born. Online communities take this

extension of the fictional text one step further—laying the diegetic heterotopia over

the real world, and creating a new heterotopia in the space between, where teenage

fans can experience the kind of empowerment, agency, and transformation they have

vicariously participated in, within the novels they love.

[1.2] I will perform a close reading of John Green's YA novel Paper Towns using

Foucault's six principles of heterotopia, and examine the connections between the

novel and the Nerdfightars (http://nerdfighters.ning.com), a primarily adolescent

online community created by Green and his brother, dedicated to philosophical

thought, play, and activism.

[1.3] Paper Towns is the story of Q, a graduating high school senior who suffers from

an unrequited love for his enigmatic nextdoor neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman.

After Margo enlists Q as an accomplice on a deadofnight revenge escapade that ends

up with them breaking into SeaWorld, she disappears. Q is convinced that Margo has

left him a trail of clues to find her and embarks on an adrenalinefuelled road trip with

three friends that ends with them finding Margo living in an abandoned barn in Upstate

New York. Margo is surprised to see them—she hadn't left clues at all, and Q realizes

that the reallife Margo cannot be contained by his fantasies of her, and that it is

"treacherous to see a person as more than a person" (Green 2008, 326).

[1.4] The Nerdfighters community began in 2007, when author John Green and his

brother Hank, concerned that their relationship had devolved to purely textbased

communication, started the Brotherhood 2.0 project, where they each posted a

YouTube video on alternate days, every day for a year. The project was instantly

popular with viewers (mostly adolescents) who had come across it via Green's novels.

These viewers were quickly integrated into the project, and the idea of Nerdfighters

was born (note 1).

[1.5] Nerdfighters are not about you and me. Nerdfighters are about a

made of awesome book, made by a woman in Australia, going to a made of

awesome baby in the United States. Nerdfighters are about raising money

and awareness for important causes. Nerdfighters are about building a

supportive community of friends…in my pants. Nerdfighters are about stupid

beautiful projects and making each other laugh and think with Tshirts and

pocket protectors and rants about the situation in Pakistan which sucks right

now. In the contemporary world where things fall apart and the center

cannot hold you have to imagine a community where there is no center…A

lot of life is about doing things that don't suck with people who don't suck.

(Green 2007b)

[1.6] The Nerdfighters community is not solely focused on activism. Its creative

output is varied, incorporating music, fiction, video, art, education, craft, and many

kinds of play, including amusing challenges, punishments, pranking, and games.

Green explains that he and his brother decided early on that the community needed a

kind of mission statement or purpose, something that was broad enough that

members could take it in whichever direction they chose, but neologistic and therefore

specific to their community. They settled on "decreasing WorldSuck" (John Green,

pers. comm.).

[1.7] Nerdfighters is not the only online literary community that incorporates

activism. Much has already been written about literary/activism/fandom organization

The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA, http://thehpalliance.org), and I won't add to that body

of writing in this article, except to say that the connections between the fictional

events of the Harry Potter novels and the activism of the HPA are explicit—even literal.

Members identify realworld parallels to the Dark Arts of the novels, and then look to

characters like Dumbledore and Potter as role models, trying to emulate their

goodness and heroism through activism (Slack 2010). The connections between a

novel like Paper Towns and the activities of the Nerdfighters community are more

subtle—but no less profound.

[1.8] Unlike the Harry Potter Alliance, the Nerdfighters don't form a bottomup

community—it's created and curated by the Green brothers, and is largely driven by

their values and interests. A fan community headed by the subject of fandom is rare,

and implies a fundamental conflict between Green's utopian, collaborative vision for

the Nerdfighters, and the actual realities of the community. This conflict is worth

exploring, as it also reflects a contradiction within literature for young people—namely,

in writing for and about children, we are positioning them as other, and by attempting

to teach them to be like us, we imply that they are currently less than human. This

concept is explored by Perry Nodelman in his seminal article comparing children's

literature to Orientalism. Nodelman states: "Our attempting to speak for and about

children…will always confirm their difference from, and presumably, inferiority to,

ourselves as thinkers and speakers" (1992, 29).

[1.9] Paper Towns is not a children's book, and it is important not to apply children's

literary theory to YA fiction, as they serve significantly different purposes. In many

ways, YA is a reaction against the "impossibility" of children's literature as discussed

by Rose and Nodelman (Rose 1984; Nodelman 1992). Most YA fiction is about the

journey away from a position of relative innocence (childhood) to a place where one

understands one's position within a social and political landscape (note 2). In many

ways, Paper Towns is making the same argument as Nodelman—that it's dangerous to

see people as a fixed and knowable other.

[1.10] Nodelman argues that "in the act of speaking for the other, providing it with a

voice, we silence it" (31). I'd like to make the case that the Nerdfighters do the

opposite—if Green speaks for and to adolescents in Paper Towns, then the

Nerdfighters project is an invitation to reply and participate, to open up a dialogue

between self and other, between author and reader. Despite its topdown construction,

the technological aspects of the Nerdfighters community allow for genuine

collaboration and individuality—the community supports many offshoot projects and

groups created solely by teenagers.

[1.11] Some Nerdfighting activities have very strong links to Green's writing. The

Positive Pranking Project (in conjunction with fellow YA author Amy Krause Rosenthal)

has clear ties to the class pranks played out in both Paper Towns and Green's Printz

Awardwinning Looking for Alaska (2005). The Positive Pranking Project, however,

seeks to subvert the traditional mischievous intent of pranking with gifts and positive

messages (Green 2010a) (note 3). To find more connections, though, we must dig a

little deeper. Green's books and the Nerdfighters share an ideologically (if not explicitly

political) common ground—creating spaces that foster mutual respect, intellectual and

philosophical thought, linguistic play, and a fundamental desire to make the world a

better place.

2. Literature and reading online

[2.1] The rise of social networking has changed the way we read fiction (Wilkinson

2009). Although book clubs and reading circles existed long before the dawn of new

media, reading has traditionally been a primarily solitary activity. New media has

enabled the collaborative aspects of reading to expand greatly, transforming it into a

creative and community building activity. Green explains, "you read and love a book,

and then you get online and find other people who read and loved it, and those

connections create communities with surprisingly strong bonds that are capable of

accomplishing a lot more than just talking about books" (Green 2011). If a book

(especially a YA book) is popular, it's probable there are online activities involving it,

whether they be forumstyle discussions, fan fiction, fan art, video, or craft. The link

between these fan communities and social activism, however, is not guaranteed.

Green comments that he hasn't seen any activismfocused fandom surrounding the

Twilight novels, commenting that "this may be because of the values in the books or

because some lack of momentum within the community, but I don't think it's a

universal or even very common phenomenon" (Green 2011). He sees literature as a

kind of conduit—a space where people with shared sensibilities can come together to

discuss and address the issues they identify as being important (note 4). I employ

Foucault's theory of heterotopia to explore this common ground and make explicit

these ideological links, and their measurable, realworld impact.

[2.2] A heterotopia is, according to Foucault, "a kind of effectively enacted utopia in

which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are

simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (1986, 23). A heterotopia is,

unlike a utopia, a real space—although, for the purposes of this article, I will expand

the definition of "real" to include physical spaces within fictional worlds, online spaces,

and indeed literature itself as a kind of heterotopia. The worlds within YA fiction are

often heterotopic—spaces that operate under different rules, existing outside the

established order of things. Heterotopic YA ranges from the realistic—such as Cory

Doctorow's Little Brother, in which the characters step beyond the borders of

governmental control to operate a massive online social protest movement, to the

fantastic world of Harry Potter, where the characters literally inhabit a world that is

outside and invisible to the order of ours—still located in England, but with its own

system of government and its own laws of physics and nature.

3. Crisis and deviance

[3.1] Foucault describes six principles of heterotopia. The first is that heterotopias

occur in all cultures, throughout history, but they can take varied forms (1986).

Foucault divides the heterotopia into two main categories, the first being the crisis

heterotopia—where individuals in a state of crisis such as adolescents, menstruating

women, or the elderly are placed until their situation normalizes (into adulthood, for

teenagers, or death for the elderly). Foucault argues however, that the crisis

heterotopia is being replaced in our society by the second category, the heterotopia of

deviation, a space for "individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the

required mean or norm" (1986, 24). Foucault suggests that psychiatric hospitals,

prisons, and nursing homes are all heterotopias of deviation.

[3.2] Joan Gordon argues in an analysis of China Miéville's novel Perdido Street

Station that crisis heteretopias and deviance heterotopias are in fact the same space,

viewed from different vantage points: "As people are cast off from society, they form a

countersociety, a countersite of their own. To the society that casts its deviants

aside, these institutions are deviation heterotopias. To the residents of rest homes and

psychiatric hospitals and prisons, their isolation from society links them to others like

themselves. No longer deviant in this countersuit, they undergo the transformative

experience of the crisis" (Gordon 2003, 466).

[3.3] Cyberspace and feminism scholar Rhiannon Bury concurs, arguing that

"defining such spaces in terms of deviance alone fails to accord agency to those

thought of in such terms" (2005, 17). She redefines the heterotopic space as not just

a site of deviance, but also of "resistance, inversion, subversion or perhaps simply a

space in which active consent to normative practices is suspended" (2005, 18).

[3.4] Adolescence is positioned in our society as a state of crisis and deviation.

Children's literature scholar Kimberley Reynolds argues that despite the emergence of

the teenager as a major advertising market, the political and social power of teenagers

has been considerably diluted since the 1960s. She argues that the cultural and social

terrain traditionally assigned to teenagers has become congested—with tweenagers at

one end, and liberal parents, aging rockers, "kidults," and "cultural necrophiliacs" at the other (2007, 77). US cultural critic Henry Giroux argues that the cultural impact of

teenagers is managed largely by a media trying to sell teenage culture to adults and

preteens: "Prohibited from speaking as moral and political agents, youth become an

empty category inhabited by the desires, fantasies, and interests of the adult world"

(1998, 1).

[3.5] Media education specialist David Buckingham links adolescent cultural

disempowerment with young people's perceived lack of interest in current affairs and

politics. He asserts that "young people are not defined by society as political subjects,

let alone as political agents," and that even in the areas of political and cultural debate

that specifically concern them—such as education—the discussion takes place 'over

their heads'" (2000, 218–19).

[3.6] Green sees this denial of political agency as a major factor in the success of the

Nerdfighters community (note 5). He explains that the combination of political

disempowerment and financial restriction exclude most teenagers from philanthropic

activities. "But we say to them 'Hey, $5 is a big deal,' because we want to introduce

them to the idea of philanthropy, the idea that your money goes further when

someone other than you spends it" (John Green, pers. comm.). Through various

projects, Nerdfighters have helped to get Democrat Daniel Biss elected to the state

legislature in Illinois in a formerly Republican district; purchased clean drinking water

for villages in rural Bangladesh and Haiti; and loaned tens of thousands of dollars

through microfinancing organization kiva.org to mostly female entrepreneurs in the

developing world. Engagement in this community of (predominantly) politically

disenfranchised teenagers, therefore, enables participants to experience the

subversive power of the heterotopia, enabling development and transformation.

[3.7] These notions of subversion and empowering the disempowered permeate

Paper Towns. Q's friend Radar, for example, lives in a house that contains the world's

largest collection of black Santas. Green states on his Web site that Paper Towns is a

novel about "how we imagine people, places and stories" (2010b), and the dangers in

doing so. He argues that the traditional cultural depiction of Santa (or God, or Jesus)

as white indicates a lot more about our society than it does about the reallife Saint

Nicholas (who was Russian), and that in collecting black Santas, Radar's parents are

trying to encourage people to imagine Santa differently—an alternate order of Santas.

[3.8] Novels about adolescence inevitably visit the high school—a true space of crisis

and deviance. Paper Towns is set in that strange, liminal period of senior year where

college offers have already been made, but students must continue to attend and sit

their final exams. On the last day of school, Q finds himself overwhelmed with

unexpected emotions. His general ambivalence towards school evaporates: "All the

things I'd done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept

welling up inside me. These whitewashed cinderblock walls. My white walls. Margo's

white walls. We'd been captive inside them for so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah"

(Green 2008, 264).

[3.9] Q feels like he is drowning in "perverse nostalgia." He is desperate to leave, but

cleans out his locker, discarding everything except a photo of him and his two best

friends. When he finally leaves he is suddenly liberated, exultant. He realizes that "it is

so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the

world" (266). As he runs towards home, he experiences a glimpse of the

transformative power of the heterotopia: "I felt myself for the first time becoming

Margo" (268). Q experiences a series of these transformations as he moves through

the heterotopic spaces of the novel toward an understanding of individuality,

imagination, and identity.

4. Changing functions of space

[4.1] Foucault's second principle of heterotopia is that the function of an existing

heterotopic space can change over time. As Paper Towns takes place over the space of

only a few weeks, this is arguably the least useful principle in this analysis; however,

the heterotopic spaces that Q explores do contain elements of this changing function:

the increasing environmental focus at Sea World; the evolution of the minimall from

shopping destination, to ruin, to urban exploration site, to exile, to sanctuary; the

change in high school before and after graduation; and the slow decay of the

abandoned planned subdivisions (or pseudovisions, as Q calls them). It is, however,

these transitions of function that facilitate Q's own evolution, from someone who views

Margo as an empty vessel for his own fantasies and desires, to a whole individual

person with desires of her own.

[4.2] The Nerdfighters project, too, is a product of evolution. The shift from

Brotherhood 2.0 into Nerdfighters was, according to Green, a natural one. "Internetbased communities," he explains, "can only gaze at their navels for so long before they want to make something out of their improbable connection to one another"

(2011). Green claims that activism in the Nerdfighters community is a mix of

encouragement from him (and Hank), and organic growth. Many individual

Nerdfighters have started projects stemming from their own interests/concerns—such

as Shawn Ahmed, who quit college and used the money he'd been saving for an XBox

360 to move to Bangladesh and start the Uncultured Project

(http://www.uncultured.com), which, with the help of Nerdfighters and other supporters has, over the past 4 years, provided lasting clean water to an entire village,

rebuilt a cycloneravaged high school, provided emergency relief in multiple disasters,

and helped over 10,000 children through a longterm health worker program. How this

and other projects merge to form the basis of the Nerdfighters community will be

discussed below.

5. Juxtaposing incompatible sites

[5.1] Foucault explains that the third principle of heterotopia is that it is "capable of

juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves

incompatible." The Internet, and all the millions of sites it contains, is profoundly

heterotopic—it operates under different rules and exists outside the established order

of things. Geographic scholar Kevin Hetherington describes the Internet as not

"located in one place, but an endless and multiple set of relations between sites

constituted through a myriad of everchanging connections" (1997, 146). Similarly,

architectural scholar Kathleen Kern also claims that the Internet is developing

"alternative semipublic spaces and realms" and that online spaces are where any and

all scenarios and social orders can be suggested and enacted, whether utopic,

dystopic, or heterotopic (2008, 114).

[5.2] Literature offers a space outside of the public/political realm, where profound

ideological difference can be set aside and a shared understanding of "goodness" can

be fostered. Green explains:

[5.3] I really value the idea that Nerdfightaria is a big tent inclusive of

conservatives and liberals, atheists and Muslims, Americans and Australians

and Egyptians…. All kinds of people like my books: People who think gay

marriage is immoral, people who think it is a human right to own assault

weapons, etc. I'm grateful to have those people as readers, and I'm grateful

that through literature I can have a kind of conversation with them, but we'll

never reconcile politically. (John Green, pers. comm.)

[5.4] While literature—particularly YA literature—is not always explicitly political, it is

almost always inherently political (see Trites 2000; LesnikOberstein 2004; Mickenberg

2005). YA literature explores the ways in which we are shaped by the institutions

surrounding us, whether they be school, family, church, or state (note 6). But YA is

not merely political. Nerdfighters have opened up a space between the politics of

literature and the linguistic pleasures of narrative, and built a community there, an

interstice of fictional, social, political, and virtual space, where individuals can

communicate their own definitions of "Worldsuck," and promote varied methods of

decreasing it.

[5.5] During Q's nighttime adventure with Margo, she takes him to the top of a

building in Orlando's financial district, where the whole city and its suburbs unfolds

below them. Q finds the view beautiful, impressive. "You can't see the wear on things,

you know? You can't see the rust or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone

once imagined it" (2008, 63).

[5.6] For Margo, however, the city can never be beautiful.

[5.7] It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper

town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those culdesacs, those streets that

turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those

paper people living in their paper houses, burning the furniture to stay

warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the

paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning

things. All the things paper thin and paper frail. And all of the people, too.

I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come

across anyone who cares about anything that matters. (63–64)

[5.8] Q doesn't know that Margo is planning to leave. He doesn't even imagine the

possibility—he is too busy imagining fantasy scenarios where he and Margo become

romantically entangled. Q's way of imagining the city is incompatible with Margo's—

just as his way of imagining her is incompatible with the reallife Margo. At this point

in the novel, both Q and Margo have not yet experienced the transformation of the

heterotopia, and so they remain isolated, locked into their own imaginings. They

cannot bring their separate ideologies together and find a common ground.

6. Slices in time

[6.1] After Margo disappears, Q follows a trail of clues to a building on the outskirts

of town. After breaking in through a boarded up window, Q finds himself in an

abandoned minimall. "The papers on the floor are pages from an old daytoday

calendar, the days scattered through the room, all of them yellowing and mousebit. I

wonder if this might once have been a little bookstore, although it's been decades

since these shelves held anything but dust" (166).

[6.2] At first he finds no sign of Margo—no sign of anything other than decay. But on

a subsequent visit, small pieces of evidence emerge—thumbtack holes on a wall, a

bottle of nail polish, paintedover graffiti on the walls, a blue blanket that holds

Margo's scent. Q decides to try and truly be Margo, to spend the night in the minimall, holding her blanket. It is the night of Q's senior prom, but he doesn't wish to attend.

This is the fourth principle of heterotopia—spaces that are "linked to slices in time"

(Foucault, 1986, 25). Foucault argues that the heterotopia begins to "function at full

capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time" (4).

Inside the minimall, time and comingofage milestones (school, prom, college) cease

to matter: "On each calendar, it is perpetually February of 1986" (169).

[6.3] It is here in that Q experiences the first of his two major transformational

realizations. He imagines Margo holed up there: "It all struck me as so lonely and so

very un Margo. But all the evidence of the past ten days accumulated toward a

surprising conclusion. Margo herself was—at least part of the time—very unMargo"

(196).

[6.4] Q realizes that the Margo of his boyhood and adolescent fantasies doesn't

match the Margo of reality. He starts to understand that he has misseen Margo, and

that there are endless ways of imagining her—"an infinite set of Margos." Later that

night, Q hides in an empty bathtub with Margo's friend Lacey at an afterparty for a

prom he didn't attend, and thinks that everyone—himself, Lacey, Margo's mother—

have all been "looking at [Margo's] reflection in different fun house mirrors" (214), and

that perhaps none of them have seen the real Margo.

[6.5] Q wonders if for Margo, the minimall was a place of comfort because she

always felt like she was in an empty, abandoned room with blockedout windows—

even when she was surrounded by her friends and family. Because everyone missaw

her, and nobody imagined that she was real. And Q understands his mistake: "Margo

was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing.

She was a girl" (231).

[6.6] This fourth aspect of heterotopia has obvious links to the Internet—from

YouTube to forum posts to blogs to Twitter—endless slices of time displayed

asynchronously. Once a year, the Nerdfighters take advantage of the Internet's

flexible relationship with time, and its obsession with metrics, for the Project for

Awesome. Green explains that "In 2007, Nerdfighters hijacked YouTube's algorithms

to push videos about charities onto the front page of the site, which is usually reserved

for, you know, cats on roombas videos. By 2010, the P4A—which had begun with

basically hacking YouTube for charity—was sponsored by YouTube" (2011).

[6.7] The project has generated over 5,000 videos, tens of millions of views, and in

2010 raised over $150,000 for charity in 48 hours, mostly, Green reports, from small

donations from teenagers. The P4A videos are now used by organizations like Save the

Children and Heifer International. It is with projects such as this that the Nerdfighters

community display the true potential of the heterotopia—using a site of exile, crisis,

and deviance to hijack time and virtual space, transform disempowerment to

empowerment, and gain a genuine global voice.

7. A system of opening and closing

[7.1] Foucault's fifth principle of heterotopia is that it "presuppose[s] a system of

opening and closing that both isolates [it] and makes [it] permeable" (26). It is

possible to see evidence of this space throughout Paper Towns—when Q and Margo

break into Sea World at 3 am; the compulsory attendance then postgraduation exile

of high school; the minimall with its locked doors and boarded up windows; the

minivan that takes Q and his friends across the country to find Margo. But perhaps the

most profound example from the novel is Margo herself. Q's series of transformations

is mirrored by the three sections of the novel: The Strings, The Grass, and The Vessel.

In the beginning, Margo and Q both see identity as like a musical instrument—and

once the strings have broken, they can never be mended again. Later on, Q takes

inspiration from Walt Whitman and sees identity as being like grass—that we are all

infinitely connected, and can use our common roots to understand one another, and

even become one another. But Q's final realization is that a broken identity isn't

irreparable, and that we can't become one another or even accurately imagine one

another.

[7.2] Each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen

—these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get

them, and we lose and fall and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to

crack open in places…. But there is all this time between when the cracks

start to open and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we

can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks

and into others through theirs… Before that, we were just looking at ideas of

each other… But once the vessel cracks, the light gets in. The light can get

out. (350)

[7.3] Green respects his teenage readers. He invites them to see the world

differently, but not necessarily to see it his way. It is this respect and emphasis on

intellectual thought that forms the cornerstone of the Nerdfighters community. Green

and his novels were the genesis for this community, but not the ongoing impetus for

one. Green doesn't believe that he is making apathetic teens political—more that the

Nerdfighters community gives teens a forum to be respectfully heard and a community

with which to share ideas.

8. All the space that remains

[8.1] Foucault's sixth and final principle of heterotopia is that it has a "function in relation to all the space that remains," that it either exposes 'real' space as somehow

fake or illusory, or creates a space that is "other, another real space, as perfect, as

meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, illconstructed and jumbled" (26).

[8.2] Nathan Rambukkana's paper on the heterotopic role of slash fiction argues that

online fan spaces "offer a potential as zones where other practices, discourses, and

consciousnesses can form or circulate with partial autonomy from the constraints upon

those practices, discourses and consciousnesses in other societal spheres" (2007, 68).

He stresses that the various ideologies that compete for attention within online spaces

are not always compatible, forming instead an alternative or radical public sphere

where ideology and protest combine with humor and emotion, thereby drawing the

attention of the general public (2007, 69).

[8.3] Political change and ideology is discussed on Nerdfighters in a unique, playfulyetserious way. For example, John has made videos discussing Maoist rebels in Nepal while eating toilet paper (Green 2007a) or discussing the GeorgiaRussia war while

letting a puppy lick peanut butter from his face (Green 2008). These subversions of

typical news reporting are not intended to detract from the seriousness of the issues at

hand, but instead to subvert the nature of civic discourse and make it accessible to

audiences traditionally excluded from politics. Green is acutely aware of the dangers of

politicized, jargonladen discourse, and finds it condescending. He argues that young

people "are tired of seeing blackandwhite photographs of sick or poor children, and

they're hungry for more complex understandings of what it means to live in poverty.

They're tired of hearing dichotomous discourse that denies what I think is the essential

fact of human existence, which is that the truth resists simplicity" (2011).

[8.4] The Nerdfighters project exposes the "real world" of politicized discourse, as

oversimplified, patronizing, and fundamentally false. Green explains that without the

Nerdfighters community, and the social networking potential in YouTube, he wouldn't

have been able to meet Bangladeshi villagers over video, and "come to know and care

about them as people and not just twodimensional images of poverty" (2010c). The

transformative experience produced by the literary and virtual heterotopia is therefore

leaking back into the real world, with concrete, lifechanging consequences.

[8.5] There are three kinds of paper town in Green's novel: Margo's view of Orlando

as being fake and shallow; the empty, abandoned pseudovisions; and fictional towns

inserted into maps as a kind of copyright trap by cartographers. This final kind of

paper town is where Q experiences his final transformation—the above understanding

of identity as a vessel, the importance of vulnerability, and the danger of "believ[ing]

that a person is more than a person." The paper town of Agloe, in upstate New York,

has a population of zero. It contains an old barn that has so many holes in the walls

that it is "simultaneously inside and outside." It is a noplace—identified on a map as having meaning and significance, but barely existing in reality. Margo explains that it's

how she felt, back in Orlando.

[8.6] It's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could

never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a

paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more

real than the people who created the dot could ever have imagined. I

thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here

also. (340)

[8.7] Agloe exposes the illusion of the paper map—Margo travels there to expose

herself, to reveal her true identity behind the paper high school girl that everyone—

including Q—adores. The novel ends with closure, but no easy answers. We learn from

Margo the danger of imagining things, but Q reminds us that if we don't imagine,

nothing ever happens at all. Q understands the importance of metaphors—when you

define yourself as the strings, the grass, or the vessel, each has different implications.

The future must be imagined in order to bring it into being, and by doing so we render

ourselves vulnerable, letting others in through our cracks. But we must not impose our

imaginings upon other people—they have their own imaginings, and underneath them,

their own vulnerable selves. Green's novel is a complex procession of complicated

philosophical ideas, yet it doesn't impose any answers upon the reader, except

perhaps a plea for mutual respect.

9. Conclusion

[9.1] What is the relationship between Nerdfighters and Paper Towns? Could

Nerdfighters exist without the scaffolding of John Green's novels? Probably, although

perhaps on a much smaller scale. Being a popular, successful author certainly adds

legitimacy to the project, and allows its popularity to grow at a more rapid pace.

Although the novel did not cause the community (or vice versa), they clearly inform

one another and are connected through the principles of heterotopia. Paper Towns

invites its readers to see each other differently and to acknowledge that we can never

truly understand one another. The novel fosters a readership that supports and

reinforces the values of the Nerdfighters community—respect, playfulness, intellectual

thought, and generosity. The participation of author John Green within his own (selfcreated) fandom calls into question the distinction between self and other, inviting the reader to begin a genuine dialogue with the author. This heterotopic space between

fiction and reality, creator and consumer, allows participants to be liberated from their

normal social functions, and encourages collaboration, communication, and creativity.

10. Notes

1. There are 60,000 members of the Nerdfighters Ning, and one of Green's videos can

receive up to 12 million views.

2. Roberta Seelinger Trites (2000) describes the YA novel as entwicklungsroman—a story of development, as opposed to the more romantic bildungsroman—a comingofage story where adulthood is attained at the novel's conclusion.

3. For example, "Ding Dong Ditching" becomes leaving chocolate Ding Dong cakes on

someone's doorstep instead of just ringing the doorbell and running, and "TPing"

becomes leaving Tootsie Pops instead of toilet paper.

4. It's important to note that despite its utopian, allinclusive manifesto, the

Nerdfighters community is not embraced by everyone. Some teens report feeling the

same kind of isolation and exclusion as they experience in reallife social cliques—see

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmtfxlrMoK1qbl0ayo1_500.jpg,

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln7ojxCvXT1qbl0ayo1_400.jpg, and

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljf3hssckC1qbl0ayo1_500.jpg.

5. Green comments that around 67 percent of his YouTube viewers are under 24, but

that adolescent viewers are disproportionately likely to be active participants in the

Nerdfighter community.

11. Works cited

Buckingham, David. 2000. The Making of Citizens: Young People, News, and Politics.

London: Routledge.

Bury, Rhiannon. 2005. Cyberspaces of their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York:

Peter Lang.

Foucault, Michel. 1986. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27.

doi:10.2307/464648.

Giroux, Henry. 1998. "Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics and the Pedagogy of Display."

http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/teenage_sexuality.htm.

Gordon, Joan. 2003. "Hybridity, Heterotopia, and Mateship in China Miéville's Perdido

Street Station. " Science Fiction Studies 30 (3): 456–76.

Green, John. 2005. Looking for Alaska: A Novel. New York: Dutton.

Green, John. 2007a. "Brotherhood 2.0: Eating Toilet Paper."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuMV6KCkLQI.

Green, John. 2007b. "John's Last Brotherhood 2.0 Video."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN4sxxYXFb4&feature.

Green, John. 2008. Paper Towns. New York: Dutton.

Green, John. 2008. "PEANUT BUTTER FACE (while discussing the GeorgiaRussia

War)." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_p3hLtr5Ok.

Green, John. 2009. "Interview with John Green."

http://www.chipublib.org/forteens/teenspages/jgreen_interview.php.

Green, John. 2010a. "Positive Pranking: the TP Edition."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJYveUpMU.

Green, John. 2010b. "Questions about Paper Towns." http://johngreenbooks.com/pt

questions.

Green, John. 2010c. "Youtube and Online Video Questions."

http://johngreenbooks.com/youtubequestions.

Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social

Ordering. London: Routledge.

Kern, Kathleen. 2008. "Heterotopia of the Theme Park Street." In Heterotopia and the

City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De

Cauter, 10517. New York: Routledge.

LesnikOberstein, Karin. 2004. Children's Literature: New Approaches. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan.

Mickenberg, Julia L. 2005. Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War,

and Radical Politics in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nodelman, Perry. 1992. "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism and Children's

Literature." Children's Litearture Association Quarterly 17 (1): 29–35.

Rambukkana, Nathan. 2007. "Is Slash an Alternative Medium? 'Queer; Heterotopias

and the Role of Autonomous Media Spaces in Radical World Building." Affinities: A

Journal of Radical Theory, Culture and Action 1 (1): 69–85.

Reynolds, Kimberley. 2007. Radical Children's Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic

Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rose, Jacqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children's

Fiction. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.

Slack, A. 2010. "The Harry Potter Alliance." http://www.thehpalliance.org.

Trites, Roberta S. 2000. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent

Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Wilkinson, Lili. 2009. "Creative Reading and insideadog.com.au." FYI: the Journal for

the School Information Professional 13 (3): 4–7.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

The absence of fan activism in the queer fandom of Ho Denise Wan

See (HOCC) in Hong Kong

Cheuk Yin Li

University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

[0.1] Abstract— The queer fandom of female Hong Kong pop singer Ho Denise Wan

See (HOCC) from 2009 to mid2011 is dealt with through the qualitative

methodology of indepth interviews and media ethnography. HOCC, an idiosyncratic

cultural producer who dabbles in the politics of ambiguity, creates texts that invite

queer interpretations from fans and from queer activists in Hong Kong. Via analyses

informed by both queer studies and audience studies, the various creative practices

of fans in reshaping their sexual identities via popular culture are explored. These

practices are highly political and empowering to a queer audience. However, the

intensive rewriting of meanings as queer symbolic creativity and tactics in cultural

politics fail to transform into formal institutional politics and more confrontational

queer activism. This is so for several reasons. Internally, the hierarchical structure of

fan organization, fan proximity to the culture industry, and the topdown

encouragement of social charity as the only channel of activism have all reduced the

possibility of transforming fans' queer sensibilities into institutional queer politics.

Furthermore, Hong Kong, under the influence of three major discourses that seek to

discipline and regulate sexualities—traditional Chinese ethics, the British colonial

legacy, and the postcolonial revival of rightist Christianity—has a long social history

of heterosexist discrimination and a preference for normalizing when striving for

queer citizenship. This empirical study examines relations between cultural

specificity and fan agency in a nonWestern context.

[0.2] Keywords— East Asia; Identity; Popular culture; Popular music

Li, Cheuk Yin. 2012. "The Absence of Fan Activism in the Queer Fandom of Ho

Denise Wan See (HOCC) in Hong Kong," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita

Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0325.

1. Interweaving popular culture, fan activism, and the queer

[1.1] I seek to address a single question here: why isn't there any queer fan activism

in Ho Denise Wan See (何韻詩) (HOCC) fandom in Hong Kong? HOCC has been the

most salient queer icon in the Hong Kong popular music scene since the late 1990s,

and in the literature, queer audiences are widely suggested to be creative and

expressive in consuming star texts. In this case study, situated in the context of queer

theory and audience studies, I argue that in the queer fandom of HOCC, fans engage

in dynamic everyday tactics (de Certeau 1984), such as gossiping, fantasizing, and

engaging in queer symbolic creativity, to rewrite texts and reshape their sexual

identities. Even though these cultural practices are political and empowering, both

internal features of the fandom and broader sociocultural contexts hinder these smallscale tactics from resulting in political action in the form of institutional queer activism that strives for sexual citizenship for the queer (Richardson 1998, 2000; Bell and

Binnie 2000).

[1.2] To address HOCC fandom, we need to rethink what kinds of fan activism we are

considering, the meaning of the notion of queer, and whose agency encourages and

perpetuates HOCC's queer images. There has been little debate on the nature of

audience since the Birmingham School (Hall 1973; Morley 1980). Audiences are now

theorized and empirically shown to be active—or, more generally speaking, productive.

Even if audience studies, with all of its different modes of focus, cannot prove that all

audiences are active, they can at least demonstrate that not all audiences are passive

(Jenkins 1992, 287). Jenkins (2006) has argued that fan activism can range from

negligible levels to macrolevels. However, this approach to defining activism is not

particularly useful because it is too inclusive. From one being active in textual

poaching, it does not follow that one necessarily engages in activism. To distinguish

between these two, I adhere to Bielby, Harrington, and Bielby's (1999) differentiation

between active and activist fans. An active fan participates in fan activities such as fan

clubs, soap magazine critiques, and online bulletin boards; an activist fan behaves

strategically in specific events and contexts to achieve a specific goal. Fan activism

thus differs from fan activities in its mass mobilization and strategic calculations.

[1.3] For the notion of queer fandom, I struggled with the question of whether I

should attempt to specify the queerness evident in HOCC fandom. I decided to do so

to better capture its important theoretical implications. Butler (1993, 315), in her

theory of gender performativity, notes that "there are no direct expressive or causal

lines between sex, gender, gender presentation, sexual practice, fantasy and

sexuality." If we define queer as nonstraight and nonheteronormative, then we are

adopting heterosexuality as the primary normative standard—a stance Butler

disagrees with. For Butler, "gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to

do, but gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very

subject it appears to express" (314). In this sense, gender, sexuality, and desires are

compulsory imitations with no original scripts. Queerness, as a spectrum of

potentialities, can therefore be said to exist in all sexual subjects.

[1.4] Parallel to this, in the realm of media reception, Doty (1993, 2–3) proposes

that queer marks a flexible space for expressing all aspects of non, anti, and

contrastraight cultural production and reception, and queerness is intrinsically shared

by all agents with varying extents of consistency and intensity. Every audience can

thus be considered as potentially reading in queer positions and proliferating queer

discourses. More importantly, he notes that terminology such as "queer positions,"

"queer readings," and "queer pleasures" is part of this flexible reception space, which

"stands simultaneously beside and within that created by heterosexual and straight

positions" (15). However, Doty is also aware that the enthusiasm of breaking down

rigid concepts of sexuality in popular culture may lead to problematic consequences of

celebrating an apolitical utopia united by all straights and all queers. Therefore, he

retained the radical and political connotation by using the term queer to highlight "a

consciously chosen 'site of resistance' and a 'location of rational openness and

possibility'" (3). Again, queer is always a dynamic, contradictory, and imperfect notion

to challenge normative categorization of identities and subjectivities.

2. HOCC as queer icon and the politics of ambiguity

[2.1] Ho Denise Wan See (aka HOCC, pronounced as HoCC, or Goo), was one of

the top 10 bestselling local singers in Hong Kong from 2006 to 2010 (IFPI Hong Kong

Top Sales Music Award 2010; IFPI Hong Kong Top Sales Music Award Presented

[2001–2009]). Winning the Golden Award for female singer in the Ultimate Song Chart

Awards Presentations in 2006 proved her popularity. She works in the mainstream

market (the nonindie sector), yet she owns her music label, Goomusic, and she often

works with independent musicians. She is regarded as idiosyncratic because of her

androgynous body, her wide range of topics for cultural expression, and her

ambivalent attitudes toward gossips speculating about her sexualities (Li 2011a, 12–

17).

[2.2] If texts are polysemic and HOCC, as an idiosyncratic cultural producer, has

produced a variety of products ranging from LGBTQ texts to texts dealing with poverty

to madness, then why is she still regarded as the most salient and influential queer

icon since the late 1990s? Whose agency encourages and even perpetuates these

queer images? The answer: HOCC as producer, the media, scholars, queer activists,

and her fans.

[2.3] HOCC is the major agent who oscillates between ambiguity and explicitness in

evincing the possible interpretations of her star texts. She is the only female singer to

repeatedly sing songs about queer sexualities; all of them were big hits, and many of

them won awards. These songs include "Rosemary" (露絲瑪莉; lesbian romance),

"Goodbye Rosemary" (再見露絲瑪莉), a sequel to "Rosemary," "Rolls.Royce" (勞斯.萊

斯, gay romance), and "Coffee in Cola Bottle" (汽水樽裡的咖啡, transgenderism). She

overtly interpreted "Rosemary" as lesbian romance and "Rolls.Royce" as gay romance

at the SuperGoo concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum in October 2009. She produced

the stage drama Butterfly Lovers (梁祝下世傳奇) in in 2005, which modified a Chinese

classic romance into a homoerotic romance, and it received positive responses

([HOCC's New "Butterfly Lovers"] 2005). Concerning these cultural products and her

androgynous, nonhegemonically feminine appearance, she has adopted a laidback

and ambiguous attitude, which in a sense invites further queer reading and articulation

([Homosexual, HOCC] 2003). Her sexuality and affairs with other female singers are

the subject of intense speculation in tabloids and by gossips—allegations she has

neither openly rejected nor admitted, even as she remains a queerfriendly figure (in

the name of social justice). However, she once came out to the public on a game show

in July 2009, although she subsequently denied being a lesbian (Li 2011a, 197–208).

If we consider only the gameshow revelation and not her subsequent retraction, she

is the first queer female star in Hong Kong to come out to the public (note 1).

[2.4] Media discourses and scholars often help to perpetuate the queer reading of

HOCC. Tabloids surrounding HOCC's affairs and sexualities tend to adopt

heteronormative language, such as calling her the "King of Flirt" (Apple Daily 2002).

Time Out Hong Kong (2011) chose her as one of the four artists shaping the future of

Cantopop for her androgynous presentation and unique style in music production.

Scholars such as Chan (2006) and Tang et al. (2010) have argued, respectively, that

she is a "queer body" and "filling in the gender and sexual gaps in Hong Kong popular

music." Kong (2010, 65) also considered her to be the descendant of androgynous

superstars of 1980s Hong Kong. Queer activists have also played a part in

perpetuating queer reading (or queering of) HOCC's star texts. In 2007, "Illuminati,"

composed by HOCC with lyrics written by queer lyricist Wyman Wong, was chosen as

the theme song of the third International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia

(IDAHO) rally in Hong Kong because of its implication of mass mobilization for

revolution. And fans skillfully queer her texts to substantiate such queer images.

3. Methods

[3.1] This study is drawn from data collected during from 2009 to mid2010 for my

master's thesis. I continued to collect data and keep in touch with my informants (both

socially and virtually) until mid2011. With their consent, I have updated the data

presented here. The main methodology is media ethnography (Marcus 1998; Bird

2003), which yields the strength of rich and firsthand data. As Bird puts it, "Only

ethnography can begin to answer questions about what people really do with media,

rather than what we imagine they might do, or what close readings of texts assume

they might do" (2003, 191). I have conducted qualitative indepth interviews with 13

voluntary respondents (aka gootoes in online fan expression, which is derived from

Cantonese pronunciation, literally "followers of HOCC") recruited from the HOCC

International Fan Club (IFC), the only official fan club. There were 10 female and three

male respondents ranging in age from 15 to 35 years. Education level ranged from

junior secondary school to holders of master's degrees. Fields of occupation included

student, education, finance, social services, and medicine. Duration of activity in HOCC

fandom ranged from 2 to 9 years. Echoing Butler's (1993) and Doty's (1993)

arguments, I deliberately did not seek from the respondents any particular rigid

sexuality but rather let them selfidentify. This resulted in sexualities including lesbian,

gay, bisexual, and unknown; some change over time, suggesting a fluidity of

sexualities and desires in this sample. Despite the small sample size, the group was a

fairly diverse group of informants (Appendix).

[3.2] I also conducted participant observation between early 2009 and mid2010 at

various functions, including the Happiness Is Free concert in February 2009, a fan

amateur video production for HOCC's birthday party in April 2009, HOCC's birthday

parties in May 2009 and 2010, Jade Solid Gold Recording in July 2009, and the

Supergoo concert on October 9–12, 2009. Participant observation is essential to

acquiring further understanding of gootoes' everyday lives and social experiences. The

primary purpose of participant observation is not to collect data but to obtain a

glimpse of fans' activities and to establish rapport with informants by enriching my

experiences of engagement and shared experiences with them. In response to the

academic myth of keeping a distance from subjects, Jenkins (1992) argues that the

more distanced perspective espoused by some researchers does not necessarily secure

a better understanding of complexity of the phenomenon; rather, "academic distance

has thus allowed scholars either to judge or to instruct but not to converse with the

fans community, a process which required greater proximity and the surrender of

certain intellectual pretensions and institutional privileges" (6).

4. Gossip, fan detectives, and fantasies

[4.1] HOCC fans are discursively empowered through various forms of queer

symbolic creativity, a notion derived from Willis (1990) referring to the everyday

creative use of expressions, signs, symbols, and art to establish and negotiate one's

identities and meaning. These practices include fan detecting, gossiping, fantasizing,

textual poaching, materializing fantasies, and interacting in online forums as

heterotopia. Again, fans, without necessarily selfidentifying as queer, use their queer

reading to reshape, rethink, and rewrite their own changing and challenging sexual

identities (Hanmer 2010, 150). The practices of play and creativity are empowering to

the queer because they question and explore links between pleasure and power, body

and subject, when participating in popular culture (Lipton 2008, 163). They seek to

negotiate their life stories and sexual identities in the flexible space offered by popular

culture.

[4.2] The most intensive form of queer symbolic creativity is gossiping and playing

with the tabloid curiosity surrounding HOCC's sexuality and her alleged affairs with

Joey Yung, another popular female singer in Hong Kong. Fans term their affair the

goo/cho relationship, with goo standing for HOCC and cho standing for Joey Yung.

While Gamson (1994) has suggested that gossip is a free realm with no repercussions

and no accountability, Turner (2004) has argued that gossip as "an important social

process through which relationships, identity, and social and cultural norms are

debated, evaluated, modified and shared" (24). Importantly, "fantasy" is not binary to

"reality" (Ang 1996, 92; Fiske 1989, 124). HOCC fans' fantasies of tabloid stories take

place online—either in private chat or, subtly, in the IFC forum—as well as in offline

social life. I consider this process a form of detection, with the fans playing the role of

detective as they share clues, find "correct" clues, play hideandseek with paparazzi,

and appropriate scenarios by drawing on resources from various media texts. They

look into what outsiders would consider trivial; for instance, a tiny logo on a piece of

tissue at the corner of a restaurant table in Joey Yung's Facebook picture may match

with the background of HOCC's newly uploaded picture on Twitter. In this empowering

process, complex and unstable pleasure in negotiating a queer world and queer

identities also unfolds.

[4.3] Felicity, a HOCC fan for more than 6 years, claimed that she had loads of

insider information about the goo/cho relationship. During our 3hour interview on

September 25, 2009, she kept checking HOCC's blog for updates because that day

was believed to be their anniversary. She vividly recalled the moment when she heard

that HOCC and Joey Yung were together:

[4.4] Everybody was so excited at that time…I was so happy that…even

happier than me having a date! I feel like…they are finally together despite

all the barriers they had previously and then I keep thinking, "Oh my God!

What if paparazzi know about it?"

[4.5] Kaitlin is another believer in goo/cho. She directly asserted, "This is true," thus implying that any validation from fan detection is unnecessary. For her, it is reality,

not imaginative engagement—in contrast to Lipton's (2008, 174) findings. She was

keen on fan detection for fantasizing and for expanding the information archive on her

own blog—for example, photo albums gathering similar clothes worn by both of them,

and an album dedicated to pictures in which either of them is wearing the famous

"fishing line" bracelet at public functions. The bracelet was so named because it is

extremely thin and can only be noticed by enlarging and carefully examining the

photos. Kaitlin constantly went online to check the updated schedule of public

functions attended by Joey Yung and HOCC. She analyzed HOCC's pattern of updating

on Facebook and the Sina miniblog (Weibo, the People's Republic of China's version of

Twitter) to speculate whether they went abroad for holidays together. In February

2009, she was one of the first fans to discover that HOCC went to Rome with Joey

Yung. She did so by analyzing the "reliable clue" of their new lovers' rings.

[4.6] Fan detectives are not limited to fans who selfidentify as queer or queerfriendly; detectives include those who are homophobic. Sheena is an anti goo/cho fan who also engages in these daily detection activities, but she seeks to deny their affair

by the way she chooses to read the ambiguous space that HOCC creates for her

sexuality. Sheena feels that she has to keep up to date with the various clues, but she

simultaneously feels distressed when she assesses the evidence collected by others.

Within this complex dimension of desires, Sheena struggles between the happiness of

HOCC and her personal hatred of lesbianism. She even read the book published by one

of HOCC's speculated exes, Theresa Fu, because Fu was said to disclose some

information about her relationship with HOCC. She skillfully read between the lines and

twisted the words of tabloids reporting HOCC's alleged affairs with male celebrities—

for instance, Oriental Daily's January 15, 2010, headline: "HOCC Turns STRAIGHT and

Goes Shopping with a Man."

[4.7] To these fan detectives, tiny bits of trivia loom large in their daily lives. They

take active pleasure in their role as detectives, scrutinizing tabloids for clues,

fantasizing, and discovering and celebrating minute pieces of evidence. This activity

constitutes queer symbolic creativity, which empowers fans in negotiating desires and

sexual identities, regardless of whether they are queer or nonqueer.

5. Materializing fantasies in The Dreamland

[5.1] The migration of fan communities to the Web is one of the most significant

shifts in audience research in recent years (Baym 2000; Soukup 2006; Jones 1997;

Booth 2008). For queer subjects, cyberspace has become a site of increasingly

intensive engagement through which to live their sexualities (Plummer 2003, 275).

Their queer symbolic creativity, together with the materializing of fantasies in the form

of making videos and writing slash fan fiction, frequently take place on the Web.

Kaitlin set up an underground forum, known as The Dreamland (note 2), parallel with

HOCC's official forum, for discussion of gossip and fantasies in mid2009 because

HOCC's sexuality and goo/cho are, according to most informants, taboo topics in the

official forum. Fans who dislike Joey Yung personally and who are against

homosexuality attacked posts that discussed HOCC's sexuality, accusing fans involved

in the discussion of being "dogs" (paparazzi), even traitors. Discussion topics such as

"whether HOCC looks handsome in a particular costume" were also attacked, as the

word handsome implied that HOCC was a butch lesbian (or "TB" [tomboy], in local

lesbian parlance), based on the commonly perceived secondary gender system of the

butch/femme binary (Kam 2003; Martin 2010). The Dreamland as a platform for free

articulation of fantasies and fan detection play attracts fans who do not want to be too

high profile in their articulation of homoerotic fantasies. The platform also permits

circulation and consumption of amateur fan videos and slash fan fiction.

[5.2] Video making is the most common and popular form of materialized fantasies.

All of my informants knew about the online goo/cho videos, such as those posted on

the Imagination Is Free Production YouTube channel, whose name was appropriated

from HOCC's 2009 concert, Happiness Is Free (note 3). Imagination is free in two senses: it is free of price, and it is free of borders. Goochos—fans who subscribe to the

goo/cho relationship—play with this name to justify their active imagining and their

fantasies. They juxtapose clues that include video clips, pictures, and Twitter status

updates to construct the love story between HOCC and Joey Yung. Some of these fan

videos are more than 10 minutes long, with editing used to highlight duplicated

costumes and personal belongings, complementary interview content provided on

separate occasions, and photo hunts, such as identifying a Miffy doll in a corner of

HOCC's bedroom. Materializing fantasies via video making is an extension of fan

detection as a fan activity. The background music of those videos is usually HOCC's or

Yung's songs. Although the channel has been removed, there are still a number of

videos made by other fans in favour of the goo/cho relationship, such as "Joey Yung x

HOCC Endless Love (10 minutes)" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=GFIGWpmc8Hk) and "(Joey Yung x HOCC) WE Support GOOCHO Forever"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zwLEr3XdcA). They enjoy the highest hit rates.

[5.3] Kaitlin defined these goo/cho videos as romantic videos showing the two as a

couple. Summer, who identified herself as a straight person, admits that she watched

them repeatedly: "I don't know gootoes or goochos who make the videos in person,

but I am always touched when watching. They make me believe in true love again. I

always search for different goo/cho videos and keep watching them repeatedly"

(interview, October 5, 2009). The pleasure is real, and so is the fantasy (Li 2011a).

Most of my informants do not watch HOCC's concert DVD repeatedly, but they do

watch the goo/cho videos again and again. These materialized fantasies intersect with

the most minute aspects of their everyday life. Video making and consumption as fan

activities are more than daydreaming; they are potentially empowering, but not

necessarily resistant.

[5.4] Slash writing and reading are relatively less popular among fans. Many of my

informants did not even know that fan fiction was written about HOCC; only a few had

either heard of or read them, in part because the site for slash in The Dreamland is

only accessible to senior forum members. Up until mid2009, there were 50 stories in

total, including both complete stories and works in progress, jointly contributed by 22

registered forum accounts. Some are situated in modern everyday life, while others

are situated in ancient Chinese royal palace settings. All are romances between

characters symbolizing HOCC and Joey Yung. Samesex romance is more popular than

heterosexual romance in terms of readership.

[5.5] There is one major difference between goo/cho fictions and slash studied by

AngloAmerican scholars. Jenkins (1992, 191) suggested slash as female pornography

that may liberate women who have long been regarded as asexual because it allows

for female sexual fantasy through creating and consuming explicit homoerotic sex

scenes. Goo/cho fictions keep sex, both homosexual and heterosexual, invisible by

merely portraying "the night and then the morning of the next day"—that is, they elide

any actual intimacy. Stories instead mainly focus on the homosocial bonding and

emotional interactions of the leading characters. In fact, the comments to the pieces of

fiction often ask for more sex scenes, but Kaitlin, as an administrator and a writer,

chose to keep the sex scenes subtle. In most societies, pornography for women in the

process of gender socialization is limited (Ybarra and Mitchell 2005). In Hong Kong,

female exposure to erotic materials and sexrelated issues, as well as scholarship

about it, is extremely limited (Ho and Tsang 2004). Lesbianism is also almost invisible

in Hong Kong society (Tang 2010). This may confine female homoerotic fantasy and

hinder transformation of such activities to activism and fan civil engagement. Yet

Jenkins (1988, 99) argues that fans' writing involves a translation of personal

experience into social expression, and slash writing is still potentially empowering by

allowing LGBT writers a space to creatively explore and experiment with their identities

and desires (Berger 2010, 183). Kaitlin, as a selfidentified bisexual woman, channels

the struggles between straight and queer born of family and religious pressure into

slash writing, which partially serves a therapeutic purpose (Hanmer 2010, 150–51). As

a result, in late 2009, she wrote a trilogy consisting of a homosexual romance between

the two leading female characters in imperial China, and two separate heterosexual

romances of the actresses in the life after death.

[5.6] The Dreamland online community can be regarded as a countersite—what

Foucault called the heterotopia that contests the "real" site (1986, 24). The Dreamland

as a heterotopia can also be understood as simply "a space where active consent to

normative practices is suspended" (Hetherington 1997, 46; see also Bury 2005, 17).

Therefore, to fans who just want to have fun, The Dreamland is a space that in some

ways exists in contrast to the heteronormative official forum. The symbolic creativity is

empowering; it reiterates the queer desires, experiences, and identities of fans. Some

fans interact with other fans on these sites by transgressing and breaking the codes of

the dominant cultural inscription of stereotypical identity (Hanmer 2010, 151). Their

sense of agency and lived experiences as sexual beings is also articulated and

negotiated. Reallife experiences plus queer readings, therefore, challenge normative

cultural practices and readings.

[5.7] Not every fan I interviewed feels the sense of resistance to HOCC IFC as a

symbol of normative control of the queer. The Dreamland can be regarded as a space

for expressing alternative fantasies and permitting cultural practices of queer and

homoerotic imagination. This is in line with Berger's (2010, 183) observation that

online queer fan forums are less subversive: they "often [enact their] transgression

and subversion through play, rather than necessarily direct politics." Why do fans'

resistant readings, which position and queer cultural sensibilities in the form of

vibrant, dynamic, and rich queer symbolic creativity, fail to transform into a more

institutional and confrontational queer politics in Hong Kong society?

[5.8] I identify two causes for the absence of organized fan activism, with its

components of strategic calculation and mass mobilization: the internal structure of

the fandom, and Hong Kong's cultural specificity. I turn to these next.

6. Internal fan structure as limiting fan activism

[6.1] The internal organizational structure of the HOCC fandom may suggest why

proactive fan activism for queer sexual citizenship is absent. Fans' proximity to the

culture industry is the first internal constraint. Soon after the establishment of the

HOCC IFC as an official fan club supervised by HOCC's mother, Ms. Janny Ho (aka

Goomo, which literally means "HOCC's mum"), in May 2002, the HOCC forum, which

was created in 2005, and the emergence of other international communication tools

such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, HOCC appeared to be the producer, not her

record label or management company. This made HOCC seem to be actively in control

of her career and her selfpresentation. This is different from the socalled Corn

fandom of androgynous female singer Li Yuchun in mainland China; in this case, the

"corns" (Li's fans) regard the culture industry as being exploitative of their beloved

superstar (Yang 2009, 536). In contrast, HOCC fans thank the music label for granting

HOCC autonomy in music production, and HOCC has openly expressed her gratitude to

the record label for this freedom ([Homosexual, HOCC], 2003). HOCC's gratitude to

the record label and her being her own representative to the culture industry make fan

activism almost impossible because any grievances and opinions are absorbed before

they can be accumulated. Fans' relationships with the culture industry are therefore

carefully mediated and orchestrated. Most informants' attitudes toward their

occasional discontent with HOCC's music and themes are best summed up by Sheena's

comment: "Everybody knows she's a typical Taurus, very stubborn. Once she has

decided, it is decided. She just ignores you, or 'pouts' in her blog or Facebook. But

whatever she does, most gootoes endorse, because she is our 'headmaster'"

(interview, October 3, 2009).

[6.2] The second internal cause concerns the hierarchical structure of the HOCC IFC

as the sole official fan club and the fans' reactions to the power that IFC wields.

Gootoes join IFC for different purposes. Some seek social networking, as stated in the

songs "Illuminati" (光明會), "Diamond Sutra" (金剛經), and "The Last Date" (舊約).

Others look for utilitarian benefits from the club. Although many informants

acknowledge that their purpose in joining IFC was to support HOCC (their headmaster

in the forum, and the one who guides their personal behavior and helps them be good

people), they admit that the biggest incentive for continued membership is their

access to exclusive concert tickets. Megan said, with a sarcastic smile:

[6.3] Goomo supervises IFC. Therefore the way IFC distributes ticket[s] is

quite fair…It's very true that unless you know other sources or "big people"

that you can get exclusive tickets from, IFC remains the only source for

ticket[s] since it's…OFFICIAL. So? You don't dare to antagonize Goomo by

talking about [the] goo/cho relation publicly and loudly. (interview, October

1, 2009)

[6.4] As Megan suggests, obtaining exclusive tickets is important to the fans, and

thus there is a perceived need to strategically mute the discussion of goo/cho affairs in

public functions and in the HOCC official forum, or the perk might be withdrawn. The

practice of HOCC IFC administrators informally punishing "misbehaving" fans who

articulate queer readings is similar to Hollywood's attempt to shut off fans' queer

reading of stars (Gregg 2010). As suggested by Gregg (2010), these measures are of

little use, but at least internally, it deters fans' public celebration of queer readings and

queer symbolic creativity.

[6.5] The third internal cause is related to volunteer opportunities. HOCC set up the

HOCC Charity Fund in 2007 to encourage fans to volunteer, although IFC membership

is not a prerequisite for joining the volunteer team. Members who pay a membership

fee are entitled to join the Volunteer Award Scheme each year; HOCC personally

presents certificates to volunteers with outstanding performances. This topdown

agenda of social services in a sense channels fan cultural sensibilities in reading

HOCC's queer text to other nonqueerrelated social issues, such as animal rights and

poverty of the elderly, as clearly stated in the Charity Fund's mission:

[6.6] Without limiting ourselves to any specific target group, the foundation

aims to offer help through services and donations to as many people in need

as possible, be it small children, youths, or the elderly. With sufficient

funding, we will extend further to promoting kindness and prevention of

cruelty to animals. Under the foundation, we have our own team of over 350

volunteers. From time to time, we also work closely with other charitable

organizations…to provide more welfare services to the underprivileged.

(Goomo 2008)

[6.7] Many popular singers in Hong Kong have founded their own charitable

institutions, including Gigi Leung, Miriam Yeung, and Leo Ku. For supergirl Li Yuchun in

China, her fans, the corns, founded the Corn Love Foundation as a way to get positive

media coverage for Li (Yang 2009, 535). This became a trend in Hong Kong and China

to improve celebrities' images through donating and encouraging volunteering. The

effect of gootoes volunteering for the HOCC Charity Fund to represent HOCC's public

image positively can be regarded as limited, a reality governed by neoliberal logic

under the East Asian welfare model of selfreliance, family unity, and state minimalism

(Mok 2011).

[6.8] However, these internal organizational features of HOCC fandom, which use

access to the star and perks like free tickets to ensure fan compliance and selfpolicing, are not sufficient to account for the absence of fan activism in the broader sociocultural context of Hong Kong.

7. Sociocultural specificity as limiting fan activism

[7.1] The second major reason for the failure of fans to transform the vibrant queer

cultural sensibilities in HOCC fandom to a more confrontational queer politics is related

to the broader historical, social, and cultural context of Hong Kong society. Given the

possible diversity of queer audiences, Dyer's (2004, 191) analysis of gay men's

reading of Judy Garland in the postStonewall era suggests that such audience

activities were random but were rooted in the social history of how a particular

marginal identity is constructed. I attempt to use Grossberg's (1993, 90) notion of

radical contextualism to define and articulate the specific contexts that defines the

relationships of power and culture (Hall 1996).

[7.2] Queer politics in Hong Kong is historically different from its European and

American versions (Kong 2010). I draw on the work of Ho (2008), Kong (2010), and Li

(2011b) to identify three major discourses disciplining and governing sexual cultures

and constraining institutional queer politics in Hong Kong as an East Asian locale:

residual Chinese ethics, which value social harmony and family unity; the British

colonial legacy; and the growing influence of rightist Christian influences and

nongovernmental organizations in the emerging civil society. Unlike mainland China,

which underwent a socialist revolution and various active interventions in reproduction

and sexuality (Ruan 1991), Hong Kong retained traditional Chinese ethics and

ritualistic practices, especially in terms of family unity under noninterventionist colonial rule. One of the best examples is the colonial government's making the Ching Ming

Festival, a festival symbolizing respect for ancestors and family lineage, a public

holiday; it is not on mainland China (Cheung 2011). British colonial legacies include

the overwhelming influence of missionaries and churches on local education and social

services organizations (Ho 2008), as well as the criminalization of male homosexuality

from the mid19th century to 1990. It has been argued that the colonial government,

rather than traditional Chinese thought, accounts more for the creation of gay stigma

and heteronormative society in Hong Kong (Kong 2010). Finally, increasingly

influential rightist Christians in Hong Kong find that their discourses fit into the

emphasis on family values in traditional Chinese thought and exert their influences

through schools and nongovernmental organizations—for instance, in the debate over

passing antidiscrimination ordinances based on sexual orientation in 2005 (see Ho

2008). The intertwining of these three discourses suggests that Hong Kong is still a

heterosexist and homophobic society. Local LGBT organizations only started

blossoming in the late 1980s, and the LGBT ( Tongzhi) movement only began two

decades ago (Kong 2010). Queer politics is largely channeled into nonconfrontational

cultural politics, such as media representation, instead of institutional politics (Kong

2010). These culturally and historically specific contexts serve as backdrops for fans'

mixed feelings about queers, their own queer identities, and the politics of ambiguity

in HOCC star texts.

[7.3] Even though most of my informants actively rewrite and negotiate their queer

identities by engaging in queer symbolic creativity, and some informants, such as

Megan, wanted HOCC to be more outspoken on LGBT issues, others who identified

themselves as queer held the opposite view. Erin, a selfidentified lesbian, regarded

the association of HOCC with lesbianism as undesirable, since "being lesbian is…not

that good in our society" (interview, October 13, 2009). The division between gootoes

and goocho, and the establishment of The Dreamland as a heterotopia and an

alternative playground of fantasies illustrate this division. As a result, gootoes who

openly participate in civil engagement about queer politics may associate HOCC with

queer as well, which may adversely affect HOCC's career.

[7.4] Definitely she will be criticized by religious groups like the Society for

Truth and Light and parents will boycott her for "being an immoral figure" to

kids. She will probably lose her mainland China market as well, as Chinese

government can be conservative as well. (Megan, interview, October 1,

2009)

[7.5] Hence, being intentionally or unintentionally packaged as androgynous

(combining qualities of masculine and feminine) or neutrosexual (being neither

masculine nor feminine) guarantees an ambivalence that secures HOCC's

marketability. In this sense, gootoes' neither initiating nor participating in queer

politics can be regarded as being governed by neoliberal regulations, which restricts

"the institutionalization of heteronormative forms of social and cultural life"

(Richardson 2001, 163). This rejection of connecting institutional queer politics to

subcultural practices in fandom for fear of politicizing one's longterm relationship to

the fandom echoes the wellknown example of the Gaylaxians' refusal to participate in

Star Trek fandom's letterwriting campaign demanding more queer characters in the

show (Jenkins 2000, 263). This illustrates that the hindrance of transforming popular

culture fandom to institutional and confrontational politics does not solely come from

culturalhistorical specificity, but also from voices within fandom with marginal and

subcultural identities and subjectivities, and both are inseparable from each other.

[7.6] What is equally important is that as a cultural producer and as one of the

agents promoting queer readings of her stardom, HOCC (as well as her politics of

ambiguity in her star texts) may not necessarily pose a challenge the compulsory

heterosexuality inherent in postcolonial Hong Kong. Stein (1995) argues that the rise

of female androgynous stars in American in the 1980s did not improve the cultural

visibility of the queer as a result of social repression and industrial constraint, noting

that "lesbian music appears in the mainstream as a series of floating signifiers, linked

to feminist/lesbian sensibilities, but having no real loyalty or commitment to an

organized subculture or movement" (421). It was in the 1990s that the industry

gradually understood that sexual ambiguity allows for a double appeal of the music to

the subculture and to mass audience. The politics of ambiguity in HOCC stardom is

similar in this sense, as an example of nonnormative gender and sexual

representations being neoliberalised in East Asian popular culture in the recent decade.

In spite of various agents, including HOCC herself, perpetuating a queer image, there

is plenty of room for camouflage, such as arguing that homoerotic songs such as

"Rolls.Royce" demonstrate homosocial bonding. Her reaction of shifting attention to

the paparazzi's ethics after the public comingout incident of July 19, 2009, is

regarded as chickening out by many informants (Li 2011a). In this sense, her alleged

queerness and lesbianism remain largely underground, and her fans remain largely

nonsubversive to heteronormativity.

8. Conclusion and implications

[8.1] The reasons for the absence of fan activism in queer fandom of HOCC in queer

studies and audience studies are multifocal. Various modes of queer symbolic

creativity empower fans who are, in different ways and to different extents, queer

sexual beings. Why, then, does the empowerment made possible by queer reading,

queer symbolic creativity, and imagination fail to be translated into formal,

institutional, and confrontational queer politics in Hong Kong society? The reasons are

twofold. First, the internal organizational structure of the official HOCC IFC has a

monopoly on various privileges, and its hierarchical and topdown volunteering

structures restrain fans from publicly articulating queer readings. Therefore, fans do it

in private and in secret in The Dreamland forum, although even at this fanrun site,

they do so with some degree of conscious selfdiscipline. Second, and broadly

speaking, the cultural and historical specificity of Hong Kong society mutes

confrontational queer politics and the struggle for queer citizenship beyond mere

cultural representation.

[8.2] The political and empowering queer symbolic creativity found in HOCC's fans

are circumscribed within the transforming social contours and within a multitude of

cultural and institutional constraints, which in turn suggests why there is an absence of

voices demanding institutional and confrontational queer politics. These fans' activities

as productive, active, and sometimes resistant are important survival tactics in a

homophobic atmosphere in which macroinstitutional changes are unlikely to take

place. However, in relation to local Tongzhi movements and endeavors to strive for

queer sexual citizenship, these practices of queer symbolic creativity are definitely no

substitute for other forms of media criticism and social activism (Jenkins 2000, 264).

[8.3] This phenomenon is unlikely to change in the near future, yet it is too early to

be pessimistic of fans' queer reading, rewriting, and reappropriating of texts in an

attempt to negotiate and articulate queer desires and identities. Considering the

productive tactics of audiences, McRobbie (1999, 72) comes to a more optimistic

conclusion: "The point is then that far from being merely the commercial low ebb of

the subculture, as far removed from resistance as it is possible to imagine, these

activities can be seen as central to it. They are also expressions of change and social

transformation."

[8.4] The blossoming of seeds sown by the local Tongzhi movements in the 1980s is

evidenced by the steadily rising numbers of participants at the IDAHO rally since 2005

(renamed IDAHOT in 2012, with equal attention paid to transphobia)and gay pride

parades since 2008; increasing coverage in mainstream media; and a more open

discussion of sexuality, at least in the realm of popular culture, even though there is

still catching up to do compared with their Western counterparts. At least three

questions are worth future study. First, from the perspective in Tongzhi movements in

Hong Kong, how can the new generation of queer audiences be mobilized to go to the

streets and push for changes to the status quo, let it be normalizing or confrontational,

on the street or institutional? Second, concerning queer audiences in East Asian

societies, how ought audience activity be theorized and contextualized in relation to

various locales with very different historical and cultural backgrounds in LGBT

movements, particularly in terms of the West in the constellation of global cultural

flows? And third, how does charity work, as an increasingly popular and organized

form of celebrityinitiated activism in (at least) mainland China, Hong Kong, and

Taiwan, relate to the developmental path of social welfare, social activism, and civil

society in East Asian societies?

[8.5] By probing these and related questions for possible future exploration, we can

come to a more thorough understanding of fan activism, agency, and cultural

specificity in relation to notions including queerness, power, desire, and pleasure.

9. Acknowledgments

[9.1] I thank the HOCC IFC and Janny Ho for their help in recruiting informants.

10. Notes

1. Leslie Cheung is often considered the first fully out queer star, yet his narrative of

coming out was ambivalent.

2. For reasons of ethical concerns of confidentiality, I did not conduct virtual

ethnography in The Dreamland. The Dreamland has undergone several server and

administrator changes since mid2010.

3. The Imagination Is Free Production YouTube channel shut down in late 2011 as a

result of pressure within the fan community. Videos were removed from YouTube.

They are now circulated privately within a small group of fans.

11. Appendix

Characteristics of the informants*

Biological Selfclaimed

Duration of

Pseudonym Age Sex

Sexual

Education Occupation HOCC Fan

Identity

Activity†

Megan

16 F

Lesbian

Secondary Student

5

school

Erin

18 F

Lesbian

Secondary Student

2.5

school

Sheena

18 F

Straight

College

Student

3.5

diploma

Felicity

24 F

Lesbian

Bachelor's Clerk

6

degree

Kaitlin

24 F

Lesbian

College

Sales

7.5

diploma

Summer

27 F

Straight

Bachelor's Social

4

degree

worker

Lorena

28 F

Straight

Master's

Financial

3

degree

planner

Jamie

29 F

Lesbian

Bachelor's Accountant 3.5

degree

Kirsten

29 F

Ambivalent

Master's

Research

9

degree

assistant

Felix

24 M

Straight

Bachelor's Banking

4

degree

Percy

25 M

Gay

Bachelor's Medical

2

degree

doctor

Pete

29 M

Straight

College

Clerk

6

diploma

Winifred

35 F

Ambivalent

College

Teacher

4

diploma

* Information was collected at the time of interview (September–October 2009).

Sexualities and occupations of interviewees may have changed since the time of data

collection. Some information has been slightly altered to protect anonymity.

† This does not necessarily equal the duration of membership in HOCC IFC.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Praxis

Too fat to fly: A case study of unsuccessful fan mobilization

Tom Phil ips

University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

[0.1] Abstract— A seemingly invisible aspect of activism scholarship is the failure to

act in the face of apparent suitability. Engaging with tropes of activist literature,

such as the prevalence of computermediated communication and the factors of

emotion and extremism, I will perform a case study of a specific fan community that

appears to adhere to these conventions, and discuss the potential for activist

practices as a result. I examine the reaction of the fan community for filmmaker

Kevin Smith following Smith's ejection from a Southwest Airlines flight in 2010. He

was removed from the plane for apparently breaching their "passenger of size"

policy, but he ardently rebuked the company's justification. Smith's treatment at the

hands of the airline would seem to be an ideal rallying point for the subject of a fan

activism campaign–using a personal issue to springboard into wider debates of

corporate practice, body image, and consumer rights. However, despite this

potential, his fan community apparently failed to mobilize into a cohesive force. I will

explore why this failure occurred, and discuss why such a failure should be

examined within academia.

[0.2] Keywords— Activism; Computermediated communication; Emotion; Fan

community

Phillips, Tom. 2012. "Too Fat to Fly: A Case Study of Unsuccessful Fan Mobilization."

In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita

Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0330.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In his description of fan activism surrounding Avatar (2009), Henry Jenkins

notes, "The event is a reminder of how people around the world are mobilizing icons

and myths from popular culture as resources for political speech" (2010). However, in

establishing the term for their own use, Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport note that fan

activism is "not about the mix between political concerns and culture but rather action

that looks like political activism but is used toward nonpolitical ends" (2009, 221n1),

and in making this distinction Earl and Kimport mark fan activism as a decidedly

nonpolitical process. In further contrast, in their study of public opposition to corporate

breaches of privacy–again something that Earl and Kimport would categorize as

nonpolitical–Laura Gurak and John Logie (2003) note the activist steps taken by

members of the public when their personal issues are at stake. Taking this into

account, studies of activism do not necessarily have to be categorized in terms of the

political, cultural, or personal, and in fact many activism studies forgo such

classification and instead highlight recurring tropes of activist practices.

[1.2] Regardless of whether a particular study highlights the activism processes of

fans or a general public, key features are frequently apparent. Firstly, the role and

importance of the Internet in activism is made clear, with Kevin Gillan, Jenny Pickerill,

and Frank Webster noting that there is a general conception that "it…appear[s]

obvious that new media have been nothing but advantageous to today's…activists"

(2008, 131). Secondly, the role that emotion and extremism play as a motivational

tool for activism is frequently highlighted. Ryan Claassen notes that "extreme attitudes

figure prominently in accounts of policy motivated political participation ranging from

campaign activism…to protest and issue advocacy" (2007, 370), and here again Earl

and Kimport's categorizations can be interrogated, as these same "extreme attitudes"

can inform fan investment in particular texts. Jenkins, for example, observes that "the

contemporary fan is a modern day minuteman–ready to respond at a moment's notice

to information that threatens their community, whether it is a cancellation notice or a

cease and desist letter" (2006b).

[1.3] Much as fan studies scholarship covers the apparently exceptional audiences

who are able to come together in order to express and articulate their fandom in

varying ways, studies of fan activism frequently cover the ways in which those same

audiences are able to unite as one to take action against an opposing force. Whether

that action is successful, such as in Doctor Who fans' efforts to get the program back

on air (Hills 2010), or unsuccessful, such as the Stargate SG1 fans who were unable

to prevent the cancellation of the program (Jenkins 2006b), studies of activism

generally focus on instances where the act of mobilization is successful, a process Joss

Hands discusses thusly: "The move from demonstration to direct action is perhaps

best captured in the process of mobilisation–the move from gathering to acting… [A]

necessary element of both mobilisation and direct action is therefore speed–in the

context of group mobilisation, speed of communication, decisionmaking and tactical

shifts" (2011, 124).

[1.4] Hands' definition of mobilization is reliant on the two most commonly recurring

tropes of activism scholarship identified above, which can lead one to the conclusion

that studies of activism highlight processes of successful mobilization as a result of the

prevalence of the communicative possibilities of the Internet and the instigative role of

emotion. While I do not disagree with this conclusion, what I would like to question in

this article is whether this end result of successful mobilization is always the case,

irrespective of the success of the activism in question (note 1). Rather, I will critique

the notion that although online fan communities–established due to their shared

passion for a particular subject and able to use the Internet to allow "exigencies [to]

come together quickly and [to] snowball in a matter of days or even hours," (Gurak

and Logie 2003, 30)–can mobilize successfully, they do not always necessarily do so,

with reference to the specific case study of the fans of filmmaker Kevin Smith.

[1.5] In February 2010, Smith was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight for

apparently breaching their "passenger of size" policy, which at the time stated that

"customers who are unable to lower both armrests and/or who compromise any

portion of adjacent seating should proactively book the number of seats needed prior

to travel" (note 2). As a result of this incident where he felt unfairly persecuted, Smith

led a tirade against Southwest via the social networking tool Twitter (2010a), his blog

(2010d; 2010e; 2010f), YouTube (2010b), and podcasts (2010c; Schwalbach Smith

and Smith 2010), which prompted particular support from his fans on his official

forum, the View Askew Message Board. When discussing his relationship with his fans,

Smith notes, "We have a symbiotic relationship, the fan base and I… I'm the tubby kid

who made it good, who comes across less like an artist and more like your buddy who

suddenly won the lottery of life" (Smith 2009), and it was a semblance of this

symbiosis that prompted fans from the Board to register their support for Smith's

opposition to and boycott of Southwest Airlines.

[1.6] The Board has been hosted by Smith's own View Askew Productions Web site

since 1995, and so many participants in the forum are familiarly acquainted with

computermediated communication. Furthermore, the passion of their fandom–

reflected in the above opinion of Smith–appears founded on a distinctly personal level

of emotion, with Board poster TheManWhoLikesSMod noting, "It is…one of the most

intimate fandoms I know of. I think that Kevin's close relationship with his fans is one

of the key reasons why he stands out among other fandoms" (survey response, May

14, 2010) (note 3). Yet despite this apparent online aptitude, emotional fandom, and activist intentions, the fan community was unable to effectively mobilize in response to

Smith's encouragement. Therefore, through the specific case study of the actions of

Kevin Smith fans, I place the actions of this fan culture in relation to previous

discussions of (fan) activism and the way in which a particular activist movement,

despite having the necessary components for mobilization, was unable to successfully

formulate into a cohesive tactical whole. As a result, I will question the assumption

that online fans will automatically be well versed in activist methods and tactics, and

will seek to develop a conceptualization of a fan community that does not necessarily

guarantee successful activism.

2. The Kevin Smith fan "community"

[2.1] There are VERY few celebrities who actively engage with their fans on

such a regular basis. Twitter has opened up the playing field to some degree,

but the number that invite fans to poker games and test screenings are still

the minority, in that it's mainly one.

–Untamed Aggression Survey response, May 12, 2010

[2.2] In July 2010 the View Askew Message Board celebrated a web presence of 15

years. The Board has existed in various guises since its inception, providing an official

space where fans of Smith can collect and express their fandom of films such as Clerks

(1994), Chasing Amy (1997), Dogma (1999), and Clerks II (2006), as well as other

aspects of Smith's media output, such as his various podcasts, comic books, and live

Q&A shows. The Board has undoubtedly been the most visible and tangible interactive

portal for Smith fans, as it has allowed more dialogical, communicative, and personal

relationships to be formed, largely due to Smith's own participation. Furthermore, the

Board is the only of Smith's Web sites that requires a fee to join (a onetime charitable

donation of $2) ensuring "the assholes, trolls and flamers who populate the dark

corners of the internet, armed to the teeth with bitterness, envy, and a lot of free

time" generally have no opportunity to post unconstructive negative feedback, and

members' "license to post, quite like [their] license to drive…is a privilege, not a right"

(Anon. n.d.).

[2.3] Smith notes that keeping in touch with his fans "has made all the difference in

not just my career, but my life as well" (2007, 63), which is a stark contrast to the fan

relationships experienced by a producer such as George Lucas, for example, whose

fans' "acceptance of the gross imbalance between the individual viewer and corporate

producer" (Brooker 2002, 98) demonstrates the way in which "the relationship

between fan and producer, then, is not always a happy or comfortable one and is often

charged with mutual suspicion, if not open conflict" (Jenkins 1997, 512). I believe this

"mutual suspicion" appears to be largely absent from the relationship between Smith

and his fans, with one possible reason being his frequent articulation of himself as a

fan of his own and others' work (Smith 2007), causing him to be seen as a part of the

fan community hierarchy, rather than as a producer part of a cultural institution–in

contrast to the opposition symbolized by Alan McKee's fanproducer binary (2004,

171).

[2.4] Smith's view that he and his fans share a close relationship via his mediation of

the fanproducer binary is an opinion shared by fans, such as that seen in the above

responses of TheManWhoLikesSMod and Untamed Aggression. Furthermore, Hannah

notes:

[2.5] I think Kevin spoils [us] by being so available. We have become

accustomed to having this man who keeps no secrets from us as far as his

life goes. I've been to his house. No other star I am a fan of has ever been

so gracious and welcoming to me so it's a lot more intense of a fandom of

Kevin. It's more of a borderline friendship. (survey response, May 12, 2010)

(note 4)

[2.6] Here Hannah identifies her own relationship with Smith as being a resolutely

more personal construct, particularly in opposition to others of whom she is a fan. In

contrast to this response, Ruth's Smith fandom is less about a fondness of Smith's

texts, and more about the producer behind the texts: "I'm not even a crazy fan of his

movies, I'm a fan of the man himself. I think because of his time online, and his open

relationship with the fans, there's a bit more of a devotion from the fans, but not in a

psychotic way you can see with some other fan groups" (survey response, May 14,

2010).

[2.7] Babydoll forgoes discussion of being a fan of Smith or his texts altogether and

instead focuses on what she feels is a distinctive aspect of Kevin Smith fandom–the

community that has arisen from the fan culture, by noting that "Kevin Smith fans have

created a community based on a mutual love of him and his work. If it weren't for

that, many people in this community would have never met or have any reason to be

friends" (survey response, May 12, 2010). Although at times ideologically problematic

(Bell and Valentine 1997, 93), the notion of community is seemingly accepted and

embraced as a method to describe the Kevin Smith fan culture by the fans themselves

(note 5), so in opposition to Marc Eaton's conceptualization of community as a

"rhetorical construct rather than an experience or a definable population," (2010,

175), here I refer to the Smith fan culture as a definable population of individuals

whose experience is integral to understanding the extent of their activist participation.

In doing this I believe we can begin to take a step back from the apparent utopian

view of online participatory practices, as summarized here by Greg Elmer, Fenwick

McKelvey, and Zachary Devereaux:

[2.8] Much hype has surrounded the democratic potential of Web 2.0

platforms as social production tools…to harness collective intelligence, allow

users to express themselves bypassing traditional media…and enable access

to a wealth of information about public issues. The rise of blogs, wikis, and

other usergenerated content and collaborative platforms has been seen as

fundamentally changing the relationships between citizens, politics, and the

media. (2009, 418)

[2.9] The emotions, relationships, and connections that the Smith fan community

feel are present between themselves–and also Smith–are important in contextualizing

the supportive structure that Smith could rely on in times of crisis or instability. It is

arguably because of these connections that the fans would be more likely to have an

emotional investment in Smith's welfare, and why one might assume that the

necessary criteria for successful mobilization were available, for as Claassen notes:

[2.10] The extreme preference model of participation posits citizens with

more extreme attitudes are more predisposed to emotiondriven expressions

of their attitudes than those with more moderate attitudes. The

psychological underpinnings of the extreme preference motivation derive

from the relationship between attitude salience and attitude extremity.

Individuals tend to think more frequently about issues they consider

important and frequent, conscious thought about an issue leads to more

extreme attitudes. (2007, 373)

[2.11] Because of the visible parameters and implicit hierarchies present in

communal structures such as the Board, it is here I look to in order to gauge the

extent of mobilization toward the Southwest incident. Jenkins notes that "today,

consumption assumes a more public and collective dimension–no longer a matter of

individual choices and preferences, consumption becomes a topic of public discussion

and collective deliberation; shared interests often lead to shared knowledge, shared

vision, and shared actions" (2006a, 233). However, I believe in regards to the

Southwest incident, the actions of the Kevin Smith fan community challenge this

notion of collective deliberation and apparently shared actions. Although the fans

categorize themselves as a community, it does not necessarily mean that their activist

actions are communal. Particularly in light of the highly personal nature of the

Southwest incident, the reaction of Smith's fans questions the extent to which their

community is capable of mobilization. However, in order to establish how successful

the mobilization can be considered, it is first necessary to detail Smith's reaction, and

the manner in which he broadcast the incident.

3. Too fat to fly?

[3.1] Detailing his recollection of the Southwest incident in a specially recorded

podcast later the same day (Schwalbach Smith and Smith 2010), Smith reported that

he had booked two tickets for himself for a flight from Oakland to Burbank, an act he

claimed was more for his comfort and a step only taken as he was able to afford to do

so (Schwalbach Smith and Smith 2010). However, upon arriving at Oakland Airport,

Smith opted to take an earlier flight, meaning he was placed as a standby passenger

on a flight already heavily crowded, with just one seat available. Upon sitting down,

Smith was approached by a member of Southwest staff and was asked to leave the

plane, as he was deemed to be too large for a single seat (McNeill 2010; Rutherford

2010). As a result of this incident, Smith led a tirade against Southwest via the social

networking tool Twitter, firing a barrage of abuse at the Southwest Twitter account

detailing his side of the story. This communication occurred predominantly in the

immediate aftermath of the incident, when his anger was clearly on display:

[3.2] I know I'm fat, but was Captain Leysath really justified in throwing

me off a flight for which I was already seated?

Dear @SouthwestAir, I flew out in one seat, but right after issuing me a

standby ticket, Oakland Southwest attendant Suzanne (wouldn't give…last

name) told me Captain Leysath deemed me a "safety risk." Again: I'm way

fat… But I'm not THERE just yet. But if I am, why wait til my…bag is up, and

I'm seated WITH ARM RESTS DOWN. In front of a packed plane with a bunch

of folks who'd already I.d.ed me as "Silent Bob."

So, @SouthwestAir, go fuck yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no

"safety risk" (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?). I was…wrongly

ejected from the flight (even Suzanne eventually agreed). And fuck your

apologetic $100 voucher, @ SouthwestAir. Thank God I don't…embarrass

easily (bless you, JERSEY GIRL training). But I don't sulk off either: so

everyday, some new fuckyou Tweets for @SouthwestAir (2010a)

[3.3] Joss Hands defines activism as taking into account dissent, resistance, and

rebellion, with the term as he uses it containing "all of these elements in a looser

configuration, and highlights the fact that activism…is thus directed against prevailing

authority as domination and exploitation, whether in personal relations of micropower, or in the form of institutional domination" (2011, 5). Even at this early retaliatory stage, one can categorize Smith's reaction in terms of activism: Noting that

every day there will be new "fuckyou" tweets for Southwest marks his activist

position in relation to a personal slight from Southwest. Following his initial ejection,

Smith was then placed on a later flight home, where his Twitter outburst continued:

[3.4] Dear @SouthwestAir, I'm on another one of your planes, safely

seated & buckledin again, waiting to be dragged off in front of the normies…

And, hey? @SouthwestAir? I didn't even need a seat belt extender to buckle

up. Somehow, that shit fit over my "safety concern"creating gut.

Hey @SouthwestAir! Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!

http://twitpic.com/1340gw

Hey @SouthwestAir! Sometimes, the arm rests are up because THE PEOPLE

SITTING THERE ALREADY PUT THEM UP; NOT BECAUSE THEY "CAN'T GO

DOWN." (2010a)

[3.5] In addition to the outrage expressed here, Smith's activist intentions are again

visible, as he explicitly engages with–and then downplays–the idea that he could

establish support for a Southwest backlash, as he noted in response to Twitter user

bogo_lode's suggestion of organizing a boycott: "A boycott of one. This is my last

Southwest flight. Hopefully by choice" (2010a). At this stage it is notable that Smith's

activist intentions are solitary, and that his goal in attacking Southwest is apparently a

simple matter of clearing his name–his oftstated defense stemming from the incident

was that "I am fat, yes; but not Too Fat To Fly (yet)" (2010d). Smith's initial response

to Southwest does not therefore indicate a desired response or calltoaction of fans

on his behalf, instead appearing to be a solitary crusade.

[3.6] In contrast however, 4 days after the event, a blog post from Smith detailed

why he took such a vociferous stance against the airline, highlighting that the issue at

hand was not simply poor customer service to a passenger of size:

[3.7] I'm sorry–I gotta bitch about this Southwest Air thing because it's

how I was raised: if someone fucks you, and you don't wanna be fucked,

start screaming. So I screamed about getting fucked against my will, and a

bunch of people–even an entire [airline]–said "You brought this on yourself!"

without realizing they're championing not a fat guy being thrown off a plane,

but a big corporation fucking over a customer…. I am both fat and financially

comfortable. But I don't care if you're Bill Gates: if ANY sort of customerservicebased business with far more means than you…fucks you over and then lies about it to make themselves look better, as a consumer, you have

a right to make noise–REGARDLESS OF THE SIZE OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.

(2010f, emphasis in original)

[3.8] In drawing the distinction between consumer and corporation, Smith indicates

to his fans that the issue at hand is not regarding personal relations of micropower,

but instead concerns an institutional domination applicable to all (Hands 2011, 5).

With the observation "you have a right to make noise," Smith–in opposition to his

initial response–explicitly demonstrates an indication to his supporters that protest is a

viable form of action in response to feelings of persecution or having been wronged,

and as such constitutes a direction for fan activism. This attitude of encouraging a

similar shared response was echoed later in the same post:

[3.9] I'll get thinner, but you'll [Southwest] always be an untrustworthy

company with zero character and integrity in the personal responsibility

department. And while "personal responsibility" may sound really ironic

coming from a fat guy, just because I like to eat and not exercise, that

doesn't mean I have zero sense of personal responsibility…

It means I'm the average American (2 in 3 Americans are

obese/overweight). And as you've repeatedly let me and everyone else know

via your blogs, your planes are not made for the average American anymore.

(Smith 2010f)

[3.10] By noting that two in three Americans are obese, and linking to a CBS news

report which notes "more than 190 million Americans are overweight or obese…

Obesityrelated diseases are a $147 billion dollar medical burden every year…

Childhood obesity has tripled in the last thirty years" (Doane 2010), Smith signals that

the Southwest issue should be part of wider cultural concerns for his fans, and that far

from being simply a reaction to his treatment as a customer (or because of the fact

that he has an established fan community), activism towards Southwest should draw

emotional power from its engagement with an issue that should matter to consumers

beyond the Kevin Smith fan community (Duncombe, cited in Jenkins 2010).

[3.11] In his study of protest Web site MoveOn.org, Eaton notes that "when

combined with personal vilification, categorical vilification allowed MoveOn to claim the

moral high ground and helped members clarify their own ideological positions by

giving them an enemy against which to react" (2010, 179). Applying this observation

to Smith's handling of the Southwest incident, one can see how his attitude to

Southwest alters from the personal vilification of poor customer service, to the broader

categorical vilification of attitudes towards obesity and body image, to be embraced by

a wider supportive group. In making clear that the Southwest issue should be

classified beyond just a personal attack, Smith makes clear the ideological positions

expected of his fans. Taking this into account, the extent to which fans were willing or

able to mobilize should be placed relative to the degree in which Smith encouraged

them to do so, regardless of the fact support may be considered expected behavior.

4. Fan reaction and response

[4.1] AnneMarie Oostveen notes that "scholars…point to [the] rise of alternative or

new forms of political action and explain that the public is now more willing to support

single issue campaigns and engage in unconventional forms of protest activity" (2010,

794), and as noted earlier, this rise in participatory activism is most commonly

attributed to either the utopian properties of the Internet or the role that emotion

plays as a motivational tool. Again, I do not believe this conclusion to be entirely false,

but I believe it depicts a onesided view of the ease and success of mobilization,

suggesting that even though activism is not always successful, the efforts to create a

united force are. If one were to follow the lead of previous fan activism studies, it

would be tempting to flatter the Kevin Smith fan community by depicting all

participants as "modern day minute[men]" (Jenkins 2006b). However, because of the

active role Smith himself plays in the fandom, exemplified in this instance by his very

vocal selfdefensive demeanor, I believe the agency of the fans to mobilize is

undermined.

[4.2] However, this is not to suggest that fans did not attempt to engage in a degree

of activism, as many individuals did actively support Smith in his dispute with

Southwest. For example, Board user Darth Predator notes that:

[4.3] I have continued to [boycott] and will until the day I die. I will also

dissuade everyone looking to fly for any reason from using the airlines. It

may not make a difference on the bottom line as far as Southwest is

concerned, but I do sleep better at night knowing I did all I could do to keep

Southwest from treating other passengers as they did Kevin Smith. If I can

dissuade one person, that is one less seat, that is one less chance they have

to humiliate someone. (email interview, March 15, 2011)

[4.4] Here Darth Predator feels that even if ultimately his contribution is ineffective

to affect Southwest's economic state, ultimately his conscience could be clear in

knowing that he had participated in some manner. He is therefore making a significant

moral decision in choosing whether or not to engage in activism. Similarly, Dianae

compares her activist practices to recent political events, remarking, "I've decided not

to take them ever again. I rarely fly so probably no big difference made but I think

grass roots actions CAN be effective. Just look what happened in Egypt!" (email

interview, March 16, 2011). Furthermore, Ruth notes, "I'm not in the US, but do fly

there fairly regularly…and will not ever fly [Southwest]" (email interview, March 21,

2011). What is perhaps most notable about these responses is that they define their

action in terms of "I," rather than "we." In opposition to the strong sense of

community previously articulated by fans, here activism becomes an isolated and

individual activity devoid of a communal direction that can lead to mobilization: there

is no noticeable "move from gathering to acting" (Hands 2011, 124, my emphasis).

[4.5] However, similar to Dianae and Darth Predator's observation that their activism

would have little impact, others within the fan community made the tactical decision

that any action would be a fruitless task. In opposition to Smith's rallying cry against

institutional domination–that "if ANY sort of customerservicebased business with far

more means than you…fucks you over…you have a right to make noise" (2010f)–the

respondents here believe that their efforts would largely have little to no effect on

Southwest's practices. For example, Customer4352 notes, "In regards to the entire…

incident…I have never [boycotted] the airline. Nor do I intend to. I followed up on the

entire thing by reading anything that came across my path. I did not feel that any

action I take would bear any notice from the airline, being as I fly so little" (email

interview, March 15, 2011).

[4.6] Similarly, babydoll opted out of any activist participation, noting that "if I have a problem with a company I am more likely to get a response and potential

compensation by contacting customer service. Large corporations aren't going to

notice the boycotts of one person" (email interview, March 15, 2011). Again, it is

noticeable here that even those fans who opted out of antiSouthwest action conceive

of activism as an individual process, despite babydoll's earlier lauding of the fan

community and Customer4352's observation that "the website and [the] fans helped

me through a dark period in my life" (survey response, June 27, 2010). Oostveen

would categorize this response as weak support, comprised of a "group of supporters

who endorse the campaign goals and objectives, but who do not participate in its

behalf or give only minimal support" (2010, 795).

[4.7] This notion problematizes the view that "a social movement is more than just

an interest group and will be comprised of more than a single organisation: it

incorporates a whole range of networks into a specific social dynamic" (Pickerill 2003,

16). The specific social dynamic of the Board–previously thought to embody

community and togetherness–now takes on a different form in light of the failure to

mobilize around an issue that the object of their fandom believes should be part of

fans' wider cultural concerns. Instead (and in opposition to Darth Predator) babydoll

believes that other cultural concerns can supersede moral decisions: "I know many

boardies who dislike Southwest and think what they did to Kevin was horrible but will

still fly them because they are the cheapest and for many people saving money

trumps principles. That's no surprise in this economy" (email interview, March 15,

2011).

[4.8] The response of the fans here demonstrates that the consumption of Kevin

Smith in this instance does not conform to the assumption of "collective deliberation"

and shared actions (Jenkins 2006a, 233), and instead relies on individual circumstance

regardless of moral (and emotional) position. As Eaton notes, there is a presumption

that "participants will have membertomember, nonhierarchical communication

channels through which to negotiate the meaning of their communities" (2010, 176).

However, this is clearly not the case in this instance.

[4.9] In relation to the (in)action of his fan community, Smith's own action against

Southwest seemingly constitutes a oneman crusade against the airline, with the fan

response–although supportive and emulative–unable to mobilize into an organized

collective because of Smith's role as spokesperson and figurehead for his own fan

culture. Smith's provocation of Southwest through various media outlets warranted

multiple replies from the airline's Twitter account:

[4.10] @ThatKevinSmith hey Kevin! I'm so sorry for your experience

tonight! Hopefully we can make things right, please follow so we may DM!

@ThatKevinSmith Again, I'm very sorry for the experience you had tonight.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do.

I've read the tweets all night from @thatkevinsmith–He'll be getting a call at

home from our Customer Relations VP tonight. (2010)

[4.11] So, there is perhaps a sense that because of Smith's hierarchal status–not

just within his own fan community, but in cultural terms as well–he was afforded

special treatment (note 6). Although the author of the Southwest Twitter feed claimed

"I read every single tweet that comes into this account, and take every tweet

seriously. We'll handle @thatkevinsmith issue asap" (2010), a personal phone call

from the VicePresident of Customer Relations to resolve a simple issue of an "average

American" being "fucked over" by a large corporation (Smith 2010f) would arguably

not be a privilege afforded to all. In contrast, Ruth notes that she "wrote [Southwest]

a formal letter, sent an email and twittered them that I felt their policy was

discriminatory and unfair and that myself and my 'fat' boyfriend would not fly their

airline, nor would any of our friends or family. I didn't get a reply in any format" (email interview, March 21, 2011).

[4.12] By not responding to Ruth's activism, yet directly engaging with Smith,

Southwest demonstrates that Smith's encouragement of activism was ultimately not

warranted, because of the cultural capital afforded to him as a producer of texts with

not only an established fan base, but also multiple media outlets. Because Smith is the

apparent wronged party in the incident–not just the figurehead for a movement–the

Southwest response is directed at their disgruntled customer, rather than a wider

(im)mobilized force. So despite Smith's claims that the issue should be pertinent to

the average American, it is precisely his public presence and very vocal selfdefensive

demeanor that prevented fan mobilization: Rather than acting as a single fan

organization, the Kevin Smith community in this instance largely let economics reign

over emotion, and conceded participation to a more vocal and influential orator. In this

instance, Smith's attempt to "engage with and draw opinion from a body of citizens"

(Hands 2011, 5) appears to have been unsuccessful.

5. "I am fat, yes…"

[5.1] However, despite this apparent unsuccessful mobilization on a more widely

recognizable scale, the Kevin Smith fan community did respond in a manner that could

be considered appropriate to the discourses of producerfan relations experienced prior

to the Southwest incident. As previously noted, Smith's frequent defensive statement

in regards to the incident was "I am fat, yes; but not Too Fat To Fly (yet)" (2010d),

and an acknowledgement and awareness of his size has been part of his comedic

discourse for many years; the DVD sleeve for Sold Out: A Threevening with Kevin

Smith (2008), for example, describes Smith as "a big, fat, pop culture geek," and

Smith's positioning of himself in this persona does appear to have had a marked effect

on fan response to the Southwest incident.

[5.2] Across his media output, Smith has frequently made comedic reference to his

size, from sharing his medical diagnosis of morbid obesity (Smith 2002) to detailing

his dieting habits (Smith 2007). Following this lead, a tangible aspect of response from

both Smith's fan community and Smith himself was that of a collective comedic

reaction, and an apparent use of humor to own the situation in lieu of a victory against

Southwest. Avner Ziv has noted that people frequently use humor as a means to cope

with difficult situations in life (1988, 109), and Smith himself noted the role that

humor played in his own perceived ownership of the situation (Schwalbach Smith and

Smith 2010).

[5.3] Thus far this article has attempted to demonstrate an absence of action with

regards to fan mobilization against Southwest. However, this is not to suggest that

there was no response from the Smith fan community whatsoever. Rather, it is

possible to examine the way in which fans did react, using comedy as a unifying

response, demonstrating that although there was a failure of mobilization in traditional

activist terms, a communityappropriate reaction did occur. Gary Alan Fine and

Michaela De Soucey have explored the way a joking culture can emerge within social

groups, noting that a collective's "comic discourse comes to characterize the group to

its members and can subsequently be used to identify the group," (2005, 2) and it is

the comic discourse between Smith and his fans that I believe signals the fans' most

successful (indirect) response to Southwest, instead of an explicit activist approach.

[5.4] Fine and De Soucey note that "joking is embedded; it occurs within the context

of an ongoing relationship," (2005, 2) and in mapping Smith's comedic, rather than

vitriolic, response to Southwest, it is important to note the context of the media he

used to communicate information to his fans. For instance, the reactionary podcast

recorded (Schwalbach Smith and Smith 2010) was produced as an episode of Smith's

ongoing SModcast series, and was titled #106: Go Fuck Yourself, Southwest Airlines.

However, despite Smith's apparent anger, humiliation, and embarrassment displayed

during the episode, the comedic nature of SModcast places Smith's rant within a

similar context by association, and thus becomes part of Smith's produced comedic

discourse.

[5.5] Via its presentation on the SModcast Web site

(http://smodcast.com/main.html), the podcast was embedded within a comedic

context. When listed, all episodes feature a descriptive tagline of the subject matter

being discussed by Smith and his copresenter; SModcast #71 (Mosier and Smith

2009), for example, is followed by "In which our heroes take it easy and forget to be

funny." In comparison, SModcast #106 featured the tagline "In which, surely, our hero

is Too Fat To Fly. And don't call me Shirley." Further explicit references to comedy

disaster film Airplane! (1980) continued with a liberal use of the film's soundtrack

embedded throughout the episode–the appearance of romantic and tense themes

adding humor to Smith's contrasting words. The use of Airplane! references help to

mark this episode as a similarly humorous addition to the SModcast catalogue, making

it part of the ongoing SModcast/ Smithaudience relationship, and implicitly adding a

joking context to the material.

[5.6] This SModcast/ Smithaudience relationship–the aforementioned perceived

"borderline friendship and "symbiotic relationship" that Smith and his fans share–fits

further into Fine and De Soucey's categorization, for they note that "joking is

interactive; it is part of ongoing interaction, and demands a response from other

group members" (2005, 2). The twoway nature of the producerfan relationship

allows Smith's fans to similarly joke about his size in an inclusive manner, taking their

direction from the comedic context of SModcast. For example, previous episodes have

inspired fan art, labeled "SMart," which has been posted on the Board, as well as being

part of a dedicated art show in 2009. In a familiar practice of tribute and textual

poaching (Jenkins 1992), fans take their favorite moments from the podcast and

recreate them via artistic depictions–an act Smith publically appreciated during

SModcast #89 (Mosier and Smith 2009), where he and cohost Scott Mosier browsed

and discussed the online art during recording.

[5.7] As such, demonstrating the comedic context of Smith's reaction in SModcast

#106, fans were quick to follow Smith's comedic lead, and began posting art that dealt

with Smith's ejection from the Southwest plane–feeling comfortable enough to use

imagery that highlighted Smith's weight. For example, in a parody of Passenger 57

(1992), malicore produced a mock film poster ("Passenger 37") featuring Smith's

image and the tagline "Always Bet on FAT." Similarly, JonathanCoit featured an image

of a grotesquely large Smith eyeing his copassengers suspiciously, with the caption

"Did you fucking bitches sell me out?"

[5.8] In addition to the art taking obvious comedic barbs at Smith, at times the art

produced also demonstrated the way in which the relationship between Smith and his

fans (and references specific to that relationship) became prevalent in the shared

comedic reaction to the incident. For example, art from poster alienmastermind

depicted an orangutan in a flight attendant uniform–a reference to Smith's films

Mallrats (1995) and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), which both featured an

orangutan named Suzanne; this is also the name of the Southwest employee who

ejected Smith from the flight, as noted in Smith's Twitter feed above (2010a). This

piece of art would therefore only make sense to those aware of Smith's work as a

filmmaker–that is, his preexisting fan base–meaning that those only aware of Smith

because of the Southwest incident would be unaware of the significance of the art to

Smith's joking culture. (In a similar manner, the number for "Passenger 37" was

chosen because of the frequent recurrence of the number in Smith's work, beginning

with Clerks. ). It is not insignificant that the Board–usually a forum open for

nonregistered users to read–became a private space at the time of the media storm,

closed off to those without a username and password. In this instance, the Board

became a symbolic refuge for Smith and his fans, representing a core space of Kevin

Smith fandom, apparently welcoming of Smith's position as spokesperson and

figurehead for his own fan culture.

[5.9] In addition to his previous comedic discourse, Smith's position as a celebrity,

with access to a mass audience, seems to be important to understanding his use of

humor to deal with the situation. John Nezlek and Peter Derks note that "one might

expect that popularity (and by implication amount of social contact) is positively

related to the use of humor as a means of coping. Individuals who deal with adversity

by trying to make light of it or by cheering people up might be more popular than

those who do not" (2001, 397).

[5.10] When applied to the Southwest incident, Nezlek and Derks' research suggests

that Smith possibly used humor as an expected response–a reaction required of Smith

because of the discourse of his celebrity persona, and the contact he has with a fan

group trained to engage with a consistently maintained joking culture. The reaction to

the event could be described as particularly Smithian because of the manner in which

it fits with Smith's preestablished celebrity discourse–allowing him the right to joke

about his size in order to preempt others doing so. This Smithian reaction has

persisted in the shape of the Southwest incident being fully integrated into his comedic

discourse: His Q&A show celebrating his birthday in August 2010, for example, was

titled Kevin Smith: Too Fat for Forty. Although fan support may be expected in other

scenarios, the specificities of the Southwest incident–pertaining to Smith's size and

body image–would seem to suggest that the reaction of the fans was wholly

appropriate to this particular culture (note 7).

[5.11] In forgoing the gathering process of activism and instead embracing comedy,

Smith's fans demonstrate their response via a method more familiar to their fan

experience, despite an apparent suitability for mobilization agency. The relationship

between Smith and his fans, touted by both as somewhat closer than other fandoms,

would appear to be apt for a defensive, retaliatory activist campaign. However, the

fact that Smith seemingly addressed the situation himself apparently led the

community's demonstration of identification to be informed by the preexisting

discourses in the relationship between producer and fan, resulting in a comedic fan

reaction more appropriate to the fandom, rather than a more readily recognizable form

of activism.

6. Conclusion

[6.1] At the beginning of this article, I noted the recurring tropes of activism

scholarship: the role and importance of the Internet, and the role that emotion and

extremism play as a motivational tool. What is clear from the Smith fan response to

the Southwest incident is that while these two factors are important and pertinent in

discussions of fan mobilization, their presence does not always guarantee success.

Despite a fan community that is quick to reference the strong emotional ties that bind

it together, there are instances when the apparent interests of the fandom fall second

to personal experience–whether that involves political, cultural, or economic factors.

[6.2] This prevalence of personal over fan experience is further highlighted by the

later emergence of a successfully mobilized activist cause originated by the Smith fan

community–the UnfollowCharlie campaign. Founded in March 2011, UnfollowCharlie is

a drive to raise awareness regarding domestic violence against women, and grew from

a concern surrounding "the media coverage around Charlie Sheen, and his growing

fanbase, despite the fact that he has a history of violence towards women" (Anon.

2011). (Due to the spreading interests of the activists involved in UnfollowCharlie, the

cause will soon be changing its name to reflect concerns other than those regarding

Charlie Sheen.) Arising from connections made on the Board (where an

UnfollowCharlie thread has remained active since February 2011), UnfollowCharlie has

spawned a dedicated blog that strives to keep followers informed of the activist efforts

such as educational events, related campaigns, charitable merchandise, and news

reports. What is perhaps most notable, however, is that while activism in the face of

the personal affront to Smith may have been anticipated (and was ultimately

unsuccessful), UnfollowCharlie–despite having its roots on the Board–has nothing

explicitly to do with Kevin Smith, demonstrating that although the Internet, emotion,

and extremism have all played a part in its inception, the success of the activists'

mobilization is not founded within the overriding fandom.

[6.3] In contrast, the Southwest case study of unsuccessful mobilization

demonstrates the invisible facets of scholarship. While many fascinating studies cover

newsworthy activism, or particularly esoteric fan cultures, I presented an exception to

these apparent rules, although another iteration of this article could have covered

UnfollowCharlie. While researchers are quick to demonstrate their subjects as

particularly special, I charted a fan community in terms of its relative normality (note

8), and suggest that although one can attempt to repeatedly assert instances of

exceptional behavior, this cannot always be the case.

7. Acknowledgments

[7.1] This article would not have been possible without the continued help and

support of members of the View Askew Message Board. I would also like to thank

Keith Johnston and Brett Mills for their comments and feedback on earlier drafts.

8. Notes

1. Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch, for example, note how the activist efforts of

Gaylaxians– Star Trek fans seeking equality in representation of homosexuals–did not

succeed, yet the success of mobilization is never an issue (1995, 250).

2. The wording has since been slightly changed, now highlighting encroachment on

neighboring seats, with the armrest "considered to be" the definitive boundary

between seats (Southwest Airlines n.d.).

3. The qualitative data from fan responses in this article are taken from a

questionnaire completed in May 2010 and email correspondence in early 2011. Taken

from my wider doctoral project examining the Smith fan culture and the boundaries

and nature of community, my chosen methodological practice of qualitative

participation and autoethnography closely follows Robert Kozinets' model of

netnography, at the core of which he notes "is a participative approach to the study of

online culture and communities" (2010, 74). Following this, I have placed myself as a

scholarfan within the Kevin Smith fan community, and my thesis derives its

conclusions from qualitative data collected from the initial questionnaire, email

interviews, and facetoface interviews conducted in JulyAugust 2010. Ethical

approval for research derived for the PhD and associated projects has been granted by

the School of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia.

4. All respondents were given the opportunity to provide an alternate username for my

research. "Hannah" is the only name that has been changed.

5. The fandom was described in these terms via survey responses by Board users

yzzie (May 12, 2010), frick (June 27, 2010), Ruth (May 12, 2010), and slithybill (May

12, 2010).

6. Diane Negra and Su Holmes have noted the manner in which "dignity and privacy

are increasingly gendered in the context of celebrity representation" (2008, [2]), and I

think it is worth questioning here the extent to which Smith's treatment by Southwest

was a gendered motivation. In considering whether the airline would have been less

accommodating–or Smith less vocal–had he been a woman in a similar situation is an

interesting prospect, particularly when one considers that on his second Southwest

flight a woman was marginalized because of her size (an incident witnessed by Smith).

Smith later reached out to the woman and provided her a platform ( SModcast #107)

to air her views on Southwest and female body image (Smith 2010c).

7. The fan culture's familiarity with Smith's attitude toward his size was noted when

Smith acknowledged Southwest's apprehension in using the term fat, noting they

"were so fucking scared when I brought up [the word] 'fat'…'fat,' 'black,' 'the nword,'

'Jew'…you can tell there are buzz words like, 'We didn't say that!'" (Schwalbach Smith

and Smith 2010). One can question here the extent to which fat can now be

considered an offensive label, and whether Smith (and his fans') use of the word is an

act of reclamation.

8. That's not to say I do not think the Kevin Smith fan community is special–I am an

active participant in the fandom myself (Phillips 2010).

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1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/humr.2005.18.1.1

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and Michael D. Ayers, 25–46. New York: Routledge.

Hands, Joss. 2011. @ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital

Culture. New York: PlutoPress.

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Who" and "Star Trek." New York: Routledge.

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Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Symposium

Of snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish play at the

Wisconsin protests

Jonathan Gray

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Fannish signs provide a sense of community, morale, levity, and

hope during protests.

[0.2] Keywords— Fan activism; Politics

Gray, Jonathan. 2012. "Of Snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish Play at the

Wisconsin Protests." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry

Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures,

no. 10. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0353.

1. The battle on Hoth

[1.1] On Friday, February 11, 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced the

Budget Repair Bill, a measure supposedly designed "to balance the state budget and

give government the tools to manage during economic crisis"

(http://www.wisgov.state.wi.us/journal_media_detail.asp?locid=177&prid=5622), but

that proposed to do so by forcing state workers to pay for a greater percentage of

their benefits, and by virtually eliminating public unions. The latter would be allowed to

bargain for wages, tied to inflation rates, but otherwise would be rendered ineffective.

In a state that has often modeled labor law for the rest of the nation, with a strong

union history, this unionbusting bill incensed many. The next few weeks therefore

saw protests day after day at the Wisconsin State Capitol Building in Madison, with

crowds peaking at almost 100,000, and with many coming out in the snow, rain, and

cold while Democratic senators camped out in Illinois to deny the Wisconsin

Republicans the necessary numbers to establish a quorum to vote on the bill.

[1.2] As I joined one of these protests and filed into the Capitol, whose rotunda and

other public areas had been peacefully occupied, a young man stood by the entrance

holding an iPad above his head. The screen played a looped sequence from The Empire

Strikes Back in which a Rebel Alliance snowspeeder attaches a cable to a huge

lumbering ATAT (All Terrain Armored Transport) Imperial Walker on the snow planet

of Hoth. The speeder then winds the cable around the walker until the doglike machine

is crippled, unable to walk, and collapses. The man in the Capitol chanted, "The Rebels

brought down Walkers. So can we!" As hundreds of protesters filed past him, many

chuckled, applauded him, shook his hand, and/or joined in his chant before joining the

protesters demanding that state representatives locked behind closed doors listen to

them.

[1.3] The young man's creative use of an iPad was impressive, but his act of seeing

the events of the week through popular culture glasses was by no means unique.

"Imperial Walker" references became commonplace, with two protesters even dressing

up as an ATAT (figure 1). Other Star Wars protest signs saw Admiral Akbar warning

"It's a Trap!", depicted Han Solo worrying, "I've got a bad feeling about this" (figure 2), and pleaded to the governor that "There's still good in you (Sky)Walker." Shifting

franchises to The Lord of the Rings, several posters invoked Gandalf's enraged words

to the Balrog, saying "This bill shall not pass!" (figure 3). Harry Potter–inspired signs

suggested that Walker was Voldemort and that school librarians were Harry (figure 4).

The Big Lebowski's The Dude cried out from signs that "This aggression will not stand,

man!" (figure 5), South Park' s Eric Cartman instructed Walker to "Respect Our

Authoritah" (figure 6), a " Jersey Shore for Union Rights" sign announced that "Scott Walker is a grenade," slightly doctored Kill Bill posters now noted "Kill the Bill,"

protesters dressed as Batman and Captain America urged that we purge the GOP and

Walker from the country, a sign with The Simpsons' Montgomery Burns congratulated

Walker for his evil brilliance, Walker was compared to the Sheriff of Nottingham on yet

another sign, and folksy It's a Wonderful Life was invoked to suggest that the bill was

"Turning Bedford Falls into Pottersville." Such signs were by no means the only signs,

as indeed a vibrant collection of sentiments from many walks of life could be seen. Nor

were they the most common. But, as with the young man with the iPad, they and their

creators often elicited friendly chatter, laughs, cheers, and compliments.

Figures 1–6. Various fanrelated protest posters (and costume) seen at the Madison

Capitol Square protests, February 2011 [Click on the above images to view larger

versions.]

2. Fannish knowledge, play, and politics

[2.1] Here I want to examine the role that fandom and popular culture played in the

Wisconsin protests. In particular, I want to argue for these signs, and for the uses of

fandom within the realm of the political, as morale and community builders of an

impressive order. While critics might see the signs as a failure to take the events

seriously, as yet another instance of entertainment getting in the way of Important

Work To Be Done, I saw ample evidence of the above signs and invocations of popular

culture as contributing to said Important Work.

[2.2] I start with the observation that these signs aided camaraderie. Protesters

came from a wide range of backgrounds, as Madison's Capitol Square filled with local

teachers, graduate students, senior citizens, firefighters, snowplow drivers, high school

students, professors, undergraduates from around the state and country,

steelworkers, and many, many more, including a wide swath of concerned citizens of

Madison. But how do such individuals and such distinct communities come together

and work together toward a common goal? How do they create a communal

understanding of what is going on and of their role in this? On the one hand, such

questions point to the brilliant organization and marshaling performed by the Teaching

Assistants' Association that played such a key role in the protests. We can also look to

patterned group behaviors—many people carried similar signs, handed out by unions

(including, for instance, "Stop the Attack on Wisconsin Families"), thereby signaling something in common. Standard protest chants ("Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Walker has

got to go," "Show me what democracy looks like," etc.) similarly brought protesters

together. Civic and state pride was instrumental, too, as many showed up in their

Wisconsin red and/or sported signs asking "What would Bucky [the university mascot]

do?" But on top of this, the fannish signs played their part in strengthening

connections. Many signs only required a passing knowledge of the texts in question,

but they also invited a deeper connection between fans. In a crowd of people, many of

whom are unknown, and when the news media has proven so invested in portraying

protests anywhere as "riots" in a way that might cause many protesters to be on edge

and slightly fearful of their fellow protesters, the fannish connection allowed for a

dispelling of such fear.

[2.3] The Imperial Walker signs and invocations are especially evocative. Such signs

were being wielded, after all, in the middle of a characteristically long Wisconsin

winter; when the Capitol Square was covered in snow, it seemed distinctly Hothlike.

Because ATATs are notable for looking like grotesque, oversized mechanical dogs,

likening one to Walker conveyed him as being a robot for special interests. The

Walkers are shown to be destructible, and they appear in the Star Wars trilogy when

the Empire is in control and the Rebels are on the run; yet fans know that the Rebels

will ultimately win out, that the Empire is doomed to failure. Even Admiral Akbar's

warning, "It's a trap!," is similarly framed by fannish knowledge: the Rebels still

destroy the Death Star and the Empire along with it. Meanwhile, Han may have "a bad

feeling about this," but we know him to survive and to be ready for all comers. The

Star Wars signs thereby offered a shared frame for understanding the events and the

protesters' place in them, one that was all the more necessary given the national news

media's early inept reporting on the protests. Granted, this understanding involved no

small measure of hyberbole, but the signs nevertheless used a fannish bond and

knowledge to help give purpose to some.

[2.4] That hyperbole, however, also helped steel protesters for the long haul. With

weather often hostile to protesters, the Republicans closing ranks and making it hard

to see a path of victory ahead, and protests seeming like they would need to continue

for a long time, investment strategies were required to make protesters feel the need

to return and to keep up the fight. To this end, all of the Star Wars signs framed the

protests in larger cosmological terms, calling for the protesters to stick around for

Episode VI and the celebratory ending. So too did the Harry Potter and Lord of the

Rings signs invoke grand and grueling battles of good versus evil. They referenced a

battle that would be neither quick nor easy, but would reward continued investment,

and that was absolutely vital. In doing so, they aimed to build morale for the long

term rather than peg it to shortterm, quickfix goals. I am under no deluded

misunderstanding that the protesters honestly believed they were Dumbledore's Army,

the Fellowship of the Ring, or the Red Team in the Death Star trenches, but even a

small, heavily discounted portion of the emotion summoned by a call to arms by

Harry, Gandalf, or Mon Mothma might have been the gentle push many needed to

come out the next day or next weekend.

[2.5] Moreover, the signs were amusing. They often inspired laughs and cheers. They

were not alone in this respect, as other comic signs abounded (as, for example, with

one sign that implored "Walker, be more like Palin: Quit"), but they contributed to

making the protests as friendly as they were driven. Protesters were angry, after all,

and many were facing poverty, a loss of benefits, and the theft of their rights. Fox

News' reports of "riots" and "union hate rallies" by "union thugs"

(http://nation.foxnews.com/politics/2011/02/17/unionhaterallywisconsinprotests

rifehitlerguntargetsdeaththreats) were nonsense and shameless lies; they did rely,

though, on images of actual signs and on audio of actual chants by a radical minority

of extremely angry protesters. As the protests continued and as they drew national

media attention, for many protesters, and for the organizers especially, it became

important to ensure that the protests remained peaceful and upbeat, countering Fox

News' images. The fannish signs aided this mission, offering reasons to smile and

laugh amidst the anger and angst, and often inspiring discussions between fellow fans.

3. Conclusion: Rallying around the rebels

[3.1] "Fan activism" may usually bring to mind images of the Harry Potter Alliance

and of other fan communities that come together through their fandom and then enter

the realm of politics as a closeknit community. However, at the Wisconsin protests,

we saw another type of fan activism, in which fandom was performed and announced

as a way to foster community among both fans and a broader public when politics was

already on the scene. The political utility of this second form of fan activism stems

from the fact that many of the utopian messages and scripts on offer by fan objects

(the democractic, liberatory zeal of the Rebel Alliance, Harry Potter's embrace of

difference, Lord of the Rings's bold objection to tyranny) reach a significantly wider

community of those who may regard themselves as fans of a sort, even if fan studies

literature has often required a greater level of participation in the fan object to count

as a fullfledged member of "fandom." If a fan activist's task is to use fandom and its

shared commitments to such utopian visions to affect change in the political world, in

some cases this task may be achieved by sharing the fan object with that broader

community of fanlike individuals. In Wisconsin, while fans may have been the ones

wearing the costumes and holding the signs, they offered those around them who

were in the know a virtual costume to wear over their actions, as well as a fleeting

moment of shared ground and togetherness in the anonymity of a large protest.

[3.2] I do not wish to overstate the importance of these signs here, as other forces

and individuals deserve far more credit for crowd mobilization and organization at the

protests in Wisconsin. The fans were hardly the Jedi masters in this battle, and should

the protesters have succeeded in their cause, I would be no more inclined to credit the

victory to fans than I am inclined to blame them for the eventual passage of Governor

Scott Walker's bill. But just because Star Wars was not the horse pulling the political

cart here, we would be wise not to underestimate the importance of morale and

community building within any political project. As much as journalists often fetishize

elections, polls, and events as sites for politics, what gets us to elections and events in

the first place, what keeps us there, what allows us to make sense of them, and what

encourages us to keep coming back—those are what truly make politics happen.

Fannish signs and play can build that morale and strengthen those communities, and

in that respect, they may occasionally prove as useful for bringing down Imperial

Walkers as a wellplaced light saber or snowspeeder cable.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Symposium

On the ordinariness of participatory culture

Aswin Punathambekar

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States

[0.1] Abstract— Amit Paul's participation in Indian Idol 3 created chances for

interaction across longstanding ethnic, religious, spatial, and linguistic barriers in

Meghalaya.

[0.2] Keywords— India, fandom, political culture, sociability

Punathambekar, Aswin. 2012. "On the Ordinariness of Participatory Culture." In

"Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita

Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0378.

1. Introduction

[1.1] The suggestion that there is a strong relationship between participatory culture

and civic/political engagement would not come as news to anyone in India. Indeed,

when one raises the topic of participatory culture in the Indian context, the standard

response is to point to Tamil and Telugu film cultures, where fan associations continue

to play pivotal roles in many film stars' political careers (M. G. Ramachandran and N.

T. Rama Rao being the most wellknown cases). In fact, this narrative of cinepolitics

has been so dominant that other sites, modes, and dimensions of participation have

not been considered, let alone studied in a systematic fashion, for no apparent reason

other than their seemingly nonpolitical character. In sharp contrast to academic

debates in the United States—where media and cultural studies scholars struggle

against mainstream political science, which approaches the issue of participation in a

narrow sense of purportedly rational, informationbased engagement with civic and

political affairs—the problem in the Indian context is the struggle to highlight the

profound ordinariness of participatory culture.

[1.2] To be sure, the past few years have witnessed some astonishing instances of

popular participation intersecting with and reshaping a wider political field. The third

season of Indian Idol, which saw fan mobilization for the two finalists influencing

broader political movements in Northeast India, and the Pink Chaddi campaign

designed to protest attacks on women pubgoers by a conservative, rightwing Hindu

group come to mind right away as two key cases that have attracted considerable

attention. However, even as we have established the importance of examining

participatory culture as a site where popular culture, politics, and daily life intersect in

new and unpredictable ways, we have, far too hastily, cast aside the sociable

dimensions of participation in favor of mapping links to the realm of politics proper. My

main argument is this: We need to develop accounts of participatory culture that take

the sociable and everyday dimensions of participation in and around popular culture

more seriously while remaining attuned to the possibility that such participation might,

in rare instances, intersect with broader civic and political issues and movements.

Using Indian Idol 3 as a case, I want to suggest that sociability should be as

fundamental to our analyses of participatory culture as civic/political engagement.

2. After Indian Idol

[2.1] Let me begin with a brief account of the events surrounding Indian Idol 3. In

the summer of 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol focused on how people in the

northeast Indian state of Meghalaya had cast aside decadesold separatist identities to

mobilize support for Amit Paul, one of the finalists. While some fans set up Web sites

and blogs to generate interest and support from the rest of the country and abroad,

others formed a fan club and facilitated efforts by a range of groups and organizations

to sponsor and manage public call offices in different parts of Meghalaya, distribute

prepaid mobile phone cards, and set up landline voting booths. Recognizing the ways

in which these activities were beginning to transcend longstanding ethnic, religious,

linguistic, and spatial boundaries, state legislators and other politicians soon joined the

effort to garner votes for Amit Paul, with the chief minister D. D. Lapang declaring

Amit Paul to be Meghalaya's "brand Ambassador for peace, communal harmony and

excellence" ( Shillong Times, 2007). It seemed that this campaign around a reality

television program could set the stage for a remarkable refashioning of the

sociocultural and political terrain in Meghalaya. As one commentator remarked:

[2.2] When Meghalaya's history is written, it could well be divided into two

distinct phases—one before the third Indian Idol contest and one after it. A

deep tribalnontribal divide, punctuated by killings, riots, and attempts at

ethnic cleansing, would mark the first phase. A return to harmony and to the

cosmopolitan ethos of the past would signify the second. The agent of

change: Amit Paul, the finalist of the musical talent hunt on a TV channel.

(Mazumdar 2007)

[2.3] While news organizations from New Delhi and Mumbai looked upon these

events with incredulity, commentators in Shillong began debating how Amit Paul—a

middleclass, Bengali, nonKhasi—had emerged as a catalyst for changing relations in

Meghalaya. To begin with, the situation in Meghalaya had begun to change over the

previous 4 to 5 years, with tentative moves on the part of different groups to reach

out and work toward peaceful resolutions of longstanding issues. Secondly, Amit Paul's

background—a highschool dropout who had to struggle in a marginalized state and

region of the country—resonated deeply with youth across the region, with questions

of ethnicity receding into the background. As Manas Chaudhuri, editor of the Shillong

Times, remarked: "In a place where there's nothing much to celebrate, Amit came as

a godsend. He's talented, and has won all our hearts by singing Khasi, Nepali, Hindi

and English songs on the show. It reminded people of the cosmopolitan culture that

once prevailed in the state, and they have been overcome by the desire to restore the

happy, multiethnic character of this state" (Mazumdar 2007).

[2.4] Finally, Amit Paul's participation in a national contest like Indian Idol was seen

as a unique opportunity for Meghalaya and other states in the Northeast to assert their

presence in the nation and claim their place in the "national family." Without a doubt,

there were several schisms that threatened to disrupt the momentum generated by

hundreds of fans across Northeast India, with groups like the Shillong Arts and Music

Lovers Forum complaining that politicians were leveraging this moment for narrow

reasons. And activistwriters like Patricia Mukhim did pose critical questions, asking

readers why recognition from the rest of the country was so important and if it was

because people in Meghalaya were unsure about their belonging in the nation (Mukhim

2008). For the most part, however, this reality television phenomenon was seen to

have set the stage for a gradual reconfiguration of sociocultural and political

relationships in Meghalaya.

[2.5] Indeed, the most striking aspect of the fan following that developed around

Amit Paul was the sheer range and number of organizations and groups involved: the

Shillong Arts and Music Lovers Forum, Civil Society Women's Organization, Society for

Performing Arts Development, Bihari Youth Welfare Association, Frontier Chamber of

Commerce, Marwari Ekta Manch (Marwari Unity Platform), and several smaller clubs in

different localities of Shillong that drew in people from different ethnic, caste,

linguistic, and religious backgrounds, with the Amit Paul fan club serving as an

umbrella organization. In addition to organizing rallies throughout the city to raise

awareness and drum up support for Amit Paul, these groups worked hard to ensure

that their contestant received enough votes to stay in the competition. Working closely

with local businessmen, including influential figures like Dwarka Singhania, treasurer

of the Meghalaya Chamber of Commerce and Industry, fans ensured that public call

offices in residential areas and several prominent locations in Shillong remained open

all night for people to come forward and cast their vote. And as Amit Paul progressed

through the competition, attracting attention in Meghalaya and other northeastern

states, fan activity intensified and funds were raised to create publicity materials

(posters and banners placed throughout Shillong, for example) and even distribute

prepaid mobile phone cards for free (note 1). Over a period of 3 months, it became

clear that the mobilization around Amit Paul had created a neutral space for a range of

people to work together, and the many public activities had dramatically changed the

way different groups inhabited the city of Shillong. In a city where areas are clearly

demarcated along ethnic and linguistic lines—for instance, Bengalispeaking denizens

tended not to wander into Mawlai, described as the "cradle of Khasi subnationalism"—

the tumultuous reception that Amit Paul received when he visited Mawlai as part of his

first visit to Shillong after competing in Indian Idol seemed remarkable even to the

most jaded observers in Meghalaya (Mazumdar 2007).

[2.6] Without exception, every news report focused attention on the political

dimensions of the participatory culture this contestant had sparked. Of course, this

focus on the political was understandable given the intensity and seemingly intractable

nature of ethnic conflicts in Meghalaya and other parts of Northeast India (note 2). But

as the contest on television and among fans came to an end and media attention

gradually drifted away from Indian Idol 3, no one asked what remain the most crucial

questions: Given the sociohistorical context of Northeast India and the complex politics

of ethnic strife, what happens when such phases of participation that emerge around a

reality television program fade away? What are the cultural and political implications of

a zone of participation that lasts a few weeks or months at best? The answers, I would

argue, are more likely to be found in the terrain of daily life, which, in turn, forces us

to rethink our understanding of public and public life in ways that are not beholden to

Habermasian ideals.

3. Public life and the struggle for the ordinary

[3.1] It is worth reminding ourselves that the world of public life is not limited to

questions of citizenship or civic engagement. As Jeff Weintraub suggests, "the key to

this alternative version of the public realm is not solidarity or obligation, but

sociability" (1997, 21). Weintraub's argument, that the vision of public life celebrated

by writers such as Jane Jacobs "lies not in selfdetermination or collective action, but

in the multistranded liveliness and spontaneity arising from the ongoing intercourse of

heterogeneous individuals and groups that can maintain a civilized coexistence," is

pertinent in the context of a city like Shillong as well (1997, 21–22). Spaces of

everyday interaction such as the street corner, balconies and verandahs, the public

phone booth, and the cybercafé are, as Kumar points out, "spaces of sociability that

are neither public nor private in the liberaleconomic sense of state versus market

forces, or in the civic sense of communitarian responsibilities and citizenship, but

constitute the heart of public life in colonial and postcolonial India" (2010, 23). In

Shillong, the idea of people from different linguistic, ethnic, or religious backgrounds

coming together in spaces such as tea shops, telephone booths, and so on has been

unimaginable for several decades now. Indian Idol 3 was a crucial media phenomenon

precisely because the public that cohered around Amit Paul created the possibility and

the space for the renewal of everyday forms of interaction across ethnic, religious,

spatial, and linguistic boundaries that had been subdued and rendered difficult, if not

impossible, over the decades. In other words, the participatory culture surrounding

Indian Idol 3 created spaces in which people had to acknowledge their differences and

set them aside, if only for a brief period of time, as they stood in lines at telephone

booths, shared mobile SIM cards, chatted with each other in front of teashops, and

took part in rallies to support their idol. In doing so, they were afforded a glimpse of

the everyday that was not shot through with suspicion and the threat of violence.

[3.2] Was this renewal of public life tied to the time and space of the television

event? Yes, without a doubt. Texting, going online to participate in a fan community,

and creating a blog are all activities that remain bound by the temporal and spatial

constraints as well as the mandates of commercial television. We also know that such

phases of participation are never entirely autonomous from the larger political field—

the interests of the government, various politicians, and civil society organizations with

their own vested interests. What the Indian Idol case suggests is the potential for such

moments of participation to move beyond the time and space of the media event into

other times and spaces to generate, in the process, alternative imaginations of public

life that, in turn, are tied to the experience of everyday life. As Veena Das, focusing on

the violence of Partition in the Indian subcontinent in 1947 as well as the Sikh pogrom

in 1984, writes: "Life was recovered not through some grand gesture in the realm of

the transcendent but through a descent into the ordinary…just as I think of the event

as attached to the everyday, I think of the everyday itself as eventful" (2006, 7). Das'

account of the lives of people and communities caught up in these events encourages

us to explore how the "event attaches itself with its tentacles into everyday life and

folds itself into the recesses of the ordinary" (2006, 1).

[3.3] Following Das, I would argue that the struggle in places like Shillong is not, in

the first instance, about the political. Moments of participation such as the one

surrounding Indian Idol need to be understood, then, by first asking questions about

sociability and everyday life. We can then ponder, given that neither the state nor

various political movements have seemed able to imagine viable solutions to a range

of problems in this part of India, if and how such spaces and moments of sociability

might generate new and sustainable ideas for social and political change. In other

words, it is only when we fully comprehend how public participation and everyday life

are braided together that we can meaningfully pose questions about political impact:

What traces has this zone of participation left behind? In the near future, how and in

what contexts will memories of Indian Idol 3 and Amit Paul be invoked? Will the

fleeting renewal of interaction and engagement across existing fault lines sustain itself

over time? Progressive ideals and expectations about participatory cultures

encouraging and informing civic/political engagement in conflictridden situations are

well and good, but only if they are grounded in an understanding of and deep

appreciation for the immense challenge of creating and sustaining spaces of sociability.

4. Notes

1. It is useful to note here that unlike American Idol, where viewers are allowed to vote for a period of 2 hours after the show's broadcast, Indian Idol viewers are

permitted 11 hours (from 9 PM until 8 AM next day). Viewers could cast their vote by

sending an SMS via mobile phone or "televote" through a landline telephone, use an

interactive voice service available for mobile phones and landline phones, or vote

online through http://www.indianidol.sify.com. Further, voting for Indian Idol was open not only to viewers residing in India but also in the U.K. and the Middle East

(U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain). For further details, see

http://sify.com/indianidol/images/jun2007/voting_terms.html.

2. For a detailed analysis of the Indian Idol phenomenon, see Punathambekar (2010).

5. Works cited

Das, Veena. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kumar, Shanti. 2010. "Globalization, Media Privatization, and the Redefinition of the

"Public" in Indian Television." Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 1(1): 21–25.

doi:10.1177/097492760900100105.

Mazumdar, Jaideep. 2007. "The Hills Are Alive: A Local Lad on National TV Unites a

State." Outlook, October 1.

"MLAs' Last Ditch Bid to Garner Votes for Amit Paul." 2007. Shillong Times, September

20.

Mukhim, Patricia. 2008. "Getting into the Underbelly of the Amit Paul Campaign."

Shillong Times. http://amitpaulrocks.wordpress.com.

Punathambekar, Aswin. 2010. "Reality TV and Participatory Culture in India." Popular

Communication 8: 241–55. doi:10.1080/15405702.2010.514177.

Weintraub, Jeff. 1997. "Public/Private: The Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy." The

Responsive Community 7(2): 13–24.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Symposium

Imagining No-place

Stephen Duncombe

New York University, New York, New York, United States

[0.1] Abstract— The mix of ideals and absurdity in alternative futures and fantasy

realms prompts fans to imagine their own alternatives.

[0.2] Keywords— Activism; Fan; Science fiction; Utopia

Duncombe, Stephen. 2012. "Imagining Noplace." In "Transformative Works and

Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue,

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0350.

[1] Scratch an activist and you're apt to find a fan. It's no mystery why: fandom

provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according to different

norms, laws, and structures than those we experience in our "real" lives. Fandom also

necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans with whom to share interests,

develop networks and institutions, and create a common culture. This ability to

imagine alternatives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite

for political activism.

[2] Science fiction, for instance, has long provided fertile ground for political

germination, attracting writers like the socialist H. G. Wells, the libertarian Robert

Heinlein, and the feminist Ursula K. Le Guin, to name just a few of the most prominent

politically minded authors. This attraction to alternative models for organizing society

is felt by fans as well. The Futurians, an early New York City–based SF fan club that

spawned many famous authors and editors—including Isaac Asimov, Virginia Kidd,

Damon Knight, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim—shared its meeting space, and

some of its members, with the Flatbush Young Communist league, and published its

first fanzine on the same mimeograph machine used to put out the Young Communist

Flatbush YC Yell.

[3] In a society like the United States, where politics is something usually left up to

the professionals, fandom can offer a familiar, first, cultural step (albeit one not always

taken) toward the more unfamiliar political work of activism. The paths from

imagination to action, and from cultural networks to political organization, are not

straight, and the obstacles are large and legion, yet imagining an alternative

someplace like a faraway planet or a future society can, and sometimes does, act as a

stimulus to action in order to bring an alternative into being. Fine and good, but also,

at this point, pretty well understood: exploring the connections and disconnections

between imagined cultural spaces and practical political action guided the early work

of scholars like Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Dick Hebdige, John Clarke, and others

associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of

Birmingham as far back as the mid1970s (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979).

What I want to offer here is a slightly different suggestion: that the political power of

fandom may reside not just in the opportunity to vicariously experience an alternative

someplace, but also in the capacity to navigate and play with a vivid noplace.

[4] Youthful dalliances with Robert Heinlein notwithstanding, my first immersion in

SF came through the original Star Trek series, which aired while I was in college.

Every weeknight, at 11 PM, I would gather with my friends, many of whom were also

my activist comrades, around the TV set to lose ourselves in the adventures of the

USS Enterprise. To be sure, we were captivated by the foreign places and strange

societies that Kirk and his crew visited, and longed for a similar world where money

had no meaning and racism and sexism had been (sort of) left behind, but what held

our interest and kept us coming back night after night was something else entirely. We

reveled in the melodramatic dialogue, the blocky staging, and William Shatner's

overacting. We looked for the seams in the sets and snickered at the lowrent

costumes of the aliens. And we all knew that once a crew member donned a red shirt

for a landing party their days were numbered. We loved Star Trek, but we also loved

laughing at it.

[5] The relationship between fandom and activism is usually understood as linear,

but my hunch is that it is dialectical, and that it was exactly this dialectical

engagement that opened up a fruitful space for politics within our fandom. That is, we

didn't become activists because we wanted to actualize the Great Society liberalism

that guided the Enterprise's mission or bring about the postcapitalist world that the

crew appeared to enjoy; we were activists because we couldn't take the televised

depictions of such a utopia seriously. Our political imagination was inspired by the

presentation of Roddenberry and company's SF scenarios, and Star Trek took us on a

voyage lightyears from the unsatisfactory present we knew too well, yet the sheer

campiness of the series kept us from accepting the future it presented as a real

possibility, or, rather, a valid fantasy. Refused satisfaction in the alternative futures

provided by Star Trek, we were forced to imagine and act upon our own ideas and

ideals of an alternative.

[6] Let me explain how this process works through another text, one that actually

names the alternative society: Thomas More's 1516 classic Utopia. The island of

Utopia, as it is depicted by Raphael Hythloday, the traveler who discovers the island

and describes it to More, is, well, utopian: there is no money, private property, or

privately held wealth; the government and priesthood are democratically elected, and

women can attain positions of power; living and labor are rationally planned for the

good of all; there are public health and education systems, and Utopians are

guaranteed freedom of speech and religion; and, perhaps most utopian of all, lawyers

are nowhere to be found. Utopia was everything More's 16thcentury European home

was not.

[7] "Utopia" has become a common word and "utopian" an oftused term, but as a

generative text Utopia is an exceedingly curious book, full of contradictions, riddles,

and paradoxes. The grandest—and best known—of these is the title itself. "Utopia,"

coined by More from the Greek ou, "not," and topos, "place," means a place that is, literally, noplace. In addition, the person who describes this magical land is called

Raphael Hythloday; his surname derives from the Greek word huthlos, "nonsense." So

here we are being told a story of a place that is named out of existence, by a narrator

who is named as unreliable. And so begins the scholarly debate: Is the entirety of

More's Utopia a satire, an exercise demonstrating the absurdity of social alternatives?

Or is it an earnest effort to suggest and promote such radical ideals?

[8] There's evidence for each side. First the case for the satirical interpretation: In

addition to giving problematic names to the place and the narrator, More, in his

description of the island of Utopia, mixes plausible political proposals like publicly held

property and freedom of speech and religion with such absurdities as the Utopians'

gold and silver chamber pots. By combining the conceivable and the ludicrous, one

might argue, More effectively dismisses all alternatives as ridiculous. On the other

hand our narrator, Raphael Hythloday, is named after the Archangel Raphael, who

gives sight to the blind and guides the lost. Furthermore, it is well known that More

modeled his Utopian society—in part, at least—on the egalitarian community of Jesus

and his disciples, and it stretches credulity to believe that More, a devout Christian

who would later give his life for his faith, would satirize Christ.

[9] But I think this traditional debate about whether More was satirical or sincere

obfuscates rather than clarifies, and actually misses the point entirely. The genius of

More's Utopia is that is it both absurd and earnest, simultaneously. And it is through

the combination of these seemingly opposite ways of presenting social ideals that a

more fruitful way of thinking about alternative scenarios can be glimpsed. For it is the

presentation of Utopia as noplace, and its narrator as nonsense, that opens up a

space for the reader's imagination to wonder what an alternative someplace and a

radically different sensibility might be like.

[10] Reading Utopia, we experience a sense of radical alterity: what is foreign

becomes familiar and what is unnatural is naturalized. More provides us with a vision

of another, better world…and then destabilizes it. This destabilization is the key. By

positing his fantasy someplace as a noplace, More escapes the problems that typically

haunt alternative futures. Most propositions insist upon their possibility: positing an

imagined future or alternative as the future or the alternative. This assurance leads to

a closing off of imagination. You either buy into what is being presented or you don't,

and in either case the act of imagination begins and ends with the architect of that

presentation.

[11] What More proposes is something entirely different: he imagines an alternative

that is openly proclaimed to be a work of imagination. It cannot be realized, simply

because it is unrealistic. It is, after all, no place. But readers have been influenced;

they have been shown another option. Because the naturalness of their world has

been disrupted, they can't safely return to the surety of their own present. Once an

alternative has been imagined, the question of whether to stay where one is or to try

something else demands attention; a choice must be made. Yet, as noplace, Utopia

makes a simple choice impossible. More resists the shortcircuiting of this imaginative

moment by refusing to provide a valid alternative. We have to generate our own plans,

because the plan we've been provided is untenable. More creates an opening to ask,

"What if?" without closing down this free space by seriously answering, "This is what."

In sum: Utopia is not a serious plan, nor, however, is it a prank. It is a prompt to

further imagination.

[12] I have no doubt that many, and perhaps most, fans take the imaginary worlds

that make up the kernel of fandom seriously. These phantasmagoric places enable

fans to escape the tyranny of reality and picture something different, something

better. Along with the solidarity, organizational ability, and communication skills built

within fan communities, it is this capacity to imagine an alternative way to organize

social life that gives fans such potential as political organizers. And…I have a hunch

that many, perhaps most, fans also have a complicated relationship to the alternative

worlds they hold so dear. They love them and laugh at them. They are utterly sincere

in their desire to manifest such ideals, and they also engage with them humorously,

satirically, and critically. This productive tension between belief and disbelief is easy to

spot in fans' approach to such SF camp classics as Star Trek and Doctor Who, but I

would argue that the relationship is present, to a greater or lesser degree, in other

arenas. Joshua Gamson, for instance, insists that "celebrity watchers continually ride

the belief/disbelief and fiction/reality axes" (Gamson 1994, 178). And in my own work

on fanzines and punk rock I've argued that irony, camp, and other complicated and

seemingly contradictory forms of reception, articulation, and communication are an

essential part of punk fandom (Duncombe 1997). Fans believe in the alternatives that

organize their fandom, but they disbelieve as well.

[13] It is this dialectical relationship with their root fantasies that keeps fans from

being mere spectators, enthralled by another's blueprint of the ideal society. Fans

enter into fantasy knowing full well it is a fantasy. The story, settings, costumes, and

characters are always, at some level, absurd. This absurdity, whether built into the

text by its producer or brought to it by the fans through their perception, keeps us

from fully losing ourselves in the prepackaged imagination of another. We are

continually cast out of the Garden. But it is this very failure of the imaginary spaces

and places of fandom that can prompt fans to imagine their own alternatives and then,

perhaps, act to bring them about. As Thomas More reminds us, Utopia is noplace, and

therefore it is left up to all of us to imagine it.

Works cited

Duncombe, Stephen. 1997. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of

Alternative Culture. New York: Verso.

Gamson, Joshua. 1994. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance through Rituals: Youth

Subcultures in Postwar Britain. London: Unwin Hyman.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.

http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203139943

More, Thomas. (1516) 2002. Utopia. Rev. ed. Translated and edited by George M.

Logan and Robert M. Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1522/cla.mor.uto

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Symposium

Fan activism for social mobilization: A critical review of the literature

Lucy Bennett

Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales

[0.1] Abstract— Social media allows fans a chance to know celebrities through the

illusion of intimacy, and to effectively organize and mobilize fan activist groups.

[0.2] Keywords— Celebrity; Civic engagement; Fan activism; Fan networks;

Fandom; Participatory culture; Social media

Bennett, Lucy. 2012. "Fan Activism for Social Mobilization: A Critical Review of the

Literature." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins

and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0346.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In an effort to foster rapid and widespread engagement with activism, it is now

a common occurrence for advocacy groups to use the Internet to promote their cause

and communicate with mass audiences (Bimber 2003; Thrall et al. 2008). In a similar

fashion, the recent rise and widespread use of social media has resulted in celebrities

also now using this medium, incorporating Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to mobilize

their fans in various philanthropic and activist projects. For example, Lady Gaga with,

at the time of writing, the highest number of followers, or fans, on Facebook, at over

33 million, and the highest number of followers on Twitter, at over 9 million, has

skillfully and successfully used social media to mobilize her fans around various activist

efforts (Bennett, forthcoming), most notably the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell

policy. Other users of social media as a platform to engage their fans in activism

include The Vampire Diaries actor Ian Somerhalder, who promotes environmental

activism and animal rights through Twitter, urging over 750,000 fans and followers to

join him in signing and distributing petitions demanding change and raising funds. This

is also supported by his foundation (http://www.isfoundation.com/), which uses social

media to send updates and calls for action to fans, encouraging them to use this

avenue further: "Connect with other change makers! Partner up, create teams and

begin projects" (http://www.isfoundation.com/getinvolved). Supernatural actor Misha Collins similarly engages fans in this manner (Stein 2011), inspiring them through

Twitter to engage with Random Acts, a charity group dedicated to performing random

acts of kindness within communities (http://www.therandomact.org/wordpress/). Civic engagement of fans was also targeted by musician Donnie Wahlberg, who drew on his

Twitter following to find a kidney donor for a fan, urging others to help. After reading

his tweet, many fans contacted the hospital, and a suitable donor was quickly found

(Graceley 2011).

[1.2] Fans around the world are currently being increasingly reached and targeted

through these online tools. In this article, I critically review the academic literature in

this area. In doing so, I explore the processes and key themes surrounding this

practice in terms of the complex relationship between celebrity and fans, and the

community it can foster.

2. A direct connection? Celebrity and perceptions of proximity

[2.1] The use of social media by celebrities as a platform with which to communicate

with fans and instigate activism raises considerations surrounding the seemingly direct

connection this practice allows. Although an artist can have millions of followers

reading their messages posted to these social platforms, a sense of intimacy is created

whereby fans feel an exposure to, and possible interaction with, the authentic self of

the star (Beer 2008; Muntean and Peterson 2009; Burns 2009; Ellcessor 2009).

However, it has been argued that the practice of celebrity tweeting, instead of allowing

fans to reach the "real" personality of the artist, involves a "performed intimacy"

(Marwick and boyd 2011), where a star purposely and strategically uses their online

presence to cultivate and maintain a fan base (Bennett 2010), through "creating the

illusion of firstperson glimpses into their lives" (Marwick and boyd 2011, 148). This

"aura of 'realness,'" then, results in the star becoming, for some, "more accessible,

more likable—[their] 'ordinary' traits…emphasized and juxtaposed with…[their]

'extraordinary' talent, beauty, or skill" (Peterson 2009).

[2.2] Kate Crawford, exploring the development of intimate connection through social

and mobile media, describes how it is the "sharing of everyday actions, habits and

experiences—everyday 'trivia'" through these platforms that "forges connections

between individuals who are physically remote from each other" (2009, 252). She

suggests that the "confidences relayed in these spaces create relationships with an

audience of friends and strangers, irrespective of their veracity. They build

camaraderie over distance through the dynamic and ongoing practice of disclosing the

everyday" (2009, 254; see also Jenkins 2009a). Thus, celebrities can divulge to fans

their everyday activities and experiences, post personal photos, reveal exclusive news,

and express their opinions directly, forgoing the filters of news media. From Oprah

Winfrey tweeting for advice about her dog (Johnson 2009) to Danny DeVito confessing

his apparent inability to use the medium (Muntean and Peterson 2009), fans who

choose to follow their favorite stars are being exposed to elements of their personality

that may have previously seemed out of reach. James Bennett uses the examples of

Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher to show how some celebrities do interact with fans

through social media so that they are "no longer…separated in the media world, but as

an everyday, ordinary and familiar persona" (2010, 174). It is this sense of closeness

offered by social media, even if a simple illusion, that enables artists who use this tool

to mobilize their fans so effectively. It is a glaring paradox that any fan is only one of

potential millions of followers being spoken to through this platform, but the directness

and dialogic nature of the communication can create a situation whereby fans feel

spoken to personally, consequently instigating a powerful and active response when

calls to action are generated by a celebrity to their fan base.

3. Mobilization through fan networks

[3.1] Whereas some fan groups receive guidance and instigation from the objects of

fandom, other fans are also using these social tools, without direct prompting or input

from the celebrity, to organize and mobilize themselves in these acts. For example,

fans of U2 lead singer and activist Bono formed their own street team, which posts

calls for action on Twitter and Facebook, describing themselves as "advocates that

support the work that Bono does for Africa. We bring exposure & actively promote the

causes close to Bono's heart & ours" (http://twitter.com/#!/bonostreetteam). The Harry Potter Alliance, "an army of fans, activists, nerdfighters, teenagers, wizards and

muggles dedicated to fighting for social justice" also uses social media in this way,

declaring how its collective "harnesses the power of new media to communicate with

more than 100,000 people, including 60 HPA chapters across the world"

(http://www.thehpalliance.org). For this collective, social media has been a vital tool in its development and coordination. As organizer Andrew Slack confesses, "without

new media…I don't think we would exist… We would be a club at one or two high

schools…we probably would have a hard time being an organization that has 50 clubs

that are really active" (Jenkins 2009b). XFiles fans use a similar strategy in their

charity endeavors (Jones 2012), as do Joss Whedon fans in their Can't Stop the

Serenity fundraising campaigns (http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com/). Thus, these

groups are using the potentially worldwide and instantaneous reach of social media to

foster their own organized civic engagement around relevant issues.

[3.2] Liesbet van Zoonen argues that these issues of activism and organization work

so well within fandom because "fans have an intense individual investment in the text,

they participate in strong communal discussions and deliberations about the qualities

of the text, they propose and discuss alternatives which would be implemented as well

if only the fans could have their way." As she observes, these are all specific "customs

that have been laid out as essential for democratic politics: information, discussion and

activism" (2004, 46). Building on this, Burwell and Bowler, in their study of online

activism relating to The Colbert Report, conclude that these fan practices not only

overlap with political action, but also "demonstrate a convergence of imaginative

performance, cultural consumption and collective engagement that blurs the

boundaries between affect and activism" (2008)—which, I would argue, starts to

illustrate why the adoption of social media for fan activism is increasing.

[3.3] Earl and Kimport's study of online fan activism discovered that within this

behavioral practice, highly organized email and online letterwriting campaigns, and

online petitions and boycotts in particular, were very much prevalent (2009, 16). Fans

are using social media to publicize their campaigns, reaching extended networks—

most significantly through hashtags and retweets, whereby one tweet is posted again

by another user, in order to reach a larger audience. Facebook pages for campaigns

are also frequently created, with fans "liking" a page and consequently alerting

individuals within their larger networks that may share the same values and goals.

Lady Gaga's instigation of fan activism toward repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell

policy is an example of how social media is used to distribute messages through

interlinked networks. Fans were requested to call their senators, asking them to vote

against the policy then post videos of themselves on YouTube undertaking the act

(Bennett, forthcoming) in an effort to encourage and mobilize others. In this instance,

Gaga's call for action functioned as an instigator, relying on fans to draw upon their

own networks to spread the message further to create a larger collective. As Henry

Jenkins argues, "as a fan community disbands, its members may move in many

different directions, seeking out new spaces to apply their skills and new openings for

their speculations and in the process, those skills spread to new communities and get

applied to new tasks" (2006, 57). As I have shown, despite this disparity, it is through

the platform of social media that a fan culture, in all its interconnected networks and

communities, can quite rapidly be drawn together, working to achieve a shared goal.

4. Conclusion

[4.1] In sum, the importance and increasing use of social media for fan activism

raises some quite pressing areas for consideration. First, how do fans reconcile

themselves to their placement as one individual within potentially millions of followers,

yet at the same time continue to maintain perceptions of intimacy with a star? It may

be argued that the directness with which celebrities appear to be speaking to their

fans online and their engagement in acts of intimacy creates a novel platform for

fostering engagement with activism. Second, are these relationships based on a oneway communication and an illusion of interaction, or does the platform of social media offer true personal interaction between fan and celebrity, thereby seeming to erode

traditional forms of distance between the two parties? As advocacy facilitated by social

media is being increasingly adopted within fan cultures and as more celebrities log on

to connect with their audience through these platforms, the perception of the

dynamics surrounding the traditional relationship between fan and object of fandom

may need to be reexamined and reconfigured.

5. Acknowledgments

[5.1] I would like to thank Will Brooker for his very helpful comments on this article.

6. Works cited

Beer, David. 2008. "Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music Culture in the Context of

Web 2.0." Cultural Sociology 2(2): 222–41. doi:10.1177/1749975508091034.

Bennett, James. 2010. Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen. Oxon:

Routledge.

Bennett, Lucy. Forthcoming. "'If We Stick Together We Can Do Anything': Lady Gaga

Fans in Philanthropic and Activist Engagement through Social Media."

Bimber, Bruce Allen. 2003. Information and American Democracy. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615573.

Burns, Kelli. S. 2009. Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular

Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO.

Burwell, Catherine, and Megan Boler. 2008. "Calling on the Colbert Nation: Fandom,

Politics and Parody in an Age of Media Convergence." Electronic Journal of

Communication 18 (2). http://www.cios.org/www/ejc/EJCPUBLIC/018/2/01845.html.

Crawford, Kate. 2009. "These Foolish Things: On Intimacy and Insignificance in Mobile

Media." In Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, edited by Gerard

Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, 252–65. New York: Routledge.

Earl, Jennifer, and Katrina Kimport. 2009. "Movement Societies and Digital Protest:

Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online." Sociological Theory 27:220–43.

doi:10.1111/j.14679558.2009.01346.x.

Ellcessor, Liz. 2009. "People I Want to Know: Twitter, Celebrity and Social

Connection." Flow 9.14. http://flowtv.org/2009/05/peopleiwanttoknowtwitter

celebrityandsocialconnectionlizellcessoruniversityofwisconsinmadison/.

Graceley, Joe. 2011. "Donnie Wahlberg Helps Find Kidney Donor for Fan in Desperate

Need of Transplant by Using Twitter." New York Daily News, April 27.

http://articles.nydailynews.com/20110427/gossip/29497302_1_kidneydonornew

kidneyblocksinger.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture. New York: NYU Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2009a. "The Message of Twitter: 'Here It Is' and 'Here I Am.'"

Confessions of an AcaFan, August 23.

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/the_message_of_twitter.html.

Jenkins, Henry. 2009b. "How 'Dumbledore's Army' Is Transforming Our World: An

Interview with the HP Alliance's Andrew Slack (Part Two)." Confessions of an AcaFan,

July 27. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/07/how_dumbledores_army_is_transf_1.html.

Johnson, Steven. 2009. "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live." Time, June 5.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902818,00.html.

Jones, Bethan. 2012. "Being of Service: XFiles Fans and Social Engagement."

Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0309.

Marwick, Alice, and danah boyd. 2011. "To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on

Twitter." Convergence 17 (2): 139–58.

Muntean, Nick, and Anne Helen Peterson. 2009. "Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of

Intrusion and Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture." M/C Journal 12.5.

http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/194.

Peterson, Anne Helen. 2009. "'We're Making Our Own Paparazzi': Twitter and the

Construction of Star Authenticity." Flow 9.14. http://flowtv.org/2009/05/weremaking

ourownpaparazzitwitterandtheconstructionofstarauthenticityannehelen

petersenuniversityoftexasaustin/.

Stein, Louise Ellen. 2011. "@mishacollins: Twitter and Fan/Celebrity Authorship."

Paper presented at the MiT7 International Conference, Cambridge, MA, May 13–15.

Thrall, Trevor, Jaime LollioFakhreddine, Jon Berent, Lana Donnelly, Wes Herrin,

Zachary Paquette, Rebecca Wenglinski, and Amy Wyatt. 2008. "Star Power: Celebrity

Advocacy and the Evolution of the Public Sphere." International Journal of

Press/Politics 13(4): 362–85.

van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2004. "Imagining the Fan Democracy." European Journal of

Communication 19 (1): 39–52. doi:10.1177/0267323104040693.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Symposium

Flash activism: How a Bollywood film catalyzed civic justice toward a

murder trial

Ritesh Mehta

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States

[0.1] Abstract—Rang De Basanti's box office success served as a catalyst for flash

activism surrounding the Jessica Lall murder trials.

[0.2] Keywords— Civic protest; Civil society; Flash fandom; Jessica Lall; Mobile

publics; Rang De Basanti

Mehta, Ritesh. 2012. "Flash Activism: How a Bollywood Film Catalyzed Civic Justice

toward a Murder Trial." In "Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by

Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and

Cultures, no. 10. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0345.

1. Introduction

[1.1] Rang De Basanti (Paint It Saffron) was a patriotism and social changethemed

Bollywood film that was strategically released in India and other countries on January

26, 2006, India's Republic Day (which commemorates the day when the Indian

Constitution came into effect). It was a significant commercial and critical success,

earned numerous awards, and was nominated for the British Academy of Film and

Television Arts (BAFTA) award for best foreignlanguage film. Despite these accolades,

Rang De Basanti' s greatest legacy might be its role (unusual for a Bollywood film) in

helping generate civic activism among urban Indian youth aimed at securing justice in

a highprofile murder case.

Figure 1. Aamir Khan, pictured in the center, has been one of Bollywood's most

popular actors and icons for more than two decades. Rang De Basanti featured Khan

playing a 20something college student.[View larger image.]

[1.2] Here I present flash activism, a model of fan activism based on the sociocivic

protests, emulating the film, that occurred in the wake of its release and the

coinciding, controversial court verdict. After chronicling the events, I elucidate flash

activism, compare it to Punathambekar's (2010) mobile publics, and consider its

critical function in sustaining the fabric of civil society, a term that I interpret

differently from the literature.

2. The case

Figure 2. Rang De Basanti's promotional posters had a striking visual aesthetic that

appealed to young people's aspirations to break societal boundaries by reaching for

higher levels of freedom of selfexpression and camaraderie.[View larger image.]

[2.1] Rang De Basanti (hereafter RDB) narrates the gradual transformation of five

college friends from happygolucky, politically apathetic youngsters to

antigovernment rebels. The death of a close friend, a fighter jet pilot, is a catalyst,

when the Aviation Minister falsely blames the pilot's foolhardiness for the crash instead

of admitting the plane was a model long known to be defective, which the Minister had

been bribed to procure. To protest, the friends organize a peaceful candlelight vigil at

India Gate, a prominent landmark in the capital, New Delhi. The vigil is violently

disrupted by the police, and the last third of the film shows the dramatic repercussions

of this violence. The film's provocation is best captured in one line of dialogue: "No

country is perfect. You've got to make it perfect."

Figure 3. The candlelight vigil at India Gate in Rang De Basanti. [View larger image.]

[2.2] RDB had a momentous impact on audiences, especially youth, who were drawn

to theaters by its visually attractive ad campaign, upbeat score, and the star power of

cast member Aamir Khan. Meghana Dilip observes there was a "significant"

postrelease increase in the discussion of political issues on Indian blogs (2008, 30).

The frustration evident on some blogs—"[RDB] is an emergencywake up call for the

youth in India to take the cause of freedom seriously" (37); "The society will be ruined

by these evil politicians. Its time to have a Rang De Basanti type resurgence" (32)—

reflected the frustrations showcased in the film's final moments. Dilip opines that Hindi

cinema can be surprisingly "ideologyfilled…Its raw material is the society of today,"

and that this motivates audiences "to act in certain ways" (7). Indeed, in the weeks

following the film's release, it did seem that change was in the air, since many were

unexpectedly moved by the film's story and ideology.

[2.3] Still, several commentators, including Dilip, agree that RDB's most prominent

impact was on the ongoing reallife trial of Manu Sharma and a number of others for

the murder of Jessica Lall. On the night of April 29, 1999, Lall, a 34yearold fashion

model, was doubling as a waitress as part of a publicity campaign for a newly opened

fancy New Delhi restaurant. At around 2 AM, Sharma, the young son of a highranking

politician and member of the city's elite brat pack, entered with his friends and

demanded that Jessica serve them drinks. It was past closing time, so she refused. He

then pulled out his gun and fatally shot her pointblank, in the presence of 300 of the

city's glitterati.

[2.4] As is common in India, the case dragged on in the courts for several years,

over which period many witnesses recanted (having been bribed or threatened) and

the murder weapon went missing. Then, on February 21, 2006, four weeks after the

release of RDB, a Delhi trial court acquitted Manu Sharma and his friends on the

grounds of insufficient evidence.

[2.5] This appalling verdict unleashed an unusually vehement public outcry. A day

after the acquittal, a Times of India headline screamed, "No One Killed Jessica." The Week expressed its disgust with a cover story titled "How the Rich Get Away with

Murder." NDTV, a 24hour news channel, submitted to the president of India the more

than 200,000 cell phone text messages it collected in response to its "SMS Jessica to

3636" campaign. And the blogosphere continued to galvanize people's frustration and

anger.

[2.6] However, the response that received the most media attention was, in fact,

directly inspired by Rang De Basanti. A few days after the verdict, Tehelka, an Indian

weekly, sent an anonymous text message: "If the Jessica case has upset you, show

you care. There is a protest gathering at India Gate next Saturday, March 4 at

5.30pm. Be there. Help keep up the pressure. Demand justice." It is not clear whether

Tehelka deliberately chose India Gate to draw a parallel to RDB.

[2.7] That evening about 2,500 people, many of them students, gathered for a

candlelight rally at India Gate. This is noteworthy for many reasons. In Shoma

Chaudhury's words, "Delhi's middle class is infamously apathetic and insular," and it

was far from clear that it would "take its outrage to the street" (2006). Evidently,

many who received the text message were moved enough not only to pass it on but

also show up. Yet what is most remarkable is that the protest was a replication of the

crucial scene of a candlelight vigil at India Gate in Rang De Basanti, which had been

released six weeks prior and was firmly alive in public memory and blogosphere

discourse. In fact, candlelight vigils were a fairly unusual form of protest in 2006; the

Times of India called them "a novel idea" (Lamchane 2006a).

[2.8] What unified the assembled group was a "quiet rage" at the injustice of the

verdict, their demand for the case to be reopened and Manu Sharma hanged, and their

"yearning for something purer." Chaudhury reports,

[2.9] A curious undercurrent of theatricality underran the entire evening.

Several people who took the mike that day referred to Rang De Basanti: at

times it seemed more than the injustice itself, the film was their inspiration.

It had not just intuited a latent public mood; in a curious twist, it had

become the mood itself. (Chaudhury 2006)

[2.10] Moreover, a survey conducted shortly thereafter by the influential Bombay

Times revealed that a significant number of people attributed the recent upsurge in

social movements to RDB (Lamchane 2006b). Clearly, RDB had become a force to

reckon with and had had a direct impact on civic engagement.

Figure 4. Protesters, largely middleclass residents of Delhi and many of them

students, hold a reallife candlelight rally at India Gate after the acquittals.[View larger

image.]

[2.11] Crucially, this rally, along with the concomitant intense media scrutiny,

resulted in the reopening of the trial and a stunning outcome in December 2006: Manu

Sharma was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Justice was

meted out in a country with a long history of powerful criminals (many of them

politicians) going scotfree, and of a conditioned apathy about it among the public.

3. Flash activism and flash fandom

[3.1] The "RDB Syndrome" (Saxena 2007) manifested in the India Gate protest is a

case of what I call flash activism. Flash activism is a temporary social mobilization

around a particular civic issue; it may or may not have clearcut goals, and may or

may not achieve these goals. At least two factors are responsible for this mobilization:

(1) an existing group of people (specifically, a fandom; more below) already sensitive

to and wishing to foster a civic ethos, and (2) external triggers, which may be cultural

media artifacts like film, music, theater, and television.

[3.2] In particular, when media artifacts mobilize flash activism, we may speak of

flash fandoms catalyzing flash activism. RDB's plot, score, marketing, and underlying

ideology successfully predisposed its audiences to action. People became fans of the

movie, but the full extent of their fandom remained latent until an external event could

release their passion, their reasons for being moved. A flash fandom, then, is a latent

admiration of a cultural artifact that is deep enough to mobilize and transform the

central values driving people's lives. An external event or issue may allow for the

manifestation of a flash fandom in the form of flash activism.

[3.3] I use the word flash to emphasize the suddenness and the selforganization of

the activism, as well as the suddenness of the selforganization. In this sense, flash

activism can be superficially yet productively compared to Steven Johnson's (2001)

principle of bottomup emergence, a paradigm he believes defines this age. Johnson's

emergent systems are adaptive and they selforganize, and even though his examples

do not include civic protest, he stresses the importance of a "critical mass" of agents,

a productive "ignorance" in individual agents, and attention to the activities of

neighboring agents (78–79). Thus he defines emergence as "the movement from

these lowlevel rules to higherlevel sophistication" (18), a movement that could not

have been predicted only by observing the rules being played out.

[3.4] In the case of the India Gate protest, the participants—as RDB fans, Jessica

sympathizers, or simply middleclass people tired of injustice—were ordinary citizens,

individually relatively powerless, who, operating in an environment awash in RDBinduced civic pride and Jessicainduced civic disgust, felt compelled to "listen to their neighbors," tap into their "agency," and pass on the text message. Tehelka,

recognizing the ripening of people's restlessness in the wake of RDB, appropriated the

simplicity and iconicity of the film's turningpoint scene at India Gate; both of those

qualities probably helped the text message reach a "critical mass." In the end, what

emerged was a passionate voice that was unprecedented, unexpected, and

unpredictable (Johnson 2001).

[3.5] One characteristic, then, that distinguishes flash activism from superficially

similar social protests is its tie to flash fandoms; the concepts go together. A latent

fandom tied to a media or cultural artifact is necessary for that fandom to manifest in

flash activism, but it is not sufficient. An external catalyst is also key. Flash fandom,

then, isn't like ordinary fandom. It is in essence contingent: its catalysis (i.e., its

manifestation) occurs at exactly the same moment that its members express it as

flash activism.

[3.6] To further understand flash activism, it might be helpful to compare it to Aswin

Punathambekar's (2010) notion of mobile publics. Punathambekar conceived of mobile

publics in response to another recent Indian media phenomenon: the passionate

cheering and voting—via mobile media such as cell phones—by the people of the state

of Meghalaya for the native Amit Paul, a finalist on the third season of Indian Idol, a

franchise of the popular British Pop Idol reality TV format. Punathambekar conceives of

mobile publics "as a way to draw attention to the centrality of mobile media

technologies to the formation of publics, highlight the fluid and ephemeral nature of

these publics, and suggest that the transient nature of mobile publics allows for the

articulation of new cultural and political possibilities" (251). Meghalaya is a remote state in northeastern India, where deep historical, ethnic, political, spatial, and

linguistic divides have long existed between indigenous ("tribal") and nonindigenous

people. The mobile publics that emerged around Paul realized a previously

"unimaginable" possibility: they enabled vastly different and divided people to "com[e]

together in spaces such as tea shops and telephone booths" (252).

[3.7] The mobile publics (hereafter MP) that formed around Paul and the flash

activism (FA) that centered on Jessica Lall were both ephemeral, transient

phenomena, "tied to the time and space of the television event" (Punathambekar

2010, 252) and the filminspired protest, respectively. This transience is common to

the meanings of mobile and flash. Yet both phenomena had lasting, important realworld consequences: Jessica's murderer was imprisoned for life, and Amit Paul, despite finishing second in the Indian Idol competition, helped temporarily overcome

social divides in his state. Further, both MP and FA were quasispontaneous, relying in

differing ways on mobile media technologies, and both brought together people with

differing backgrounds who would ordinarily remain separate, and some of whom were

"not normally given to acts of citizenship" (Chaudhury 2006). There are, however, also

important differences between MP and FA. With MP, deep but latent sociopolitical

differences were temporarily set aside in an overt fandom, whereas with FA, a

relatively latent fandom was urged to overt sociocivic action (note 1). Besides, Punathambekar introduces MP as building on the notion of split publics, which

understand people as divided "along linguistic and caste lines, for example" (2010,

250), whereas FA is not about a public per se; even though it is a phenomenon

embodied by human participants, it is also formally substantiated by the abstract

purposes of social justice and civic rights.

4. Commentary

[4.1] Flash activism and flash fandom fascinatingly imply the possibility of individuallevel transformation and sociallevel sustenance. At the individual level, their investments in popular culture and their consumption of popular media help people

become conscious of and channel their civic voices. However, people need not be

members of a formal fan community, with wellarticulated norms or ongoing

interaction, to do so. In fact, the surprise element of the flash is explained by its

members' weaker social ties and less sustained relationship to the text. This

differentiates flash fandoms from fandoms and, by extension, from fan activism, as

displayed by, say, members of the Harry Potter Alliance (see KliglerVilenchik et al.

and Jenkins, this issue). The India Gate protest is an instance of fan activism that was

not in principle meant to be sustainable. It was not planned or guaranteed to occur.

Tehelka may have relied on its guess about the deep admiration people felt for RDB

and the film's inherent transformative power, which sentiment and quality only the

transpiring of the protest revealed.

[4.2] Yet I do posit that what instances of flash activism help sustain—i.e., repair,

rejuvenate, remind us of—is the sociocivic fabric and individual social identities within

what Chaudhury (2007) calls civil society, which is "marked by a collective of ordinary

citizens who come together to protect the rules of justice and fair play whenever they

are violated by the instruments of State." She claims that "the beauty of such victories

is that it enters the bloodstream and irreversibly alters the fabric of a society. Once

you engage and win…, you feel empowered. Even as you return to the ordinary course

of your life, the shadow of a nobler you lurks beneath. It will call you to action again."

[4.3] I concur with Chaudhury's endorsement of the importance of such protests for

the sustenance of a social fabric. Moreover, I would like to point out how this

relationship departs from that depicted in the literature on civil society. Edwards

provides a metareview of the "huge range of entities" that are included as

organizations in civil society, listing "grassroots associations, social movements, labor

unions, professional groups, advocacy and development NGOs, formally registered

nonprofits, social enterprises, and many others" (2011, 7). However, none of these—

not even social movements, which are increasingly the "outcome[s] of a lengthy

process of…intensifying solidarities…[with] earlier progressive movements" (Della Porta

and Diani 2011, 76)—is akin to my conception of flash activism. The best way to

explain its uniqueness is that flash activism is by definition not organizational but

temporal in scope. It is, quite literally, a flash in time. The Jessica activists were a

group of strangers who serendipitously congregated, united for but a moment in their

identity as Indians and members of civil society, in their desire to no longer remain

apathetic, in their source of inspiration (RDB), and in their demand for a legal remedy

to senseless injustice. Civil society, in this view, is sustained to an underappreciated

degree by such participation, which is more likely to occasion shortterm ripples than

longterm effects.

[4.4] A caution, then: flash activismtype protests cannot be deliberately and

repeatedly engineered and still be effective. The societies—collectives too often

misleadingly labeled as nations—in which they occur are too complex and

multidimensional to be responsive to this kind of manipulation. Their members' civic

participation, through which they enact their multifaceted identities and multifarious

investments, is embedded in a deeply historicized, highly mediated flux of symbolic

and collective memories, meanings, and actions. Social change, or pressure toward it,

is temporal, unpredictable, and organic, flashing like the occasional high wave from an

ancient ocean of values and traditions: from the rooted complexity that is society. The

Jessica flash activism, while it may allude to a particular filminspired mood of a time,

is thus better viewed as a spike in a longdrawnout civic heartbeat, an eruption from

a sometimesdormant batholith, a participatory action tacitly conscious of contributing

to only a moment in a singular yet relentlessly unfurling sociohistoricity.

5. Conclusion and epilogue

[5.1] Returning to the presentness of this historicity, it is indeed remarkable that

Bollywood, selfproclaimedly and proudly churning out escapist fare, could help effect

such impressive social justice. In this article, I have conceptualized flash activism from

a single case, and because of this, my essay offers less a theoretical model than a

generalized description of an individual event. Flash activism may resemble other

types of citizenled protests around the globe, but such similarity cannot be claimed

without indepth comparisons.

[5.2] Even so, with regard to the Jessica Lall case, it is heartening to note that the

murderer remains in jail (note 2). It is also interesting to witness art imitating life

imitating art: in 2011, five years after the release of RDB, another Bollywood film was

released chronicling Jessica's murder, the trial, the RDB intervention, and the

candlelight protest. This film was also a critical and commercial success, and while it

didn't engender any flash activism (and wasn't expected to), two months after its

release the trials of witnesses in the Lall case who were accused of perjury for

withdrawing their testimony during the 2006 trial were reopened. The film was named

after the headline on the Times of India's report of Manu Sharma's initial acquittal: No

One Killed Jessica.

6. Acknowledgments

[6.1] I would like to thank Professor Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova for their

valuable feedback, support, and guidance throughout the writing of this article, from

conception to submission. I am also grateful to Sangeeta Marwah and Neta Kligler

Vilenchik for their feedback and support. Parts of this paper are directly adapted from

a brief writeup on this case study for my research group's Google site

(https://sites.google.com/site/participatorydemocracyproject/casestudies/rangde

basantiandflashactivism).

7. Notes

1. In this sense, the incisive, oneday phenomenon that was the flash activism around

Jessica Lall was much closer to being activism, even though it was surreptitiously

initiated by Tehelka, than were the mobile publics around Paul, which were more

obviously orchestrated (and for a longer period) by vested interests in Meghalaya.

2. In 2010, the Supreme Court denied Manu Sharma parole and upheld his life

sentence.

8. Works cited

Chaudhury, Shoma. 2006. "Sleeping Idealists?" Tehelka, March 18.

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main23.asp?

filename=hub031806Sleeping_idealists1.asp.

Chaudhury, Shoma. 2007. "Is This Only Protest Theatre?" Tehelka, January 13.

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main25.asp?filename=essay01132007_p1417PF.asp.

Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2011. "Social Movements." In The Oxford

Handbook of Civil Society, edited by Michael Edwards, 68–79. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Dilip, Meghana. 2008. " Rang De Basanti: Consumption, Citizenship and the Public

Sphere." MA thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Edwards, Michael, 2011. "Introduction: Civil Society and the Geometry of Human

Relations." In The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society, edited by Michael Edwards, 3–14.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Steven. 2001. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and

Software. New York: Scribner.

Lamchane, Purnima, 2006a. "Making Your Voice Heard." Times of India, May 14.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com//delhitimes/Makingyourvoice

heard/articleshow/1529104.cms.

Lamchane, Purnima. 2006b. "We Will Not Take Things Lying Down Anymore." Times of

India, May 16. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/Wewillnottakethingslying

downanymore/articleshow/1533954.cms.

Mehta, Ritesh. 2010a. "Civic Proportions: Jill and Jagruti in Community and Society."

http://civicpaths.uscannenberg.org/2010/10/civicproportionsjilljagruticommunity

society/.

Mehta, Ritesh. 2010b. "'Mobile Publics' and 'Flash Activism': Comparing Explanations

for the Sociocivic Movements in the Wake of Indian Idol 3 and Rang De Basanti. "

http://civicpaths.uscannenberg.org/2010/06/mobilepublicsvsflashactivism

comparingexplanationsforthesociocivicmovementinthewakeofindianidol3

andrangdebasanti/.

Punathambekar, Aswin. 2010. "Reality TV and Participatory Culture in India." Popular

Communication 8 (4): 241–55. doi:10.1080/15405702.2010.514177.

Saxena, Shobhan. 2007. "Campus Netagiri Gets Radical." Times of India, November

11. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/20071111/special

report/27953535_1_jnusuelectionsstudentpoliticsaisf.

Susan, Nisha. 2011. "The Investigation We Did. And the Movie They Made." Tehelka,

January 22. http://www.tehelka.com/story_main48.asp?

filename=hub220111THE_INVESTIGATION.asp.

Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 10 (2012)

Book review

Fan fiction and copyright: Outside works and intellectual property

protection, by Aaron Schwabach

Stacey M. Lantagne

Loyola University New Orleans Col ege of Law, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

[0.1] Keywords— Derivative works; Fair use; Litigation

Lantagne, Stacey M. 2012. Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outside Works and

Intellectual Property Protection, by Aaron Schwabach [book review]. In

"Transformative Works and Fan Activism," edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita

Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10.

http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0418.

Aaron Schwabach. Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outside Works and

Intellectual Property Protection. London: Ashgate, 2011, hardcover,

$89.95 (184p) ISBN 978-0754679035.

[1] In law, there are few easy answers. The answer to almost any legal question you

might wish to ask is frequently a carefully reasoned and hedgingly delivered "it

depends." So, too, in Aaron Schwabach's impressively thorough new book, Fan Fiction

and Copyright: Outside Works and Intellectual Property Protection, which sets out to

answer the question "Do fancreated works—fan fiction as well as fan vids and fan art

—infringe on the copyright of the works on which they are based?" Eminently readable

and engaging, bringing a depth of analysis that has so far been lacking in other

shorter treatments of this issue, and littered with helpful examples and illustrations,

the book reaches a typically legal conclusion: fan works probably don't infringe

copyright, but, well, it depends. The value in this book, as with most legal analysis,

isn't in the answer so much as in the reasoning that gets you there. This book's value

in that respect is considerable.

[2] Schwabach is a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. He has

published on a wide variety of topics, including intellectual property law. His list of

publications include several articles about Harry Potter (Hall et al. 2006; Schwabach

2010). As Schwabach writes, "We all have our fandoms" (3), and Harry Potter appears

to be one of his. This is important to keep this in mind while reading this book.

Schwabach strives admirably for—and mostly achieves—objectivity and a balanced

analysis, but he also writes with a knowing affinity for the fan creators. This is not a

criticism. The book benefits from its deeper and more detailed understanding of

fandom's interests, motivations, and mores. Copyright holders, usually possessing

more money and more lawyers than fans, can often shout loudly enough to drown out

opposing positions. This book's sympathy for the fan creators' side of the argument

actually increases its instructiveness, gathering in one place disparate arguments that

are otherwise scattered all over the Internet in cozy fandom pockets. The insider tone

to the book also adds an authoritative gloss to the apocryphal legends of fandom

history related in the book.

[3] While fan works' copyright implications have been examined in a number of law

review articles (Tushnet 1997; Chander and Sunder 2007), they have not yet been

treated to many booklength analyses. This book ably fills that gap. The full

complexities of the central question flourish in the longer medium, presenting a much

clearer picture of the many moving parts of the analysis, all in one neat package for

ease for the curious fan—or copyright holder. This is a book aiming beyond merely

fellow intellectual property professors, with appendices containing excerpts of relevant

US statutes and Web site resources for fan creators. It never drags into an overly long,

esoteric discussion but does an excellent job relaying the nuances of complicated

copyright law in such a way as to make the topic seem less intimidating. At the same

time, the book is academically sound, dotted with helpful (and sometimes snarky)

footnotes, and it never loses sight of the fact that the question it is seeking to answer

is complicated.

[4] The book is divided into five chapters of decent length—long enough not to feel

rushed or shortchanged, but short enough not to feel heavy or overwhelming.

Schwabach walks well the careful tightrope of being informative without being

condescending, useful for an outsider and nonetheless interesting for an insider. For

those with no familiarity with fandom, intellectual property law, or both, the book goes

into enough detail to provide context. For those familiar with these topics, the book

manages not to get mired in definitions. Its pace is brisk, but not brusque.

[5] The opening chapter is a crash course in both fandom and intellectual property

law that provides just enough background. Those comfortable with the topic could

probably skip the first chapter, but it is lively enough to be enjoyed even by experts,

and it serves as a nice introduction to the friendly and appealing authorial voice of the

book.

[6] The meat of the book is contained in its second and third chapters, where

Schwabach steps through the legal analysis that must be applied to all fan works.

First, he focuses on the copyrightability of the underlying works upon which fan works

are based. This is a topic that some disputes ignore altogether. Few people would

argue about whether Harry Potter is copyrighted. Indeed, most content owners take

this fact for granted. When they attack fan works, they make broad statements

regarding their ability to control their characters and worlds. However, there are no

easy answers in law. Characters—normally the link between the original work and the

fan work—are only copyrightable if they fulfill one of two tests that courts have

developed: first, they must either constitute the "story being told," or second, they

must be "sufficiently delineated." Not all characters pass these tests. For instance,

courts have found the character of Tarzan to be copyrightable, but not the character of

Sam Spade. The fact that some characters aren't copyrightable and some are

immediately introduces unpredictability into the infringing nature of any given fan

work. Is fan fiction about Sam Spade's early life okay, but not fan fiction about

Tarzan's last days? Schwabach agrees that Harry Potter is probably copyrighted, but

what about the myriad minor characters in the Harry Potter series? Severus Snape?

Lily Potter? Stan Shunpike? How minor does a character have to be not to be

copyrighted? What about setting? Can you use all your own characters but just stick

them in Hogwarts? What about Sam Spade in Hogwarts? All of these valid questions

are difficult to answer succinctly. Schwabach does an admirable job of examining them

without simplifying them.

[7] If the fan work in question is about a copyrighted character or place, the inquiry

has not yet ended. Under US copyright law, copyright holders control the right to

"derivative works," which are works "based upon one or more preexisting works" (59–

60). Therefore, a fan work, even about a copyrighted character or place, would have

to be a derivative work to be infringing. After a brief discussion, Schwabach concludes

that most fan fiction probably would be considered derivative—but again, as always, it

depends.

[8] However, even if a derivative fan work about a copyrighted character exists, the

question remains whether that work is infringing, because that fan work is

noninfringing if it qualifies as a fair use. Fair use is a complicated and factintensive

inquiry, requiring an examination of at least four factors: "(1) the purpose and

character of the [fan work]…; (2) the nature of the [original] work; (3) the amount

and substantiality of the portion [of the original work] used in relation to the [original]

work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the [fan work] upon the potential market for or

value of the [original] work" (63). The outcome of a fair use analysis is almost

impossible to predict in the best of circumstances (note 1). Rendering the predictive nature even more challenging in the fan work context is the fact that a dearth of

precedent exists. There has been little litigation and even fewer published decisions. In

reaction, Schwabach skillfully incorporates British court cases as well as disputes that

never even reached the courts into his analysis, and he thoroughly mines them for all

the information they can give. This is a tricky proposition: the rest of the world often

views copyright very differently than American law does, and disputes that have never

become public record suffer from mainly being gossip. However, Schwabach does a

commendable job, extracting what's useful while acknowledging its shortcomings.

[9] The fourth chapter of the book is devoted to the space where the interests of the

original authors conflict with the interest of their fans. It is, debatably, a curious place

to put this chapter. Having established what fandom is in the first chapter, it might

have made more sense to explain there how fandom has come to be an area of such

great debate before going on to analyze whether that debate is deserved. However,

this is a minor quibble. The chapter also works where it's placed: having just

determined through his analysis that most fan works are not infringing, it does make

sense to look at why copyright holders might not like to hear that. Schwabach

identifies and discusses three reasons why: (1) the copyright holder may not like the

way fan works portray the original material; (2) the fan work may be too similar to a

work the copyright holder intended to publish in the future, preventing the copyright

holder from publishing said work; and (3) the fan work "borrows too extensively" from

the original work (93). As he does throughout the book, he illustrates the copyright

holders' interests with helpful, reallife examples from fandom disputes.

[10] Schwabach's final chapter is a sort of catchall for topics that didn't quite fit in

the previous chapters. For instance, Schwabach examines the copyrightability of the

fan works themselves and whether there might be future litigation around

infringement of them. He concludes that some fan works may themselves have

copyrightable elements, but that litigation is probably unlikely as a result of the lack of

money involved. However, in stark contrast to the thoroughness characterizing the

analysis in the rest of the book, Schwabach's discussion here feels brief and

perfunctory, merely skimming the surface of the question. The book's focus is on the

legal relationship between fan works and the original works. A discussion of the

copyrightability of fan works themselves (a different question than whether they are

infringing) deserves its own more indepth analysis and feels out of place and

shoehorned here.

[11] The book does have some weak points. For instance, Schwabach spends a great

deal of time on the Harry Potter Lexicon case, in which Warner Bros. sued a Harry

Potter fan who was planning to publish an encyclopedic guide to the Harry Potter

books. Schwabach's focus on the case is understandable: It is one of very few existing

court precedents in which a copyright holder directly attacked a fan work. However,

the case is actually of little value when it comes to the more common fan works of fan

fiction, fan vids, or fan art, which are otherwise the main focus of this book. The Harry

Potter Lexicon was a factbased guide to a fictional work, and as such, precedent

existed to guide the analysis (note 2). It is a very different beast from, for instance, a

piece of fan fiction about Harry Potter's future marriage to Draco Malfoy. A preliminary

examination of the fair use factors illustrates this: The purpose and character of the

fan fiction is quite different from the informative encyclopedia. The amount of the

original work used in a fan fiction is also different from the amount used in an

exhaustive guide. Fan fiction has a different impact on the market and value of the

Harry Potter books. Perhaps most importantly, the Harry Potter Lexicon was about to

be published and sold for profit, unlike the vast majority of fan fiction about Harry and

Draco. Therefore, although the Harry Potter Lexicon case is interesting, it is probably

easily distinguishable—a fact that Schwabach does not adequately address.

[12] Schwabach also glosses over some other difficulties impacting the analysis. For

instance, he barely mentions the havoc that the widespread misunderstanding of

copyright law has already wrought in fandom, limiting references to it to brief,

undeveloped asides. But fan creators' common belief that only profitable works can

infringe copyright spurs resentment for copyright holders who may be defending

legitimate rights, just as copyright holders' assertions that they unquestionably own

their characters and can prevent all use of them spurs resentment for fan creators who

may be engaged in legitimate transformative uses. The misperceptions of the law lead

to emotional showdowns that do nothing more than cloud the law even further. Maybe

Schwabach is attempting to keep his book's focus on the knowable legal aspects of the

problem rather than hottempered and uncertain accusations, but the effect of legal

misunderstanding on the feeble precedents that exist should be considered. In

addition, Schwabach dismisses the extension of copyright terms as irrelevant. While

this may be true, the continuing expansion of copyright holders' rights in this way at

least suggests an attitude toward copyright that is at odds with Schwabach's

conclusion that fans can legally create vast numbers of derivative works.

[13] Schwabach's final plea in the book is for marketplace acceptance of fan works.

He makes a good case for it. After all, a flourishing fandom, complete with the fan

works it brings, makes the copyright holders money: "Fans who might have spent a

few dollars on books—or taken the books out of the library—became fans who spent

thousands of dollars on books, movie tickets, DVDs, and merchandise" (16). Lawrence

Lessig (2008) has also tried to promote marketplace acceptance of fan works under

his theory of the hybrid economy, in which he posits that the Internet has created an

interplay between a sharing economy (such as fan creators) and a more traditional

commercial economy (such as copyright holders) that should be encouraged as

profitable for both. As a practical way to support such abstract acceptance, Lessig has

set forth the concrete idea of Creative Commons licenses—a proposal that is curiously

never mentioned in Schwabach's book (note 3). Nonetheless, this marketplace

acceptance will doubtless be slow to come. Schwabach himself relates several stories

about previously fandomfriendly authors whose relationships with fandom broke down

spectacularly.

[14] The point of this book, however, is not to arrive at a solution. Schwabach's

great achievement is to finally gather together in one place the many precedents—

both court cases and outofcourt disputes—that scholars can use to make their own

arguments and draw their own conclusions. The book is stripped of the hysterical

emotion that often permeates this topic on Internet forums. It sets forth, as logically

and simply as possible, the implications of the question of whether fan works infringe

copyrights. This is a book that should serve as a valuable resource for fan creators and

copyright holders alike, even if they may not like its main lesson: There are no easy

answers.

Notes

1. Compare, e.g., Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 136 F. Supp. 2d 1357, 1377 (N.D.

Ga. 2001) with Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257, 1277 (11th Cir.

2001) (reaching different conclusions on the fair use status of the same work). The

Supreme Court has cautioned that the analysis is "not to be simplified with brightline

rules." Campbell v. AcuffRose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 577–78 (1994).

2. See, e.g., Castle Rock Entm't, Inc. v. Carol Publ'g Group, Inc., 150 F.3d 132 (2nd Cir. 1998) (concerning a trivia book); Twin Peaks Prods., Inc. v. Publ'ns Int'l, Ltd., 996

F.2d 1366 (2nd Cir. 1993) (concerning a fan guide to a television series).

3. The Creative Commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/) permit copyright

owners to keep their copyright while allowing people to copy, distribute, and modify

the work, so long as proper credit is given. The licenses can be personalized, so each

copyright owner can choose the conditions under which copying, distribution, and/or

modification will be permitted, if at all.

Works cited

Chander, Anupam, and Madhavi Sunder. 2007. "Everyone's a Superhero: A Cultural

Theory of 'Mary Sue' Fan Fiction as Fair Use." California Law Review 95:597–626.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=984919.

Hall, Timothy S., Jeffrey E. Thomas, Danaya C. Wright, James Charles Smith, Aaron

Schwabach, Joel Fishman, Daniel Austin Green, Andrew P. Morriss, and Benjamin H.

Barton. 2006. "Harry Potter and the Law." Texas Wesleyan Law Review 12:427–84.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=829344.

Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid

Economy. New York: Penguin. http://www.archive.org/details/LawrenceLessigRemix.

Schwabach, Aaron. 2010. "Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses." In The Law and Harry Potter, edited by Jeffrey Thomas and Franklin Snyder, 67–90. Durham, NC:

Carolina Academic Press.

Tushnet, Rebecca. 1997. "Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction and a New Common

Law." Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 17:641–86.

http://www.tushnet.com/law/fanficarticle.html.

Document Outline

Transformative Works and Cultures, special issues: Transformative Works and Fan Activism, No. 10 (June 15, 2012)

Editorial

Henry Jenkins & Sangita Shresthova, Up, up, and away! The power and potential of fan activism

Theory