deepa ):)

@fiercynn.bsky.social

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never over #badbuddy or #23point5 • 🇮🇳 🇺🇲 • 30s • no pronouns • agender & tme • has long covid ✌🏾 • abolish caste & fuck hindutva • FREE PALESTINE https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiercynn

Header of a fic on Archive Of Our Own called "i'll orbit in your atmosphere", by fiercynn. Summary: “What if Earth...doesn’t show up?” Ongsa asks. Sun looks thoughtful, and a little resigned. “I would be sad, I guess.” Then she brightens. “But I think he’s coming. He told me he would.” Even now, Sun has so much trust in Earth. And Ongsa’s about to shatter that trust. But she can’t take the hopeful look in Sun’s eyes any longer. “What if Earth…is already here?” she says. Tags: Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: F/F Fandom: 23.5 องศาที่โลกเอียง | 23.5 (TV 2024) Relationship: Ongsa/Sun Characters: Ongsa, Sun, Aylin, Charoen, Tin, Vi, Dear, Kongkwan, Alpha, Luna Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, High School, Love Confessions, too gay to function ongsa/still working on breaking out of her heteronormativity sun, as many space metaphors as i can cram in, (but not nearly as many as the show lol), also unrelated to the fic but, FREE PALESTINE 🇵🇸 🇵🇸 🇵🇸, From the river to the sea palestine will be free Language: English Stats: Published: 2024-04-11 Completed: 2025-01-23 Words: 11,622 Chapters: 5/5 Comments: 79 Kudos: 350 Bookmarks: 30 Hits: 4,537
header and tags for the fic "i'll orbit in your atmosphere" by fiercynn on Archive Of Our Own. chapter 4: a dream began, it grew uncontrollably Summary: "Ongsa takes her own turn at a telescope around midnight, and she’s still buzzing at the thrill of it as she makes her way back to her friends. But when she reaches their blanket, she stops short, because – Sun is sitting there, in the spot where Ongsa was. 'Sun?' says Ongsa in disbelief. 'What are you doing here?'” Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: F/F Fandom: 23.5 องศาที่โลกเอียง | 23.5 (TV 2024) Relationship: Ongsa/Sun (23.5 TV) Characters: Ongsa, Sun, Aylin, Charoen, Tin, Vi, Dear, Kongkwan, Alpha, Luna Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, High School, Love Confessions, too gay to function ongsa/still working on breaking out of her heteronormativity sun, as many space metaphors as i can cram in, (but not nearly as many as the show lol), also unrelated to the fic but, FREE PALESTINE 🇵🇸 🇵🇸 🇵🇸, From the river to the sea palestine will be free Language: English Published: 2024-04-11 Updated: 2025-01-16 Words: 9,268 Chapters: 4/5 Comments: 67 Kudos: 322 Bookmarks: 28 Hits: 4,136
Podfic cover art with a screenshot from Bad Buddy where Pat and Pran are sitting on the beach next to each other, their backs to the camera, looking out at the sea. Superimposed is the text 'Seaside, written by midnightfreeway, read by fiercynn'
Cartoony graphic with Nong Nao from Bad Buddy wearing a Santa hat and holding a gift box; there are multicolored snowflakes in the background. The text reads: "Join us in the Nong Nao's Holiday Countdown. From Pat-Got-Shot-iverary to OMG it's 2025?!! 24/12/2024 - 1/1/2025. Let's celebrate with 9 days of gifts. You can make a gift too. Sign up to participate"
Tumblr post by rinsedrice one day ago: "hey everyone, my friend is a disabled Black trans person and their partner is a disabled Black trans fem who was just fired from her job a week before xmas 😔 they are now sorely in need of aid before december ends!! anything helps at all, we would like to raise at least $500 to help with food and bills by december 31st! cashapp & venmo: torkz428 paypal: torkz 0/$500" reblogged by rinsedrice 17 hours ago to update that $10 had been raised out of a goal of $500
Nong Nao's Holiday Countdown sneak peak graphic, with art of Nong Nao at one corner, a photo of Pat and Pran with Pran's hand over Pat's mouth in another corner, and cartoony snowflakes in the background. The preview, by fiercynn for fic coming on December 24th, reads: "It wasn’t until today, on stage, when Pran turned to him in the middle of the song he’d written with Pat’s help, that his face completely lit up with happiness, no pretense to it at all. Pat didn’t even know how to respond, in the moment: his own return smile was tentative at first, edging on wary. But as they continued playing, Pat finally felt everything else slip away, all the barriers that have kept them from being friends all these years. He was almost laughing by the time they finished, his body suffused with adrenaline and joy. Then Book and Mot had to go and fucking ruin it."
[4.3] Using Tumblr's hashtags can be strategically and politically deployed, particularly if offering criticism. When a post is reblogged, the tags on the post are wiped clean so that the reblogger can add their own, which contextualizes a user's response to the original poster. At the time, I was thinking through modalities and insufficiencies of the representational rubric, which was a chief concern of the PhD dissertation I began in 2015. Warner's argument was simply representative of a larger problematic framework, and my tags were a response to arguments that fix Black femininity in familiar but limited tropes, the absence of which deems null the character's racial specificity. It is a flawed argument elegantly interrogated by Tara-Lynn Pixley (2015), whose work, coincidentally, appears alongside a different article of Warner's (2015a) in The Black Scholar Journal dedicated to Scandal earlier in 2015. Unbeknownst to me, Warner was following my blog and my Twitter account. She read my post and tags. On Twitter, she thanked me for spreading the word about her article and took my criticism, though she remained firm in her argument about the creator, Rhimes, having a history of colorblind approach to her work. We fundamentally disagreed on the degree of its insidiousness, but it was without rancor, and we went about our day.
[4.1] In late October 2015, I logged into Tumblr. One of the first posts to appear on my dashboard was a (since deleted) subpost by a mutual Scandal follower. The subpost directly praised @babycakesbriauna (BCB hereafter) for how she excoriated ("dragged") an unnamed fandom member. Desperate curiosity and the desire to be entertained led me to BCB's Tumblr, wondering who her target had been and why. My heart rate increased tenfold when I came across her reblog of a post I had made earlier that evening, which had received significant engagement. I kept scrolling down to the response, my anxiety levels off the charts, hoping mine was not the targeted post. It was. Katrinapavela was the subject of BCB's dress-down (https://babycakesbriauna.tumblr.com/post/131668674331/katrinapavelababycakesbriauna). The ferocious precision of the response surprised and flummoxed me because my post had nothing to do with BCB directly nor made any circular reference to her. Yet her words went beyond disagreement into an intensely personal realm (repeated use of "you" and "your") in its publicness. A castigation disguised as intersectional intellectualism. Such a practice was not unfamiliar to Tumblr nor to the Scandal fandom there. However, I had never been the target. In some ways, BCB's public callout of my politics had much to do with the perception of me as a prominent fan in our niche world. BCB's missive blurred the lines between katrinapavela, the blogger, and Kadian Pow, the researcher, the consequences of which entailed psychic and emotional ripples extending well beyond that autumn evening in 2015.
[4.3] Using Tumblr's hashtags can be strategically and politically deployed, particularly if offering criticism. When a post is reblogged, the tags on the post are wiped clean so that the reblogger can add their own, which contextualizes a user's response to the original poster. At the time, I was thinking through modalities and insufficiencies of the representational rubric, which was a chief concern of the PhD dissertation I began in 2015. Warner's argument was simply representative of a larger problematic framework, and my tags were a response to arguments that fix Black femininity in familiar but limited tropes, the absence of which deems null the character's racial specificity. It is a flawed argument elegantly interrogated by Tara-Lynn Pixley (2015), whose work, coincidentally, appears alongside a different article of Warner's (2015a) in The Black Scholar Journal dedicated to Scandal earlier in 2015. Unbeknownst to me, Warner was following my blog and my Twitter account. She read my post and tags. On Twitter, she thanked me for spreading the word about her article and took my criticism, though she remained firm in her argument about the creator, Rhimes, having a history of colorblind approach to her work. We fundamentally disagreed on the degree of its insidiousness, but it was without rancor, and we went about our day.
9. Notes 1. Keating was not conceived as Black but became Black because Viola Davis's audition convinced the series creator Peter Nowalk that the character could be Black (Turchiano 2020). It should be noted that this beloved Black character is a result of colorblind casting practices.
To piggyback off of the Annalise Keating/VD comparison is that what disappointed me the most in this thread was you all failing to to look outside of stereotypical views of blackness to the argument that OP read a race neutral. None of you thought to compare Olivia to Annalise Keating or MaryJane Paul (who had a privileged upbringing) or Anika (another privileged character) or Rainbow Johnson. No you all defaulted to the one character that represents a stereotypical American blackness. Saying “we want OP to read as black” isn’t saying “want what her to be hood or ghetto or ‘loud’.” Why is that? That comparison in and of itself feeds into the idea that there’s only type or two types of blackness. That type is thinking is problematic, just like SR . If we’d learnt anything from this publication it’s that people are paying attention to what you’re saying. Come on y’all do better. How are you gonna yell that blackness isn’t monolithic then default to the believed monolithic blackness, what kind of nonsense. That doesn’t help your argument; not when there are numerous other comparison to be made. No one is saying Olivia should fit into a tiny neat box marked black and that be that. We are saying that she be a nuanced character all around that includes her gender, class, sexual orientation, and race (intersectionality folks). Olivia should be black on purpose without fans having to fill in the missing puzzle pieces the writers didn’t want to accept.
[4.10] BCB compares Pope's inauthentic blackness with other "Black on purpose" characters—Empire's (2015–20) Cookie and How to Get Away with Murder's (2014–20) Analise Keating (note 1)—for whom Pope and Scandal paved the way, but was subsequently judged to be lacking. BCB leaves unaddressed the difference that class and environmental upbringing have on these characters' blackness—all information given by those shows. Pope's lack of imagined limitations as a Black woman is not a flaw in characterization but Rhimes's deliberate attempt at having the character appropriate white male privilege for herself, not be a white male (which is farcical). It is a perspective Black writer Zahir McGhee writes into episode 5.4 "Dog Whistle Politics," which aired two weeks before this fantagonism. In the episode, a television program about Pope is aired, and the presenter notes, "He [Eli Pope] once told a colleague that he was on a quest to do the impossible…raise an African American girl who felt fully entitled to own the world as much as any white man." That entitlement to operate with one's full humanity in the world is not the same as wanting to embody a white man. Just as racial stereotypes about Black people allow others a false sense of knowing, familiar and unifying tropes of blackness provide a false notion of its fixity. Therefore, witnessing an attempt at appropriating white male privilege ("the impossible," as McGhee notes) can invoke racial insecurity or dissatisfaction in some viewers, allowing them to feel unmoored from blackness as they know it or expect it to look like. As someone who grew up with both African American and Jamaican forms of ethnic blackness, at no point did Olivia Pope feel (to me) like a "white man," as BCB notes, or anything other than the Black woman she is. That reading, though different from BCB's, should count for something.
You’ve been doing your reading, and you present a lot of information here that I have read and absorbed. I will not be doing a point-by-point rebuttal. Because what will result is an endless back and forth due to the fact that, as you say, we will never look at blackness in the same ways. (And your assumption is that neither will Kristen and I. Are you her publicist now?). At 21, you are convinced that this is true whilst, at 36, I think it remains to be seen. I’m not trying to convince you of anything, since you, too, are standing in your obstinacy, which you deem to be correct or superior.
[3.3] This insider/outsider position results in a more complex standpoint on how ideations of Black femininity can be used to create textual dividing lines. Being a critically engaged ethnographer intentionally blurs the line between the objectivity and subjectivity of the researcher. For this reason, my own fan production and engagement with other fans on Tumblr, as katrinapavela, are offered for critical examination and reflection. As someone who was a member of Tumblr's Scandal fandom in 2012 before my return to academia in 2015, it seemed unethical to ignore my content production, relationships, and standing as a Big Name Fan (BNF) before formalizing my research. Therefore, my own motivations and attitudes are questioned.
For record, I am not asleep. I just happen to see more. I “still haven’t broadened or shifted [my] view of how OP’s is read, impact the show, and influences how folks relate to her” because my view is not like underwear. It doesn’t change by the day. Impact is not singular nor is it hegemonic. I am performing consistent, evidence-based analysis of the text. My reading of the show is one that is informed not just by information I have gathered, but by an intellectual framework that questions the one you are working from, and from the epistemological knowledge of my lived experience as a black woman. (How come Kristen’s 10 years of writing about Shondaland is evidence of her strong scholarship, but my consistency is evidence of failure?). 
 Neither blackness nor academia require that we agree on the reading of this text. Do you even know what academia is? It is a space filled with people who look at the same set of data, the things that have been analyzed about said data and draw varying conclusions, some of which will be in opposition to each other. Of the two of us, it seems that you are the only one trying to stifle debate based on your intellectual conversion.
While stating your present belief that we will never be on the same page on this matter, you simultaneously try to convert me to your point of view in your screed. You attempted to invalidate my views whilst also paying lip service to the debates that need to happen in these spaces as well as in academia. (In case you don’t know this, there is no shortage of these racial debates in academia. It’s just that the majority of them sound like the view that you’re espousing.).
[5.1] As a veteran of Scandal's Tumblr fandom, I knew a lack of response to BCB would be interpreted as a moral and intellectual win for her. A lack of response typically means one has been sufficiently embarrassed into silence by the shade thrown at them. In other words, I had not sent for BCB, but she came for me publicly. Through the overwhelming anxiety and sleeplessness that night, accusations and would-be responses infesting my mind like bedbugs, I knew I would have to respond. My ego was hurt, and as katrinapavela, I had a reputation to protect. This interaction was public, and I had been dragged into an arena where I was expected to give my own performance as part of the entertainment. Moreover, I just disagreed with BCB on several points and wanted it known. I wrote a response a day later, conceding some points, presenting my own evidence, and pointing out BCB's inconsistent arguments (https://katrinapavela.tumblr.com/post/131616245704/babycakesbriauna katrinapavela). She wrote back (https://babycakesbriauna.tumblr.com/post/131668674331/katrinapavelababycakesbriauna), but I did not respond. I could not reconcile BCB's insistence that "the conversation [about Black femininity] needs to happen" with the attitude of the response, the latter indicating that the conversation was open only to one perspective on the lived experience of Black femininity (hers). Understanding and disagreement coexist. Unlike BCB, who had soured on the show and stopped watching full episodes, my fan production did not center upon disaffection for Pope's Black femininity. My original post and the back and forth with BCB received replies well into 2016. The thread fell into a fruitful discourse that did not require or entice my participation. My complaints about the show lay elsewhere and I would only discuss those with fans who knew how to hold in dynamic tension their delight as well as their dejection.
[4.1] In late October 2015, I logged into Tumblr. One of the first posts to appear on my dashboard was a (since deleted) subpost by a mutual Scandal follower. The subpost directly praised @babycakesbriauna (BCB hereafter) for how she excoriated ("dragged") an unnamed fandom member. Desperate curiosity and the desire to be entertained led me to BCB's Tumblr, wondering who her target had been and why. My heart rate increased tenfold when I came across her reblog of a post I had made earlier that evening, which had received significant engagement. I kept scrolling down to the response, my anxiety levels off the charts, hoping mine was not the targeted post. It was. Katrinapavela was the subject of BCB's dress-down (https://babycakesbriauna.tumblr.com/post/131668674331/katrinapavelababycakesbriauna). The ferocious precision of the response surprised and flummoxed me because my post had nothing to do with BCB directly nor made any circular reference to her. Yet her words went beyond disagreement into an intensely personal realm (repeated use of "you" and "your") in its publicness. A castigation disguised as intersectional intellectualism. Such a practice was not unfamiliar to Tumblr nor to the Scandal fandom there. However, I had never been the target. In some ways, BCB's public callout of my politics had much to do with the perception of me as a prominent fan in our niche world. BCB's missive blurred the lines between katrinapavela, the blogger, and Kadian Pow, the researcher, the consequences of which entailed psychic and emotional ripples extending well beyond that autumn evening in 2015.
[5.1] As a veteran of Scandal's Tumblr fandom, I knew a lack of response to BCB would be interpreted as a moral and intellectual win for her. A lack of response typically means one has been sufficiently embarrassed into silence by the shade thrown at them. In other words, I had not sent for BCB, but she came for me publicly. Through the overwhelming anxiety and sleeplessness that night, accusations and would-be responses infesting my mind like bedbugs, I knew I would have to respond. My ego was hurt, and as katrinapavela, I had a reputation to protect. This interaction was public, and I had been dragged into an arena where I was expected to give my own performance as part of the entertainment. Moreover, I just disagreed with BCB on several points and wanted it known. I wrote a response a day later, conceding some points, presenting my own evidence, and pointing out BCB's inconsistent arguments (https://katrinapavela.tumblr.com/post/131616245704/babycakesbriauna katrinapavela). She wrote back (https://babycakesbriauna.tumblr.com/post/131668674331/katrinapavelababycakesbriauna), but I did not respond. I could not reconcile BCB's insistence that "the conversation [about Black femininity] needs to happen" with the attitude of the response, the latter indicating that the conversation was open only to one perspective on the lived experience of Black femininity (hers). Understanding and disagreement coexist. Unlike BCB, who had soured on the show and stopped watching full episodes, my fan production did not center upon disaffection for Pope's Black femininity. My original post and the back and forth with BCB received replies well into 2016. The thread fell into a fruitful discourse that did not require or entice my participation. My complaints about the show lay elsewhere and I would only discuss those with fans who knew how to hold in dynamic tension their delight as well as their dejection.
[7.1] John Fiske (1989) notes that fans use media to explicitly interpret the world around them, reproducing parts they like the most. This deeply affective process applies even to the antifan, who does the opposite: reproduce parts of the world they dislike the most (Johnson 2017). This further complicates the idea of fantagonism predicated on intersectionality. The disparagement of Scandal's politics around Black womanhood may be the point. As I see it, the antifans' love language is expressed most authentically through biting criticism and denigration, be it of clothing, characters, or storylines. The virtue signaling taking place is for disaffected fans who either never liked the show or had since fallen out with the show due to severed expectations. Affective bonds begin to form on a foundation of hypercriticality, which, if breached, would sever those bonds. Performing hypercritical discourse of the show is the stickiness that reinforces both a sense of communalism and an authentication of "true" Black womanhood.
I could not reconcile BCB's insistence that "the conversation [about Black femininity] needs to happen" with the attitude of the response, the latter indicating that the conversation was open only to one perspective on the lived experience of Black femininity (hers). Understanding and disagreement coexist. Unlike BCB, who had soured on the show and stopped watching full episodes, my fan production did not center upon disaffection for Pope's Black femininity. My original post and the back and forth with BCB received replies well into 2016. The thread fell into a fruitful discourse that did not require or entice my participation. My complaints about the show lay elsewhere and I would only discuss those with fans who knew how to hold in dynamic tension their delight as well as their dejection.
[6.2] A BNF is a fan who has gained a considerable amount of recognition within a fan community (Hills 2002). The BNF's standing has usually been achieved through "hierarchies of knowledge, fandom level/quality [of content produced], access, leaders, venue" (Jones 2018, 258). Important to note is that BNFs are not self-designated but fan-designated. That designation is not static and can change based on any number of factors. Though I did not interact with the cast or producers, some eventually viewed me as having power in the fandom. Sometimes, fans would invoke me to settle tensions, recruit me to a side of a disagreement, or speak up about an injustice in the fandom. In some ways, BCB's public callout of my politics had much to do with the perception of me as a BNF. There was online social currency and clout at stake in positioning herself as a Black intellectual challenge to katrinapavela. Indeed, my ego wanted to defend the standing I had gained in the fandom (though that standing was not always positively charged).
[4.8] BCB had also read the full Warner piece and came back with a lengthy treatise directed at me, defending Warner's work. I presume she saw my tagged comments about Black femininity and took personal offense on behalf of Warner, with whom she was friendly and ideologically aligned. BCB's main bugbear concerned Black women fans having to do ideological work to fill in gaps in Olivia's blackness (https://babycakesbriauna.tumblr.com/post/131668674331/katrinapavelababycakesbriauna), which Warner (2015b) highlighted. Pope's fictional Black femininity fails some fans' authenticity test and comes to signify a failure against Black women by the series creator and head writer, Shonda Rhimes. Furthermore, protesting the unacceptability of this failure means treating Rhimes, and those who fail to sufficiently criticize her writing, with often virtue-signaling derision. For these fans, Rhimes's identity as a Black (presumed heterosexual) woman is inextricably tied to fan expectations and disappointments in Pope. For BCB and others, katrinapavela's blog disseminated Rhimes's viewpoint, which BCB had come to reject. Any of my racial and gendered ideologies deemed similar (even if not) to Rhimes meant I needed to be rejected publicly as a BNF and perceived avatar for Rhimes.
[4.6] These comments reflect the wider context of research in Black fandoms, questioning who is allowed to do it and how they are allowed to characterize the fans. Notable here is that these reactions are based on the combination of the excerpt of Warner's argument discussing shipping real-life actors and the context of Black women's fandoms. It is not based on a reading of Warner's actual piece. This defensiveness is fair, as fan studies has, in the past, had a wave of pathologizing analysis about fan relationships with their love object. While far from Warner's humanizing argument, these women had their defensive hackles raised based on partial information and (understandable) insecurity. The reactions above demonstrate the ways in which Warner (perhaps, ironically, because of her nonethnic name) is presumed to be a white (or race-neutral) researcher, thus solidifying the belief that her argument sees Black women fans as anthropological curiosities. Because I had not explicitly noted Warner's race as Black in my post, she was assumed to be white and thus suspicious. When the assumption about Warner's race was corrected as Black, thus making her "like us," baronessvondengler reaffirms her position about the researcher by casting Warner as a race traitor who gains white acceptance through pathologizing her "own" people. For that fan, no number of qualifiers about Warner as a Black woman researcher could correct an impression she had already confirmed. Perhaps this logic psychically protects baronessvondengler's fan production from judgment.
[7.2] One of the tacit rules in some Tumblr fandoms is being mindful of tagging one's hate or anti opinions. The presumption is that default fan production should reflect an affinity for the fan object, even in jest. Content that is specifically antagonistic or hypercritical is encouraged to be tagged with suffixes like "hate," "trash," or similarly derisive terms. I did not always do this, especially regarding Jake Ballard on Scandal. I was part of a community of hate with other Black women, but I did not see it that way. Our performative antifandom for Jake Ballard, an interloper in the central ship of Olivia and Fitz, was also a way of expressing love for the couple. The more we hated Ballard, the more we loved Olitz and reinforced our bonds with each other (figure 1). This social performance of hate, as Bethan Jones (2018) notes, serves a social function that coheres like-minded antifans in addition to reifying their imagined superiority of taste. I saw myself as righteous, insightful, and funny. Because Ballard is a TV character, this allowed me to see my subposts and direct posts as victimless entertainment. The Jake Ballard fandom felt very differently.
[7.4] The spectrum of fandom and fan orientations can be grounded in affinity, disaffinity, floating between those poles, or gathering from both. Fan and antifan become points on a spectrum, the fulcrum for which is the media (or other) object. The gauge of the spectrum moves with the fan's orientation to (or relationship with) the object. If the material is required to spark connectivity or provocation, or to cohere the group, then the orientation (positive or negative) toward the material matters less than its social stickiness. Be it Tyler Perry's oeuvre or Shonda Rhimes's penchant for interracial relationships in her shows, if a fan group's cohesion hinges on shared derision of a piece of media, the relationship to that object remains important. Relationships with media objects can change from love to disappointment to disdain (often a defense against disappointment). Short of complete disengagement from the fan object, this holds true no matter where the fans travel along the spectrum between affection and disaffection. Furthermore, maintaining a disaffected relationship helps refine the identity of the fan as one who is culturally distinguished because, unlike others, they can see the deeper or harmful potentialities of the media object. Or, to summarize Jones's reading of Ahmed (2004), disaffected fans "reinforce their positions as subcultural authorities and secure their social hierarchy" (2019, 286). Moreover, I argue that fans protect their sense of racial and feminine identities by doing so.
[6.4] Black women's relationship with each other in fan communities is not all based in solidarity from a race and gendered perspective. I have explored that solidarity in other works where Black women interrogate Black patriarchy, media racism, and Pope's sexuality (Pow 2021). We contain multitudes of divergences and culturally specific tastes, even within blackness. The exchange with BCB left me (at the time) with a sense that I (and others who agreed with me) had been doing Black womanhood wrong. Laurie Schulze, Anne Barton White, and Jane D. Brown found that antipathy on the part of some fans toward others was grounded in the perception of some fans as a "low-Other" (1993, 31). That one can be othered within a group of Black women for one's view of Black womanhood speaks to both the diversity of situated knowledge and lived experience in the group. Additionally, it highlights the diversity of age, political orientations, and social location (both geographically and economically). It is worth examining the more complex contours of these relationships, including how disaffection creates division as well as opportunities for social bonding.
[5.3] These debates about Black femininity are not intellectual masturbation; they are real and consequential to Black women's lives. Based on several experiences, including the one above, I began thinking about the racial logics that light the flames of fantagonism. Secondly, as I observed ideological cliques developing in the Scandal fandom, I began thinking of how communities cohere around mutual disaffection for the same media object they once loved. Based on the narrative and analysis in the previous section, I discuss intersectionality and authenticity, cultural taste hierarchies, and fandom as a spectrum that includes antifandom and fantagonism.
[4.9] BCB, though she had admitted in her reply to no longer following the show closely, agreed with Warner's argument that Pope lacked racial specificity and that Rhimes engineered this to appeal to a white audience. It is notable here that BCB's assertion is not dissimilar to baronessvondengler, quoted above, who accused Warner of the same thing by studying Black women fans of Scandal. Both Rhimes and Warner are accused of being racial shills, even as they are coming from different ends of the ideological blackness spectrum. Moreover, BCB wrote that given all the critical reviews of the show and academic articles, katrinapavela should have "shifted your [my] views" by this point. She urges katrinapavela to adopt a stance more closely aligned with her evolved position. BCB's standpoint on racial identity in Scandal had changed since 2013, when she was commenting on katrinapavela's posts, race-bending Fitz, and imagining him oiling Olivia's "scalp with olive oil" (http://babycakesbriauna.tumblr.com/post/49949623886/katrinapavela babycakesbriauna). By 2015, Pope's blackness was so nonspecific for BCB that she could have been played by "a white man, and nothing about her characterization would change." This view echoes Warner's (2015b) work on Shondaland's (Rhimes's production company) colorblind casting practices.
[2.1] "Fantagonisms" is a term coined by Derek Johnson (2017), who details the differing constitutive hegemonies of fandom. The term merges "fan" and "antagonism" to express specific tensions within communities of fan practice around textual meaning and struggles to shape production to their expectations. The term "antifan" is closely related, which predates Johnson's term. Coined by Jonathan Gray (2003), "antifan" ostensibly identifies fans whose relationship to a media object (or to fans of that media) is almost exclusively antagonistic. In expanding his theory, Gray (2019) develops a tentative taxonomy of antifandom that embraces multiple modalities and orientations to media (and other fan objects). Gray recognizes that disaffective relationality (bad media, disappointment, fan aggression) has something to teach us about fandom writ large. I employ fantagonism as a merger between antifan and Johnson's (2017) fantagonism. Studies that have explored fantagonism or antifandom focus on contested relationships between the fans and (show) producers or writers (Jenkins 1992; Jones 2019), fans and characters of a media property (Lotz 2014; Halladay and Click 2019), or, more recently, with the oeuvre of an auteur (Martin 2019), among others. In some instances where intra- and interfandom interactions reveal gendered concepts of the good and bad fan (Bacon-Smith 1991; Busse 2013; Stanfill 2013), race is not highlighted as a significant variable, even in instances where gender is. Those studies largely leave the interplay of race and gender logics as furtive ground for intraracial antagonism underexamined. In instances where race is explicitly factored into intrafandom aggression, it's usually about a marginalized group being labeled as the aggressor by the dominant group for raising race-based concerns (Johnson 2017; Scott 2017; Pande 2018).
[3.2] Matt Hills (2021), who wrote about fandom from an autoethnographic perspective, notes that when writing, the researcher's positionality within fandom needs acknowledgment due to biases and attachments that inform their work. Rukmini Pande (2021) goes further in a way that echoes Collins by pushing the duality of self/other and (un)belonging as a woman of color researcher among same-race fandoms. She argues that such researchers have the critical training to recognize larger structures and hierarchies, even as we "squee from the margins" (2018). Using CEE, I examine the contestations around Black femininity within the fandom arising from Scandal's characters and themes. [3.3] This insider/outsider position results in a more complex standpoint on how ideations of Black femininity can be used to create textual dividing lines. Being a critically engaged ethnographer intentionally blurs the line between the objectivity and subjectivity of the researcher. For this reason, my own fan production and engagement with other fans on Tumblr, as katrinapavela, are offered for critical examination and reflection. As someone who was a member of Tumblr's Scandal fandom in 2012 before my return to academia in 2015, it seemed unethical to ignore my content production, relationships, and standing as a Big Name Fan (BNF) before formalizing my research. Therefore, my own motivations and attitudes are questioned.
Article These often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame offer expansive interventions in the field of fan studies or analyze the particular, applying a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicating fan practice; performing a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relating transformative or fan phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks. Articles undergo anonymous peer review. (maximum 8,000 words including notes and references, plus a maximum 250-word abstract)
Article A true sista: Exploring intraracial fantagonisms among Black women fans of Scandal Kadian Pow Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom [0.1] Abstract—I explore the complexities of Black women's fan practices and their affective and disaffective engagements with each other. Operating under the pseudonym katrinapavela, I examine the emergence of "fantagonisms" within the Black women's fandom, a term coined by Derek Johnson to describe tensions within fan communities. I explore the influence of race, education, class, and cultural taste on Black women's disaffection with certain media content. Through a critical analysis of the ideological tensions and conflicts within the Black women's fandom, I provide a nuanced understanding of intraracial fantagonisms and the ways in which Black women negotiate their identities within popular culture. Examining disaffection within Black women's Scandal (2012–18) fandom on platforms like Tumblr sheds light on the varied and contested relationships between fans and media content. [0.2] Keywords—Antifandom; Disaffection; Tumblr
[5.2] Missandei and Grey Worm deserve better. Chewing_Gum's post and Writegirl's reflection on Missandei's death demonstrate the affective responses of fans of color when fandoms mirror the dominant ideologies (i.e., whiteness) in a show. Lady_R's fic reimagines the representations of white supremacy in GOT to instead center Black characters, their cultures, and their agency. To center Black fans and characters means recognizing—at every level, from popular media tropes to fan discourse to which characters fans desire or identify with—the pervasiveness of whiteness. In fandoms, Black characters are consistently overlooked or not seen as desirable. For popular media products to kill or write off characters of color is a violent political choice, especially in the face of real historical and current violence against Black people. In the face of research that consistently shows how Blackness and Black people are devalued, fans and fan researchers must continue to promote critical and antiracist fan practices; to celebrate subversive practices; and to uplift Black creators, fans, and actors. One of the many paths of healing is to carve out space to love Blackness in popular culture and fandoms alike.
[4.5] Her fic also demonstrates how she, as a Black fan, feels—and is—alienated and unwelcome in the GOT AO3 fandom. She writes: [4.6] Further more, y'all really need to start writing more Grey Worm/Missandei stories because honestly the ones we have now are not the best but they're a'ight I guess. I just need more Black love in this fandom. And I know I'm gonna have a bitch in comments talking about "Well then you should write the stories yourself " nah hoe, if I could write them trust and believe they would be up right now. [4.7] Her criticism of the lack of Grey Worm/Missandei stories points directly to the lack of Black representation and "Black love" in the GOT fandom; her words resonate with hooks's call for loving Blackness. She prompts readers to rethink how they view Missandei, Grey Worm, and the fan community by encouraging them to write fics that celebrate Black characters, cultures, and people. She also anticipates potential responses, saying "I'm gonna have a bitch in the comments," demonstrating she is prepared for pushback, which Black fans often receive when they point out racism; her preparation also points to the dominance of whiteness in the fandom. Her criticism invites reader response, reimagines how AO3 may be used, and demonstrates why Missandei deserved better. To date, there is no negativity in the comments, and her readers seem to celebrate and agree with her criticism. Most comments echo her anger and frustration, with one commenter writing "PREACH" and two mentioning their own Missandei/Grey Worm stories. Those who engage with her do so because they already have similar perspectives.
[4.3] One fan's AO3 post, "Fuck this shit" by Chewing_Gum, perfectly captures how fan fiction may be both critical and disruptive. I found her fic because she used the "Missandei/Grey Worm" relationship tag and has "Grey Worm" included in one of the additional tags: "Y'all need to write stories about the trauma Grey Worm is going through." Her fic—less than one hundred words long—is a post calling out the fan community for ignoring Missandei's death and Grey Worm's trauma and demands better from the fandom and media writers. Specifically, Chewing_Gum's piece demonstrates how Black antifans may use disruptive writing techniques as activism, specifically their criticisms of racism and white supremacy. Chewing_Gum disrupts by using expletives, reimagining platform norms, and incorporating a call to action. She uses expletives in the title and additional tags directed at both the show and the fandom. She also disrupts traditional use of AO3 by using the space to write metacommentary rather than a fic. Fans have previously used AO3 to write metacommentary about fandoms and community practices, including toastystats’s (destinationtoast's) extensive documentation of fandom stats. Most fandom metacommentary, though, occurs on platforms like Tumblr or Twitter. When fans use AO3 for metacommentary, they often utilize the additional tags, author's notes, or comments. Chewing_Gum takes space largely designed for fics to both respond to the GOT fan community and invite others to respond to her. Her piece acts as a writing prompt, inviting others to take up her call.
[3.8] In the last scene, Missandei asks Grey Worm if he is afraid of Daenerys, and he says, "I had one fear, remember that. A fear that I left behind." This calls back to the scene in season 5 of GOT when Missandei and Grey Worm first kiss, demonstrating the importance of representing romance and joy for Black characters in popular culture texts. Lady_R's focus on Missandei and Grey Worm's arcs, their choices to defy Daenerys, and their final reunion signifies how fic authors can challenge white supremacy and other systems of power.
[3.6] In "The Girl Who Got Away," Lady_R incorporates the moment Missandei stands on the wall before her loved ones. Lady_R uses the tags "Missandei lives" and "Fix-It" to emphasize her focus on Missandei. This fic reimagines only her ear being cut off as the catalyst for the burning of King's Landing. Missandei survives and escapes, watching in horror the destruction Daenerys brings upon the city. She finds Grey Worm and tends to him as they exchange promises of love. The story progresses by focusing on exchanges—their choices, their actions, and their emotions—between Missandei, Grey Worm, and Marselen, Missandei's brother. There is a conflict between Grey Worm and Marselen early in the piece, as Grey Worm continues to slaughter soldiers after they surrender. Marselen convinces Grey Worm to help survivors instead of slaughtering them, thus defying Daenerys and resisting his own conditioning from enslavement. He chooses then to keep everyone safe by calling his soldiers to "'Find the survivors!'—Grey Worm's throat itches as he screams the new command, but he repeats it once more, and twice again in the Valyrian tongue. 'Find them. Keep them safe! This is not who we are! This won't be who we are!'" [3.7] Just as Grey Worm defies Daenerys, so does Missandei. Lady_R actively critiques the "window dressing" convention in fics that Writegirl points out, in which Missandei appears merely to affirm Daenerys. In Lady_R's fic, Missandei defies Daenerys, both in thought and action. Missandei helps survivors find shelter away from Daenerys and her dragon, commands the Dothraki from Daenerys's army to do the same, and realizes that Daenerys has never cared about liberating others. Missandei thinks, "So much for the Breaker of Chains." Lady_R highlights Missandei's agency and personhood as separate from Daenerys, emphasizing the philosophies that Missandei lives by: "But the way of the Naathi is to grow what we can from burned terrain."
[3.3] Writegirl provides one alternate version of Missandei's arc. Her fic, "OtherWhen: Game of Thrones," is a collection of short vignettes reimagining particular moments in the show. She uses the "Missandei deserved better" tag, which is how I found the fic. Chapter 10, titled "In Which Missandei Takes Control of Her Fate," reimagines Missanndei's death, where she refuses to be used as a political pawn. In her interview, Writegirl cites her motivation for critically taking up Missandei's death as frustration toward the writers—not only that she believes Missandei's final words were out of character but that the writers undermine Missandei's liberation arc by choosing to have her "die in chains." While the frustration Writegirl felt was the exigence of her piece, she also argues that not enough fics focus on Missandei, and she wanted to provide space for that. [3.4] In Writegirl's fic, Missandei's arc still concludes with her death but centers her agency and emancipation through two actions: Missandei openly critiques Cersei and then chooses to jump off the wall with her, effectively ending the war. Her final words are not to Daenerys, Grey Worm, or the army standing before the wall—Missandei speaks directly to Queen Cersei. She says, "You would have fit in well with the masters in Astapor." The "masters" here refer to Missandei's enslavers. When I asked Writegirl about this moment and why she chose to have Missandei speak to Cersei, she explains, "She's really seeing Cersei for the creature Cersei is, beyond just being kind of a high-born woman in Westeros. She's seeing the monster that's inside Cersei." Cersei is one of the main antagonists, and her status as queen demonstrates how she is able to manipulate those around her to gain her position of ultimate power. Missandei, however, refuses to acknowledge Cersei's power.
[3.2] Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2019a) argues that Black women characters in popular culture follow the narrative arc of the "Dark Other." One step in this narrative cycle is "haunting," which occurs after the "violence" cycle: the haunting is how the violence that Black women characters survive or die from resonates throughout the texts. She looks, for example, at Rue from The Hunger Games, a young Black girl whose death motivates the white main characters' story forward, sparking a revolution. Missandei's death is the final straw that leads to Daenerys burning King's Landing and its people. Missandei's final words—Dracarys, or "dragonfire" in Valyrian—haunt the last few episodes of GOT as Daenerys and her armies destroy King's Landing, murder its people, and suffer the consequences. Critical fans' antiracist reimaginings of Missandei's character and execution align with Thomas's call for "critical counterstorytelling for a digital age" (2019a, 10), in which emancipation is the final step in this Dark Other narrative arc. How do fans, then, reimagine and construct this emancipation? Fans' reimaginings of Missandei's death demonstrate not only their care and love for her but the recognition that she "deserves better." On the Archive of Our Own (AO3), a few fics use the additional tag "Missandei deserves better" or a similar tag, signaling fans' mourning of Missandei as well as the recognition that she was subjected, like many Black characters are, to an unjust violence and death.
[1.1] In the final season of Game of Thrones (GOT; 2011–19), Missandei is brutally executed in front of her loved ones. Queen Cersei, the main antagonist of the show, captures Missandei to demonstrate her power to Daenerys, Missandei's close friend, as they fight over the throne. Missandei is forced to stand on the wall surrounding King’s Landing—a stage for her death—with her hands bound in chains. Her loved ones, including her romantic partner Grey Worm, watch as Cersei gives the signal to murder Missandei. GOT's writers are known for killing characters, beloved and hated. Missandei's death is just one of many; every character's demise affirms there are no happy endings in the GOT universe. Yet, in the final season, the writers offer fulfilling endings for several characters, including Arya, Sansa, and Jon. They survive extreme violence and live with trauma, but they each find hope at the end of the series. Missandei's death, in this context, hurts; her life ends, ceasing her liberation arc and preventing her from ever returning to her homeland. Her death resonates differently than most other characters; her death is a type of violence that feels all too real in the face of colonialism and white supremacist systems of power.
Symposium Parallel to academia's tradition of compact essays, often published as letters, fandom has its own vibrant history of criticism (aka meta), some of which has been collected at the Symposium archive. In the spirit of this history, TWC's Symposium is a section of concise, thematically contained essays. These short pieces provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures. We have discovered that brief, thesis-only papers, particularly those providing overviews of topical subjects or illustrating a particular writing mode (such as a close reading of a single fan-created artwork), are frequently used in classrooms. Symposium submissions undergo editorial review. (maximum 4,000 words including notes and references, plus a 2-sentence abstract)
Symposium "Missandei deserves better": A case study on loving Blackness through critical fan fiction Cara Marta Messina Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York, United States [0.1] Abstract—Missandei is one of the only recurring Black characters on Game of Thrones (2011–19); her death is just one example of Black characters being used as tools to propel white characters' narrative arcs. This case study traces how fans center Black characters in response to Missandei's death, with critical fans, both Black and non-Black, intervening when fandoms and popular culture texts uphold whiteness. [0.2] Keywords—Antiracism; Black fans; Critical fan studies
[4.7] Due to my affinity for Jenkins, and the fan studies discipline, I consider this article a fannish labor, and in my writing, I stumbled across the exact phenomenon I aimed to describe. I found myself extracting and molding elements of some of the works cited to reach a conclusion that applies to my experiences as a Black female fan and spectator. The field of fan studies has long focused mostly on the experiences of the white fan, and in its diversification efforts, either the female fan or the Black fan, not necessarily Black female fans. The circumstances that arise at the intersection of these two underserved identities remains understudied. I have here combined separate texts on female fans' and Black fans' experiences to provide a clearer picture of Black female fans' experience. The experiences of Black female fans disrupt the idea of fandom as an idyllic space for minoritized groups to thrive, yet these experiences also reveal the persistence of Blackness as a culture even in nondominant spaces. To be a fan is undoubtedly a labor of love; however, to be a Black female fan is to extend labor beyond love, safeguarding survival and relevance.
[4.2] While protecting West/Patton from those who were against the casting, and by extension, Black females and their fandom, the IWDS fought also against the writers, aiming to protect West/Patton from any perceived harm. While the casting of Patton was in its own way a win for Black female fans, with racially blind casting came the issue of misrepresentation of Black women's experiences (Warner 2015). As discussed above, racially blind casting typically does not account for the changes that a different race would bring to a character. While it mostly occurs in roles where race is "not of consequence," changing the race of a character should result in certain changes in characterization. This often places the extra labor of advocacy for accurate representation on the shoulders of the Black female fans, as was the case with ABC's Scandal (2012–18).
[4.1] In keeping with their roles as protectors, the self-proclaimed Iris West Defense Squad (IWDS) was established via a community of Black female fans gathering in defense of Candice Patton's casting as Iris West in the television adaptation of DC Comics' The Flash (2014–23). The origins of this community can be traced back to Tumblr (Warner 2017, 257). In 2014, Patton debuted as one of the earliest cases of race swapping from source material in television. Race swapping for this purpose is the changing of a character from white to Black, as opposed to a character of color being swapped for a white actor. As a Black woman playing an originally white character, she was in a position of vulnerability, and the IWDS was "self-tasked with the responsibilities of protecting and defending the Blackness of the television character as well as the actress who portrays her" (Warner 2017, 253). The Black female fans of The Flash took upon themselves the labor of protection for both West and Patton. Here, Black female fans were driven by what Kristen J. Warner describes as the "dual functions" (253), as their labor was born out of both love for the fan object and Black female fans' resistance against a racist society. Iris West served as an extension of Black female fans, and thus, her protection and elevation was synecdochically equated with the protection and elevation of all Black women.
[3.4] One of the ways in which Black female fans' extra labor comes to fruition is through racebending in fan fiction and art. While racebending sometimes occurs in (trans)media representations of women, usually through racially blind casting, it often does not account for the nuances that come with living life as a Black woman. While there are universal female experiences, there are certain things that are either only possible or not possible when race is factored in. As Kristen J. Warner writes, "Race bending allows for a negotiation between the original actor's performance and the audience's acceptance of the performance" (2015, 39). When Black female fans racebend characters in their fan fiction or art, they put in the labor of carefully depicting the characters as authentically Black, based on their own lived experiences as Black women. Thus, Black female fans insert themselves into a narrative that is not otherwise catered to them; they elect to rework such narratives to include Black women like them, fighting for their right to be represented while also engaging as fans with the texts they love.
Plastic representation operates as a system that reifies blackness into an empirical system of “box checking.” It is a mode of representation that offers the feel of progress but that actually cedes more ground than it gains for audiences of color. When audiences, cultural critics, and even industry professionals buy into the subtle but popular belief that social progress occurs when the focus of representation is placed solely on the racially visible difference of above-and-below-the-line talent, it means that for industry gatekeepers and executives, less time has to be devoted to developing and appreciating the meaningful cultural and historical differences of those bodies. My aim here is not to disparage the joyous effect and identification that arise from seeing a version of one’s self on screen; to the contrary, I believe the desire should be expanded, not only to see a version of one’s self on screen but for that identification to resonate and connect with the histories and experiences of the culture that the character’s body inhabits. Pursuing and embodying the cultural specificity of characters of color is harder work and requires a shift away from thinking only in positive and negative evaluative terms. Resonant characters that are complex and nuanced may not resemble the respectable characters so often proffered as the social cover for racial integration and as proof that black lives matter. The true indicator of the progress that is desired lies in showcasing how all those specifically black lives exist and thrive as themselves, not as the ones whom they happen to be cast to represent.
Thus, before even being categorized as fans, audience members perform labor. To be considered an audience member requires some level of effort (labor), as media must be consumed before an audience member chooses to enter the participatory culture of fandom. Becoming fans takes audience members to higher levels of active participation by inviting them to participate in communities inspiring their own cultural productions. Mel Stanfill (2019) coined the concept of "lovebor" to account for the work of loving and sharing love for fan objects. They note that "although lovebor does produce value, it does not always do so quantifiably" (152). Stanfill then likens the devaluation of fan labor to the devaluation of women's labor, acts of love that are not valued as work due to the component of affect (153). [2.2] For Black female fans, whose labor is doubly devalued, this can be taken further. Black viewers' labor begins before connection has occurred. Due to Hollywood's historical negation of Black representation, there has been a particular labor in Black spectatorship. Despite eventual Black representation, there has not been a decrease in the labor required of Black spectators. Instead, there was an increase, for rather than configuring their minds to accept their erasure, Black viewers had to reconcile the often negative and stereotypical representations on screen with reality, turning a blind eye to the harm caused by the image and embracing solely its positive aspects or embracing a gaze at once critical and "oppositional" (hooks 1992, 115).
To love and to labor: The Black female fan experience Onyinyechukwu M. Chidi-Ogbolu University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States [0.1] Abstract—In order to be classified as a fan, one must go beyond simply watching and become a participatory viewer, taking the text and engaging with it beyond the existing material, resulting in a form of labor. I discuss the additional labor Black female fans must perform when negotiating with their fan objects in the wake of the intersection of racial and gender marginalization. [0.2] Keywords—Fandom; Identity; Intersectionality; Race; Resistive
[1.4] But as hooks notes in Black Looks, women of color have different and additional problems with mainstream cinema. Women of color have to deal not only with sexism and the ways in which the construction of white womanhood can exclude women of color from being seen as women at all but also with the ways in which mass media is a system of knowledge and power that reproduces and maintains white supremacy. In her work, hooks describes some of the strategies of the black female spectator, which include repression; for instance, hooks notes that, "Every black woman I spoke with who was/is an ardent moviegoer, a lover of the Hollywood film, testified that to experience fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down critique, analysis; they had to forget racism. And mostly they did not think about sexism." This, according to hooks, is cinematic gaslighting (120). But hooks also describes how she, like many black women, developed an oppositional gaze: a way of looking that interrogated the work and took pleasure in that interrogation: "Not only would I not be hurt by the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating representation, I interrogated the work, cultivated a way to look past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language" (122).
[1.1] Toni Morrison (1975) asserts that one of the main goals of racism is to keep those at the margins busy trying to prove that they deserve a seat at the center table. Instead, she suggests, we could just do our work and treat it as if it is the center, because it is; it is our center. This issue situates Black fans and their practices at the center of the table. Inspired by a need not only to study Black fans but also to center their experiences, this special issue brings together scholars working across an array of disciplines to center Black fandom. Fan studies research has shown how Black fan practices are similar to other racialized fandom practices. But studying Black fandom, as Rebecca Wanzo (2015) demonstrated, also "troubles some of the claims—and desires—at the heart of fan studies scholars and their scholarship" (¶ 1.4). Work like Sarah Florini's (2019) documents how Black fans create hashtags to discuss TV series on social media with other Black fans using "AAVE-inflected versions of shows' titles" (¶ 3.4). Hashtags like #DemThrones (for Game of Thrones), #DeyWalking (The Walking Dead), and #DatArrow (for Arrow) draw Black fans and are notably "separate from the broader stream of tweets using the official hashtag" (¶ 3.4). This articulates Black audiences' stealth reception practices and points to two Black fandom trends: The first is the "enclaving nature" of many Black fandoms, in which Black fans build their own communities around favored texts as an insulation from the racism that often structures fan communities. These communities often exist outside officially designated fandom spaces and may subvert the meanings encoded into the texts.
[1.1] A thought experiment: the year is 1992 and fan studies is about to be propelled into vibrancy by a new and highly influential text. This work is not Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers, nor is it Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, Constance Penley's "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Popular Culture," or Lisa A. Lewis's The Adoring Audience. No, the groundbreaking fan studies work is bell hooks's (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. In this alternate universe, the discipline of fan studies is built on hooks's concept of the oppositional gaze: a way of looking that both interrogates the work and takes pleasure in that interrogation.
[1.1] A thought experiment: the year is 1992 and fan studies is about to be propelled into vibrancy by a new and highly influential text. This work is not Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers, nor is it Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, Constance Penley's "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Popular Culture," or Lisa A. Lewis's The Adoring Audience. No, the groundbreaking fan studies work is bell hooks's (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. In this alternate universe, the discipline of fan studies is built on hooks's concept of the oppositional gaze: a way of looking that both interrogates the work and takes pleasure in that interrogation.
Tumblr post by cryptenby 9 hours ago: "i don’t have the energy to promote this. I’ve started the new job & all available reserves are going to maintenance. we are behind on every single bill, and due to my partner’s ocd and my working until 10pm we haven’t been able to cook. my commute is 20 minutes. we are blowing through every dollar we get rapidly. if you see fit, consider helping us at least meet our original goal, and pray that i can survive long enough to get this first check and pay our rent for january. thank you so so much if you’ve helped us thus far. 1600/2000"
Tumblr post by cryptenby: "we have just enough for gas and me and my wife to get one meal today. please consider sharing this. we need more funds, we aren’t going to make it out of this month without it. i’m currently not confident that we’ll be able to pay rent for January, let alone stay caught up on all our bills $1555/2000 1,022 notes December 8th, 2024"
Spotify Wrapped summary with a photo of "Nanon" Korapat Kirdpan. Top Artists: 1. Nanon 2. Marconi Union 3. Bashar Murad 4. Kendji Girac 5. Rodrigo y Gabriela Top Songs: 1. Weightless Part 1 2. Le feu 3. So pudiera 4. แค่ปากแข็ง (Pretend) 5. Weightless Part 3 Minutes Listened: 41,668 Spotify.com/wrapped
Spotify Wrapped summary with a photo of "Nanon" Korapat Kirdpan. Top Artists: 1. Nanon 2. Marconi Union 3. Bashar Murad 4. Kendji Girac 5. Rodrigo y Gabriela Top Songs: 1. Weightless Part 1 2. Le feu 3. So pudiera 4. แค่ปากแข็ง (Pretend) 5. Weightless Part 3 Minutes Listened: 41,668 Spotify.com/wrapped
Tumblr post by cryptenby on December 4, 2024: "My job starts on Sunday. my wife has to go to work in the meantime, and we have to eat. we’re getting behind on bills at the moment. power and gas bill: $200 to clear the past due phone bill: $130 i can post screenshots if needed. please share this. help us AT LEAST complete the original amount of our crowdfunding. we’re not far off! $530 will help us stay caught up and helps us fill up on gas for the car and food for ourselves and our cat. share this and help us reach TWENTY PEOPLE with a spare $30 to clear this out for us! $1470/2000"
Tumblr post by @cryptenb yesterday: "Thank you for helping bc us raise $75 yesterday!!! three days left and we are really struggling with enjoying the holidays with this looming over our heads. pls consider sharing this post or sharing funds. even a dollar goes a long way!! we can easily raise the $237 to get us to $1400 today, and i know with your help we could reach our original goal of 2k!!! $1163/1400"