Fan Studies

My experience of fan culture, my conception of fan studies as a field, and my own fan scholarly identity are intimately bound up with feminism. It was foregrounded in my initial encounters with fan studies, sitting in Anna McCarthy's television studies course and reading Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers (1992) as an NYU undergraduate.¹ It enveloped me as a graduate student through the support of my fellow fan scholars, echoing both the communal support networks of fandom as well as the self-reflexivity of feminist scholarship. It has haunted me over the past decade, as I've witnessed growing strains of misogyny, racism, and homophobia in geek and fan culture. And it has heartened me to see fans respond to growing antifeminist sentiments with their trademark activism, organization, and transformative creativity. I would wholeheartedly agree with Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse's characterization of female fan culture as a “project of working against...