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Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane; her refusal to accept things the way they are is one of her defining characteristics. She is dropping out of the mainstream even while she embraces a thing that is as mainstream as a thing can get.
“Fan Is a Tool-Using Animal,” and concluded it with praise for what he saw as a DIY, punk-y energy: “Fans transgress. Fans never sold out, man!”6
In public, fangirls were a joke: a ball of hysteria, so noisy! On the internet, the joke was on everybody else. The Rihanna Navy moved over from a small co-run blog to a Twitter account called @RihannaDaily in 2009, the same year that the biggest fan accounts for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga appeared. At the time, Twitter had not yet decided what to be. These early Twitter-using fans often came from the cultural powerhouse of Black Twitter, or from insular fandom spaces like LiveJournal and Yahoo Groups, and initially found themselves in small, tightly knit clusters, discussing the movements of their
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“The story of my life, I take her home, I drive all night to keep her warm,” Harry Styles shouted— as she informed me. “The story of my life, I give her hope,”
If I focus, I can put myself back in that car and feel the hot rush of gratitude and surprise. I can see my oldest friend’s hand on the dial, turning it up without comment while our waves of nausea passed.
why I and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did, and how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody who spends their time in it.
How did fans use the internet to create and accrue a new kind of power? And then, What are the characteristics and limitations of that power?
As one-dimensional “girl power” rhetoric and corporate feminism have once again succeeded in leeching real meaning from the women’s movement, pop stars have also appropriated it for their own use, to charm greater allegiance from fans by embracing an extremely narrow idea of what it means to support women: supporting the beautiful women they’ve turned into stars, defending them on the internet by lashing out against anybody who would criticize them.
The legacy is something else: the people who took the paragon of a commercial product and made it the foundational text of a new kind of culture. Their indefatigable belief that the dull, senseless pain of modern life could be undone—the world remade in the likeness of a pop song.
Infatuation is irrational but it can be a precursor to introspection. The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time. Screaming at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.
I wanted to know how the screaming fangirl became a trope.
“Everything is set up against this idea of white straight masculinity, where the emotions are in control and the body is in control.”
gender blurrers, who performed emotion-filled and romantic music appreciated by women and feared by many men, who were threatened by this alternative mode of what masculinity could be.
The trope of the screaming fan also ignores the possibility that some fans know they’re being looked at, and that they don’t care.
This style of self-aware acquiescence to an irrational passion may always have been part of the screaming fangirl experience.
We knew that our lives
would not be fantasies, except for the fact that they were right now. When we shrieked, it was at the knowledge that the moment would end.
It’s “all about laying hands upon the source and twisting it to the fans’ own purposes,” they wrote in 2009. “It tends to spin outward into nutty chaos at the least provocation, and while there are majority opinions [and] minority opinions, it’s largely a democracy of taste; everyone has their own shot at declaring what the source material means, and at radically re-interpreting it.”2
All I know about them is that they were infatuated with or intrigued by One Direction enough to make something funny and weird using an image that most people would have considered pretty uninspiring. The resulting meme makes fun of One Direction and it makes fun of the people who love them—it may read in other ways to other fans, but to me it looks like a sardonic wink or a playful jab at fans’ ridiculous fervor for defending something that doesn’t really need defending.
Though the criticism of fangirls is that they become tragically selfless and one-track-minded, the evidence available everywhere I look is that they become self-aware and creatively free.
remember what I wanted more than anything when I was nineteen years old. I wanted something to happen to me that couldn’t be described.
Girls were writing “to maintain connection rather than to convey information,”
“Girls and women are a substantial presence on the World Wide Web,” the researcher Pamela Takayoshi wrote in 1999, bucking the general assumption—it was just that the sites they were building occupied “a nonmainstream, nondefault position” and were going unnoticed.18
A local is a person who belongs to no subculture, understands no intricacies of online humor, follows only the accounts of people they know in real life—and maybe The New York Times?—and retweets only the most generic content. Most simply, and most often, a local is a non-stan. If you haven’t been around since the early days of One Direction but buy a ticket to a Harry Styles concert just because you like his pants, you’re a local, taking up space that doesn’t belong to you.
The type of densely connected networks that Manjoo noted—in which people with shared cultural reference points follow each other’s accounts, becoming what’s known now as “mutuals”—is crucial to fandom,
The paper identified Twitter accounts that served as “hubs,” defining them as “a small number of influential users”
Critics of social media often point out that Twitter’s functionality and engagement-juicing business model rewards dramatics and over-the-top rhetoric—suggesting that the platform is its cause. But it’s also the emotional stakes of Stan Twitter that set the tone.
The structure of stan networks is what makes them feel so unavoidable on Twitter—their slang is everywhere, their trends are filling up the sidebar, their wrath is coming down on anyone who makes so much as an offhanded comment about a pop singer whose latest single was not their best. This is how the mannerisms of Stan Twitter became the mannerisms of the whole site—through mutuals creating, as they did, thousands of denser, smaller networks knit together.
online fandom’s allegiance to manipulation.
“The importance of fandom for personal identity is not so much about the disorder caused by the mass media as it is about the order found in devotion.”19
By then, the word “tinhat” was in wide use, as was the word “het,” as slang for a nonbeliever.
We should talk about how we went online, driven by some sort of longing, and why we stayed there, pushing that want outward, over and over, until it couldn’t be ignored.
