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

Critical Cultural Communication

by Suzanne Scott

Reveals the systematic marginalization of women within pop culture fan communities

When Ghostbusters returned to the screen in 2016, some male fans of the original film boycotted the all-female adaptation of the cult classic, turning to Twitter to express their disapproval and making it clear that they considered the film's "real" fans to be white, straight men. While extreme, these responses are far from unusual, with similar uproars around the female protagonists of the new Star Wars films to full-fledged geek culture wars and harassment campaigns, as exemplified by the #GamerGate controversy that began in 2014.

Over the past decade, fan and geek culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream as fans have become tastemakers and promotional partners, with fan art transformed into official merchandise and fan fiction launching new franchises. But this shift has left some people behind. Suzanne Scott points to the ways in which the "men's rights" movement and antifeminist pushback against "social justice warriors" connect to new mainstream fandom, where female casting in geek-nostalgia reboots is vilified and historically feminized forms of fan engagement--like cosplay and fan fiction--are treated as less worthy than male-dominant expressions of fandom like collection, possession, and cataloguing. While this gender bias harkens back to the origins of fandom itself, Fake Geek Girls contends that the current view of women in fandom as either inauthentic masqueraders or unwelcome interlopers has been tacitly endorsed by Hollywood franchises and the viewer demographics they selectively champion. It offers a view into the inner workings of how digital fan culture converges with old media and its biases in new and novel ways.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Cultural, Academic, Gender, Fandom

302 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 16, 2019

Reviews

[Jacqie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a bit of a hard time with this book. It's written in dense, academic language, but I'm not sure that it supports its thesis, or even exactly what its thesis is. Maybe it's this (from the beginning of the last paragraph of the introduction): "Fandom's war on women thus draws on media industries' historical devaluation of female audiences and longstanding conceptions of space (real or virtual) as mapping and maintaining gendered structures of power." I find this sentence difficult to parse. On the one hand, using inflammatory language such as "fandom's war on women" hardly suggests an academic, objective work. I'd paraphrase this as: misogyny in fandom takes its arguments from professional media industries and its historical perspective of gender and power structures. Sound about right? Maybe a bit easier to understand? Maybe makes fandom seem a bit less monolithic in its attitudes towards women? So, in other words, the roots of amateur/fandom's attitudes toward women were already present in the larger media representations of them. Maybe even a bit easier to see? A slightly more interesting argument?
That sentence encapsulates the issues I had with this book. The language is heavy academese, but the arguments seems to largely consist of a few specific examples widely known in fandom with much extrapolation that these examples therefore exemplify all male fandom's attitude towards women. This feels like too broad of an argument, supported by a few examples instead of actual data analysis. One chapter (4) is almost entirely taken up with the Walking Dead/Talking Dead shows and how they are exclusionary of female fandom. Each chapter might be an interesting journal article, but taken together they aren't stitched tightly enough to make a good argument for a book.
To me, this book felt like it wanted the trappings of academia without the rigor to support it. Now, I am more familiar with psychology or history academia than media studies, but it seems to me that the liberal arts (of which history is a part) still has an obligation to back a thesis up with data. This might be a qualitative study, but it is also an argument by the author to defend a community that she is a part of, and while her knowledge of fandom's inside baseball gives her a fair amount of examples to work with, it also makes it more difficult for me to see that she's got much more here than those very examples. And there are glaring oversights in the examples- the Sad Puppies, for example, got a huge amount of traction starting in 2013 and 2014 for wanting to take the Hugo Awards "back for classic science fiction", basically meaning white male-authored, male gazey type SF without a lot of diversity in the characters, but the whole kerfuffle, which lasted for years, is largely mysteriously absent. Is it because of coded language, another topic which gets short shrift here?

This may be the best text out there discussing misogyny in fandom, for all I know. But I'm not convinced that it's a good one. It goes out of its way to be inaccessible and doesn't tie up its argument in a coherent way.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A razor-sharp analysis of the crucial role gender continues to play within the “convergence culture industry” that caters to the tastes and desires of certain groups of fans over others. The book is elegantly organized, finding a perfect balance between theoretical sophistication and powerfully resonant case studies, all the while keeping everything perfectly clear and compulsively readable. I’m a fan. 😘

[Sistermagpie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent introduction and examination into the complex relationship between the creators of fan properties and their fans. The author focuses on ways the culture tries to legitimize certain fan practices and often, therefore, certain fans while marginalizing and controlling others. She focuses on a fanboy/fangirl divide, but sees it as a starting point to look at how this effects the treatment of plenty of other types of fans as well.

Some of the things she talks about I had thought about in the past, but she also gets into areas that I had no real personal experience in, like fan merchandising. There's also a really interesting consideration of professional fans like Chris Hardwick, who's a perfect example of what the media is looking for in a fan. And also how fans can use their own artistic creations to critique or push back on what they're being given.

Feels pretty perfect to have read this book right after watching "The Long Night" episode of Game of Thrones and certain fan reactions to it that were picked up by wider media.

[Gabi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense and complex deep dive into the gender politics of fandom. Even though she chose gender as her primary lens for this work, I appreciate the instances and the entire conclusion in which she discussed intersectionality and oft-neglected lenses in fan culture. Very academic (so not very casually accessible) and it took me some time to really process it, but a very smart and important book. It was written before Captain Marvel and Black Panther were released, so it was extra interesting to think about those movies and other recent media industry moves in this context.

[Courtney Tabor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I assigned this book for my 400-level students in Participatory Culture & Identity after previously reading (most of) it 3 years ago in a grad school class. It’s a great text that grapples with industry control, toxic masculinity, policing authenticity, and the efforts of women and girls to carve out spaces for themselves in fan communities. Fan studies isn’t my field, but it speaks to me in political ways, through feminist theory, and just as a woman trying to navigate the media sphere.

[Peggy Jupe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh boy. This book frequently hits the nail right on the head in regards to the ways in which the mainstreaming of nerd culture has in many cases served to underline the dominance of straight white men. While I expected it to unpack the real life consequences of these patterns, as a strictly theoretical discussion, it was very insightful. She a dense boi tho.

[S.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible and insightful piece of work and I highly recommend it. However, it is a scholarly text, so it is dense in places (particularly the intro and first chapter, I thought). Don’t go into this expecting a breezy read.

[Kennedy Koford Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for class but ended up loving it. Super interesting, especially coming from a female fan often steeped in geek circles and navigating that world.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting...lots to think about with gender and fan communities.