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Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture

Online ISBN:
9781479824984
Print ISBN:
9781479824953
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture

Mel Stanfill
Mel Stanfill

Associate Professor

University of Central Florida
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
27 August 2024
Online ISBN:
9781479824984
Print ISBN:
9781479824953
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Ugly fandom is fans who are willing to destroy what they love when it doesn’t go the way they want, like trying to get a show cancelled because their favorite character was killed or responding to fan fiction they don’t like by attacking the author or the hosting website. Ugly fandom is fans who think they’re so marginalized that they are punching upwards when they send waves of social media harassment. Ugly fandom sharply distinguishes the good “us” from the evil “them,” whether “good” and “bad” fans, fans and industry, or whoever the “them” who have wronged “us” may be. The specifics differ, but Fandom Is Ugly: Affective Attachments and Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture argues that to understand cultures organized around reactionary politics, we need fan studies, and to understand media fandoms, we need the insights of research on reactionary cultures. In each case, participants have intense attachments to texts and people they organize communities about online, from TV shows to politicians. Community members talk about interpretations and create and circulate their own texts, from art to memes, forging ties that enable taking collective action, at times even offline. Drawing on a corpus of angry social media posts using a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods, Fandom Is Ugly finds that ugly moments happen when deep emotional attachments collide with social structures and situations that have been misunderstood, showing why we need to think about contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies.

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