Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 7

Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part Two)

Cosplay has had its hundredth monkey moment, for sure.[1] Once describing only a petit monde of media fandom, cosplay has shifted from “geek” descriptor to everyday parlance; an evolution shadowing its move from margin to center, the international limelight. Yet despite periodic and lively discussions within fan circles about the “future of fandom,” or as it’s sometimes phrased, the “end of fandom,” I’m not sure anyone could have predicted this spurious expansion in usage and meaning, still less think about what it means— but think about it we must for it’s a semantic shift gathering rather than losing momentum.  

A question intrudes itself into my barely begun thoughts, one worth stating but not, I think, elaborately answering: Does mass adoption of the descriptor “cosplay” mark the end of cosplay? (Shortish answer: No. These new usages will not kill fan cosplay, just as photography didn’t kill painting, digital publishing didn’t bump off books, and Zoom hasn’t terminated face-to-face meetings— nor, alas, science done away with religion. But they might change cosplay’s meaningscape.[2]) More absorbing is its sister question: If anything and everything can (or cannot) be cosplay, then what is cosplay? And who gets to decide— Who makes meaning stick?

Change, of course, provokes questions; not all, as we’ve seen, worthy of answers, or leastways long answers.[3] But there are a few questions worth cracking open before closing.

Why the broadening out and uptick in popular usage— why now? What work is the descriptor “cosplay” doing in these new spheres of usage— from news and entertainment media to social media? What do these usages say about public perceptions of cosplay, of media fandom, more broadly? How do these newly described modes of cosplay fit or extend our current template of fan cosplay? Might they reshape it? What does, can, cosplay mean now? Moreover, might this popular semantic change, or charge, rekindle the definitional project, the not-so-small matter of defining cosplay?

Let’s start thinking then but without traditional expectations of arriving at a full, satisfying account of this phenomenon. Adopting principles of “low theory,” what follows is the beginning, or continuance, of an unplanned journey, one seeking not to arrive at a final destination or a clear-cut answer — an impossibility given the in-process nature of, well, everything — nor to adjudge a firm understanding of what’s happening but rather to happen upon other ways of understanding this unfolding phenomenon.[4]

But it’s not a solo journey.

It includes you, the reader and fellow meaning maker, unknown to me but doubtless full of thoughts on the subject at hand. Egalitarian, disordered collaboration is critical to developing new forms of knowing; sharing our motley thoughts and experiences allows us to build alternative knowledge-making communities, which are essential to becoming better acquainted with emerging phenomena and better prepared, as Jack Halberstam advises, to “illuminate the oppressive forms of governance that have infiltrated everyday life.”[5]

Artworks from  “Dog Ear” series by Erica Baum

A few opening thoughts—

Looking into popular uses of “cosplay,” I’m immediately struck by how it trends towards the pejorative. Not always in the words chosen but invariably in tone. People on the left “larp around as a cosplay ‘Resistance’”; they’re “cosplay cowards,” “just cosplay activists.” Those on the right are “cosplay Stormtroopers,” “cosplay jackalopes,” part of an “incel-civil-war-cosplay crowd,” or even more jaw-breakingly, “talibangelical cosplay Rambo MAGA QAnon cultist traitors.” Antifa are “cosplay clowns,” a “street theater/cosplay platoon,” or some kind of generic “violence cosplay or kinda like Nazi furries.” A similar sneering tone is perceptible in news and entertainment media. Headlines and stories pushing a cosplay angle are laden with terms like “fake” or “faux,” “impersonating,” “ridiculous,” “acting out,” “farce,” “veneer,” and on and on.

In this scene, describing someone as cosplaying is far from complimentary. It’s an insult. Akin to yelling, “Oi! You’re a phoney!” at someone “masking” down the street.[6] An affrontous, textured charge of being duplicitous, counterfeit, superficial, dishonest, infantile, and relatedly, clownish. (Vastly different to the meaning operating within media fan culture.) A smear tying into escapism too, its negative connotation, that is— a topic for another day. People “accused” of cosplaying may well be all these things, but that cosplay has come to enfold such negative qualities — has become the insult du jour in the public imagination — is exasperating. More than that, it’s perplexing. Because to start using “cosplay” as scornful shorthand, there must be some sort of general agreement that it works as scornful shorthand, that the sheathed insult, like the ubiquitous velvet gloved fist, will be felt when it hits— otherwise, what’s the point? And yet that’s what’s happening, today, not only are everyday people choosing to now use “cosplay” invectively, they understand that it (works) as invective. 

But I don’t remember getting my invite to the husting on repurposing the meaning of cosplay, nor my polling card. Do you? I’m being facetious, of course, but I’m curious about this semantic shift, by the idea that disparate publics have reached consensus on shifting cosplay’s popular meaning, imperceptibly and simultaneously. And it’s not just down to context. As we’ll see, a golden thread of (mis)understanding about cosplay, and media fandom more generally, strings this rattle-bag coalition of meaning-makers together.

Photo: Starling Murmuration by  Søren Solkær , from his book  Black Sun .

And like watching a flock of murmuring starlings in the twilight winter sky, I wonder less about the why-of-it-all — that we may never really know — and more about the how. (Knowing too, somewhere deep inside, that looking at the how-of-things usually reveals something of the why, as illustrated below.) How has “cosplay” come to this place, so far from its source set of meanings? A question we can start puzzling out by looking at how people outside media fandom (mis)use “cosplay” as a descriptor. Usage rooted in partial knowledge and manifesting in one of two ways, both troubling, one more so than the other. Whatever the popular expression, however, the effect tends to be the same: derision.

Observing “cosplay” in the wild, a trio of words springs swiftly to mind: inattentive, imitative, and increasing. That’s how usages of “cosplay” manifest in public realms, mostly. Its uptick in public discourse speaks to its massification; that’s to say, over time, publics have developed a popular familiarity with the broad idea of “cosplay” but not the actual fan practice and/or scholarship, a scenario creating the perfect conditions for inattentive and imitative usage. Put otherwise: not comprehending the breadth and qualities enfolded into “cosplay,” everyday people may be simply unaware that “cosplay” means more than “dressing up as [x]” and thus might straightforwardly replace one term for the other. Seems a fair point. Moreover, cosplay is part of today’s pop cultural zeitgeist and so referring to it is a sure-fire way to sound culturally informed, relevant, and perhaps — given cosplay’s heterodoxy — a little edgy too. Another fair point. It’s worth remembering, however, that, and riffing off Orwell, language usage is never entirely neutral. Before getting into that issue, however, I should quickly qualify the idea of inattentive use. That’s to say, while folks outside media fan culture may not still be entirely clear on what cosplay is, they know enough to be able to exploit ancillary meanings. And thus, the utility of “cosplay” in popular discourse starts to raise its head, open its close-lipped mouth, and commence speaking softly to the why-of-it-all.

Take journalists, for example. Granted, at first, they may not know the full meaning of cosplay; after all, why should they, media fandom can be bewildering, from a mainstream perspective. But we can expect them to ferret it out, right? Isn’t part of their job, their joy, to find out what words mean before using them? To discover — through careful research and communing with experts (via experience and/or study) — the best words to use to describe unfamiliar phenomena and to share that knowledge, those stories, those words and worlds, with us, their readers. And if that isn’t a journalistic duty today then we have lost something without price, for it certainly was a prized feature of journalism in the past. How then do we explain their inattentive usage? Incompetence? Laziness? Indifference? General befuddlement?

But wait.

What if there’s something willful behind journalistic usages of “cosplay,” something tactical. Not tactical in the sense of a shrewd misuse of the full, fannish meaning of cosplay. (That would presuppose an awareness of that meaning, and that, sadly, seems unlikely today.) It’s more that journalists are tactically deploying “cosplay” to quickly tap into a range of secondary meanings, associations, and stereotypes. While inattentive, replacing “dressing up” with “cosplay” might not always thus be a lousy habit, a sign of lazy thinking, or an imitative utterance; it may be calculated: one small, sharp word can do the bladework of many.

An example: wishing to negatively critique erstwhile UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a few British journalists took to describing him as a cosplaying statesman. Doing so, our errant wordsmiths were able to disparage Johnson subtly and effectively in a way that touting him as “dressing up” could never do.[7] Cosplay gave them cover, a disguise. Having recourse to its masked meanings — childish, bogus, mendacious, unserious etc. — allowed mainstream journalists to communicate messages that would likely not have reached page or screen had they been said directly. (To say nothing of saving word counts.) Messages that were, despite the subversion, all too clear to readers, somehow already versed in “cosplay” as invective, as observed earlier. The morpheme “play” too makes the descriptor “cosplay” irresistible low hanging fruit for those wishing to suggest some behavior is mere trumpery— a juvenile, inane, whimsical rollick.[8] A smear spreading easily to the one so behaving; Johnson thus becomes readable as a juvenile, inane, whimsical rollicker. And so it goes.

When tactically used, “cosplay” works efficiently as a motely slur by tapping into ugly and persistent perceptions of media fandom. For despite increasing and positive visibility, media fans can still fall foul of adverse stereotypes in public imaginaries. Y’know what I’m talking about here: media fans presented as puerile losers and loners and nerds— think “Comic Book Guy” from The Simpsons. Or worse, as “crazy,” “obsessed,” “freakish,” “rabid,” and “unhinged”— think of Annie Wilkes from Misery, if you dare. Exactly the kinds of people you don’t want running — or ruining — your country. Like lazy bakers going to the larder for a packet of bread mix, loafing journalists pull these stereotypes off the shelf for their shake and bake “cosplay” news stories. And while it’s grand that journalists found a way to satirize a “Teflon” leader in a partisan press, it’s not so great that they had to find an artful way of doing so, such is the state of the British press. Moreover, as a cosplay aficionado, it’s disheartening that cosplay proved the sacrificial lamb in this political roasting.

Untangling the threads weaving through this example, we see a combination of usages produce cosplay’s piercing effect. Ditto for popular usages. Yet there is much still to discover. For as is becoming clear, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of this popular if niche semantic shift, and given the power of words, language, and stories to reflect, to illuminate, to manifest, and to transform — for good and ill — this unfolding trend is one to watch.

“A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”

— Noam Chomsky

Before closing I want to dig lightly into some of those subterranean goings on. To think a little more and a little more broadly about why this localized semantic change matters; that’s to say, why we should notice and care about conflicts between grassroots — here, media fan — and mainstream meaning-making practices.

Unlike Athena, cosplay did not appear fully formed from the head of one creator. Like all grassroots movements, practices, and words, it emerges through time, people, and place. Media fans spun the cosplay idea from lived experience, hand-weaving the festooned fabric of this global practice and culture through decades of love-entangled encounters with media texts, all too often exclusionary and hostile. That’s to say, the cosplay idea materialized from us. We are its mother-tongue. Our minds, bodies, histories, imaginings, realities, and localities collectively shape its meaning, its protean definition. And definitions are, like maps with blank spaces, to be treasured not feared. Not interned in dictionaries, splayed in showcases, nor pinned to boards in dusty museum drawers like specimen butterflies, lying still, wings no longer flittering, no longer capable of changing worlds, but instead fannish definitions beat through us and our communities, always fluttering, wild, on the tips of our tongues.

Yet — arguably more influential — non-native speakers are now mediating the meaning of words, of worlds, we have made; indeed, words and worlds we are still making; in public squares, they’re translating the language we dream and play in.[9] Modern transmogrifiers, compromising the possibilities, the promise of cosplay in public imaginaries— will this corrupted meaning sprout still more wings and take off in other yet unimagined directions? Will it beat its way into fan imaginaries too?

Cosplay = what lies await?

Cosplay is, of course, a growing plurality; an umbrella term sheltering many meanings and modes, and many words to describe those vogues. Indeed, media fans are eminently creative when it comes to language and to coining new words and phrases to describe their fandoms and practices; the arrival of a new mode of cosplay is almost always accompanied by a new or compound expression— think: crossplay, cosability, photocosplay, hijab-cosplay, Disney- or Potter bounding, ishoku-hada (body paint cosplay), stealth- or closet- cosplay, and so forth. But the expressions — action and usage — I’ve been discussing are emerging outside cosplay culture, outside media fandom, and within the cultural dominant. Representing too a new, and leastways to my mind, unexpected evolution in cosplay’s ontology. So, what to do? How will cosplay communities respond to this semantic encroachment, especially given its deleterious roots and nature?

Perhaps there’ll be a sharp inhale, a pause, to wait for the bluster, the trend, to pass, as media storms often do. Or no inhalation at all, the moment observed but unmarked. Maybe there’ll be a rush to shore up the meaning of cosplay; a struggle to establish boundaries between fan and non-fan cosplay or between “real” and “fake” cosplay. From such turbid times might not a new word for “cosplay” emerge, like a lotus flower rising from muddy waters?

This all remains to be seen.

What can be said is that cosplay, today, is coming to represent ideas other than it once did. Those self-same outside forces are readjusting its meaning, shifting its “nature and direction,” nebulously fabricating a new cosplay idea in which cosplay is not only synonymous for all kinds of dress-up practices but for all kinds of duplicitousness, and who knows what else will follow.[10]

[Breathing mark: I could enfold the former amplification into my cosplay idea, perhaps, but the latter, I simply cannot; how can I write the sum that makes cosplay = fakery? I know too much about this imagological practice to see those qualities in it.]

Cosplay’s definition seems up for grabs. Having caught the mainstream’s eye, is it now becoming victim of its own success? Like punk, or other counter-cultural movements or practices defanged by massification and commodification. But we don’t need to go that far back to see why it’s troubling when the mainstream coopts a grassroots word or phenomena; just look at what’s happening today to “intersectional” or “graffiti” let alone “feminism” or indeed “fandom.” A custom word — cosplay — is here not so much losing its definition as undergoing a process of translation but coldly done, and inexpertly.

“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up.”

— bell hooks

A struggle for meaning is afoot.

 A struggle rather than, say, a war, for this inchoate semantic change is to many people imperceptible and, to many more, irrelevant. For really, isn’t it such a little thing, this shift, this desiccation of meaning; not even a whiffet amidst the winds of change besetting our calamitous age. True. But it is also true that this soft wind is part of the raging tempest battering the integrity of language usage today, as in past times. And thus, as Orwell famously observes, battering the integrity of thinking and worldmaking: not only does slovenly language prompt foolish thoughts and vice versa, it prohibits clear thinking, the “first step towards political regeneration.”[11] (Indeed, the contrived decline of language really helped blow us over the brink and slap bang into the sixth mass extinction.[12])

Look all around: voices silenced; writers assaulted; journalists murdered; words repurposed; books banned; news commercialized; lives surveilled; laws undone; futures rewritten and unwritten. One unifying plotline is detectable through all these disparate tragedies: in the matter of worldmaking, words matter.

Artwork: The Color of Words IX by  Wosene Worke Kosrof

Language remains a “place of struggle,” and no word or shift in usage is ever so small nor so niche as to go unminded.[13] As all herders of little things know, small oversights can cause big problems down the line— just ask a bistitchual about dropped stitches.[14] Moreover, each co-option, adaptation, euphemism, equivocation tells its own story about power, control, domination, if we but take the time to look. Looking, or confronting, is a critical step towards social action. But what does examining the co-option of cosplay reveal? A glance before closing allows us to point to a few revelations, for example:

(i) not as much progress has been made on rehabilitating public perceptions of media fans as we (involved publics) might hope.

(ii) the partisan nature of mainstream British media culture, today, excessively commercialized: to critique troublesome political figures, journalists must resort to code words and hidden messages rather than clear and direct language.

(iii) the utility of distraction: focusing on the spectacle of cosplaying politicians distracts publics from the real and immediate issue of corrupt, inept political figures.

(iv) power relations: political figures are so out of touch with everyday people that they feel our jobs, our lives, are entertainment, are whimsical worlds that they can dip a boneless toe into, like old Greek gods stepping down from Mount Olympus to play at being a worker or being poor.

(v) that nothing changes (unless we, the people, act to bring about progressive social change). For a quick illustration, let’s return to 2022: Take the popular idea that Truss was cosplaying Thatcher, for example. This message worked to reassure Tories of a continuation of, arguably more extreme, neoliberal policies, as noted. Yet, the observation also alerted the British public to this continuance. Truss’s Thatcher cosplay revealed that despite cries of a fresh start and new beginnings, things were not going to change under Prime Minister Truss. Coming face-to-face with this zombie Thatcher gave us a heads up. We didn’t have to wait to see what would happen; we knew what was going to happen. We can strike, now, before it’s too late, I remember thinking. Like survivors in zombie apocalypse stories, the first zombie might well catch us off guard but not the second. (It didn’t pan out that way, and Truss became arguably not only the worst UK Prime Minister, but also the shortest serving, lasting barely seven weeks.)

But it’s not enough to simply observe language change, particularly top-down change; we must confront it robustly and those triggering it. Our observation and struggle against the co-option of “cosplay” — and other fan terms, such as fanfiction — into dominant discourse becomes thus part of a bristling ancient howl against the corruption of words, of language, of stories and thus against the reactionary forces currently straightening the progressive arc of history— “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!”[15]

Image from  Howl: A Graphic Novel by Eric Drooker , (2010). Full animated version of Howl by Allen Ginsberg / Animation by Eric Drooker available  here

[1] A new behavior, idea, or phrase inexplicably spreads from one group to all other groups rapidly.

[2] Note, for instance, my clarification of “fan cosplay” suggesting other non-fannish kinds of cosplay, a fresh development in cosplay discourse.

[3] Questions prompt troubling notions of answers and while there will be answers of a kind in this essay, they’ll not take the form of pronouncements, conclusions, or solutions but rather comprise observations, considerations, reasoning, and thoughts.

[4] See, The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (Duke University Press, 2017).

[5] See, The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam (Duke University Press, 2017, p. 17). And, of course, all other modes of intellectual activity (e.g., visual, musical, crafting).

[6] Here, to “wander aimlessly” (OED).

[7] The monopolized mainstream British press is fervently right wing and supportive of any Tory leader, as long as they do as they’re told.

[8] Interesting too, though a tad speculative perhaps, is remembering that “cos” is shorthand for “because,” “cosplay” thus becomes readable as a childish explanation of a behavior. Question: “Why are you dressing up like [x]?” Answer: “‘cos play.”

[9] That’s to say, more influential in terms of making “official” meanings stick within public domains and dominant discourse.

[10] See, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks. (Boston; South End, 1990. 145-53).

[11] See, “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell, Horizon, April 1946.

[12] E.g., euphemism, adaptation, co-option, and so forth

[13] See, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks (Boston; South End, 1990).

[14] First-rate knitting slang: someone who knits and crochets.

[15] Fragment from “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.

Biography

Based in the north of Ireland, Ellen Kirkpatrick is an activist-writer with a PhD in Cultural Studies. In her work, Ellen writes mostly about activism, pop culture, fan cultures, and the transformative power of storytelling. She has published work in a range of academic journals and media outlets. Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds, her open access book on the radical imagination and superhero culture, can be found here. Ellen can be found writing at The Break . 

Into the Wild: A Reflection on Cosplay in Public Discourse: Notes on an Unfolding Semantic Shift (Part One)

“Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance.”

— bell hooks

“The fight against bad English is not frivolous…”

— George Orwell

Cosplay is big news today. And I’m not just talking about within the realms of fandom and fan studies; cosplay has hit the mainstream hard over the last few decades. A socio-cultural evolution seeing its meaning change in ways unexpected and not yet quite understood. Once describing a subcultural, niche fan practice, cosplay is fast becoming a metonym for all kinds of dressing up practices. Forget the subtleties of masking and costuming, masquerade, mimicry, fancy dress, dressing up, or just plain old dressing, it’s all cosplay now.[1] As a natural aspect of evolving phenomena, semantic shifts are hardly surprising— that’s not the story here. Like seasoned seamsters, fans and scholars are always adjusting the meaning of cosplay, altering its pattern and form, letting it out a bit here, a timely tuck or hem there, and always embellishing our understanding of this art of making otherwise. Less important then is the idea that cosplay’s meaning is stretchable, it’s the origin, nature, and agents of this particular public amplification that I want to observe and consider, and its potential impact upon what’s rather magically called the “cosphere.”

 

Pinpointing when I first became aware of journalists using cosplay as shorthand for dressing up in Western mainstream news and entertainment media reportage is tricky. I inappreciably felt the approaching storm before realizing it, like catching the sweet whiff of ozone on the summer air. A quick search of newspapers suggests it couldn’t have been before 2021 because that’s when “cosplay” starts showing up in news headlines. In the UK, the trend gathered pace during the 2022 Conservative Party leadership election, in which both candidates — Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — were accused of cosplaying a variety of sources, from professions and trades to economic classes and past political figures.[2] Well-heeled Sunak, for example, was described as “cosplaying” a soldier and “playing” at being a plebeian, rather poorly, it has to be said, and Truss too, who was also mocked for her “Thatcherite cosplay”.[3] Moreover, as a “walking embodiment of [the] union flag,” Truss — frequently dressed in red and blue color blocks — was also thought likely to be cosplaying the Union Jack, the UK’s national flag, alongside dangerous concepts like nationalism and patriotism. (Following that line of thought, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher herself arguably cosplayed as soldiers and Russians.)

Images of Truss (bottom row) “cosplaying” as Thatcher (top row). Source: @LouisHenwood

  This semantic shift did not go unnoticed. Large parts of the notoriously irreverent British public gleefully seized upon the idea of cosplaying politicians— a garden-fresh stick to beat them with. Prior to this groundswell of usage, cosplay-as-dress-up was most often targeted at former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — infamous for dress up and play acting— and his “Cosplay Cabinet”: “A quick glance through their PR shots you will find top politicians dressed in camouflage, branded jumpers, hardhats, aprons, lab coats, police jackets, goggles and fishmonger hats.”

Image from Huff Post: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost

 There’s nothing new in politicians dressing up to attract voters or to build their brand, of course. Appearing as or like another popular or public figure can help make the strange familiar, efficiently signaling political stances and continuities and so forth; a helpful tactic for “unknown quantities” wishing to amass public appeal quickly (and economically), as we’ll see later. And much like fan cosplayers, they draw upon a mix of sources, real life and fictional and specific and general.

JFK set a trend for Air Force bomber jackets, a vogue followed by every US president since, usefully tying into martial and hero mythologies.[4] Vladimir Putin reinforces his alpha male image by dressing up as all kinds of “action men,” from soldiers and bikers to hunters, the bare-chested variety. Buffoons and clowns continue to inspire Johnson and Donald Trump from their pantomime coiffures to their outsize clothing and grins.[5] And when official campaign photos of the usually sharp-suited French President Emmanuel Macron showed him unshaven and wearing a black special forces hoodie, he was roundly “accused” of cosplaying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Election campaigns, however, see even the most sartorially challenged politicians dress up as something, anything to attract voters; in the US, it’s often cowboys, in the UK farmers, in Taiwan, it’s Squid Game players, and in Peru, to secure the “otaku” vote, it’s anime characters.

Dressing up like fictional secret agents — think James Bond, all dark custom suits and bespoke watches — is de rigueur amongst male politicians of all stripes, however. (Tellingly, Putin’s personal vehicle registration plate is 007.) Like the imported trees in Belfast’s iconic “Palm House,” our idea of what powerful people look like — resolutely male and wearing business attire — is planted, deep-rooted, and out of place. Thus, women politicians too, sadly, often dress up like — or, today, cosplay as? — male politicians and tycoons, or spies. As Mary Beard writes, “we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.” Social progress, of course, brings the possibility of altering that template.

J’accuse!

But it’s not just politicians, journalists, or dissenters who are driving this semantic shift. Public discourse is awash with all kinds of people describing all kinds of other people as cosplayers, often in accusatory tones.[6] Members of American far-right, neo-fascist, male organizations are frequently, and mockingly, characterized as cosplaying Nazis or soldiers, real and fictional (e.g., “Call of Duty,” Peacemaker, or Punisher). Antifa fighters, those black-clad activists known as the “black bloc,” are likewise described as cosplaying soldiers or ninjas or even — to tactically muddy the waters — MAGA devotees, that’s to say charged with cosplaying MAGA insurrectionists at the January 6th Capitol Riot. Frequently too, MAGA adherents denigrate Antifa activists as “cosplay activists,” those whose activism is performative rather than substantive.

Keeping with the rich MAGA theme, CPAC 2022 not only played brazenly with fascist and Nazi symbolism and iconography but dabbled with performance art in the form of a tableau vivant.[7] While characterized on social media as cosplay, the “living picture” performance was closer to a cosplay skit, a short theatrical piece or performance. Hatched by pro-Trump influencer Brandon Straka, the skit’s surreality makes it worthy of description: a teary white male (Straka) wearing a fresh orange jump suit — and incongruously a red MAGA cap and conference badge  — sits barefoot in a prop jail cell.[8] A consolatory Marjorie Taylor Greene kneels at his feet, scarlet-clad, dollish ‘n’ doltish, and happy to play Mary Magdalene to his sideshow Jesus. Outside the “cell” a tepid hellfire “preacher” leads an offbeat congregation in prayer. (If you feel up to it, you can check it out here.) After the act, onlookers could either silently contemplate the weepy prisoner — surely parodying commemorative traditions of silent moments — or don a headset and listen to testimonies from those arrested on January 6th, getting an earful and an eyeful at the same time— a watery encounter promoting reflection, one hopes.

Image from Daily Mail: Adam Gray/Daily Mail

 With everything noted so far, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we’ve reached the limit of actions describable as cosplay.[9] Not so. In the public imagination, such is the stretchiness of “cosplay” that countries may be described as cosplaying other countries, from other times: during a United Nations Security Council meeting, Sergiy Kyslytsya (Ukrainian ambassador to the UN) asked, “Why has the Russian Federation decided to cosplay the Nazi Third Reich by attacking the peaceful neighboring state and plunging the region into war?”

Note that, apropos behavior, nothing is changing here; people are doing what they’ve always done, and countries; the only thing changing is how journalists and editors and everyday people are now choosing to describe those doings: what was once dress up, mimicry, pantomime, and so forth is now cosplay. A specialized media fan term is being publicly co-opted, in real-time; its meaning (potentially) altered as frequent misuse becomes standard. And, as we’ll get into later, adopting “fanspeak” allows lay users to tap into a wellspring of subordinate meanings, often nefariously; that’s to say, politicians readable as media fans, or “worse” — as far as flattening gender stereotypes go — as media “fanboys” or “fangirls.” The action of dressing up in the public sphere is itself undergoing something of a semantic costume change. And we must, as George Orwell advises, be ever watchful of language change — buzzwords, euphemisms, replacements, etc. — enacted by the state and its agents and adopted within public discourse, as we’ll also get into later.

Yet perhaps there’s good reason for the curious uptake of cosplay in news media and everyday parlance, and it’s not just a bad habit demonstrating muddy thinking. After all, the behaviors I’ve been cataloging do share much with fan cosplay— as far as a meaning or definition of media fan cosplay can be pinned down, that is. But do they fall within what Theresa Winge usefully describes as the “cosplay continuum”?

Let’s take a closer look.

Countries aside, people are using modes of dress to play with their identity; in many cases, there’s a citation of specific sources (real and fictional); some parties make their “costumes” while others shop for them; costumes can be outlandish or “everyday,” the latter form mirroring developing trends within fan domains for less costumey modes of cosplay, such as Disneybounding or “stealth” or “closet” cosplay. As in fan cosplay, certain performances have more depth than others with some “players” perfecting idiolects, facial expressions, gestures, mannerisms, and so on. But it can go deeper. News media, for example, described Truss as cosplaying Thatcher sartorially and ideologically; as with Thatcher, Truss cultivated a reputation for hard-nosed politics and an unbending leadership style.[10] During the 2022 leadership contest, the British public watched Truss (try to) forge herself as an “Iron Lady”; in keeping with technological advances, her robotic and despotic performance proved, however, rather more “Evil Robot Maria” from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). 

Does it seem fair then that people describe these behaviors as cosplay? Yes, perhaps. But for all the points of connection, something blocks me from affirming these kinds of happenings as cosplay. I sense a disconnect; deeper realities lie beneath surfaces. Encountering another mainstream headline or news story ballyhooing “cosplay” is like coming upon a cultural shadowland, offering a grimmer, soulless view or version of cosplay. Something is missing from these mainstream usages and practices, something vital, some vital things. To regain the missing things is to make sense of the disconnect.

Self-definition is one of those missing things. And relatedly, intention. Intention to cosplay, that is. (There are plenty of other intentions behind these usages and dress-up performances— courting voters, for example.) Like vegans, cosplayers announce themselves. That’s to say, they happily self-identify as cosplayers; they want you to know they’re cosplaying or are part of cosplay culture. Even those performing “stealth” or “closet” cosplay acknowledge their practice in some form, public or personal; inquiries upon it are not met with surprise, denial, or silence. Even cosplayer politicians — in the traditional fannish sense — like Taiwanese legislator Lai Pin-Yu proudly affirm themselves as part of the cosplay family. But the people involved in the opening examples are described as cosplaying; they do not recognize or identify themselves as cosplaying, nor indeed as dressing up; others label them so. Even today, politicians, say, may be unaware that “cosplay” is a thing, never mind a thing that they might do— such are the bubbles we inhabit.

Thus, while some politicians might be readable as cosplaying, they might not see it that way; they’re not trying to “be” or to “be recognized” as someone else; it’s accidental, coincidental, detrimental, if discovered. Stated otherwise, those “cosplaying,” or channeling the look or ideas of other national leaders, for example, would surely deny it. In their world, imitation is far from a sincere form of flattery (unless you’re the one being imitated, that is). Rather, it suggests fakery, unoriginality, and followership, as well as play-acting; when what politicians want, no, need is to be seen as the real deal, as trailblazers, as serious leaders, as themselves.

Is awareness a requisite of cosplay? To what extent must we know we’re doing it to be doing it? Must cosplay, like war or bankruptcy, be declared to be “real”? A curious question given cosplay’s deep bond to the imaginary, which brings me to my next missing thing— imagination.

Cosplay is an art of making things otherwise— the self, the text (in its broadest sense), the world. As Theresa Winge memorably describes it, cosplay is all about “costuming the imagination.”[11] The word we have somehow settled upon — for the time being, things can always change in cosplay culture — to describe this diverse range of behaviors tells us everything we need to know; more than just “dressing up as,” cosplay combines costume and (role)play and is deeply bound to the imagination and invention and pleasure and desire. Even when the cosplayer means only to replicate their source text, it’s still an act of imagination, often lovefuelled.[12] A worldmaking act illustrating a bondedness to the origin text and a wish to share and celebrate that bond with everyone, and to give and take pleasure in that sharing, in connecting with the source and with cosplay communities, real world and digital.

All this good stuff — creativity, pleasure, transformation, belonging, worldmaking — materializes from everyday encounters with the imagination. It’s hard to imagine cosplay without imaginings, and gloomy. Imagine: a wren without a song; a spring morning without its chorus— “a thousand blended notes”; a heart without cause to soar— “the freshness of the morning/ the dew drop on the flower.” The objects — bird, dawn, heart — remain in this imagining but lacking now the things that make them manifestly them.[13] And that’s what I feel when I see what’s being reported as cosplay in mainstream news and social media. It looks like people (possibly) dressing up as other kinds of people, all surface and no heart. And I find that it doesn’t really look like cosplay at all.

Where’s the intention, the creativity, the love, the community, the play?

A trail of questions returning me to my terminus a quo: Why are a great many people choosing to replace perfectly good terms — dress up, mimicry, costuming, copycat, and so forth — with cosplay? Beyond observing this surface change, what are we to make of it? What deeper realities lie beneath this semantic shift?

Artwork:  “Once Emerged from the Gray” of Night by Paul Klee  (1918).

 

[1] A semantic shift synonymous with the wider mainstreaming, or massification, of media fandom.

[2] Labour Party leader Kier Starmer described Liz Truss as indulging in “Thatcherite cosplay,” while he himself was accused of engaging in “Blairite cosplay.” Note: “Thatcherite” refers to previous UK (Conservative) Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and “Blairite” to previous UK (Labour) Prime Minister, Tony Blair (1997-2007.

[3] Notorious and odious right-wing British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg is routinely identified in news and social media as cosplaying a “toff” (a member of the British “upper-class”), particularly “Lord Snooty,” a character from the iconic British comic, Beano. For a fascinating broader discussion of class, mimicry, and British politicians, see “‘The Beano's’ Lord Snooty” (Part 4 of 4) by Dave Miller. CEOs and celebrities also tap into this kind of class cosplay, billionaire “tech bros” wearing priceless jeans and hoody combinations etc.

[4] JFK refers to former US President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963).

[5] Johnson is regularly derided for his awful “Churchill cosplay” too, referring to former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1940-1945, 1951-1955.

[6] The selection of examples included here are drawn from social media searches and offer only an illustrative sample of how “cosplay” is being used within public spaces and discussions.

[7] The Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC for short.

[8] Straka was himself convicted on misdemeanor charges after the Jan 6th attack.

[9] I’ve been sticking to political realms but similar expansions in cosplay usage may be observed in other spheres, such as business, technology, climate industries, creative industries, and so forth.

[10] Thatcher too, famously, lowered the timbre of her voice and adopted “mannish” mannerisms to match dominant ideas of what powerful people look like, as discussed earlier.

[11] See, “Costuming the Imagination: Origins of Anime and Manga Cosplay” by Theresa Winge (Mechademia, 2006).

[12] Or “coser” as is popular within China’s cosplaying communities; a term gaining international traction, you see how language shifts and bends. Interestingly, note that this contraction drops the “play”— a discussion for another day.

[13] Fragment from “Lines Written in Early Spring” by William Wordsworth. Lines from “My Heart Soars” by Chief Dan George.

Biography

Based in the north of Ireland, Ellen Kirkpatrick is an activist-writer with a PhD in Cultural Studies. In her work, Ellen writes mostly about activism, pop culture, fan cultures, and the transformative power of storytelling. She has published work in a range of academic journals and media outlets. Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds, her open access book on the radical imagination and superhero culture, can be found here. Ellen can be found writing at The Break . 

The American Key Demo Needs to Get Older

With America’s Senior Citizens in control of more money than younger generations, it is time for US entertainment companies to more aggressively appeal to older audiences.

In a CNBC report, Ipsos CEO Darrell Bricker stated that, “the single biggest power group in the economy going forward are older women because there's a lot of them and there's more every day.” This came out in 2021 and it has only become more accurate and important. As Bricker shared with me, population data shows that current “female seniors in America are 55% of the senior population, while men are 45%. In 2050 the UN estimates that 63% of American seniors will be women and only 37% will be men. Where the population numbers go is where the money goes. Senior women are the fastest growing age cohort in America today.”

 

FIGure 1: "Which U.S. Generation Wields the Most Economic Power?" from VisualCapitalist.com's Iman Ghosh and Marcus Lu

With American Baby Boomers having an estimated combined wealth of $75 trillion, an amount of wealth that towers above the $8 trillion held by Millennials, it is time for entertainment companies to change their “Key Demo.” Not only will this change allow them to focus on consumers that advertisers want and who can also pay for their subscriptions, but it will also push studios to make shows and films directly appeal to people who are 50+

But first…

What is the Key Demo?

The key demo is the primary demographic that advertisers and media creators want most as their audience. For decades, the key demo was mostly young people. As Jaime Weinman wrote for Maclean’s, “Young adult viewers have been TV’s target demographic for decades, because they’re thought to have less brand loyalty and more disposable income.”

In the 2002 article “The Most Desirable Demo,” NextTV.com’s R. Thomas Umstead explained why the key demo changed; “with cable-network penetration now pushing toward 90 percent of all U.S. television households, the weight placed on absolute household eyeballs during the 1980s and 1990s has given way to a more narrowly defined, demographic-oriented focus.” And according to Umstead, “no demographic is more desirable than 18-to-49-year-old adults.” [Emphasis added] 

People under the age of 50 were so highly valued that audiences 50+ were described as “empty calories.” Umstead shared that while CBS enjoyed ratings success in the early 1990s because it did so well in total viewership numbers for several consecutive years, “those triumphs were the equivalent of empty calories. Because so much of the CBS audience was aged 55 or older…those ratings never translated into major ad dollars.” [Emphasis added]

While the key demo is often associated with television, it overlaps with consumers that movies, games, and sports historically targeted: young and typically male. Through the 1980s and 90s, the video game industry was primarily focused on appealing to males that ranged from being in kindergarten to in college.

(A 1988 Nintendo survey found that only 27% of the audience was female. Additionally, in the documentary Console Wars, Tom Kalinske - the President and CEO of Sega of America from 1990 to 1996 - explained that Sega saw teenage and college age males as its core audience.) 

As the American film industry reorientated itself around blockbuster films, the young male demographic became a key demographic for movie producers. “The whole notion of the summer blockbuster has always been built around young men,” Comscore, Inc’s Senior Media Analyst Paul Dergarabedian told the New York Times in 2015.  

But as Dergarabedian further explained, the importance of young men as a demographic is fading, “I think we’re about to see that change. The clout and importance of the female audience has never been bigger.”

And a reason why audiences who aren’t young and male are becoming more important is because… 

The Financial Power of Young Men is Collapsing in Real Time.

The above is not hyperbolic. In general, Millennials and Gen Z have far less economic power than Boomers did. According to ConsumerAfffairs.com, “Gen Z dollars today have 86% less purchasing power than those from when baby boomers were in their twenties.” Zooming on a specific example of this generational disadvantage, “Gen Zers and Millennials are paying 57% more per gallon of gas than baby boomers did in their 20s.” Even more troubling, Millennials and Gen Z “are paying nearly 100% more for their homes than baby boomers did in their twenties.”

Figure 2 - Consumer Affairs, "Comparing the costs of generations"

Moreover, sectors that have relied on young men for the last decade have been especially gutted by this economic downturn; two of these are esports and crypto.

The esports sector has been largely male for years. As one report states, “despite the split between male and female video game players being very close to 50:50, the esports audience is still predominantly male,” with over 80% of the esports viewers being male.

During the 2010s esports became so popular myriad articles were published proclaiming that it would eclipse the NFL and other traditional sports. A 2017 Business Insider article, linked the NFL’s then lower ratings to young men being more interested in esports. Flashforward to 2023 and the NFL, NBA, and other sports have high television ratings while viewership for esports has dropped.

(Of note, for the 2023 Super Bowl, advertisers were actually focused on targeting people 50+ because, according to Danielle McMurray, “with younger audiences cutting back on spending, marketers are wise to focus on the 50+ audience.”)

In the last few years Venture Beat has reported that the middle class of esports is dead and Bloomberg has covered that, “the hype around esports is fading as investors and sponsors dry up.” Moreover, esports leader FaZe Clan, which once was valued at over $1 billion in 2021 has lost over 90% of its worth.

Figure 3- Since FaZe Clan went public, its stock value hit a high of $24.69 only to collapse to less than a dollar.

In regards to crypto, as Marisa Dellatto wrote for Forbes in November 2021, crypto’s super users were young men. That was the same month the total crypto market hit a value of over $3 trillion. Since then, the value of the total crypto market has plummeted more than 66%.

Figure 4 - Overall cryptocurrency market capitalization per week from July 2010 to March 2023 (in billion U.S. dollars) from Statista.com.

Returning to the topic of television, recent economic contractions and business deals have brought to light information that suggests that young adult audiences have not been economically viable consumers for over a decade. For example, The CW was created in 2006 when CBS and Warner Bros. merged their respect networks, UPN and The WB, into one new network. When Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery sold their controlling interests in The CW to Nexstar in October 2022, something shocking was revealed about The CW. The CW, a network known for appealing to the key demo of people between 18 - 35, a network that had hit shows such as America’s Next Top Model, The Flash, Supernatural, Arrow, The Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, and many others, “has never been profitable.” [Emphasis added]

In 2018, Charles Lane wrote for NPR that the influential male demographic was waning. “Men between the ages of 18 and 34 have been a key demographic for marketers for years,” Lane said. “That's starting to change, say some marketing experts, who say the economic fortunes of these men have declined.”

The prediction made by Lane is now here, and…

The Shift is Already Happening.

The economic power of older women is already impacting the economy and non-entertainment brands are beginning to take note. For instance, PYMNTS noted that the beauty industry has placed “a renewed emphasis on older women as a means of capturing the attention of one of the wealthiest cohorts of consumers.”

And “wealthiest cohorts” does little to truly communicate just how economically powerful this demographic is. This is because American women over the age of 50 “represent over $15 trillion dollars in purchasing power.”

Older people are already flexing their superior buying power. As James Rodriquez wrote for Business Insider, boomers are buying homes at a substantially higher rate than millennials.

“Between July 2021 and June 2022, boomers were the largest share of homebuyers for the first time since 2012, according to new data from the National Association of Realtors,” Rodriquez penned. “Boomers purchased 39% of all homes that sold during that span, up from 29% the year before. Millennials, on the other hand, saw their share of the market shrink to just 28%, down from 43% the year prior.”

Rodriquez further stated, “despite the numbers game favoring millennials, a slew of other factors conspired to allow boomers to stick it to their successors. The main thing, though, was cash. Boomers are more advanced in their careers and in many cases have already spent decades amassing home equity, making them much more likely than other generations to fork over all cash for their next property. And when bidding wars become the norm, it pays to offer a lump sum.”

There is also a gendered component to this because single women are buying more homes than single men. In every state except North and South Dakota, women own more homes than men. According to Khristopher J. Brooks, “single women own roughly 10.7 million homes, compared to 8.1 million for single men.”

Figure 5 Source: USAFacts.org - "Which generation has the most wealth? Baby boomers have the highest net worth, averaging $1.6 million per household"

And remember, the wealth that older generations currently have will persist for decades to come. As research from USAFacts.org documents, "baby boomers have the highest household net worth of any US generation." USAFact.orgstates, "with most baby boomers financially planning for at least a few more decades, they benefit from wealth earned from long careers and have more robust retirement accounts than” other generations.

Furthering this gap in economic buying power is that student loan payments will restart in October 2023. According to Apollo Global Management’s chief economist Torsten Sløk, it is estimated that student loan repayments resuming will, “subtract roughly $9 billion from consumer spending every month, or roughly $100 billion a year.” Sløk goes on to point out that this, “will mainly have an impact on younger households.”

In short, older women can buy houses in the real world; younger adults can only buy houses in virtual worlds.

And in regards to entertainment…

This is Already Impacting the Entertainment Industries.

A Comscore/AARP study found that older audiences returned to movie theaters in 2022 in numbers that outpaced their attendance before the pandemic. “According to the data,” the report notes, “the attendance of people 45 and older grew five percent from previous attendance levels in 2019, the last full year before the COVID-19 pandemic affected theater attendance.” A movie that significantly benefited from this was Top Gun: Maverick, which benefited from nearly 40% of its audience being 45 or older.

Even Barbie, the film with the biggest box office of 2023, somewhat reflects these trends. For instance, 18-24 year olds only made up 27% of Barbie’s opening weekend. Evidence suggesting that Barbie’s success is partially due to an overrepresentation of people outside of the key age demo.

It isn’t just the traditional theatrical experience that appeals to older audiences, because television is finally catching up. As Warner Bros. Discovery Chief US Advertising Sales Officer Jon Steinlauf said in May 2022, “our most affluent viewers are adults 50+….They account for over 50% of all US consumer spending. A large majority of them watch us every month.”

In the world of streaming, people 50+ have recently become the largest age group in this sector. According to the Decider’s Greta Bjornson, for the “first time ever, consumers ages 50-64 are streaming more TV than the generation below them.” On top of this, Netflix has announced plans to better appeal to older consumers. And while networks used to see senior citizens as “empty calories,” Yellowstone has become one of the most popular shows in the country due to appealing to older audiences.

Similar to Yellowstone, if we go back to August 2022 and look at Netflix’s top show, we’d find that Stranger Things was knocked out of the number 1 spot by Virgin River, which, according to AdWeek, had a “viewing audience [that] was nearly two-thirds over 50 and almost a third over 65 years old.”

We aren’t just seeing older audiences become more important, we are also seeing older talent becoming essential to shows or movies finding success. According to a study from the National Research Group, people were asked to name movie stars that could get them to see a movie. Nineteen of the top 20 actors named were over 40; the only exception being Chris Hemsworth who was 39 at the time of this research. Even when the list expands to the top 100 actors, only 13 are under the age of 40 when the study was conducted.

And we are beginning to see this consumer power of older women impact the video game industry. An April 2023 AARP report, “Gamers 50-Plus Are a Growing force in the Tech Market,” found that gamers over the age of 50 are now a population of 52.4 million, roughly 45% of all Americans in that age range. On top of that, “in 2023, older adults’ continued interest in gaming could lead to $2.5 billion in biannual spending on digital and physical game content.”

As CBS’s Chief Research Officer Radha Subramanyam recently said, “at CBS, we love older viewers. They watch a lot of television. And advertisers love them because they have tons and tons of spending power.”

Not only is this group increasingly spending more money, it skews female because 52% of the women in this demographic play every day vs. just 37% of men.

But now the question is… 

The Future is Silver and Female, What Should Be Done?

“The 18-34 year old demographic has traditionally been the most coveted by Hollywood,” Comscore, Inc’s Senior Media Analyst Paul Dergarabedian shared with me. “But in recent years, the realization that mature audiences not only have the discretionary income but also the desire to consume big screen and small screen entertainment should inspire studios and producers to tailor films and TV shows that have appeal to those over 40.”

A soon to be real world example of this appeal to seniors is The Golden Bachelor, which is a twist on The Bachelor franchise but will center its focus on a 72-year-old man looking for love among women who are in their 60s and 70s. And The Golden Bachelor is not alone. As New York Times article by John Koblin points out, The Golden Bachelor will be joining a landscape slowly pivoting to appeal to older audiences with shows such as the continuation of the original Law & Order, and reboots of Magnum, P.I. and Matlock. Even Abbot Elementary, a hit show that feels as though it appeals to a young audience, has a viewership with a median age of 60.5.

With people 55+ becoming more digitally literate and expected to be the dominant consumer group for decades,[1] major entertainment brands are facing a consumer landscape in which young people are simply not a worthwhile group to pursue. Or as Ryan Glasspiegel wrote for Barrett Sports Media, “Baby Boomers Have All The Money, Brands & Advertisers Have To Pay Attention.”

Of note, this is not advocating for uninspired entries from legacy franchises to be created. Instead, it is advocating for films and shows to be made that highlight actors older audiences enjoy or that have narratives important to Boomers.

For entertainment companies in need of advertiser and subscriber revenue, embracing this shift means more than just producing more Yellowstone spinoffs (with that said, no one is against more Yellowstone). It means doing more to craft shows and films that resonate with people 55+. This could be more movies like 80 For Brady or a reboot of The Golden Girls, but it also means content that speaks to the everyday human experience of getting older and wanting more out of the life one has left.

As the value of media companies have plummeted, many industry experts have provided several smart reasons as to why so many streaming platforms are failing. But what they often overlook is the generational wealth gap and the customers these new media companies focused on. Digital media leaned heavily into a generation with little disposable income, a lot of debt, and a job market in which entry-level jobs will be taken by AI. So, while linear entertainment may appeal to the olds, it is the olds who have the cash. And if the entertainment industry wants to continue to see green it will have to follow America’s population into its golden years.

[1] Visa’s Wayne Best, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist wrote in this 2018 report, “baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) have continued to dominate consumer spending in the U.S. In fact, consumers over 50 now account for more than half of all U.S. spending. They are also responsible for more spending growth over the past decade than any other generation, including the coveted millennials.”

“As a group,” Best continued, “this over-50 crowd should continue to be a major force in U.S. consumer spending, especially as those over 60 years old drive growth over the next five to 10 years.”

Additionally, Edward Yardeni, an economist and founder of Yardeni Research, believes that spending by Boomers could delay the next recession.

Biography

Nicholas Yanes Ph.D. is a digital vagabond who now works on developing artificial intelligence systems. Having drifted away from traditional academia, Yanes’s non-AI professional work centers on analyzing entertainment industries, contributing to M&A research, and periodically publishing an awesome article now and then. (Check out The Birth and Death of Budcat Creations, Iowa’s First and Only Triple-A Game Studio.)

His first book, The Iconic Obama, examined the 2008 presidential election and its relationship to popular culture. And his second book, Hannibal for Dinner, reflects on Bryan Fuller’s adaptation of Dr. Hannibal Lector’s adventures. Yanes has written for CNBCPrime, MGM, ScifiPulse, Sequart, the Casual Games Association, Shudder’s blog The Bite, and several other publications.

More about Yanes can be found at his LinkedIn profile.

The Space Between Fiction and Reality: A Conversation about ‘Swarm’ and the Crucial Project of Cinematic Representation

Swarm (2023) is a streaming television series created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers about a super-fan of Ni’Jah (read: Beyoncé)—who becomes a serial killer, driven by her love of Ni’Jah. Jacqueline Nkhonjera studies race, gender, and postcolonial media, and Yvonne Gonzales studies fandom, queerness, and affective attachment; they have come together in this dialogic essay to process this piece of media that pulls their interests together in new—and sometimes horrifying—ways.

Yvonne Gonzales (YG): I want to start this conversation, before we get into more of our research-based analyses, with a discussion of just how this work made us feel. I found myself viscerally uncomfortable so often. I flinched away from the screen on several occasions, and it was actually hard to finish. I admit, I’m generally averse to thrillers, but that last episode was rough. If this is a comment on its quality, which I don’t intend it to be, Swarm is incredibly powerful. It inciting discomfort is intentional, but it was definitely a difficult watch. How did you find yourself responding?

 

Jacqueline Nkhonjera (JN): I agree—there were several parts of the series that were difficult to watch. I found myself covering parts of the screen with my hand, with one eye shut, as I waited for the more visceral murder moments to end. I am also averse to thrillers and gore, so this was unsurprising. But I found myself sitting in discomfort beyond those scenes as well. I struggled with awkward exchanges between Dre, the main character, and the people in her life. I was consistently on edge each time Ni’Jah appeared on screen, afraid of what reaction her presence would elicit from Dre. Nothing about this series is comfortable—from the casting to the storyline, down to minute cinematic choices made by the creators. Why do you think discomfort was such a key tenet of this watching experience? What was achieved?

 

YG: I’m so glad that you brought up the discomfort not only with the murders and violence, but with the seemingly normal human-to-human interactions and Dre’s constant failures. As for why discomfort was so central, I think that might be a better question to loop back to, as it’s so tied up with another facet that’s integral to Swarm: its relationship to reality. It even starts with the bold text on a black screen: “This is not a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is intentional.” That attachment to reality is, for me, a major part of the discomfort. I found myself watching Dre obsess over Ni’Jah with a massive poster of BTS hanging up behind me and wondering is that supposed to be me? I’m a super fan—one who doesn’t kill anyone or get into fights with strangers on the internet, to be clear—and one major effect of the discomfort of Swarm is that I found myself reflecting on my own parasocial attachments to my celebrity love objects; maybe that’s the point, or one of them.

 

JN: Swarm did not remain within the confines of my screen either. The series bled through the frame and into my day-to-day life. I thought of some of my friends, who are Beyonce super fans, and I heard Dre’s dialogue in their voices at certain moments. When Ni’Jah dropped the visuals for her new song Festival, I was taken back to the year Beyonce dropped the Lemonade (2016) visual album. It made so many people in my life feel seen—like the songs were made for them. Depictions of that cathartic experience created some of the most powerful moments in the show. It is a beautiful joy to witness and one that I have felt as well. I agree that this is the point at which the discomfort sets in. Relating to Dre’s connection to Ni’Jah—even to a small extent—while also possessing a deep fear of that attachment creates an unsettling tension. Her character moves audiences to introspection in a way that I find fascinating. Dre is the canvas upon which we are invited to negotiate our own relationship to the affective attachments in our lives.

 

 

YG: Absolutely, it very much forced a reckoning with reality. I found myself struggling, though, as someone who has devoted my whole career to studying the real-life joy of the fan experience, with the pathologization of Dre’s fannishness. Her murders are framed as a direct result of her love of Ni’Jah; in Swarm, being a fan is, in itself, a sickness. The only other Ni’Jah super-fan we see is within the true crime episode, where he briefly talks about the supportive community but then switches into something of the lines of “yeah, we’ll attack people online, but we don’t murder.” Especially since Swarm very intentionally asks us to attach this story to reality, I don’t love this dismissal of fans and fandom in general as insane, as the cause of violence, without addressing the actual purpose of fandom, which is often to provide community to marginalized people. In many cases, fandom is where people can explore queer identities—which I would love to get into with Dre’s unspoken queerness—but also, in the case of the Beyoncé fandom, to facilitate a community of Black women around an object that they can take inspiration from and comfort in. What does it mean to turn a space of historical marginalization into a pathologized mental illness that produces violence?

 

JN: You have, so aptly, put words to some unnamed feelings that I am sitting with. The predominantly Black cast was what initially drew me to the series. I never thought I’d say this and wouldn’t have guessed that I needed it but: it feels liberating to see a Black woman casted as a serial killer. It’s exciting to see Black women play roles that are largely played by white men, even when they are frightening or uncomfortable. We deserve the complexity, range, and nuances of roles that are afforded to those with social positions that are lauded in our society and—by extension—the media industry. A role like this pulls Black women in from the margins and suggests that we too can make a home of the weird, the scary, and the spine-chilling. There’s a lot of power in that.

That said, I found myself feeling protective over Dre’s character. Her fandom, as you noted, was persistently positioned as an illness, and her personhood outside of it was left quite bare. There was a vacancy to Dre, her personality and dialogue an echo of her past. “Who’s your favorite artist?” she commonly asked her victims before killing them. To invoke Audre Lorde (1985), there are no new ideas with Dre, only new ways of making them felt. With her character being so deeply attached to her fandom, it was difficult to humanize her. The joy and safety that fandom provides is easily overlooked in the series. Instead, she is presented as a victim of it, like she has no choice but to attack her victims due to her allegiance to Ni’Jah. This depiction of Dre strips her of agency and humanity in a way that I found quite jarring.

How can we better walk the line of representing marginalized groups and individuals in new ways without reproducing hegemonic stereotypes? In this case, Swarm reproduces common depictions of Black women as senselessly angry, for instance. And it doesn’t end at that—there is much to be said about representations of her queerness as well.

 

YM: Wow, there’s so much to respond to here. You’re right, it’s such an uncomfortable balance: how can Black women be represented as complex and imperfect and boundary-breaking and terrifying without falling into stereotypes? What we’re really talking about here is what is good and bad representation? I would argue that portraying a queer Black person’s—I hesitate to use the term “woman” for Dre, but we’ll come back to that—attempts to find community and love through her attachment to an idol as illness is… not necessarily bad representation, but complicated representation. Because you’re right, it’s rare to see Black women treated with the same care that Netflix uses for Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, and that care is deserved. But then, is this harmful? Is this going to dissuade Black women from engaging in fandom and forming homosocial relationships like the one Dre had with Marissa before her death? And especially when you bring in all of Dre’s other identities—queer, gender non-conforming, foster child—why must she be the villain? Again, what does good representation mean, and where do portrayals like this fit? 

 

JN: Right, and how do we engage in representation that honors the intersections of different identities? This depiction of Dre centers her mental illness, for instance, and marginalizes other parts of her identity. Her queerness is not given the attention or care that the storyline demands. Also, when dealing with questions of desire and wanting—it’s difficult not to consider this facet of her identity in relation to her attachment to Ni’Jah. The scene where Dre bites into a red apple, as a representation of Ni’Jah’s neck, feels deeply erotic on both a functional and symbolic level. The fruit, a common symbol for affection and forbidden desire, suggests a consumption of—and hunger for—Ni’Jah. An exploration of that hunger in relation to Dre’s queerness would have complicated Dre’s character in a way that would’ve felt more human. Good representation doesn’t just consider parts of people. It creates room for those parts to exist in messy dialogue with one another. We need to be willing to get messier.

 

YM: That’s so bold to say, when I feel like Swarm already revels in the mess. Maybe the fully intersectionality-aware version would be a few episodes longer! But to return to the apple (or was it a plum?), the forbidden-ness really feels key. I think there might be a reading of Swarm in which Dre’s murderous impulses come from her suppression of identity. You see in the interviews with Marissa’s mother some remark about how women could still be friends without being “...funny.” All of Dre’s murders, too, start with some slight—however imagined—against women. Even her outburst as a child was because she viewed some girl as harming Marissa. And then once Dre (as Tony) gets together with Rashida, she (he? they?) goes for at least a year without killing (as far as we know), maybe because they’re living in their true identity and are satisfied. That is, at least until Rashida offends Ni’Jah.

Again, I don’t think this is a definitive reading of Dre’s queerness, but it’s an argument that we commonly see about other serial killers, like Dahmer or Gacy: murderous intent as a result of oppressive heteronormativity and internalized homophobia. I feel like I’m writing a long Tumblr conspiracy post with this one, but I think it’s important to look at when marginalized identities can be read as the cause of mental illness in the media, and why the creators set it up that way. Maybe the way to segue this rant into something more productive is a question: what do you think the intention of Swarm is, for the creators?

JN: This makes me want to get back on Tumblr—I need more Tumblr conspiracies in my life! What an interesting read on suppression, queerness, and violence in the show. This is the mess I was looking for! By “mess,” I mean the interconnectedness of things that don’t feel like they can or should be related, the narratives that are imperfect and confusing but valuable still.  From what you’ve just shared, it’s true that some of that weaving and connecting needs to be left to the audience. After all, media are co-created by both maker and watcher. As for the intention of Swarm, I think that there are many.

One thing that we haven’t touched upon yet is the show’s commentary on social media and technology through Dre’s attachment to her phone. This relationship is put on full display when she spends time at Eva’s cult-like get away. Dre becomes frantic when Eva takes her phone away, and she ends up running over her with her car. The need to stay close to the phone seems to stem from her desire to stay informed about Ni’Jah-related news on her Twitter “stan account.” The account and her phone also become a space of affirmation. In a world where people don’t seem to understand Ni’Jah’s power and excellence, a community of like-minded people are only a click away.

The digitalization of her community, thoughts, and feelings is also made evident in the texts she sends herself through Marissa’s phone after she dies. Dre’s phone is a space of mourning and celebration all at once, a space of both loneliness and community. In the final episodes of the show, when Dre starts dating Rashida, there are significant changes in her gender expression, walk, and voice. She almost feels like a different person. She also no longer has a phone. Whether the loss of her phone—and all that it represents—brings her closer or further away from a potentially suppressed self: I don’t know. But I think that there is something to be said about people who find refuge in the digital world. This could be the intention of the creators or just another Tumblr conspiracy! What are your thoughts on representations of social media and technology in this project?

 

YG: I loved the focus on technology; especially in the early episodes, every time Dre pulls out her phone we hear a buzzing swarm in the background. When she opens her phone in that first episode and sees all the missed texts from Marissa, the swarm becomes overwhelming. Technology, for Dre, is both a lifeline and a manifestation of obsession. A lot of the people she kills, she kills because of things they said about Ni’Jah online. She kills Eva because she took away her phone and, by extension, her connection to time and Ni’Jah. The phone becomes her connection to Ni’Jah once again when her lack of a phone prevents her from getting her tickets replaced. The thing that seemingly pushes her to get her shit together and settle down as Tony in Atlanta is the deactivation of Marissa’s phone; for her, “normalcy” as we understand it requires her to be separated from technology and, by extension, Ni’Jah.

I think the facet of the online fan experience that really gets glossed over and forgotten is how fandom functions most centrally as a community, not between fan and performer but within and between fans themselves. She talks about her Twitter followers as friends, no matter how often people say things like, “Those are not your friends, those are some crazy ass fans. They don’t give a fuck about you, it’s not real.” For Dre, though, the digital is the most real. And often, as we discussed before, online spaces exist to bring marginalized folks together around the things they love. The dismissal of her social life, as it exists through technology, further alienates her from real life social interactions. We’re really in the mess here, but technology provides access to some forms of social life and community, while also preventing access to others. It can be all consuming and warp perceptions of reality, specifically in the context of “the Swarm” or “the Hive.” This contrasting portrayal of technology as both negative and positive is a great example of how technology and social media actually do function—they can be wonderful, and they can be terrible. Did you find yourself being critical of your own social media use after watching this?

 

JN: Absolutely, it made me interrogate my own connection to social media, technology, and my “digital” communities. As a diasporic subject, my connection to my physical home and communities across southern and eastern Africa is highly mediated. I cultivate and strengthen relationships through a screen and—in many ways—technology keeps certain parts of me alive. Living in the West, where certain parts of my identity remain severely undernourished, I often turn to my devices to resuscitate the parts of myself that I do not want to forget. If people around me aren’t talking about a political event or afrobeats album drop, for instance—I turn on my phone to find the people who are!

I was raised in multiple countries, and I sit at the intersection of several identities. I exist between borders, both physical and metaphorical, and I have made homes of spaces between the digital world and my off-screen reality. Social media is one of the few spaces where I find comfort in my liminality; where I can easily engage with people who have similar lived experience, and where I am able to tend to multiple parts of myself. I think that this is also indicative of the realness of digital spaces and communities. Conversations like this are an invitation to take that more seriously. Swarm encourages us to do the same.

 

YG: I think Swarm makes that uncomfortable, though; no one takes Dre’s online love seriously, and while we occasionally see tweets praising Ni’Jah and calling her a goddess, we see far more of the negative aspects of online communities like fandoms. For example, I know that through fandom, I can find people all over the world whose couches I could sleep on. Hell, when I moved to LA, a Twitter follower gave me their couch; it’s still in my living room and great for naps. Swarm doesn’t show any of that, not really. There is a little taste of that when Festival drops in the first episode and Dre transforms suddenly into a sexual, confident person, but it is immediately overshadowed by Marissa’s death. I wish we got to see how beautiful the internet can be, especially for marginalized people. Fandom was instrumental for my own gender and sexual exploration, and many of the people who are part of these intense fan communities are queer.

I think Dre’s queerness is an important part of Swarm, too, but not one that the show spends too much time on. Why do you think that by the end, Dre is Tony—both in the final episode, and in the pseudo-true crime episode—but there are no conversations of gender? The closest we get is Rashida bringing Dre a tampon and saying “I don’t care.” We also see Eva kiss another member of the cult and Dre’s confused face in response, like she wasn’t aware that was something people could do comfortably. Yeah, I just want to push towards an understanding of how gender and sexuality function within Swarm and how we can read it as an audience.

 

 

JN: Agreed, however I think that Dre’s attachment to her online world—no matter how uncomfortable it may make us—still depicts an important reality that many of us have experienced. That said, it is true that it is not portrayed in the most positive light and that felt like a missed opportunity in the series.

You bring up an interesting point about the absence of conversation around Dre’s gender despite the shift in Dre’s presentation as depicted in the final two episodes. To an extent, I don’t think the creators wanted audiences to read Dre as a definitively trans character. Is Dre’s change in appearance a reflection of gender or is it a reinvention driven by a need to remain under the radar? These tensions, and the development of Dre’s gender across the series, felt frustratingly simple. This is often what it comes down to in conversations around representation: which identities are granted the privilege of particularity? And which ones are rendered ambiguous and open to debate?

As you mentioned, the vagueness around Dre’s gender is heightened by the true crime episode, where it’s revealed that Dre is now living under the alias Toni. What an interesting episode—I found the stylistic shift to a mockumentary fascinating! Stylistic boundary-pushing within film and TV is an incredible way to reimagine on-screen representation. It creates room for audiences to get to know characters in ways that aren’t as easily attained in traditional filmic formats. Shows like Dear White People serve as an example of this—the main character’s radio show is used as a space for her to air out personal grievances and frustrations that nuance the audience’s understanding of her life and actions.

What role do you think the medium and stylistic choices of the show play in the ways that fandom, Black womanhood, and queerness—for instance—are represented in Swarm? What can we learn from them? This is an important question to ask for this show and other on-screen projects that center the narratives of marginalized folk.

 

YG: I want to tattoo your response on my forehead, specifically that question: which identities are granted the privilege of particularity? Gender is one of those identity aspects that feels impossible to pin down, and through this discussion, I am coming to appreciate the embrace of that ambiguity with Dre; the debate itself becomes generative. There’s just a particular tension with portraying a potentially trans person as a serial killer in the political environment we are experiencing in 2023, which might explain my sensitivity to the portrayal.

As for the true crime episode, that was the part of the show that really had me thinking. No joke, I googled “Andrea Greene” at the end of that episode just to make sure, 100%, that this wasn’t a dramatization of a true story. In that episode, they censored every mention of the pop star Dre was obsessed with, and they referred to the fandom not as the swarm but as the hive. On top of that, the mug shot they showed at the end was not Dominique Fishback but some other actor; the family interviewed were also not the same actors who played her foster family in the previous episode. And then that red carpet footage of Donald Glover talking about how he’s working on an adaptation with Janine Nabers and Dom Fishback—I truly believed it was real for a second. That in itself says so much about the fact that this is a believable story, or at least, it presents itself in such a way that it could be real. As much as we argue for authentic representation, a part of me believed this story either way.

True crime is also a genre that is most primarily consumed by white women, so what does it mean to tell the story of a Black woman through this specific medium? And the title of that episode—“Falling Through the Cracks”—speaks heavily to identities and unequal distribution of attention, especially when the detective is also a Black woman. Medium says something, so what does this medium and the perceived consumption of it say in this instance?

 

JN: I googled “Andrea Greene” too! I also called the number at the end of the episode and reached a voicemail where a pre-recorded voice asks if you have any information on the whereabouts of Andrea Greene. The person is then interrupted by, who I assume is, Andrea Greene. Andrea asks the speaker who their favorite artist is, and the speaker starts to scream. The voicemail is then cut short. This is another example of, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation, the ways that Swarm (quite literally) bleeds through the cinematic frame and into our day-to-day lives. From a functioning voicemail feature, to several real-life references, a mockumentary episode, and the use of interview footage of the creators—Swarm challenges storytelling traditions in a new and interesting way. It is a multimedia offering that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, the digital and the non-digital.

The consumption of such a project, keeping in mind the racialized consumption practices of true crime that you brought up, elicits a discomfort because it is unusual and unexpected. This also circles back to our conversation around the politics of discomfort and the use of the “uncomfortable” as a tool. The question remains: when is instrumentalizing discomfort effective and at what point does it become harmful? Swarm, even in its representational shortcomings, provides powerful insight into the good and the bad of on-screen representations.

YG: That’s a great question to leave this conversation on: when is discomfort effective, and what does it tell audiences about themselves? This conversation has become so generative from the starting place of discomfort, and it invites us to ask ourselves why certain things make us flinch away from the screen. Swarm is a great vehicle to ask these questions and masterfully forces us to do so. I’m going to be thinking about this show for a while.

JN: Agreed! The question of why we respond the way we do and—with reference to our dialogue on mediums—how this is achieved by creators is an important place for us to land. I’ll be thinking about this too.

 

Biographies

Jacqueline Nkhonjera is a Dual Masters candidate in Global Media and Communications at the University of Southern California and the London School of Economics.

Yvonne Gonzales is a doctoral student at USC Annenberg.

Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0 — A Syllabus

As regular readers of this blog know, the syllabus for my PhD seminar on fandom studies has evolved a lot through the years. The changes I have made this round mostly center on integrating a transcultural fandom perspective across the whole, with a particular emphasis on East Asian fandoms. This shift reflects a number of things. For one thing, I have a growing number of PhD students with strong interests in K-pop and its fans as well as a growing constituency from the East Asian Language and Culture program at USC. I was recently given an honorary appointment there to reflect my involvement and commitment. Beyond that, having spent seven weeks this summer teaching, speaking, and doing research on fandom, I am really fascinated by everything I learned and brought back a ton of interesting raw materials to work through. I also see transcultural fan studies as one of the richest spaces in the subfield at the moment. This is why I ran the Global Fandom Jamboree here a year or so back. We are building contact with fandom studies faculty around the world, offering us new data on different local practices and logics. And to do this we need new theories which deal with regional, diasporic, and crosscultural connections within fandom. I am especially intrigued with the nexus between Japan, Korea, and China and the continued role of America and the UK in that region. Each of these cultures has vibrant and distinctive fan communities and a great deal of cultural exchange despite geopolitical conflicts, both historical and contemporary, which makes this to me the most compelling space to discuss. And there are open questions about how India fits into this nexus as another major pop culture-producing country or the emerging role of Thailand and Southeast Asia in relation to this nexus. I have lots to learn here, but there's a broad range of expertise amongst the students enrolled in the class and so I look forward to creating a context in the classroom where we can all learn from each other -- one of many reasons I am leaning heavily on the dialogic writing process for the assignments.

Comm 577: Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0Fan Studies:

emerged from the Birmingham School's investigations of subcultures and resistance

became quickly entwined with debates in Third Wave Feminism and queer studies

has been a key space for understanding how taste and cultural discrimination operate

has increasingly been a site of investigation for researchers trying to understand informal learning or emergent conceptions of the citizen/consumer

has shaped legal discussions around appropriation, transformative work, and remix culture

enters discussions of racial representation, diversity, and inclusion within the entertainment industry

offers a useful window for understanding how globalization is reshaping our everyday lives

contributes to important debates about the nature of media authorship

and so much more

This course will be structured around an investigation of the contribution of fan studies to cultural theory, framing each class session around a key debate and mixing writing explicitly about fans with other work asking questions about cultural change and the politics of everyday life. This term, I have chosen to revise my syllabus to reflect ongoing debates in the field – in particular, a new effort to “de-colonize fandom studies,” to re-center the field around questions of race and nationality, as well as its historic focus on gender and sexuality. Together, we will work through the ways that this new work requires us to question and revise earlier formulations of the field.  I am also building on research I did this summer on fandom in Shanghai to give particular attention to the matrix of different fandoms that intersect in East Asia, including those from China, Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Great Britain.

Student Learning Outcomes

Distinguish among fandom, participatory culture, and Web 2.0

Map the roots of fandom studies in earlier theories of audiences, readers, subcultures, and publics

Recognize and apply methods (ethnography, autoethnography, historiography, close textual analysis) associated with fandom studies

Explore the links between fandom studies and earlier forms of grassroots media practice

Engage with debates in fandom studies around gender, sexuality, generational differences, race, and nationality

Apply concepts like transcultural fandom and cultural imperialism to understand fan cultures in the East Asian context.

Identify core fandom practices, such as fan fiction, vidding, and cosplay

Map the social dynamics (and tensions) that define fan communities

Discuss the relationship between fan activism and civic imagination

Define core concepts used to explain fan activity, such as resistance, participation, engagement, taste, and mastery

Question the conflicting assumptions about authorship and intellectual property that shape relations between fans and producers

Debate Moral Economy and Fan Labor as contrasting models for how value emerges from fan communities

Make an original contribution to the scholarship on fandom and participatory culture

Required Readings and Supplementary Materials

Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Izumi Tsuji (eds.), Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

Rukmini Pande (ed.) Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020). 

I assign a lot of reading in the hopes of providing you resources for your research and writing, not to mention a broader mapping of key debates and figures in the field. My expectation is that you will scan everything to get a broad sense of goals, theories, methodologies, and subjects. You then should drill deeper into at least one reading each week that you feel will be most related to your own interests in fandom studies and be ready to speak to it in class discussion,

Optional Readings and Supplementary Materials

Elizabeth Affuso, Suzanne Scott (erf.) Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity (University of Michigan, 2023)

The opening session of this class considers fandom in the context of larger trends in cultural studies and is considered a review of fundamental texts in the field. If you have not previously read any of the following, I recommend you take a look at these readings:

Angela McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Account,” http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~jdslack/readin...

Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding” in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007), https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvine....

Raymond Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary” (1958).

Janice Radway, “The Readers and Their Romances,” Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984).

Richard Dyer, “Judy Garland and Gay Men,” Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: McMillian, 1986).

bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators," in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press).

Stanley Fish, “Is There a Text in This Class?” Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

Assignments

Dialogic Writing: This semester, I want students to experiment with collaborative or dialogic forms of writing. You will be assigned a partner at the start of the term (someone who will bring a significantly different background and perspective from your own). Across the term, you will write a weekly series of conversational pieces where the two of you dig into issues which have been raised by the course materials, conversations, and experiences, but which will also draw on your own observations about fandom and participatory culture. These are not crossfire posts; your goal is to explore your differences but also to search for common ground. Each installment should be roughly 1,500 words (i.e. 750-1k words per contributor) and should include more than one round of back and forth exchanges.  Assignments are due by 9 AM on the day the class meets.

Auto-Ethnography:  You will write a short five-page auto-ethnography describing your own history as a fan of popular entertainment. You will explore whether or not you think of yourself as a fan, what kinds of fan practices you engage with, how you define yourself as a fan, how you became invested in the media franchises that have been part of your life, and how your feelings about being a fan might have adjusted over time.

Annotated Bibliography: You will develop an annotated bibliography exploring one of the theoretical debates that have been central to the field of fan studies. These might include those which we've identified for the class, or they might include other topics more relevant to the student's own research. What are the key contributions of fan studies literature to this larger field of inquiry? What models from these theoretical traditions have informed work in fan studies? This bibliography is intended to get you started with the secondary reading for your final project and should include a brief abstract of what you hope to explore through that project.

Presentation: Students will do a short 10-minute presentation of their findings for their final paper during the final week of class.

Final Paper: You will write a 15-20-page essay on a topic of your own choosing (in consultation with the instructor) which you feel grows out of the subjects and issues we've been exploring throughout the class. The paper will ideally build on the annotated bibliography created for the earlier assignment.

Some students may be asked to informally do share and tell on fandom practices or communities which surface in their dialogical writing. If you have something you want to present, please let me know. But recognize that this is not a course requirement – you can say no – and these presentations will not be graded.

 

Course ScheduleWeek 1: Fandom Studies - A Prehistory

Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, "Why Study Fans?" in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington (eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

See recommended/ supplemental readings highlighted in this syllabus for further review materials.

NOTE: The opening session considers fandom in the context of larger trends in cultural studies and is considered a review of fundamental texts in the field.

 

Week 2: Fan Studies and Cultural Resistance

John Fiske, "The Cultural Economy of Fandom," in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Joli Jensen, “Fandom as Pathology” ," in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Camille Bacon-Smith, "Identity and Risk," Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 

Constance Penley, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture," in Lawrence Grosberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

Henry Jenkins, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten,” Fans, Bloggers and Gamers (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Rebecca Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan studies,” Transformative Works and Culture 20, 2015, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/699.

(Rec.) Stephen Duncombe, “Resistance” in Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray (eds.), Keywords For Media Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

(Rec.)  Henry Jenkins, “Negotiating Fandom: The Politics of Race-Bending” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

(Rec.) Stephen Duncombe, “Resistance” in Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray (eds.), Keywords For Media Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

(Rec.)  Henry Jenkins, “Negotiating Fandom: The Politics of Race-Bending” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

 

Week 3: From Engagement to Participation

Rhiannon Bury, “Fans, Fan Studies and the Participatory Continuum,” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “The Value of Media Engagement,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 113-150.

danah boyd, Henry Jenkins, and Mimi Ito, “Defining Participatory Culture,” Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (London: Polity, 2014), 1-31. 

Alfred L. Martin Jr., “Surplus Blackness,” Flow, April 27, 2021, https://www.flowjournal.org/2021/04/surplus-blackness/.

Nancy Baym, "Participatory Boundaries," Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

 

Week 4: Tracing the History of Participatory Culture

Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensibility," The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 2009).

Daniel Cavicchi, “Foundational Discourses of Fandom” in Paul Booth (ed.), A Companion of Media Fandom and Fan Studies (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

Alexandra Edwards, “Literature Fandom and Literary Fans” in Paul Booth (ed.), A Companion of Media Fandom and Fan Studies (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

andré m. carrington, “Josh Brandon’s Blues: Inventing the Black Fan,” Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 

Helen Merrick, “FLAWOL: The Making of Fannish Feminisms,” The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (New York: Aqueduct, 2019).

 

Week 5: Transcultural Fandom

Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, “Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom,” Participations, May 2013, http://www.participations.org/Volume%2010/Issue%201/7%20Chin%20&%20Morimoto%2010.1.pdf.

Bertha Chin, Aswin Punathembekar, Sangita Shresthova, “Advancing Transcultural Fandom: A Conversation,” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

Rukmini Pande, “Can’t Stop the Signal: Online Media Fandom as Postcolonial Cyberspace,” Squee From the Margins: Fandom and Race (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019).

 

Week 6: The Case of East Asia

Henry Jenkins, “Transcultural Fandom” (Work in Progress).

Hiroki Azuma, “Database Animals” in Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Izumi Tsuji (eds.), Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

Sharon Kinsella, “Japanese Subcultures in the 1990s: Otaku and the Amateur Manga Movement,” Journal of Japanese Studies, Summer 1998.

Teguh Wijaya Mulya, “Faith and Fandom: Young Indonesian Muslims Negotiating K-Pop and Islam,” Contemporary Islam, 2021.

Ingyu Oh, Hyun-hin Lim, and Wonnho Jang, “What Is Female Universalism in Hallyu?: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration” (Work in Progress, August 2023).

Miranda Ruth Larsen, “‘But I’m a Foreigner Too’: Otherness, Racial Oversimplification and Historical Amnesia in K-Pop Fandom,” in Rukmini Pande (ed.), Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

Mizuko Ito, “Contributors Versus Leechers: Fansubbing Ethics and a Hybrid Public Space,” in Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Izumi Tsuji (eds.), Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

 

Week 7: The Contested Social Dynamics of Fandom

Matt Hills, “From Fan Doxa to Toxic Fan Practices,” Participations, May 2018.

Benjamin Woo, “The Invisible Bag of Holding: Whiteness and Media Fandom,” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

Mel Stanfill, 2011, "Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom," in Robin Anne Reid and Sarah Gatson (eds.), "Race and Ethnicity in Fandom," Transformative Works and Cultures 8 (special issue), 2011, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/256.

Suzanne Scott, “Interrogating the Fake Geek Fan Girl: The Spreadable Misogyny of Contemporary Fan Culture,” Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender and the Contemporary Culture Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

Daisuke Okabe and Kimi Ishida, “Making FuJoshi Identity Visible and Invisible,” in Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Izumi Tsuji (eds.), Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

 

Week 8: Fan Activism/Fan Education

Henry Jenkins, “‘Art Happens not in Isolation, but in Community’: The Collective Literacies of Media Fandom,” Cultural Science, 2019.

Neta Kligler Vilenchik, “’Decreasing World Suck’: Harnessing Popular Culture for Fan Activism,” in Henry Jenkins et al., By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

Renee Alexander Craft, “Afrofuturism and the 2019 Wakanda Carnival,” in Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Renée Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz (eds.), The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (London; New York: Routledge), 385-394.

Elizabeth Gilliland, “Racebending Fandoms and Digital Futurism,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 22.

Dustin A. Greenwalt & James Alexander McVey. “Get Gritty with It: Memetic Icons and the Visual Ethos of Antifascism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19:2, pp. 158-179, 2022.

Pratik Nyaupane, “#WeAreAllMonkeys: Eating Bananas as the Intersection of Hashtag Activism and Anti-Racist Solidarity,” in Terry L. Rentner and David P. Burns (eds.) Social Issues in Sport Communication: You Make the Call (New York: Routledge, 2023).

Alice E. Marwick and William Clyde Parton, “Constructing alternative facts: Populist expertise and the QAnon conspiracy,” New Media and Society, 2022.

(Rec.) CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, David Stanley, and Linda Howell, “Fans of Q: The Stakes of QAnon’s Functioning as Political Fandom,” American Behavioral Science, 2022.

(Rec.) Nico Carpentier and Henry Jenkins, “What Does God Need with a Starship?”: A Conversation about Politics, Participation, and Social Media” (Work in Progress).

 

Week 9: Performing Fan Identities

Ellen Kirkpatrick, "On [Dis]play: Outlier Resistance and the Matter of Racebending Superhero Cosplay," in Abigail De Kosnik and andré m. carrington (eds.), "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color,” Transformative Works and Cultures 29 (special issue), 2019, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1483.

Samantha Close, “Fannish Masculinities in Transition in Anime Music Video Fandom,” Transformative Works and Cultures 22, 2016, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/713.

Joan Miller, “Race Play: Whiteness and Erasure in Cross-Racial Cosplay,” in Rukmini Pande (ed.), Fandom, Now in Color: A Collection of Voices (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

Juli Gittinger, “Hijabi Cosplay: Performance of Culture, Religion, and Fandom,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Summer 2018.

Daisukd Okabe, “Cosplay, Learning and Cultural Practice,” in Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji (eds.), Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

Jacqueline E. Johnson. “From Muggle to Mrs.: The Harry Potter Bachelorette Party and “Crafting” Femininity on Etsy. “ in Elizabeth Affuso, Suzanne Scott (eds.) Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity (University of Michigan, 2023).

Lucy Mishou, “Retcon: Revisiting Cosplay Studies” “ in Elizabeth Affuso, Suzanne Scott (eds.) Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity (University of Michigan, 2023).

Rebecca Williams, “Disneybounding and Beyond: Fandom, Cosplay, and Embodiment in Theme Park Spaces,” in Elizabeth Affuso, Suzanne Scott (eds.) Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity (University of Michigan, 2023).

 

Week 10: Fan Production – Fan Fiction

Francesca Coppa, “Five Things Fan Fiction Is and One Thing It Isn’t,” The Fan Fiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2017).

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo,“Race, Storying and Restorying: What We Can Learn From Black Fans?” in Abigail De Kosnik and andré m. carrington (eds.), "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color,” Transformative Works and Cultures 29 (special issue), 2019, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1562.

andré m. Carrington, “Dream in Gincolor: Racial Revisionism in Fan Fiction,” Speculative Blackness.

Jack Lipei Tang, “Shipping on the Edge: Negotiations of Precariousness in a Chinese Real-Person Shipping Fandom Community,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2023.

Erika Ningxin Wang & Liang Ge, “Fan Conflicts and State Power in China: Internalised Heteronormativity, Censorship Sensibilities, and Fandom Police,“ Asian Studies Review 47:2, 355-373, 2023.

Abigail De Kosnik, "Relationshipping Nations: Philippines/US Fan Art and Fan Fiction." In "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color," edited by Abigail De Kosnik and andré carrington, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 29, 2019, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1513.

(Rec.) Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnett, “Transformative,” in Keywords in Remix Studies (London: Routledge, 2018).

 

Week 11: Fan Production – Vidding and Fan Art

Francesca Coppa, Vidding: A History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2022).

Tisha Turk and Joshua Johnson, "Toward an Ecology of Vidding," in Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo (eds.), "Fan/Remix Video," Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (special issue), 2012, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/326/294.

Francesca Coppa, Alex Lothian, Tisha Turk, “Vidding and Identity: A Conversation” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

Bobby Schweitzer, “Playing Make-Believe with #homemadeDisney Pandemic Ride Videos,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 12:1, 2021, pp. 199–218.

 

Week 12: Fandom and Authorship

Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

If you have not yet read it, please also read:

Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Gustafson/FILM%20162.W10/readings/foucault.author.pdf

 

Week 13: Fan Labor, Moral Economy, and the Gift Economy

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, “What Went Wrong with Web 2.0,” Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

Kristina Busse, “Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizijng on the Fannish Labor of Love,” Cinema Journal, Spring 2015.

Abigail De Kosnik, “Fandom as Free Labor,” Digital Labor: The Internet As Playground and Factory, Trebor Scholz (ed.), Taylor & Francis Group (New York: Routledge, 2012)

Meicheng Sun, “K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans,” Global Media and China, 2020.

Hector Postigo, “Of Mods and Modder: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modifications.” Games and Culture. October 2007.

Mark Andrejevic, "Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor," in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009).

John Campbell, “Whistle While You Work: Alienation, Exploitation, and the Immaterial Labor of Disney Fans” (Work in Progress).

 

Week 14: Taste, Mastery, and Material Practice

John Bloom, "Cardboard Patriarchy: Adult Baseball Card Collecting and the Nostalgia for a Presexual Past," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002).

Jonathan Gray, “How Do I Dislike Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” in Melissa A. Click (ed.), Anti-fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

Melissa A. Click, “Haters Gonna Hate,” in Melissa A. Click (ed.), Anti-fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

Rebecca Williams, “Fan Tourism and Pilgrimage” in Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (eds.), The Routledge Companion of Fandom Studies (London: Routledge, 2017).

Alan McKee, "Which is the Best Doctor Who Story? A Case Study in Value Judgment Outside the Academies," Intensities 1, 2001.

The Revolution is Female: How Luiza Trajano Has Been Transforming the World with Disruptive Technology, Civic Engagement and Community Logic — An Interview with Renata Frade

“Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.”

— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000)

One of the 100 most influential people in the world, according to Time magazine in 2021—and the only Brazilian citizen on the list. Businesswoman on the select Forbes magazine list of billionaires. Founder of Mulheres do Brasil (Women of Brazil), a disruptive social, economic, political and educational movement which directly impacts more than 115,000 women in Brazil and abroad. Luiza Trajano is 75 years old and has been working in Magazine Luiza since she was 18.

Credit: Luiza Trajano´s PR agency.

She started on her own initiative in her family's small business, which was created by her aunt in the interior of São Paulo, during school holidays. Studying and working incessantly, she turned it into a business conglomerate that now includes more than 20 companies, from the cosmetics and sporting goods trades to KaBum, the largest technology and games e-commerce concern in Latin America, and Jovem Nerd, a Brazilian humor and news blog acquired by Magazine Luiza in 2021, which addresses topics on entertainment such as cinema, television series, science fiction, comics, role-playing games and travel.

Also a great communicator, Luiza Trajano is a frequent visitor to Magazine Luiza stores and is always interested in talking to customers and employees. Participating in corporate and government events as a speaker, she leads the effort to access COVID-19 vaccines for the Brazilian population.

In recent years Luiza Trajano has seen the Magazine Luiza, or Magalu (as the company is known) brand repositioned to point to a future that has already arrived. The company is guided by technological innovations developed by Luiza Labs, a technology and innovation laboratory with digital solutions for customers, created with a start-up DNA. One of the entrepreneur's goals is for the stores to become technology centers and to maximize the customer experience. The company developed a new sales application and a tool to optimize store inventory. Stores now offer credit checks, free Wi-Fi and the ability to pick up online purchases in person. To further support offline operations, 30% of each store's physical space became a small distribution center, helping Magalu's online operations.

You can understand the company’s success through its relationships. Digital engagement is a priority that is mirrored in the development of technologies that bring the virtual and real world closer together, based on projects such as the creation of Lu do Magalu, a digital avatar that won the hearts of customers and social media, becoming the most followed virtual influencer in the world.

In recent years, Luiza Trajano has dedicated herself to numerous social causes aimed at social and racial equality, such as the creation of a trainee program tailored only to black people, a business investment fund for women, and a mobile platform for female candidates for political office. Luiza Trajano’s career is ripe for an academic case study, but she is also an exemplar for businesspeople, communicators, and activists.

Credit: Luiza Trajano´s PR agency.

Renata - You are an example of an empowered, courageous, successful woman, and this is reflected in the realization of projects that are really changing the reality of millions of people, especially women. How should a woman mobilize today to become empowered and go in search of her dreams, in the midst of so many adversities for her studies, her business, even just for her as a person?

What are Luiza Trajano's challenges and dreams in 2023, after the pandemic and amidst the scenes of war around the world? What inspires and moves a great executive and great woman to accomplish so much? What do you still want to accomplish?

Luiza - We lived a very heavy thing. The whole world had been put indoors, and we had to live with two great challenges: health and employment, especially in Brazil. In Brazil we lost seven hundred thousand people in the pandemic, many people we loved. There were several effects of the pandemic, including emotional ones. Our fifteen hundred stores were closed. There were also some positive effects among the many negative ones.

Something that was accelerated was the type of management, which had been completely mechanical in companies. I already preached organic management, where people could be themselves. In the pandemic, I couldn't stand still just watching people die. So we got together for the vaccine since no one else was doing anything to resolve it. We took over more than five-thousand municipalities in Brazil. We monitored the best health system in the world, the Brazilian public system SUS, where we went to distant places, took our own refrigerators for the vaccines, cool boxes, tents, everything, just driving to be able to vaccinate. The first thing we, together with the Mulheres do Brasil group, did was to invite men to the cause as well and establish a target of seventy-five percent of the population vaccinated (almost 210 million citizens). We managed to vaccinate the population thanks also to the union of the population.

Today, together with the Mulheres do Brasil group, I now think that we must heal people; they are very destabilized. Social inequality was wide open during the pandemic, as well as violence against women worldwide. I have my personal goal, I talk about it with everyone, even with the US ambassador, Mandela's wife: in four years there will be no violence against women. That's my big dream.

Credit: Mulheres do Brasil

Renata - A study conducted by the World Wide Web Foundation and the Alliance for Affordable Internet confirmed men are 50% more likely to be online in 32 countries. This gender gap is a challenge for women in tech inclusion activism. Your company has been investing a lot in technology and in social inclusion projects. When we talk, sometimes about giving access to applications or artificial intelligence, we forget the very basic things like access to the Internet.

Historically, women have really engaged with technology, not only in the production but in the consumption of computational devices and programming. Also, there are female tech communities that emerged in America, Brazil, and all over the world. There was already a project of yours with one of these communities. So, I would like you to talk a little about how you think it would be possible for your company, in addition to what you've already done, to reach a vision of the inclusion of women in this field, not only in terms of consumption, but above all in terms of access to education or job opportunities. And a little bit about the importance of communities within the context of this aspect of women in technology.

Luiza – The Magazine Luiza company was born as a physical company 45 years ago. When the digital appeared about 20 years ago in Brazil, we were gradually able to digitize the business, and today our stores coexist with online sales via websites and apps. We are carrying out tours all over Brazil with mentorships to teach women and small entrepreneurs how to digitize their businesses, how to use applications based on the ones we develop, and putting an end to limiting beliefs such as “women are uninterested in mathematics” or “women are not good at technology.” We also launched courses for 400 people, only women, who we then inserted into the job market.

Renata - In a lecture at the Brasil Digital Forum, you said that “digital is not software, it is a culture.” This perception is unusual among big businessmen, who often disregard the meaning that the term culture can represent beyond the corporate. There is no neutrality in technology—this is a historical fact that even kept women out of the job market in IT for many decades. Thinking that beyond the algorithm there is, in addition to intelligence, a human component resulting from a history that continues into today, their way of relating to the world can make a difference in companies like yours.

Professor Henry Jenkins (2016) stated something similar in Participatory Culture in a Networked Era : “I do not think technologies are participatory; cultures are. Technologies may be interactive in their design; they may facilitate many-to-many communications; they may be accessible and adaptable to multiple kinds of users; and they may encode certain values through their terms of use and through their interfaces. But ultimately, those technologies get embraced and deployed by people who are operating in cultural contexts that may be more or less participatory. I do not think of platforms like Facebook or YouTube as participatory cultures. Rather, they are tools which participatory communities sometimes use as means of maintaining social contact or sharing their cultural productions with each other.”

How should companies think of the digital in cultural terms? What are the challenges of the digital in the midst of an overwhelming technological advance for businessmen and consumers? What is it like to promote the company's DNA to key influencers, consumers and employees among intense competition?

Luiza - Brazil is very prepared for this digital world; we are innovative, more creative, more opened, what is really lacking is greater access. The digital is a culture. It is not software or an application; it is a way of life. It's a way to help businesses. One of the things that the pandemic brought was people's willingness to work things out. People often don't know how to use cell phones and social media for their own benefit. What we try to do is help them to use this so that we can do more. In the pandemic, we managed to adapt much more easily to the migration to digital.

Luiza Trajano at the Brazil President Lula economic, social, sustainable and development new council inaugural session (2023).

Credit: Luiza Trajano´s PR agency.

Renata - Regarding engagement, one of the main and happiest projects of the company seems to me to be Lu do Magalu. Created in 2003 to help with the consumer's shopping experience in digital retail, at a time when few companies knew how to develop online projects, it is an avatar that relates to customers throughout their purchase and relationship journey.

In 2022, Lu do Magalu had 6 million followers on Instagram, 15 million on Facebook, and 1.3 million on Twitter, in addition to followers on YouTube, TikTok and other networks—all told more than 31 million followers in 2022. According to The Most-Followed Virtual Influencers of 2022 , she is ahead of Barbie and Minnie Mouse.

Another interesting aspect, which reflects the company's culture, is how Lu do Magalu mobilizes people about women's empowerment, anti-racism and pro-LGBTQIAP+ via activities like dancing and participating in TikTok trends, playing games while serving customers, and being present at special dates like birthdays or Christmas by sending individual messages.

What does Lu do Magalu have in common with Luiza? What are the upcoming avatar-related projects? What were the main challenges and achievements of this project to date?

Luiza - One of Magazine Luiza's principles is to do the simple things first, for instance a good website like the one we launched and have evolved since 2000, then invest in more sophisticated technologies. Lu da Magalu was inspired by my aunt Luiza, founder of the company, and was present on our website many years ago, when we didn't even sell much online. Lu evolved and followed the evolution of the world, in a simple but not simplistic way. We have a team that takes care of Lu. She's more human every day: she goes for a walk, apologizes. When we enter the site, it talks about vaccination, about violence against women. Our goal is to make Lu more and more human by bringing the principles of our company, which is a capitalist company that earns money, but which has always defended women, always defended the social. It's amazing how sweet she is; you just know she doesn't exist. People identify with her, and today she is the biggest influencer in the world. She won gold at the Cannes Festival. She is our face, even if we make mistakes, or if we get it right.

Credit: Lu do Magalu as Barbie (2023). Magazine Luiza´s Instagram profile.

Renata - Mulheres do Brasil group is a social organization of extreme relevance in Brazil and inspiring to the world. Created in 2013, in partnership with different spheres of power to encourage the adoption of affirmative policies and eliminate gender, racial and social inequalities, it involves 115,407 women around the world in 155 centers (113 national and 42 international). The American chapters are in Washington DC, Florida, and New York.

There are projects to encourage women's entrepreneurship, raise awareness about racism, and prepare and train black women for the job market, among others. What are the biggest dreams you have in relation to this initiative?

Still regarding the Mulheres do Brasil group, I would like to cite a concept called civic imagination : “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political, or economic institutions or problems. Put bluntly, one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Too often, our focus on contemporary problems makes it impossible to see beyond immediate constraints and develop a clearer sense of what might be achieved. One also can't change the world until one can imagine oneself as an active political agent.”

I believe that you are an example of a civic imagination activist. What are the dreams that the citizen, entrepreneur, businesswoman, woman, and activist Luiza Trajano intends to bring to Magalu costumers, to Brazil and to the world? What is the world you envision for citizens and new generations?

Luiza - First, I want to make it very clear that we are a political group because we believe that public policies drive the deepest change in society. We are not partisans, and we do not have a party. I am a political person, despite being invited a lot to be president or a senator. I am not affiliated with a political party, but I was invited a lot. I believe that a united civil society can change a country.

We have twenty-two causes. The UN invited us to be a representative; we have very strong international causes, particularly violence against women. We are united in the international community so that in four years, led by the Mulheres do Brasil group in Brazil and in the whole world, we will not have more violence against women in the world. Everyone wants to participate in this.

The other cause and campaign are for the inclusion of more women in politics. The goal is to reach fifty percent of the candidacy vacancies in Brazil. So, we've been working on this for four years in Brazil. We created an application for the dissemination of candidate materials. Many men are with us because they are changing. Any political party can be on our website. Any woman who intends to be in politics can participate in our application by signing a letter of commitment with us with these items: to be in favor of democracy, health, and education for all.

The Mulheres do Brasil group is present in all Brazilian capital cities and on all continents. Each chapter also works within the goals and difficulties of its country. They have a lot of independence and autonomy. We always have global goals, but it's amazing how much work the local chapters do; I can't keep up with everything.

In the group you do not enter as your company but as an individual. One message I'd like to leave is that women can do whatever they want now. I have a slightly different relationship than most women. I'm from the countryside, from Franca, a very enterprising city. Imagine how many years ago when I arrived in São Paulo for work, I was discriminated against because of my accent. I made a pact with myself not to change who I am. I didn't join the male side of the war, I didn't fail to position myself in any way, even when I was a mere unknown.

Credit: Mulheres do Brasil Facebook profile.

Biography

Renata Frade is a tech feminism PhD candidate at the Universidade de Aveiro (DigiMedia/DeCa). Cátedra Oscar Sala/ Instituto de Estudos Avançados/Universidade de São Paulo Artificial Intelligence researcher. Journalist (B.A. in Social Communication from PUC-Rio University) and M.A. in Literature from UERJ. Henry Jenkins´ transmedia alumni and attendee at M.I.T., Rede Globo TV and Nave school events/courses. Speaker, activist, community manager, professor and content producer on women in tech, diversity, inclusion and transmedia since 2010 (such as Gartner international symposium, Girls in Tech Brazil, Mídia Ninja, Digitalks, MobileTime etc). Published in 13 academic and fiction books (poetry and short stories). Renata Frade is interested in Literature, Activism, Feminism, Civic Imagination, Technology, Digital Humanities, Ciberculture, HCI.

Catherine D´Ignazio and Lauren Klein Interviewed by Renata Frade: The Future of Tech Feminism in the Present with Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling

“When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. When computers became the miniaturized circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them . . . when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female.”

― Sadie Plant, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

After the release of Data Feminism (2020), Catherine D´Ignazio and Lauren Klein became mandatory and acclaimed voices not only in academia but also for readers around the world. They built a solid theoretical work that brings together aspects that define a future for technological feminism. Based on data science and extensive field work, as well as associated with design, storytelling, and transmedia, the book includes several case studies of communities of women who use technology and intelligent data processing to combat violence. They also valued the work of groups who are considered minorities, such as those from the global south and Indigenous peoples.

This interview with Catherine D´Ignazio and Lauren Klein is an excellent opportunity to understand how their research developed. Knowing these contexts is highly relevant in these times of questioning the path of humanity with artificial intelligence advancements, as well as news and developments since the launch of Data Feminism. Both scholars consider storytelling crucial in their way of looking at the world, even beyond the research they develop.

 

Renata: When I interviewed Judy Wajcman , I asked her what would technofeminism be nowadays, if she had ever thought about updating the concept or believes it is still valid. She's been researching about artificial intelligence and the sociology of speed with more emphasis in the last years. She answered:

Technofeminism has perhaps morphed into ‘Data Feminism’. I like that term data feminism, as data science and AI are the major technological developments since I first wrote about the relationship between gender, power and technology. To me technofeminism is still a useful approach from which to extend our analysis to think about how gender is being embedded in code and software, as well as in hardware and material machinery. We have a broader sense of what technology means, such as machine learning systems and infrastructure, as well as artifacts.

Data Feminism (2020) was released two years ago but still retains freshness and vigor. It has become a mandatory source in feminist studies, technology, activism, feminist technoscience, etc. Looking back, what were the main goals achieved with the book, anticipated and unexpected? What are the main contributions—to academia and to society—of this publication?

Lauren and Catherine: First off, it’s such an honor to hear that Dr. Wajcman had such kind words to say about Data Feminism. Her work has been such an inspiration to us both! As far as your question about the goals of the book, we wrote the book above all else to show how feminism could contribute to conversations about data science and data justice. All around us we saw how data systems were being used to amplify existing inequalities rather than interrogate them, and how flawed assumptions about data and algorithms—like their being “neutral” or “objective—were leading to biased outcomes. To us it seemed that data science had so much to learn from feminism–that it really needed to learn from feminism–since feminism, and intersectional feminism in particular, has been centrally concerned with issues of inequality and the power imbalances that cause them for so long. We worked hard with our writing and with our examples to make that connection clear, and one achievement of the book which we did not necessarily anticipate is how many other people have seen what we saw, about how feminism has a central role to play in current conversations about how to envision more ethical and equitable data practices. 

The other main contribution of our book, we hope, was to show that there was so much amazing work at this intersection already taking place. Folks have been working for a very long time to envision more ethical and equitable data practices, so in many cases it’s just that we need to look a little harder or a little longer for people already doing the work so that we can learn from it and raise it up. We think this lesson applies to folks in the academy as well as to society writ large. We all need to get better at recognizing our work as collective and our future as shared. 

 

Renata:  In the book, you wrote that data feminism is:

a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought. The starting point for data feminism is something that goes mostly unacknowledged in data science: power is not distributed equally in the world. (…) The work of data feminism is first to tune into how standard practices in data science serve to reinforce these existing inequalities and second to use data science to challenge and change the distribution of power. (…) Underlying data feminism is a belief in and commitment to co-liberation: the idea that oppressive systems of power harm all of us, that they undermine the quality and validity of our work, and that they hinder us from creating true and lasting social impact with data science. 

You developed 7 principles for data feminism: “examine power; challenge power; elevate emotion and embodiment; rethink binaries and hierarchies; embrace pluralism; consider context; make labor visible.” Could you please cite communities and initiatives which have managed, in some way, to employ these principles since the book’s launch? What are the communities with practices you consider models of activism, communication, and engagement in this sense (cited in the book or arising from it)?

Lauren and Catherine: There have been a number of interesting communities and programs which have arisen to discuss the book or use the book. There have been at least 17 book clubs (that we know about). Some of them spawned larger initiatives. For example, the Data Feminism Network was started by a group of students in Canada as a book club and then went on to run podcasts, book clubs about other books related to gender & data, mixers and more. The nonprofit Data-Pop Alliance has started a program in Data Feminism where they use the principles to help organizations address SDG #5: to “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”. Another nonprofit, the Civic Software Foundation, founded a program based on principle #6 about context. The technology think tank Pollicy, based in Kampala, Uganda, used data feminism to develop a report about Afrofeminist Data Futures. In the Latin American context, groups like DataGénero and Feminicidio Uruguay are discussing starting a Latin American data feminism network. There have been two standalone conferences about data feminism (one in Spain and one in Denmark).

We have been thrilled to see these book clubs, discussions, reports and programs arise across a range of disciplines, geographies, and age groups. When possible we try to support these groups, connect them to each other, and show up for Q&As. 

 

Renata: Ruha Benjamin (2022) said in her latest book :

Viral Justice grows out of my contention that viruses are not our ultimate foe. In the same way that COVID-19 kills, so too ableism, racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism work to eliminate unwanted people. Ours is a eugenicist society: from the funding of school districts to the triaging of patients, 'privilege' is a euphemism for tyranny. (…) Viral Justice offers a vision of change that requires each of us to individually confront how we participate in unjust systems, even when ´in theory´ we stand for justice. Whether you're the explicit target or not, inequality makes us all sick. (…) But viral justice is not a new academic theory or a novel organizing strategy, nor does it name a newfangled phenomenon. Instead, it is an orientation, a way of looking at, or looking again at (i.e., respecting), all the ways people are working, little by little, day by day, to combat unjust systems and build alternatives to the oppressive status quo . Viral justice orients us differently toward small-scale, often localized, actions. It invites us to witness how an idea or action that sprouts in one place may be adopted, adapted, and diffused elsewhere. But it also counters the assumption that ‘scaling up’ should always be the goal.

In a way, Benjamin invites readers to have courage and enthusiasm not only for fighting for a more egalitarian, fair, diverse and supportive world, but for imagining it and building what we wish for. This brought me to civic imagination (Jenkins et al, 2020):

the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world without imagining what a better world might look like. (…) The civic imagination requires and is realized through the ability to imagine the process of change, to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, to feel solidarity with others whose perspectives and experiences are different than one's own, to join a larger collective with shared interests, and to bring imaginative dimensions to real-world spaces and places.

D´Ignazio (2016) applied civic imagination concept in a very original way, a case study on the MIT campus. I would like to know how it would be possible for a person or a community to develop a sense of civic imagination when we are talking about data and numbers, something so markedly quantitative? You mentioned that behind numbers there are stories and narratives. What would be good practices, or case studies that you consider important, which relate storytelling with data in activism?

Catherine: Yes - I have always loved the concept of the civic imagination and I definitely think it can be applied to working with data. Because first of all, not all data are quantitative. For us, data are information that are collected in a systematic way. So this could certainly be numbers, readings from a sensor or income levels by census block, let's say. But this could equally be oral responses to a questionnaire (so qualitative data) or images, drawings or art. Data also do not have to describe only what "is" already in existence. For example the Paper Monuments project by Monument Lab asked residents to draw new proposals for monuments they would like to see in their neighborhood. This is definitely a project where narratives and stories and art were interwoven with data, indeed each paper monument became an entry in the larger dataset. And this is also a project where data can come from the future – i.e. from visions of the future generated by residents and everyday people. Another project that interweaves storytelling, data and civic imagination (and that Lauren and I admire a great deal) is COVID Black, led by Kim Gallon, who’s now at Brown, from Purdue University. COVID Black not only gathers and publishes Black health data, but it also does trainings and produces data stories, visualizations and other public interpretations to combat racial health inequities (and also to push back against the relentless, racialized deficit narratives depicted by the mainstream media). They state "Data is more than facts and statistics. Black health data represents life." Both of these projects produce data, analyze data, and visualize data in the service of larger goals around sparking civic dialogue, challenging stigmatizing narratives, and working towards social justice.

 

Renata: In Data Feminism and also in D'Ignazio's upcoming book from MIT Press, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action, communities and collective expressions are fundamental for changes in the status quo against prejudice, racism, and various expressions of violence, especially in the global south axis, in Latin America.

Political and social awareness is a consequence of plural and broad access to information. Today, data consumption is concentrated on Big Tech digital platforms. In addition to issues arising from the HCI, the importance of producing inclusive and participatory design on platforms for collectives, there is a crucial issue that many communities face, precisely because most of them run on volunteer work: the difficulty of executing communication plans, whose activities are concentrated, many times, in special actions such as campaign launches and commemorative dates.

According to Dahlgren & Hill (2023), “media engagement as an energizing internal force that propels citizens to participate in society. (…) Furthermore, we distinguish engagement from participation: we see engagement as a subjective prerequisite for participation – which we in turn treat as observable action, the fulfillment of engagement.”

What would be the elements that could awaken in citizens involved with data feminism or femicide an engagement beyond the occasional participation in causes like this? Do you believe that a transmedia plan could be an assertive path?

Catherine: One place to direct our attention in relation to this question is the work of Helena Suárez Val. She has almost completed her doctoral program, and her dissertation examines engagement and participation in feminicide data that circulate on Twitter. She is asking what kinds of emotional and affective impacts participation on social media has in relation to the issue of feminicide. You'll be able to see her thesis later this year - it is titled "Caring, With Data: An Exploration of the Affective Politicality of Feminicide Data."

And one of the things our research team found in the Data Against Feminicide project is that many of the feminicide data producers – the activist groups who painstakingly register gender-related killings – are not only working to create counts and statistics but are also working to craft narratives and reframe debates around the issue. While most media attention focuses on women's murders as isolated events perpetrated by pathological actors (the "jealous" ex-husband, etc) feminicide activists use aggregated data to support the feminist argument that feminicide is a structural and systemic and preventable form of violence. They use data to move feminicide from a personal or domestic issue to a political or public issue. I called this theme "reframing" and discuss it at length in Chapter 6 of Counting Feminicide, and it especially applies for groups who are coming to this work through data journalism and communications. 

FIGURE 1: Graphic recording by Sofi Donner about tools co-created by the Data + Feminism Lab with data activists to monitor feminicide

I think many data activist groups could benefit from learning about the ideas of transmedia storytelling and transmedia planning. From what I've observed in the Data Against Feminicide project, many groups are already employing transmedia storytelling without explicit knowledge of these theories or ideas. They develop highly creative ways to circulate their data across multiple digital platforms, also in public spaces, and often using compelling and vibrant visuals and narratives to support their numbers and statistics. Much of this work is also about memorialization – about not forgetting the people lost to structural violence and about seeking justice for them and their families. 

 

Renata: Lauren, I see that you also have a new project coming out with MIT Press on the history of data visualization. How does this connect to Data Feminism and the work that you did there”?

Lauren: Yes, I am finishing up a project with my own research group called Data By Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization. It tells the story of the emergence of modern data visualization in a way that shows how questions of ethics and justice have been present in the field since its start. One of the things that we tried hard to convey in Data Feminism is how all of these technologies–data science, data journalism, data activism–they all have long histories, and those histories influence the tools we have to use in the present as well as how we think to design new ones. These histories are not always good ones. In a US context, for example, the history of data is inseparable from the histories of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. This does not mean that we should not use data or data science, but it does mean that we need to know about those histories so that we can be on alert for the ways that they might inadvertently influence the work we do in the present. The same thing is true for data visualization, so I’m trying to tell that story in a way that makes it clear and compelling and necessary for visualization designers today.    

FIGURE 2: A news article and visualization examining where Christopher Columbus is commemorated in the heritage landscape along with where his presence is being contested. By Youjin Shin, Nick Kirkpatrick, Catherine D’Ignazio and Wonyoung So for the Washington Post.

Another aspect of that project that is connected to the work that Catherine and I did in Data Feminism is how it looks to women, to Indigenous folks, to Black folks, to folks on the margins, for historical examples of work using data and data visualization to challenge unequal power structures. Interestingly, many of these historical figures understood their work as multimodal and functioning not too dissimilarly from how Dr. Jenkins describes transmedia storytelling. You could think of W.E.B. Du Bois, or someone who I spend a lot of time talking about, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody–they understood their data visualizations as only part of the story, and were very explicit about how their images created meaning only when considered alongside writing and lived experience. There’s probably something in there about how the experience of being reduced to a datapoint, which is very common among marginalized folks, teaches you that the full story can only be gained by communicating across (and at times against) different media forms.   

FIGURE 3: A screenshot of the homepage-in-progress for Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization. Project team: Lauren Klein, Tanvi Sharma, Jay Varner, Nicholas Yang, Dan Jutan, Jianing Fu, Anna Mola, Zhou Fang, Shiyao Li, Margy Adams, and Yag Li. 

Renata: How do you see the present and future of feminism? I know it's a very broad question, but what is the perspective between losses and gains today and in the coming years in academia, society, and companies?

Lauren and Catherine: This question has become timely in more ways than we could have ever known. With the Dobbs decision and all of these anti-trans bills coming up through the states, we have suffered major losses, so as a society we need feminism now more than ever. And that clear need for feminism is a gain. With that said, we need to be very very careful to ensure that the feminism of the future is an inclusive one, that a renewed attention to child-bearing bodies doesn’t come at the expense of trans exclusion. We all deserve autonomy over our bodies, and some work we as feminists can do is to help everyone–in society as well as in academia and industry–see how reproductive justice and trans justice are both struggles for autonomy, and those struggles are interconnected. 

Lauren: One other hope for the feminism of the future is that it will become more transnational, and in particular, that the (perceived) dominance of US feminist movements–at least from our perspective here in the US–might become a little shaken up. We have so much to learn from Latin American feminist movements in places like Argentina, for example, which were ultimately successful in re-establishing abortion rights. Theirs was a struggle that began out of an anti-feminicide movement, grew to encompass reproductive rights, and per my comment above now includes issues relating to transgender justice. These activists recognized that their values and goals were aligned with each other, and that they would be more powerful if they allied themselves with each other. The broad lesson of solidarity is one that’s always helpful to re-hear. 

 

Renata: In Data Feminism, Catherine presented it as follows:

I am a hacker mama. I spent fifteen years as a freelance software developer and experimental artist, now professor, working on projects ranging from serendipitous news-recommendation systems to countercartography to civic data literacy to making breast pumps not suck. I'm here writing this book because, for one, the hype around big data and AI is deafeningly male and white and technoheroic and the time is now to reframe that world with a feminist lens. The second reason I'm here is that my recent experience running a large, equity-focused hackathon taught me just how much people like me—basically, well-meaning liberal white people—are part of the problem in struggling for social justice.

And Lauren:

I often describe myself as a professional nerd. I worked in software development before going to grad school to study English, with a particular focus on early American literature and culture. (Early means very early—like, the eighteenth century.) As a professor at an engineering school, I now work on research projects that translate this history into contemporary contexts. For instance, I'm writing a book about the history of data visualization, employing machine-learning techniques to analyze abolitionist newspapers, and designing a haptic recreation of a hundred-year-old visualization scheme that looks like a quilt. Through projects like these, I show how the rise of the concept of “data” (which, as it turns out, really took off in the eighteenth century) is closely connected to the rise of our current concepts of gender and race.

The trajectories of you both are special and inspiring. Therefore, I would like to know:

What advice do you have for academics and people who would like to work in areas similar to yours? Or for a world view, how to start having a more plural, diverse, fair view and to put this into practice? What were your main inspirations in life? What is the importance of storytelling in your life?

Catherine: My main inspirations in life were books and stories. As a shy kid, I would retreat to reading, books, and hanging out with my cat in a tree making up my own stories. I had a powerful role model in my father who is a writer and was also a technologist and early proponent of computers as creative and educational tools. One of the things I feel that I learned from him is that when you love seemingly unrelated things, you can bring them together. He did that in the form of creative educational technology at a time when computers were seen as tools for business and accounting. For me, the disparate things were software development and art and feminism. But it did take time to figure out how to join these interests. For a time, I had three separate careers as an independent artist, a freelance software developer and an adjunct professor. This was completely untenable after having kids and needing a steady paycheck, so I ended up struggling for some years trying to figure out a path forward. I was eventually able to find that path in academia. While definitely not perfect, there is a lot of intellectual and creative freedom you have as an academic. My advice for people is to take care of your own and your family's health and basic needs first – this is like the stable base from which you can be a creative person in the world – and then work on joining your seemingly disparate interests and values into a new path forward in the world. It is possible and the results will be beautiful.

Lauren: I love that! My advice is connected to Catherine’s, which is that it’s OK if your path is not a direct one, and that it’s totally fine (and, honestly, probably better) to permit yourself to follow each twist and turn. (I wish I’d given myself that permission when I was feeling lost). I also think the most interesting and impactful work comes from people who bring their own disparate interests together, and who have a range of experiences in the world. If you’re able (and I recognize that this isn’t an option for everyone) try to spend time in different environments and connect with different kinds of people. A broader and more inclusive world view begins with exposure and understanding.   

FIGURE 4: Lauren in the classroom at Emory University. Her co-taught course on Data Justice brings together perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, about the promise and pitfalls of data and AI. Photo by Kay Hinton.

As far as storytelling, that’s a large part of how I see my current work. I research things that matter to me and then use storytelling to try to make them matter to others. I spent a lot of time thinking about narrative and structure and style and, simply put, how to tell a good story. Stories are how we learn about–and learn to care about–lives and experiences that we can’t directly access. I feel so privileged that this is the kind of work I get to do. 

 

Biography

Renata Frade is a tech feminism PhD candidate at the Universidade de Aveiro (DigiMedia/DeCa). Cátedra Oscar Sala/ Instituto de Estudos Avançados/Universidade de São Paulo Artificial Intelligence researcher. Journalist (B.A. in Social Communication from PUC-Rio University) and M.A. in Literature from UERJ. Henry Jenkins´ transmedia alumni and attendee at M.I.T., Rede Globo TV and Nave school events/courses. Speaker, activist, community manager, professor and content producer on women in tech, diversity, inclusion and transmedia since 2010 (such as Gartner international symposium, Girls in Tech Brazil, Mídia Ninja, Digitalks, MobileTime etc). Published in 13 academic and fiction books (poetry and short stories). Renata Frade is interested in Literature, Activism, Feminism, Civic Imagination, Technology, Digital Humanities, Ciberculture, HCI.

Catherine D´Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the  Data + Feminism Lab  which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial justice.

Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the Departments of  English  and  Quantitative Theory & Methods  at Emory University, where she also directs the  Digital Humanities Lab . She previously taught in the  School of Literature, Media, and Communication  at  Georgia Tech . 

What Makes Media Work Special is Also What Can Make People Sick

In recent years, across various media professions around the world, a series of reports, industry-wide surveys and studies commissioned by unions and other organized networks documented what some call a mental health crisis among media practitioners. Prominent examples include a series of ‘Mentally Healthy’ reports by Never Not Creative, UnLtd, and Everymind in Australia (since 2018 surveying thousands of workers across various media industries), a landmark 2022 ‘Taking Care’ report on the wellbeing of Canadian media workers, regular ‘Looking Glass’ survey reports on the UK film and tv sector by the Film and TV Charity, the Australian Actors’ Wellbeing Study (AWS), and media professionals from around the world participating in cross-national surveys such as by the World Federation of Advertisers (in the context of its Global Diversity Equity and Inclusion Census starting in 2021), the annual Developer Satisfaction Survey by the International Game Developers Association (conducted in some form since 2004), and the International Center for Journalists (as part of its monitoring of the consequences of the pandemic). Reports on content creators, streamers, influencers and others in social media entertainment similarly suggest such practitioners often struggle with mental health issues related to the work.

The majority of workers in the media – in digital games, advertising, marketing communications and public relations, film and television, music, social media, and journalism – report experiencing mental health problems, struggling with feelings of fatigue, isolation and depression related to the job, and experiencing irregular and inadequate sleep. Media professionals subsequently tend to engage in a variety of unhealthy lifestyle practices such as lack of regular physical activity, poor nutrition and overeating, and smoking and alcohol abuse. Despite all of this, most of these industry studies and reports note that professionals still claim to be satisfied on the job. As one recent research headline notes: “Journalists Sense Turmoil in Their Industry Amid Continued Passion for Their Work” (from a 2022 survey among nearly 12,000 U.S.-based working journalists by the Pew Research Center).

While the numbers differ somewhat in different industries, in different parts of the world, and the way all of this impacts the working lives of individuals in specific contexts, a global picture emerges of an industry where its professionals are clearly suffering yet also seemingly happy at work. It is exactly this tension between vision and reality that goes to the heart of any debate and assessment of mental health and wellbeing in media work.

When considered in terms of work-related psycho-social risk factors, working in the media has remarkably consistent key elements that can be considered to be potentially hazardous to people’s physical and mental health, across the broad spectrum of professional media production practices:

professionals generally work in informal circumstances, quite often unregulated and without clear policies, protocols and standards (for example regarding bodily and social safety);

an ever-transforming technological context of the work expects workers to constantly learn and adapt to new standards, skills, and production processes;

the work tends to be (physically, cognitively, emotionally) involving and demanding, as expressed in long working hours, having to manage intense emotions (of colleagues, clients, as well as consumers), and needing to be ‘always on’ to keep going and make it work;

jobs are few and far between, often without formal benefits such as sick pay, medical or legal protections, and scheduled time off, and tend to be governed by conditions of ‘atypical’ or non-standard employment;

the job market tends to be quite competitive, high strung and conflictful, involving a lot of unpaid and speculative labor; and

the culture at work can be characterized by constant looming deadlines, unusually intense schedules and pressured productivity, all of which are further illustrated by numerous industry-wide reports of ‘toxic’ work cultures (often on the level of specific teams or certain departments) where favoritism, bullying and work overload are prevalent. Some high-profile examples include Weta Digital in New Zealand, the Ellen DeGeneres TV show in the U.S., Canadian newspaper The Toronto Star, game company Activision Blizzard facing numerous lawsuits, and Dutch popular tv show DWDD facing formal workplace reviews or lawsuits, and dealing with worker suicides.

It is important to note that all more or less work-related hazardous issues related to the physical and mental health of media professionals tend to be disproportionally experienced by women, minorities, workers with disabilities, and those working in non-standard employment settings. Moving forward to addressing these issues, it is therefore essential to take an intersectional approach – considering how aspects such as gender, ethnicity, class, age, ability, and family status intersect when experiencing, coping with and addressing occupational hazards and work-related stress disorders.

Considering the available evidence regarding the mental health and wellbeing of media professionals, it seems we are faced with a paradox: what makes media work special is also what can make people sick. The very elements that are most likely to contribute to mental illness because of circumstances at work – a highly pressured, informally organized environment where people tend to be passionate about the work – also add to the attractiveness of such jobs throughout the various media industries. Key factors that explain the occurrence and persistence of work-related stress disorders across various industrial sectors tend to be paramount for the media industries: lack of reciprocity (between people’s passionate engagement and the often-indifferent nature of the industry), low procedural justice (typified by less than clear policies and inadequate management), and unusually high job demands (in media governed by the permanent deadline of the digital). Work in the media, in other words, for many constitutes a distinct occupational hazard.

It has to be noted that there is an emerging awareness on all of this across the media industry. Some companies provide employees free access to mental health applications such as Moment, Moodkit and Headspace, offer (some) counseling sessions, appoint confidential advisers, and organize events around employee wellbeing. Notably, freelancers tend to be excluded from such initiatives, and at the moment these are still exceptions to the rule of the industry still underestimating, downplaying or willfully ignoring that media work comes at a cost.

What remains is the question of what we (as media scholars, educators, students, current and future media professionals) can do? Many of the referenced industry reports in this post make excellent recommendations for companies to introduce formal protocols for addressing problematic work cultures and handling health issues, raising awareness of health and wellbeing at work, and calling for further professionalization when it comes to issues related to mental health and wellbeing.

Although these issues play out across the various industries, only the field of journalism has a relatively well-developed field of scholarship and practice around mental health, trauma and wellbeing, offering rich resources. Of particular relevance here I would like to mention the ‘Recommendations for supporting journalists’ well-being’ drawn up by a British working group on journalists’ wellbeing in the Spring of 2022, featuring representatives of the BBC, British National Union of Journalists, Centre for Media Monitoring, European Federation of Journalists, Headlines Network, Reach, Rory Peck Trust, Society of Freelance Journalists and UNESCO, as well as academics (disclaimer: I had the privilege of participating with this working group). These recommendations, applicable to any kind of media organization, as documented by Maja Šimunjak of Middlesex University London, include:

acknowledge the well-being issue and contribute to the culture change;

create and deliver fair and transparent support systems within media organizations;

ensure well-being practices and systems are accessible and sustainable; and

build and join coalitions to support evidence-informed solutions.

Another important initiative I would like to mention is the Journalism Education and Trauma Research Group (JETREG), originally formed by about sixty journalism educators around the world, meeting regularly online and organizing symposia, workshops, and seminars, and contributing to publications.

Beyond these examples I would like to conclude this contribution with a benchmark scholarly intervention in the field: the promotion and development of mental health literacy specific to media work, and the necessity to highlight and pursue research and teaching in media (and related fields) that is grounded in the principles of creative justice.

First, one could argue that what media work seems to be missing is a certain degree of mental health literacy, broadly defined as knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention. Considered in more detail by Australian psychologist Tony Jorm (who originally coined the concept in the mid-1990s), mental health literacy consists of:

a)     knowledge of how to prevent mental disorders,

b)    recognition of when a disorder is developing,

c)     knowledge of help-seeking options and treatments (insofar as such options are available),

d)    knowledge of effective self-help strategies, and

e)     first aid skills to support others affected by mental health problems.

Throughout the literature and industry reports it seems that media organizations tend to take little or no responsibility for the mental health of their employees – let alone for the growing army of freelancers and otherwise atypically employed professionals that make up the bulk of the workforce. Furthermore, the culture of the business – with its roots in a ‘tough-nosed’ style of management, relentless focus on deadlines, an overall lack of diversity, equity and inclusivity, coupled with a naturalization of stressful working conditions (“this is just the way things work around here”) – is not particularly conducive to the development and implementation of mental health literacy. One could add to this kind of literacy particular to media work the development of a nuanced notion of mental health and wellbeing as outlined earlier, including the critical awareness that the very elements that can contribute to mental illness also explain the attractiveness of the work.

Second, Mark Banks (of the University of Glasgow) advocates how we should pursue creative justice in all our work – and promotes corresponding practices throughout the media industries. When making sense of, managing, or doing media work, creative justice means respecting all the internal benefits, capacities and pleasures media work provides, without discounting the external structures and pressures (such as exploitation, alienation, low pay, and stress) that can make media work deeply unfair and unjust. This additionally includes advancing social arrangements that allow for the maximum range of people to enter and participate in the work, in which they will be fairly treated and justly paid and rewarded for their efforts. It is this inclusive, inevitably ambivalent perspective on mental health and wellbeing in media work that is necessary in order to move forward effectively.

Of course, simply introducing mental health literacy and creative justice does not solve any problems – some would argue the root cause is (the culture of contemporary) capitalism, where success seems to be premised on one’s ability to accept fragmentation and permanent change, which in turn prohibits the kind of anticipation and hope that one needs in order to rebel against intolerable working conditions. However, I would argue that adequate literacy about mental health, and pursuing work benchmarked with the principles of creative justice, can empower media scholars, students and (prospective) professionals alike to both envision and enact different futures.

Biography

Mark Deuze is a professor of Journalism and Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam (before that at Indiana University). He is author of 11 books, including McQuail's Media and Mass Communicatin Theory (Sage, 2020), Leven in Media(Amsterdam University Press, 2017), Media Life (Polity Press, 2012) and Media Work (Polity Press, 2007).

On Parasocial Relationships with Professional Athletes

The following post was created as part of the assigned work for Henry Jenkins's PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals. The goal of the class is to help communication and media studies students to develop the skills and conceptual framework necessary to do more public-facing work. They learn how to write op-eds, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and dialogic writing and consider examples of contemporary and historic public intellectuals from around the world. The definition of public intellectuals goes beyond a celebrity-focus approach to think about all of the work which gets done to engage publics — at all scales — with scholarship and critiques concerning the media, politics, and everyday life. Our assumption is that most scholars and many nonscholars do work which informs the public sphere, whether it is speaking on national television or to a local PTA meeting. 

I might owe my sister an apology.

My family have always been fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. To most Philadelphians, being an Eagles fan means more than just supporting our favorite football team: it’s a lifestyle. We bleed green, as they say. Generations of children have been raised on the grit and fire and defiance offered by Eagles teams. We’ve formed a collective identity and earned notoriety around being underdogs in the National Football League (NFL), the brash and bare-knuckled bullies who always have to scrap for what we deserve. It’s always been us vs. everybody.

So when my sister brought home an Odell Beckham, Jr. jersey several years ago, I was mortified. Not only did he play for the New York Giants, our football rivals since the beginning of football, but he was an extremely skilled, lightning-fast receiver who always seemed to have our number. I was furious when I saw her holding that horrible red and blue jersey. In my memory, I ranted and raved for days. I knew OBJ was an exciting athlete to watch, but was he worth compromising our values? How could she ever cheer for a Giants player? Who did she think she was, bringing that into our house?

Figure 1: Odell Beckham, Jr. (OBJ) catching a touchdown over an Eagles player. Image by USA Today (2016)

It wasn’t until years later that I realized she had recognized something crucial about the changing landscape of American sports fandom: people invest a lot more into individual players today than they have in the past.

American sports fandom: from team to player

In years past, sports fandom was strongly defined by location, and people generally cared more about their favorite teams than their favorite players. Many of the fiercest rivalries in NFL history, for example, have been predicated on proximity. There are only 184 miles between the home stadia of the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears, the two titans of the NFL’s most notorious rivalry; only 85 miles separate my Eagles from the Giants’ home at MetLife Stadium. In the past, fans chose a team and stuck with it, and it was easier to stick with a team whose fanbase was local.

That trend seems to be shifting for sports fans lately. Brendan Dwyer (2011) explored some of these changes in their piece on evolving fan loyalty: they argued that digital sports technology, in particular fantasy sports, could shift our fannish sentiments from team-based to player-oriented. In the fantasy sports context, competitors win points based on the athletic performances of the players they’ve chosen. Players gain more points for the ‘managers’ of their fantasy team by putting up better stats, and they lose these ‘managers’ points by making in-game errors. More than ever before, we’re closely following and monitoring the input of individual players.

This evolution to player-based spectatorship has fascinating implications for the relationships between professional players and sports fans. Many of us watch teams we don’t even like simply to observe their star players in action. The Milwaukee Bucks aren’t a worthy spectacle without Giannis Antetokounmpo; the Memphis Grizzlies don’t make headlines, but Ja Morant does. We should expect this increased scrutiny of individual players over teams to impact fannish perceptions of those players, but it’s unclear right now exactly how these changes across sports leagues have shifted fans’ parasocial relationships with athletes.

Parasocial relationships with athletes

The term “para-social relationship” was first seen in a 1956 publication by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl wherein they analyzed mass media and how consumers relate to personas. Parasocial relationships are imagined connections between us and people who don’t know we exist; they are, in essence, our manifestations of the assumed intimacy between us and the people we see on our screens. These (generally one-sided) relationships exist, as Horton and Wohl would say, “between spectator and performer.” Horton and Wohl argued that parasocial relationships can be considered part and parcel of a normal life, tools that can help us understand ourselves socially in relation to others. They also, however, cautioned readers against developing intense parasocial relationships that obscure the realities around us.

Parasocial relationships can look different in different contexts. Some of us have posters of our favorite performers on our bedroom walls. Some of us consider ourselves part of a global fan network, a hive of sorts, united through the common goal of defending our ‘faves.’ Some of us just really, really like watching Bob Ross videos. Even if we haven’t called them by their name, parasocial relationships exist all around us and have for a long time.

 Figure 2: Michael Jackson live in Bucharest for the Dangerous tour. Video from YouTube

We’ve clearly developed parasocial relationships with professional athletes and other celebrities in the past, well before social media and sports tech. As a student in Los Angeles, I can’t help but think of the public allure of athletic personas like Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, O.J. Simpson, and LeBron James. These figures can be thought of as having transcended the typical mold of the athlete; they don’t just “shut up and dribble”, they evolved to represent something personal, powerful, and intimate for the fans who follow them.

Figure 3: Messages of support outside O.J. Simpson’s home in Los Angeles. Image by Steve Granitz/WireImage 

Figure 4: LeBron leaves the court after a game against the Phoenix Suns, Nov 12, 2019. Image by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

New sports media and technology

We’ve clearly been fostering parasocial interactions with professional athletes for a long, long time now. However, new media and technologies are drastically changing our relationships to professional athletes, and quickly. Our modern mediascape looks completely different than it did even just five or ten years ago, and our parasocial relationships have become much more complicated as a result. Sports tech like fantasy football has arguably driven the move from geographic team fandom to player-based fandom, but most academic studies on sports fandom couldn’t have anticipated, for example, the legalization of sports betting in the U.S. in 2018. Fans now have skin in the game like never before, which has changed the ways we interact with pro athletes and how we allocate blame for our financial decisions.

Figure 5: Highway billboard that reads: “WHY SHOULD VEGAS HAVE ALL THE FUN? DRAFTKINGS SPORTSBOOK IS COMING TO NJ.” Photo by @readDanwrite on Twitter.

Though the legality of sports betting is ultimately decided by each individual state, the digitization of the practice allows fans to place bets from virtually anywhere. And people don’t just make bets on teams: parlays and prop bets make it easy to bet your money on the performance of an individual player. If I as a fan bet my own hard-earned money on LeBron grabbing 8 rebounds and he only manages to pull down 7, I’m gonna have way more of an issue with him than I would have, had my money not been on the line. Social media sites represent the perfect platform for fans who’ve lost money betting on sports to speak directly to professional athletes.  

Figure 6: Fans use Twitter to express their frustration with player insufficiencies around betting.

To add to all the commotion, the modern mediascape has done more than enable us to speak with athletes: it’s granted athletes the space to speak back to us. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Lillian Feder’s (2020) research on the COVID-19 pandemic and athletes. They found that “heightened online interaction between professional athletes and fans [during the pandemic] has served to strengthen their existing parasocial relationships.” Feder went a step further, though, to clarify that the relationships between the two groups haven’t just been fortified as a result of this heightened online interaction: extraordinarily, they’ve begun to trouble our core understanding of what constitutes a parasocial relationship in the first place.

If we’ve read up on our Horton and Wohl, we understand parasocial relationships as providing the illusion of intimacy, but the combination of social media and the COVID-19 pandemic have created an environment wherein these relationships are more than just one-sided or imagined. Now more than ever, we’re not just tweeting into the void when we slander athletes and other celebrities online. Whether consciously or not, we’re engineering and maintaining social spaces around sports fandom that defy what we’ve collectively understood to be parasocial. Professional athletes (and mutual relationships with them) are no longer out of our reach.

Often, these athletes have expressed frustration and disdain with new fan practices around betting. Apparently, they don’t take kindly to being treated as commodity so explicitly.

Figure 7: Athletes use Twitter and Instagram to voice their displeasure with the social habits around fan betting

In a country built on the enslavement of Black people, wherein the most profitable sports leagues are majority Black, sports betting stands to represent a slippery slope in regards to race and labor. Those tensions are not easy to untangle. It is critical to explore fannish responses to new sports technologies; however, we are in clear need of an intervention around the ways we think and talk about the bodies of athletes, and it is necessary to learn more about athletes’ responses to the changing shape of sports fandom.

Final thoughts

Simply put, sports fandom looks shockingly different than it did even just a few years ago. The changing dynamics of fan relationships to players and teams have been intensified by new social modalities and sports technologies. We have muddied the waters around what it means to have a parasocial relationship with somebody, and we have yet to discover the implications of this cloudiness. Do we need to expand our definition of parasocial interaction to encompass this sort of quasi-reciprocal relationship that exists between professional athletes and sports fans? Or should these phenomena be classified as something else entirely? We have yet to fully understand or describe the impacts of these evolving social dynamics of sports fandom on our relationships with professional athletes.

It’s difficult to admit, but when my sister bought that Odell Beckham jersey, she wasn’t undermining the team-based fandom that I had grown so accustomed to. She was pioneering (in our household, at least) a new way of thinking that reflected modern shifts in fan self-definition. And because she knew something about the changing state of sports fandom that I didn’t quite know yet at the time, I’m happy to offer her my apologies. But I ain’t buying no damn Giants jersey.

Biography

nikki thomas is a Philly sports fan, cat mom, and PhD student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. nikki’s scholarly work revolves around the changing shape(s) of NFL and NBA fandom, with a focus on parasocial relationships between athletes and fans. Recently, they have been dipping their toe into film photography and sports talk radio. Previously, nikki studied education and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

From Brazil to L.A. : Transmedia and Audiovisual Creators Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz (Part Two)

See Part One of “From Brazil to L.A. : Transmedia and Audiovisual Creators Raphael Draccon and Carolina Munhoz”

Stephen King (2010) said “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.” What were the main inspirations during your trajectory as book authors and, if in the transition to audiovisual, these inspirations changed and what would they be? Could you talk about the process of creating narratives in books, TV series and now in comics?

Our main inspirations as authors have been classic literature, folklore, and mythology. Whether in books like Dragons of Ether and For a Golden Touch or series like The Chosen One and Invisible City, we like to bring our version of the stories that made us storytellers, especially in a way that makes the reader/viewer wonder if it could be real.

In the transition to audiovisual, our inspirations have expanded to include films and TV shows we admire, from Breaking Bad and Succession to Spartacus and Supernatural. Creating narratives in different mediums is always challenging, but we try to stay true to our vision and adapt our storytelling to fit the medium.

 

There is an immense number of courses and manuals on audiovisual, cinematographic language, technical aspects, script, writing manuals in books. Today, for someone starting a career as an author, especially in a multiplatform market of fictional content, what would be the main sources for study?

The main sources for study for someone starting a career as an author in a multiplatform market of fictional content would be to read widely and study the craft of writing. Many resources, such as writing blogs, courses, and workshops, are available online. It's also important to stay current on industry trends and network with other professionals.

The amount of free material available on YouTube these days is more than anything I had access to in film school. Not to mention that an iPhone can shoot better quality movies than the digital cameras of years ago. The directors and the entire editing team of Everything Everywhere All at Once never took visual effects courses and learned to edit through internet tutorials. If you really want it, it's all there. Just go get it and practice!

 

McKee (2014) said “the audience´s emotional involvement is held by the glue of empathy. If the writer fails to fuse a bond between filmgoer and protagonist, we sit outside feeling nothing. Involvement has nothing to do with evoking altruism or compassion. We empathize for very personal, not egocentric reasons. When we identify with a protagonist and his desires for him in life, we are in fact rooting for our own desires in life.”

The audience consumes entertainment more and more, especially audiovisual. TV series have become a phenomenon in the last ten years outside the USA, where they are consolidated in countries like Brazil. This consumption sophistication can denote that everything has already been seen and known in terms of storytelling, so how to awaken this empathy with readers or spectators?

An observation that I believe is part of this question is the fact that your series, “Invisible City,” was built with contemporary characters formed from the archetypes of characters from Brazilian folklore. Characters so endowed with specific, local, and cultural characteristics, ended up awakening empathy in spectators who had never heard of Saci, Yara, Cuca around the world. What is the connection point? Would it be possible to rationalize this in an answer?

figure 4: Credit: Authors´ Facebook profile

figure 5: Credit: Authors´ Facebook profile

figure 6: Credit: Authors´ Facebook profile

We believe that empathy is the key to engaging audiences with storytelling. We can make audiences emotionally invested in the story by creating characters that audiences can identify with and root for.

In the case of "Invisible City," we wanted to introduce Brazilian folklore to a global audience and create relatable and contemporary characters. We believe the connection point was the story's universal themes of love, loss, family, and identity.

I always like to use the example that nobody cares if your story is about a knight going to slay a dragon. But if your story is about how that knight must slay the dragon to protect his village, about the sacrifice for his daughter, about the love left behind and the price he is willing to pay to become a legend, then that story everyone will care.

 

“Storytelling is as much about the way in which you choose to tell a story as it is about content” (Bernardo, 2015). What do you think about developing narratives for videogames? If so, where and when?

Developing narratives for video games is a unique challenge that requires a deep understanding of game design and mechanics. We believe that storytelling in games can be just as powerful as in other mediums and can create immersive and interactive experiences for players. It's important to approach game storytelling with a different mindset than other mediums and to collaborate closely with other professionals. It is a collective work, squeezed between an original work, our vision as creators, and the expectation of a fan base.

We have had many contacts with producers ranging from the makers of Sonic to the Playstation games, and at some point, one of these game adaptations for other media will happen on our part.

 

Before becoming a couple, you already had your respective careers as authors. Together you conquered memorable steps inside and outside Brazil. Collaboration, for Syd Field (2005), “is a relationship. And a half-and-half split. Two or more people are working together to create a final product, a script. Collaborators tend to lose sight of this quickly. They get bogged down in 'being right' and other ego conflicts, so you better ask yourself a few questions first. There are no rules when it comes to collaboration. You have to create it, make it grow as you go along. And like a wedding. You have to create it, sustain it and maintain it.”

What is it like reconciling a professional life so close to personal in creation, not getting lost in relation to the ego and also in the company of other screenwriters in the conception and development of series and projects? Could you talk about the experience of collaborating cultural and entertainment products in Brazil and the US? What did you learn where you are and what you could contribute in terms of experiences?

Syd Field compared the collaboration between writers to marriage; in our case, we are married. So the trust, open communication, and preferences were already established between us by our married life, which were transported to our screenwriting partnership.

We had years of following and cheering for each other's careers before joining them, so ego and hurdles were prevented. We love entertainment and are workaholics, so sharing life and work for us feels natural. Even the pandemic didn't affect because we were already used to working from home and with each other twenty-four seven.

Collaborating professionally and personally can be challenging, but we believe it's worth it when the result is a project we are both passionate about. It's important to communicate openly and honestly with each other and to value each other's contributions. We have learned a lot from collaborating with professionals in Brazil and the US, and we believe our unique perspective as Latin American creators can contribute to that.

 

In cultural studies and the entertainment industry and the creative industry studies, there are criticisms about the use of reward resources and loyalty in attracting and maintaining an audience, such as bonuses and ratings. According to McQuail & Deuze (2020), “not just as loyal customers, but also as participants (in publicizing and promoting activities) and sometimes even co-creators in maintaining a profitable value chain. As fans migrate within a franchise across multiple media properties, and franchises are increasingly created in ways as to entice such migration, metrics for the multi-channel audience become an important property of media business decision-making.”

When developing projects for companies like Netflix and HBO, do you feel pressure to generate this type of engagement and create worlds parallel to the central narrative source for commercial promotion of the content?

These strategies are important for media business decision-making and maintaining a profitable value chain. This pressure extends to the creator because the algorithm counts every minute watched as a statistic, forcing creators to think even if the opening scene of their series would benefit that metric.

It is not ideal if we think only as storytellers, but this is the game, and if you want to play, you have to know the rules.

figure 7: Credit: Authors´ Facebook profile

Well-constructed turning points are essential for the success of a series, a movie, a book. Could you say if there are differences in the construction of these moments of narrative turn in books, comics, movies and TV series, or would the principle be the same?

While there may be some differences in the construction of turning points in books, comics, movies, and TV series, the basic principles are the same. A well-constructed turning point should be a moment in the story where a significant change occurs, affecting the plot's direction and the characters' development. It should also create tension and keep the audience engaged. The way these moments are presented and executed may vary depending on the medium, but the overall principles remain the same.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that a movie and a series have the opinions of many more people than a book. And the more success and attention it receives, the more it will try to please the established audience.

The most impactful would be the soap opera structure, where the audience can change plot twists in the same week, according to the rating numbers.

 

How was the experience of creating a comic book? How has it been received by readers? Do you intend to develop others? Could you talk about upcoming projects?

figure 8: Credit: Authors´ Facebook profile

figure 9: Credit: Authors´ Facebook profile

Creating a comic book can be a challenging and rewarding experience. For us, it was easy because it is a medium we love and because we work with characters we grew up with.

We had the experience of being novelists and screenwriters before doing a comic, which helped. We can't wait to do more and have plans about that for now, we can't share, but we hope to announce them soon.

 

References

Bernardo, N. (2015). Transmedia 2.0: how to create an entertainment brand using a transmedial approach to storytelling. Lisbon: Beactive Books.

Bradbury R. (2017). Zen in the art of writing. New York: RosettaBooks.

Field, S. (2005). Screenplay: the foundations of screenwriting. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

King, S. (2010). On writing: a memoir of the craft. Scribner trade pbk. ed., 10th anniversary ed. New York: NY, Scribner.

McKee, R. (2014). Story: style structure substance and the principles of screenwriting. HarperCollins e-Books.  

McQuail, D. & Deuze, M. (2020). Mcquail's media and mass communication theory (Seventh). London: SAGE Publications.

Biography

Renata Frade is a tech feminism PhD candidate at the Universidade de Aveiro (DigiMedia/DeCa). Cátedra Oscar Sala/ Instituto de Estudos Avançados/Universidade de São Paulo Artificial Intelligence researcher. Journalist (B.A. in Social Communication from PUC-Rio University) and M.A. in Literature from UERJ. Henry Jenkins´ transmedia alumni and attendee at M.I.T., Rede Globo TV and Nave school events/courses. Speaker, activist, community manager, professor and content producer on women in tech, diversity, inclusion and transmedia since 2010 (such as Gartner international symposium, Girls in Tech Brazil, Mídia Ninja, Digitalks, MobileTime etc). Published in 13 academic and fiction books (poetry and short stories). Renata Frade is interested in Literature, Activism, Feminism, Civic Imagination, Technology, Digital Humanities, Ciberculture, HCI.