Feminist Fandom

Abstract

Examines how fannish and feminist modes of cultural consumption, production, and critique are converging and opening up informal spaces for young people to engage with feminism. Adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, bringing together media and communications, feminist cultural studies, sociology, internet studies, and fan studies, Hannell locates media fandom at the intersection of the multi-directional and co-constitutive relationship between popular feminisms, popular culture, and participatory networked digital cultures. Using a layered methodological approach comprising participant observation, surveys and interviews, Feminist Fandom constructs a multifaceted ethnographic account of how feminist identities are constructed, lived, and felt through digital fannish spaces on the micro-blogging and social networking platform Tumblr. It captures the richness and diversity of young people’s creative engagement with the competing meanings and representations of digital feminism, locating Tumblr as a fruitful site for young people to engage in interest-based feminist activism, community building, and knowledge sharing. The experiences of over 300 feminist fans captured throughout the book speak to how broader shifts within feminist practice, theory, and activism over the past decade have shaped and informed the social and cultural practices of media fandom, while also complicating utopian framings of these practices to reveal the contradictory and ambivalent processes of inclusion and exclusion at work within them.