Making fandom great again: silencing discussions of racism in reactionary and transformative fandoms

ABSTRACT

This article examines comments about race, racism, and fandom from the far-right comics fan subreddit r/WerthamInAction and on stories tagged “Don’t Like, Don’t Read” on progressive fanfiction sharing site, Archive of Our Own. We find significant convergences between the two groups despite their ostensible difference in ideology. In particular, both groups deployed racist stereotypes and resisted re-casting characters portrayed as white in media texts as people of color. Both groups also argued that fannish spaces were for escapism and fantasy and that discussions of race and racism brought unwelcome “political” concerns into the space. These cases thus demonstrate how online communities that discourage politicized discussion provide hospitable conditions for both subtle and overt racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Fandom
• racism
• reactionary politics
• transformative works
• escapism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Supporters of Gamergate argued their anger was about “ethics in games journalism,” pointing to the movement’s start in an accusation that independent game developer Zoë Quinn was “trading sexual favors with journalists for positive reviews of her game” – allegedly ill-gotten reviews that did not exist (Gray, Buyukozturk, & Hill, 2017, p. 2). However, as an investigation by Newsweek demonstrated, the vast majority of Gamergate’s vitriol targeted women game developers and commentators, not journalists or media outlets. See Wofford (2014).

2. Posts are reproduced exactly, with emendations in brackets as needed for clarity. We acknowledge that direct quotation means the posts might be found by search engine, but not directly naming users or linking adds a level of protection with the recognition that scholars are an unintended audience. Posters are numbered in the order we quote from them to create persistent identifiers across the paper.

3. On transformational fandom, see obsession_inc (2009)

4. Doxing is posting private information online (like addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers, or even medical information). For more on Comicsgate’s use of doxing, see Elbein (2018) and Pitts (2018).

5. The earliest comment is from four days after the subreddit’s creation on March 17, 2015. It is not clear whether the subreddit sat empty for a few days, earlier posts were deleted, or the API did not return earlier posts due to reaching maximum permissible data extraction. However, given that so few days are missing, the data is very close to complete at the time of collection. Thanks to our colleague John Murray for help with this scrape.

6. For a summary of the 2020 incident, see Lothian and Stanfill (2021); the 2023 campaign’s manifesto is available at https://end-otw-racism.tumblr.com/post/716978822501875712/fandom-against-racism-a-manifesto

7. Many fans simply read the story and do not leave kudos; “lurker” behavior is common here as it is across the Internet, so it is when this is disproportionate that it becomes a useful metric.

8. AO3 provides certain privacy settings. First, authors can choose to only show their work to registered users. Second, authors can moderate comments. Finally, there are settings for who can comment: (1) registered users and guests; (2) only registered users; and (3) no one. These settings demonstrate a limitation of this study: some comments that might otherwise have existed may have been prevented by such settings – and authors or commenters may have deleted others.

9. Indeed, comic industry workers such as David Gabriel, the senior vice president of print, sales, and marketing at Marvel, have argued that comics fans are not receptive to new characters: “We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against” (Bryant, 2017).

10. Manuscript on file with authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren Rouse

Dr. Lauren Rouse (xe/xir) is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Central Florida. Xir research analyzes representation of disability identities in media and fandom communities. Xe have been published in Social Media + Society, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Flow.

Megan Condis

Dr. Megan Condis is an associate professor of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University. Her book, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2018.

Mel Stanfill

Mel Stanfill is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Texts and Technology Program and the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. They have been published in venues such as New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Television & New Media.