Mel Stanfill, Exploiting fandom: How the media industry seeks to manipulate fans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019, paperback, $75 (262p), ISBN 978-1609386238.
[1] Exploiting Fandom by Mel Stanfill sits at the intersection of two areas of fan studies that are seeing increased attention and work: a recognition of axes of identity that have been undertheorized, especially around issues of race and ethnicity; and an interest in the ways in which different groups within fandom exert a level of hegemonic power in order to constrain fans in their behaviors and performance of fandom. In particular, Stanfill is interested in the top-down exercise of that power, analyzing the ways in which various industries, but specifically the media industry, look to guide and encourage fans into particular forms of fannish practice and participation that will generate the most utility for the industry.
[2] Stanfill describes the organizing principle of the book as the domestication of fans, specifically connecting the management of fans by industrial structures to agricultural cultivation of animals. The analogy of fans to livestock is not one that will sit comfortably with all readers, but Stanfill does an excellent job of extending the metaphor, thinking through the ways in which the media industries guide fans into practices that are going to make them more valuable to the industry. Within this metaphor, Stanfill is careful to point out the benefits to fans too, proposing that the safeties and securities experienced by domesticated livestock, as opposed to wild animals, are similar to the benefits and privileges accorded to fans who act within industry guidelines. Although the domestication metaphor underlies the book's argument throughout, Stanfill actually refers to this metaphor relatively rarely; more work connecting the argument back to this metaphor could have strengthened its utility beyond the scope of this book. However, the underlying argument is strong and is comfortably supported throughout.
[3] Methodologically, Stanfill introduces readers to an innovative approach, big reading, that brings the practices of close reading to a big data–like sample. These sources include interviews conducted with industry professionals responsible for fan management and engagement, extant journalistic materials in which people have addressed industry/fan relations or specifically focused on journalistic coverage of two key annual fannish events, interfaces and terms of service (TOS) from a number of official websites of fannish interest, and representations of fans in fictional and nonfictional audiovisual products. This methodological approach allows for a holistic understanding of the discourses and ideals that exist within these diverse spaces related to fan practices.
[4] The book is divided into six chapters. The first discusses the ways in which different groups construct their own image of an idealized fan and addresses the normative image that this idealized fan represents. The second looks at the paradox represented by the fact that this normative fan (white, masculine) is also seen by those outside fandom as failing at the hegemonic potentials of their privilege through their involvement in fan cultures and addresses the ways that some fans seek to reassert the dominance afforded to them by their privilege. These two chapters, focused as they are on the fan image and fan identity, cover some relatively well-trodden ground, but they do offer important interventions by using three key axes—race, gender, and age—with relatively equal emphasis in order to construct a clear image of who the idealized normative fan is, especially in terms of the "unmarked category" (43), the category into which a given fan is assumed to fall unless defined otherwise. Stanfill also clearly identifies the failures of fannish identity to meet the normative imaginaries of these unmarked categories, such as failing to meet cultural standards of masculinity. Some of these areas have been previously theorized, but Stanfill brings different strands of academic thought together in order to outline a coherent paradigm of the normative conception of the fan.
[5] The book then moves from looking at fan identity to looking at fan practice. Stanfill addresses normative modes of consumption and the ways that media industries work to establish consumption as the standard mode of fan engagement. Stanfill notes at the start of chapter 3 that fan scholarship has been surprisingly uninterested in consumption as a dominant fannish mode (with a couple of noted exceptions) and aligns this with the negative connotations that consumption often bears. Stanfill takes a broad reading of consumption, identifying transmedial and interactive engagement as an extension of consumption (termed here Consumption 2.0), crafting a compelling argument for the importance of not neglecting consumption, particularly industry's desire for fan consumption, as a crucial element of fan experience. Chapter 4 adopts a legal perspective, examining the ways in which industries use the force of law, or threats thereof, to corral and constrain fan practices, using TOS or terms and conditions that far exceed the reach of the law in order to create economically advantageous conditions for the industry while giving up the least amount of control possible to fans. This chapter provides a detailed investigation of the legal and contractual frameworks that govern fan engagement. It is here, however, that Stanfill falls victim to their own paradigm. The unmarked category here is being American, with a strict focus on US laws and their effects on people within the United States, with no acknowledgment that a great number of fans operate outside this highly specific paradigm. Although there is an argument to be made regarding the impact of US laws on copyright structures globally, as well as the impact felt when supposedly global commercial sites such as YouTube are governed by laws that are stricter than, or at least diverge from, laws in other locales, such an argument is not made here. Thus, although the underlying critique mostly holds true of technology and TOS contracts being stricter than the law, it potentially only holds true in a single national context—a context that goes unmarked throughout.
[6] The final two chapters turn their attention to labor, looking at the work that fans perform, in different ways, in the process of practicing their fandom. The commodification of the time, energy, and information of fans is all cast as labor, with the normative fan being invited to "do the work of being watched" (19). The final chapter then works to understand what drives fan labor and how these drivers might differ depending on whether fans perform their labor on industry's terms. Here Stanfill looks at whether fans genuinely consent to the industry's extraction of value from their labor. Stanfill puts significant work into the argument that fan practices can and should be conceived in terms of labor, especially in the context of media industries seeking to employ fewer "full-time regular employees, in favor of a contingent workforce" (162). The Marxist economic reading of the role of fan labor in the media industries is instructive; it establishes a generative reading of exploitation based on surplus value, mostly avoiding the popular discourse casting fans as cultural dupes. However, this nuanced take is problematized by Stanfill's reading of consent, which stipulates that "in addition to not being coerced, people have to know what they are agreeing to" (170). In order to make the argument that industry use of fan labor is nonconsensual, Stanfill must make the argument that fans are not aware of the limitations placed on them contractually by industry's TOS, or that they are not aware of the extent of use of their data to which they are agreeing—an argument that replicates many of the discursive formulations of the cultural dupe. It's unclear on what Stanfill is basing the supposition that "in agreeing to the TOS of Twitter, one may formally agree to the use of one's data, but there is low awareness of the extent of use" (172–73). This supposition unfortunately undermines the consent argument as a whole, although there does seem to be space here for this argument to be built on and extended in useful ways in future work, especially through fan ethnography investigating the depth of understanding of the contractual terms that fans agree to. I still found the argument around exploitation convincing, though, and believe it offers a vital intervention into an area that fan studies often skirts or oversimplifies.
[7] The conclusion, which hearkens back to a moment of fannish activism that Stanfill uses to set the tone in the introduction, then brings in a trope from the mid-2010s: the entitled fan. This trope was used in contemporary online popular critical columns and was elucidated to mean any fan who expressed discontentment with the direction or practices of a fan text and who called for change. The critique of this fannish behavior came to a head with a widely circulated think piece, Devin Faraci's "Fandom Is Broken" (2016). Stanfill smartly positions this pushback against fans as being a part of the domestication drive, aimed at bringing fans within a normative understanding of appropriate responses, coded within the familiar discursive patterns of moral panic. Here Stanfill returns to the construction of fans, as seen in the first two chapters, with a focus on how both industry and popular culture might see the fan-as-identity category. Stanfill does not try to make an argument about whether fans are entitled but instead focuses on whether they are externally read as such. In this sense, Stanfill is convincing.
[8] Although not overtly presented as a dominant theme of the book, a key recurring element is race, an area that fan studies as a discipline has chronically understudied. Stanfill's work highlights the ways that the assumed domesticated fan occupies a position of whiteness—as well as the crucial elements that are missed by erasing that element from discussion. The importance of work addressing race should not be neglected. Stanfill here joins a wave of interventions, alongside Rukmini Pande's Squee from the Margins (2018) and the edited collection Fandom, Now in Color (2020), as well as work by andré m. carrington, Alfred J. Martin, Rebecca Wanzo, and Kristen J. Warner. These works have begun the process of addressing the structural and assumed whiteness that has underpinned much of the work in the field of fan studies so far.
[9] In Exploiting Fandom, Stanfill has built a robust argument for the necessity of considering the role that industry plays in the ways that fans act—an element that fan scholarship has a tendency to downplay in deference to a discourse of fan agency. The use of multiple modes of discourse analysis usefully grounds and supports the work, thus allowing for important arguments that move the field forward. While the work is focused on the US experience, it does provide a critical framework for future work that might look at the different experiences of fans in other national contexts and under differently structured media industries.