Tag: identity
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Twitter Dialogues
I just learned that Storify is going away in May 2018, and I had been using the platform to store tweets for my Fractured Fandom project, such as this list that helped me curate stories for my research: Stories of and Thoughts on Fractured Fandom As part of this process, I also engaged in various…
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Gendering Hatsune Miku
Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I have been working on our concept of the networked gender, building off the concept of the networked self to understand the co-constructive nature of gender identity. We will be publishing a piece on using this concept to look at BMO in Adventure Time, and this represents our…
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A Subject by Choice: The Agency of Fans
I wrote this reflection paper back in 2007 to consider how theories about subjectivation occurs in fandom. Which is to say, how fans of something willingly become identified with that thing they are a fan of. Subjectivation would argue that people passively become something through external ideological forces — that they have no say in…
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The Dark Side of Fandom
Last fall the call went out from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (aka C2E2) for proposed panels for the 2016 convention. I had just been part of a very successful discussion at an academic conference that considered the problems, tensions, fractures that fans have been facing, online and offline, for years. But that was…
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Conversations of GamerGate and Fractured Fandom
One of the things I have been doing this year (i.e. 2015) is trying to better understand what I mean when I say “fractured fandom” and how it manifests in the world. I’ve been writing about it for a couple years now, I have done an online interview study to gather people’s stories, I have…
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The Pop Culture Lens: Episode on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Fandom
On a special episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I discuss a subject that has been one we have debated numerous times in our private lives and has become one that I have been focusing on as a research project: fandom, is it good or bad? We begin the conversation with…
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Fandom as Repeatedly Returning to What Matters Most
Being a fan can mean many different things to many different people. It may mean a person likes to collect memorabilia for a favorite sports team. It may mean a group like to wear costumes and reenact an important event. It may mean individuals compete with one another to test their knowledge in trivia contests.…
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Pop Culture Lens Podcast: The X-Files
In the sixth episode of our ongoing podcast, The Pop Culture Lens, Christopher Olson and I discuss my favorite television series of all time, The X-Files. I was a huge, huge, huge fan of this series; I can still recall sitting there when the show premiered, on that magical Friday night back in 1993, with…
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Categorizing Fractured Fandom
Defining Fractured Fandom According to the discipline of fan studies, at this point in history, being a fan is considered a positive for any individual. Being a fan helps people discover their identities, and to determine what they like and do not like. Being a fan helps people find friends, establish communities, and develop a…
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An Autoethnography of Collegium – Final Day
Final Day: Thursday, June 26th Here we are, at the end of a very long week. Long but fruitful. I do not regret coming, although I will be very happy to once again be sleeping in my bed, with the nice padding. After days of discussing, debating, defining what is Catholic intellectualism, Catholic social teaching,…
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