1. Theory
[1.1] A thought experiment: the year is 1992 and fan studies is about to be propelled into vibrancy by a new and highly influential text. This work is not Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers, nor is it Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, Constance Penley's "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Popular Culture," or Lisa A. Lewis's The Adoring Audience. No, the groundbreaking fan studies work is bell hooks's (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. In this alternate universe, the discipline of fan studies is built on hooks's concept of the oppositional gaze: a way of looking that both interrogates the work and takes pleasure in that interrogation.
[1.2] What's the same and what's different about a fan studies field built on hooks rather than on Jenkins, Penley, or Lewis? A lot, as Rebecca Wanzo points out in her groundbreaking 2015 article "African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies," which imagines such a recentering. Some similarities: building fan studies on hooks would still give us fan cultures of "resistance, struggle, reading, and looking 'against the grain'" (hooks 1992, 126)—elements often cited as key to transformative fandom. Fandom would still be described as a place of creativity in which dissatisfactions with the text provoke the critical spectator to make art or write criticism—here we can easily recognize the impetus for a fannish fix it. As a historian of vidding, I love hooks's description of a "theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation" (126). I've written a lot about what it means to watch television or film like a fan fiction writer or vidder: critically, finding the bits you like, cutting the work into pieces, and reassembling it. All that might stay the same. But fandom would put black women at its center, and that would change everything.
[1.3] As a visual art practice, vidding in particular would have a reckoning. Much of vidding culture is rooted in the feminist film studies of the 1970s; as I note in my book, Vidding: A History (2022), 1975 is the year both of Kandy Fong's first Star Trek vid and of the publication of Laura Mulvey's foundational film studies essay theorizing the male gaze, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In 1992, hooks called for us to rethink the "body of feminist film theory that is firmly rooted in a denial of the reality that sex/sexuality may not be the primary and/or exclusive signifier of difference" (124). Now, in 2024, there is a broader awareness of the ways in which that foundational 1970s feminism was a white feminism that provoked the creation of a white feminist film theory and, subsequently, a white feminist fan culture. To be clear, by saying this I mean no insult to those early (note 1) white feminist critics and theorists; rather I intend whiteness as a descriptor, a way of indicating that the problems do not apply equally to women of all stripes note 2).
[1.4] But as hooks notes in Black Looks, women of color have different and additional problems with mainstream cinema. Women of color have to deal not only with sexism and the ways in which the construction of white womanhood can exclude women of color from being seen as women at all but also with the ways in which mass media is a system of knowledge and power that reproduces and maintains white supremacy. In her work, hooks describes some of the strategies of the black female spectator, which include repression; for instance, hooks notes that, "Every black woman I spoke with who was/is an ardent moviegoer, a lover of the Hollywood film, testified that to experience fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down critique, analysis; they had to forget racism. And mostly they did not think about sexism." This, according to hooks, is cinematic gaslighting (120). But hooks also describes how she, like many black women, developed an oppositional gaze: a way of looking that interrogated the work and took pleasure in that interrogation: "Not only would I not be hurt by the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating representation, I interrogated the work, cultivated a way to look past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language" (122).
[1.5] Fan studies could easily be based in hooks's description of the pleasures of oppositional viewership. While some fan studies work focuses on identification with or immersion in the source text, much of the work on transformative fandom focuses on its deconstructive edge. Certainly fans celebrate and enjoy the media, but they also come together to enjoy being critical of it; this has been particularly true when it comes to issues of sex and gender. Vidding history frequently centers works that are critical of a text's sex or gender politics: Sisabet and Luminosity's Women's Work (2007), Giandjuakiss's It Depends on What You Pay (2009), Counteragent's Still Alive (2008). But if vidding has developed elaborate strategies to engage issues of sexuality and gender, it has not done as well with matters of race. That's not to say that vidding can't address race, but it hasn't, or hasn't often, because many white female vidders don't see race in mass culture as a problem they have to solve (and solve themselves) the way they clearly see gender and sexuality as problems. So white vidders will reedit the text to alter the gaze, create new sexual relationships, queer the text—and leave problems of race untouched.
[1.6] That said, there are both nonracist and antiracist vids in vidding history. A vid that's not racist might be focused on a character of color or create a romance between characters of color or an interracial romance. Even this isn't as simple as it might sound; as the vidder thingswithwings has pointed out, the aesthetics of film and TV have historically prioritized whiteness so visibly that "if you want to make vids about underrepresented minorities, you'll have to massage the footage and accept crappier shots" (note 3). In an overwhelmingly white media world, it can be meaningful simply to make fan works about characters of color: about the MCU's Sam Wilson or Doctor Who's Martha Jones or Luther's John Luther.
[1.7] But in addition to nonracist work, vidding does sometimes produce antiracist work: work that creates an oppositional gaze and interrogates the text in specifically racial terms. Vids like Lierdumoa's How Much Is that Geisha in the Window (2008) and hapex_legomena's Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers off Death (2009) are popular vids that make strong antiracist arguments against Firefly and The Lord of the Rings films respectively. If fan studies were more strongly based in hooks, vids like these would be even more central to fandom's imagination and practice.
2. Praxis
[2.1] A vid like rhoboat's That's Not My Name (2012) (video 1) manages simultaneously to be a loving and danceable character vid and a critique of how a black female character was treated. The vid speaks back to the TV show Fringe and overtly critiques its treatment of Astrid Farnsworth, played by Jasika Nicole. Fringe had a running joke around Astrid, which was this: while Astrid is an indispensable assistant to an irascible mad scientist named Walter Bishop (John Noble), he cannot remember her name. For five seasons, Walter calls her Astry, Asgard, Asterisk, Asteroid, Ashcan—well, you get the idea. She is also the only recurring black woman on the show.
Video 1. That's Not My Name by rhoboat (2012) set to "That's Not My Name" by The Ting Tings.
[2.2] Rho uses The TingTings' song "That's not my name" both to give voice to Astrid ("They call me her / They call me Jane / That's not my name!") and also to protest the joke from the spectator's point of view by inserting captions between the clips. "Astro?" "Ascot?" "Aspirin?" "Astringent?" the vid queries, as if unable to believe it. The captions get increasingly irritated: "Asteroid?" "Esther Figgleworth?!" (a real misnaming on the show) and then further objecting to "Claire?! / That doesn't / even / start with an 'A.'" This vid both centers Astrid in the story, showing her as beautiful, competent, essential to the story, and eyerollingly patient with Walter, and speaks up on her behalf, refusing to let the joke at her expense go unaddressed.
[2.3] The story doesn't end there. In 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests, Jasika Nicole replied to a fan on Twitter who had tweeted to the actor John Noble: "I loved Astrid's relationship with Walter. How he always got her name wrong." Nicole replied:
[2.4] As a black woman with a name that white people seem to find incredibly difficult to pronounce, sometimes knowingly using the wrong name for me, I always thought it was a pretty tasteless joke and hated that it lasted the whole five seasons of the show. (@TheJasikaNicole-July 14)
[2.5] Twitter being Twitter, people turned up to tell her that she was wrong, that it wasn't racist, that it was clearly affectionate, a father-daughter thing, an in-joke, and so on. And besides: why didn't she complain if she didn't like it? One Fringe watcher replied:
[2.6] I genuinely want to understand this: For me, the name thing with Walter & Astrid was never about the skin colour. It would've been exactly the same & exactly as funny & endearing if the character of Astrid would have been of any ethnicity. Where am I going wrong in my thinking?
[2.7] Nicole replied:
[2.8] Have you asked yourself why Walter got olivias name right for 5 seasons, got Charlie's name right, ninas, ellas (note 4), a host of other characters, but never astrids? The only black woman on the show? Unconscious bias exists. I have a lifetime of experience with it. [sic] (@TheJasikaNicole-Aug 23)
[2.9] Nicole then elaborated her position in a Twitter thread, connecting her frustration with the name joke to her poor treatment as a black female cast member more generally:
[2.10] [O]nce I *could* articulate how frustrating the joke was, I couldn't do anything with it…We had directors (plural) who refused to get my name right. One insisted on referring to me as "you," "that one" and pointing at me to give me a direction. Another one simply refused to say my name correctly and called me everything he could think of but Jasika.
[2.11] She also explained that "the initial spirit of the joke was not lost on me," but it turned from being an indication of Walter Bishop's absentmindedness "to him being fully aware of who she is and just teasing her for fun. THAT part became bullying and racist" (note 5).
[2.12] "Most white people don't do things to intentionally hurt the feelings of POC," Nicole concluded. "And that's the point. Noone ever thought to ask how it made me feel cause it was written through the lens of whiteness. Just cause someone doesn't SEE the harm doesn't mean it's not there." But of course people had seen the harm; rhoboat and other fans had seen it years earlier. Fandom is far from perfect, but we'd had this particular conversation: a vid had been made to make the point and had gotten attention in fannish spaces.
[2.13] But a fandom that more explicitly centered hooks's work would make vids like rhoboat's more common; would call out problems and center absences; would "construct an oppositional gaze via an understanding and awareness of the politics of race and racism." Such a fandom would better enact a black woman-centered feminism in which work on sexual and gender politics did not suppress the recognition of race or, in hooks's phrase, "racialized sexual difference" (123). And a hooks-centered acafandom could encourage fandom to see race-based critique as collaborative, communal, and even fun: as a central fannish practice. Gender-based and sexuality-based critique is often experienced by fans as pleasurable and affirming (note 6); might making race-based criticism not come to be felt as a similarly enjoyable part of fandom's participatory culture?