Suzanne Scott - Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

FAKE GEEK GIRLS

CRITICAL CULTURAL COMMUNICATION

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Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

Suzanne Scott

Fake Geek Girls

Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

Suzanne Scott

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

A portion of was first published as the article The Hawkeye Initiative: Pinning Down Transformative Feminisms in Comic-Book Culture through Superhero Crossplay Fan Art by Suzanne Scott from Cinema Journal 55:1, pp. 150160. Copyright 2015 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

ISBN: 978-1-4798-3860-8 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-4798-7957-1 (paperback)

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For Luke, my favorite fanboy.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Make Fandom Great Again

In a March 2017 interview with ICv2 , Marvel Comics senior vice president of sales and marketing, David Gabriel, blamed a slump in OctoberNovember comic book sales on the changing tastes of comic book readers. More precisely, Gabriel blamed the sales slump on a perceived lack of changing tastes among comic book readers. In a quotation that rapidly spread across digital fan platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, Gabriel bluntly stated, What we heard [from some comic retailers] was that people didnt want any more diversity. They didnt want female characters out there. Thats what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I dont know that thats really true, but thats what we saw in sales. It is significant that Gabriels comment conflates diversification with the development of female characters, particularly considering that Marvel Comics diversity initiatives of the past several years have included racially recasting iconic superheroes such as Spider-Man (mixed-race teen Miles Morales, who first donned the webslingers suit in 2011) and Captain America (with Caps black friend and fellow superhero Sam Wilson taking up the iconic shield in 2015).

There are two primary takeaways from Gabriels statement. The first is that the blame for Marvel Comics sales slump lies with female comic book fans, particularly those who have vocally criticized comic books lack of creative and representational diversity. This framing reaffirms that Marvel still considers women to be a surplus audience for mainstream superhero comics, and that they presume male readers are unlikely to invest (emotionally or economically) in female-led titles. Placing the blame on female fans for a sales slump precipitated by an array of issues, ranging from oversaturation of the market

Facing immediate pushback from predominantly female and minority comic book fans, and a wave of think pieces contesting his statistical claim about the comparatively low sales for diversity titles, Gabriel quickly walked back his response. Clarifying that Marvel remained committed to its newer female characters, Gabriel suggested that he was merely responding to comic retailers concerns about the companys perceived abandonment of the core Marvel heroes. and other fans were quick to draw parallels between the erosion of Captain Americas character and more cancerous forms of prejudice spreading through geek culture and society at large.

The past decade has been marked by growing fan activist efforts surrounding issues of diversity in media production cultures, and pushback from mostly cisgendered, heterosexual (cishet, hereafter), white, male fans who view these efforts as an unwelcome encroachment of political correctness and SJWs (a pejorative term deployed by antifeminist, racist, homophobic, or transphobic commenters online to disparage social justice warriors) into geek and fan culture. As the aforementioned controversy surrounding Gabriels comment makes clear, industrial diversity initiatives are often viewed skeptically by marginalized fans as performative or perfunctory, particularly when they are ultimately wielded to justify the industrys commitment to preexisting demographic conceptions of fans as straight, white men. A vicious cycle has accordingly emerged: minority fans offer justified critiques of hegemonic production cultures and media representations, content producers offer (routinely half-hearted) responses to speak back to these concerns, and media industries dismiss minority fans textual predilections as too niche when these efforts are not immediately successful, thus further empowering a segment of entitled white, straight male fans to dismiss minority fans concerns and invalidate their claim to authentic fan identity.