Mediating and Mediated: Fandom Discussion, Knowledge-Making, and the (Re)Shaping of Fannish Realities

Abstract

This dissertation builds on research in digital rhetoric, multimodal composition, media studies and digital culture, feminist ethics, and fandom studies to better understand the role of the metatextual discussions across fandom that surround the community’s consumption and remixing of media objects. This dissertation draws from autoethnographic reflection, surveys from 671 fans, and in-depth interviews with 12 demographically diverse participants to explore knowledge of, intersections between, and tension within self, community, and social justice in fandom discussions on Tumblr. Fans perceive fandom discussion as operating in seven keys ways: building and breaking community relationships; building and breaking interpersonal relationships; facilitating criticism of content and fan behavior; modulating relationships to canon materials; prompting self-reflection; surfacing new perspectives; and recording fan and fandom history. Through these seven processes, fandom discussion mediates fans’ relationships with and understanding of themselves, their communities and those in them, and social justice. The entanglements and tensions within these themes are evident in the ways that fans approach reading and writing fandom discussion, analyzed through the lens of curation. Fans’ practices of curation are driven by a feminist ethics of care that encompasses the underlying themes of fandom discussion—self, community, and social justice—within two guiding ethics: an ethic of self-care that attends of fans’ selves and individual experiences of fandom and an ethic of community care that attends to community interrelationships and social justice. Many fans conceptualize their production of fandom discussion in terms of the self-image their writing creates and conveys and in relation to the complex direct and indirect audiences they address. They curate their consumption of fandom discussion for content they do and do not want to consume in ways that similarly highlight entanglements of self, community, and social justice and the conflicts that can arise between an ethic of self-care and an ethic of community care. These conflicts are concretized in the ways that actions driven by self-care (e.g., avoiding contentious content) can inhibit community care (e.g., social justice) and actions of community care can inhibit self-care (e.g., mental health). Many fans recognize these driving ethics of care in their theorizations of the purpose, place, and value of fandom discussion in fandom, and, exhibiting the self-reflection that is characteristic and unique in much of fandom, most fans theorize the place of fandom discussion in fandom by dwelling in these tensions. This capacity for and willingness to dwell in tension may prove a productive approach to addressing the many negative and harmful aspects of fandom discussion that fans raise when describing its function in fandom. This dissertation has implications for fans, fan studies scholars, digital studies scholars, and instructors. For fans, it can facilitate a greater understanding of fandom culture and the diversity of perspectives that engage in fandom discussion, thereby potentially helping fans improve fandom discussion and reduce conflict. For fan studies scholars, it highlights the potential of collaboration with fans as a central part of research practice and offers a fandom-wide framework for investigating discussion within the community. For digital studies scholars, the similarities between fandom and other digital spaces means that the insights from this project can stand as departure points for re-thinking knowledge-making and discussion online. For instructors, this dissertation offers a foundation to question the potential of collaborative knowledge-making about self, community, and social justice in the classroom.