Anti-Fandom

Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age

Melissa Click

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479883240
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A revealing look at the pleasure we get from hating figures like politicians, celebrities, and TV characters, showcased in approaches that explore snark, hate-watching, and trolling The work of a fan takes many forms: following a favorite celebrity on Instagram, writing steamy fan fiction fantasies, attending meet-and-greets, and creating fan art as homages to adored characters. While fandom that manifests as feelings of like and love are commonly understood, examined less frequently are the equally intense, but opposite feelings of dislike and hatred. Disinterest. Disgust. Hate. This is anti-fandom. It is visible in many of the same spaces where you see fandom: in the long lines at ComicCon, in our politics, and in numerous online forums like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and the ever dreaded comments section. This is where fans and fandoms debate and discipline. This is where we love to hate. Anti-Fandom,a collection of 15 original and innovative essays, provides a framework for future study through theoretical and methodological exemplars that examine anti-fandom in the contemporary digital environment through gender, generation, sexuality, race, taste, authenticity, nationality, celebrity, and more. From hatewatching Girls and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to trolling celebrities and their characters on Twitter, these chapters ground the emerging area of anti-fan studies with a productive foundation. The book demonstrates the importance of constructing a complex knowledge of emotion and media in fan studies. Its focus on the pleasures, performances, and practices that constitute anti-fandom will generate new perspectives for understanding the impact of hate on our identities, relationships, and communities.

PART I

Theorizing Anti-Fandom

1

How Do I Dislike Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

JONATHAN GRAY

In 2003, I published an article about the control that fan studies had taken over audience studies and about my concerns that this had pushed under water greater and full consideration of distracted, sometime, and casual viewers—“non-fans”—and of those who dislike the text—anti-fans (Gray 2003). I was trying to rethink textuality and thus offered an “atomic” model of the text and its viewers, accounting for fans as positively charged protons in the very nucleus of the text, likely consuming all or most of a television show, for instance, plus a great deal of its various paratexts. Meanwhile, I described anti-fans as the negatively charged electrons, spinning around the nucleus and hence seeing less of it. As a visualization tool, and as a way of thinking about textuality, the atomic model had some utility. Thankfully, though, few who have cited the article have mentioned that model in particular. I say “thankfully” because it has its problems as a tool for thinking about audiences. On the one hand, the model and the article construct fans and anti-fans of the same text as opposites when they may not be. Inasmuch as fans and anti-fans are both highly “charged” viewers (i.e., they care about the text), we might instead expect them at times to have more in common with each other than with non-fans. On the other hand, the model crudely lumps various practices, motivations, and affective positions into one big undifferentiated mass called the “anti-fan.” In the years since writing that article, I have come to regret not seeing more nuance and difference in anti-fandom.

As an exercise in speculation, therefore, this chapter aims to subdivide and taxonomize some forms of anti-fandom. It is not based on a specific audience research project and thus is not empirical. Rather, it gestures toward the rich and varied work that may lie ahead in studying anti-fans precisely because they are not all cut from the same cloth and because each form of anti-fandom therefore directs our attention to yet more realities and mysteries of media audiences (as of course do the other chapters in this collection, often with considerably more empiricism and detail). What does anti-fandom look like? How might we distinguish starkly different modes of disliking? And what is to be gained by examining each mode? This chapter offers preliminary answers to some of these questions, with a brief tour through several forms of anti-fandom. Occasionally, I enjoy the luxury of being able to point to work conducted by others that examines these forms of anti-fandom; at other times, I must simply ask for the reader’s willingness to speculate with me.

Competitive Anti-Fandom

Although I wish to step back from a model that sees fans and anti-fans themselves as differently charged atoms, a good entry point to this taxonomization may be instances when the fan object and the anti-fan object are locked in a Manichean battle. As Vivi Theodoropoulou (2007) notes, fandom can easily lead to a form of anti-fandom when dislike (whether serious or playful) is directed at a perceived rival of one’s beloved fan object. Theodoropoulou offers the clear example of sporting rivalries, in which certain fandoms practically require dislike of other teams: Boston Red Sox fans are expected to hate the New York Yankees, Liverpool fans “should” revile Manchester United, and so forth. However, we might apply Theodoropoulou’s observation more broadly to all sorts of fandoms. Thus, for instance, we often see franchises pitted against each other: Star Wars fans and Star Trek fans will often perform dislike of the “rival” franchise, just as Buffy fans can at times offer Twilight or Vampire Diaries a chilled response, threatened in some way by the success of other vampire texts. Television texts that face off against each other in scheduling, or that replace one another on that schedule, may similarly be surrounded by anti-fans. Or entire media may be framed as locked into competition, such that cinephiles, for example, may feel compelled to grumble loudly about television and video games, and statements of love for a certain medium quite often involve straw-man invocations of other media.

A complex set of processes are in play with competitive anti-fandoms. Analysts could ask, in particular, about the choice of rival, what this says about the beloved object that is being “defended,” and what perceived threat exists to the beloved object in the first place. Sport rivalries may seem relatively simple, inasmuch as many key rivalries develop when teams must commonly defeat each other to advance. So, for instance, in the National Hockey League a rivalry developed between the Colorado Avalanche and the Detroit Red Wings after the two teams met each other numerous times in the Stanley Cup playoffs throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Manchester United and Liverpool, too, have vied for supremacy in the English Premier League many times, thereby commonly pitting them and their fans against each other. But as is the case with this latter rivalry, sporting competitions can be about much more than just wins and losses, as geographic rivalries are often superimposed onto the realm of sports. Theodoropoulou examines this in the case of Greece’s two elite soccer clubs, Panathinaikos and Olympiacos, the former of which has become articulated to urban and upscale Athens, the latter to the surrounding, working-class areas, such that matchups between the two teams become grand dramas of two classes and two regions at war with one another. Or one need only think of national sports rivalries to see plenty of instances when sporting matches are seen to be competitions of ways of life, as with Cold War–era rivalries between the United States and East Germany or the Soviet Union (witness the ideological reading of the so-called Miracle on Ice in 1980). In this respect, sporting anti-fandoms can tell us a great deal about the values that a community or individual hold dearly and about the cultural geographies and moral economies being created around teams.

Rivalries outside the realm of sports or scheduling conflicts add extra complexities, for when two texts are not involved in leagues or competitions against each other, or are not vying for audience attention in a specific time block, we as analysts must ascertain why it is that this or that text is perceived as a rival. What threat, for instance, does Star Wars pose to Star Trek such that some fans feel the need to choose between them? Or why might a Buffy fan find Twilight especially egregious, but not any number of other films or television shows? As with these two examples, sometimes we should expect competitive anti-fandoms to exist within genres, with anti-fandom being a performative form of distinction. Perhaps Freud’s narcissism of small differences is at work when Star Trek fans, wary of being lumped in as generic science fiction fans, feel a need to delineate how their beloved object differs from other texts in the genre, as with the prominent Star Wars. These competitions may also tell us, therefore, about what genre fans find important about a genre and about what they most want from it. Some Buffy fans’ disdain for Twilight’s Bella, and stated preference for Buffy, might tell us a great deal about those fans’ expectations about the role and status of women in the vampire genre. It might also tell us about audiences’ lack of comfort with public genre classifications writ large, whereby one rejects the label, and the generalization implied, that is attached to a beloved object and performs and articulates a dislike for others in that genre to argue for uniqueness—un-generic-ness—in that object.

Bad Objects

What, though, of one-way rivalries? Here one might think of a general, popular dislike of the New York Yankees in baseball fandom, of Duke in college basketball fandom, or of Manchester United in soccer fandom. As with two-way rivalries, these may reveal something about cultural geographies, as, for instance, the New York Yankees are commonly derided for having more money than sense and/or for having an unfair advantage in a way that quite clearly voices a concern about New York City in general having inordinate power. Duke’s status as an elite private school similarly compounds its dislikeability, especially when voiced by fans from public institutions such as the University of Kentucky. These may have little to do with geography, indeed, but will often have a great deal to do with power. Manchester United anti-fandom, for instance, should hardly be read automatically as an indicator of concerns about Manchester’s power within the English cultural economy (although we might expect that those in Manchester’s suburbs or outlying towns may feel such power), and we might more appropriately expect to see dislike of London-based teams. However, Man U anti-fandom says a lot about fans’ concerns about money taking over the sport, as expressions of this anti-fandom regularly focus on the team’s proclivity to pay extravagant sums to buy the very best players from around the world.

Bad objects abound in anti-fandom, not just in sports. Twilight, for instance, may have its rival vampire genre anti-fans, but it has also more generally been constructed as a bad text, as have texts such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Titanic, Miley Cyrus, Nickelback, and Celine Dion (see Wilson 2007). Of course, we all have our own personal bad objects, but here I refer to popular bad objects. In simple cases, they may be based on a widespread agreement—whether moral, aesthetic, affective, or political—about what is inappropriate in the media world. But we should also expect that bad object anti-fandoms are coalitional and intersectional, as the object finds itself at the crossroads of multiple types of anti-fandom. To take Miley Cyrus in Fall 2013, for instance, it would be insufficient to suggest that she became such a lightning rod for dislike within popular culture simply because a nation (and more) shared moral approbation for her behavior, or a gendered disdain for pop culture icons, or an aesthetic disapproval of her style of music. More likely, these various reasons, alongside many more, intersected and in doing so strengthened the resolve of any one “entryway” to the Bad Object anti-fandom. If one hates pop music, therefore, one has any number of options of figures and bands to dislike, but when Cyrus is so widely reviled by others for other reasons, it simply becomes easier to nominate her the representative of pop music and to focus one’s dislike in her direction.

As with all coalitions, though, Bad Object anti-fandoms unite groups that may otherwise not work together, and they may even lead to awkward compromises of group values. In the case of Cyrus, for instance, a group may have nonsexist, nonelitist reasons for reviling her but may find themselves embroiled in an anti-fandom that often takes a virulently sexist, elitist form. Anti-fandoms are thus key sites to examine how and whether hegemonic values are maintained or challenged through coalitional dislike. One could hypothesize, for example, and as with the case of Cyrus, that, in a patriarchal society, female figures and texts aimed at or otherwise coded as designed for women will prove easy default bad objects, as even those consumers with feminist values may find anti-fan coalitions easier to come by when they are directed at female figures or texts. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural distinction (1984) may prove central to an understanding of why certain types of texts are popularly derided, but it rarely tells us everything, as one is still regularly left with questions of why this text, performer, or celebrity is hated more than others of their ilk. Carl Wilson’s book-length journey into and analysis of his own dislike of Celine Dion is illustrative here, for while he diagnoses himself in Bourdieuian terms as something of a snob, as he elaborates upon his dislike one can see its complexities, part classed, part gendered, part national, part linguistic, part generational. At times he finds his dislike echoed by others, while elsewhere he bristles against other’s stated reasons for disliking Dion (Wilson 2007). As cultural critics, we, too, must be willing to go beyond Bourdieu and ask about the various reasons for dislike and about how it moves and who it connects. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (2013) write of “spreadable media,” rejecting the notion of “viral content” to ask instead about the agential decisions made to spread media. Their model focuses on content that is enjoyed, but we could and should just as easily ask about the coalitional, collaborational, and contestational work that is required to spread anti-fandom.

Disappointed Anti-Fandom

Above, I discuss anti-fandom as opposed to fandom, or as directed toward one object as an outgrowth of fandom toward another object. In truth, however, we will often find anti-fandom and fandom working in tandem, an inseparable pair. Certainly, a great deal of fan studies has examined processes that are remarkably close to anti-fandom. Henry Jenkins’s famous Textual Poachers (1992) catalogues and theorizes multiple instances in which fans like a text to a point but reject parts of the text and feel the need to renovate or cure those parts. In other words, they are fans of the text as a whole yet also anti-fans of specific parts. Jenkins’s exploration in Textual Poachers of Star Trek slash fiction suggests as much, for instance, as it discusses women who love the science fiction frontier of Star Trek, rich with the possibility of new ways of aligning social structures, yet they find the hypermasculinization of Kirk and Spock disappointing. Kirk conforms to one hypermasculine stereotype as the always-active man in charge, while Spock conforms to another as the coldly rational, unemotional Vulcan. Through sl...