1. Introduction
[1.1] In 2015, Rebecca Wanzo published "African American Acafandom and Other Strangers," a landmark essay that called for rethinking the genealogy of fan studies and taking seriously the long history of Black audiences, fandom, and critique. In the near-decade since its release, Wanzo's article has become the fifth most cited piece Transformative Works and Cultures has ever published. In this roundtable, we have brought together five Black scholars to consider the impact of Wanzo's piece on their own research and the field as a whole.
2. Question 1
[2.1] Tell us about yourself.
[2.2] Alfred L. Martin Jr.: I am an associate professor in cinematic arts at the University of Miami. I am author of The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom and the forthcoming Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences as well as editor of Rolling: Blackness and Mediated Comedy and coeditor of the forthcoming The Golden Girls Reader: Essays from the Lanai. I've also written a host of essays and book chapters in scholarly and public-facing outlets.
[2.3] Faithe J. Day: I am a writer, creator, and educator with a BA in English and digital humanities and a PhD in communication studies. My research and writing focus on analyzing the impact of race, gender, class, and sexuality on media, data, and technology. My work has been featured in academic publications such as the Journal of Lesbian Studies, as well as public-facing publications like Cosmopolitan and ZORA. Additionally, I have book chapters in Television Studies in Queer Times and Media Bookends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations.
[2.4] Aymar Jean Christian: I am an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University and the author of Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television and the forthcoming Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture, based on community-based research project OTV | Open Television.
[2.5] andré carrington: I'm a scholar of race, gender/sexuality, and genre in Black and American cultural production. I'm an associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where I also direct the graduate emphasis in the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. I wrote Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, and Abigail De Kosnik and I coedited a special issue of TWC, "Fans of Color/Fandoms of Color." I'm also working on a new book, Audiofuturism, on radio dramatizations of Black speculative texts.
[2.6] Sascha Buchanan: I am a teaching fellow in sociology at Coventry University in the UK. I published my first article in the 2019 TWC issue "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color," titled "Competition and Controlling Images as the Fuel Igniting Beyoncé and Rihanna Fandom Fights." The paper was a foundation for my PhD thesis titled "Fandom, Pop Music, and the Reproduction of Race-Gender Inequalities" (completed in 2023), which explores more broadly juxtaposition as a racialized-gendered, neoliberal, and neocolonial technology of power, with a particular focus on Beyoncé, Rihanna, and their fan communities within media discourses. My academic interests stem from my participation in stan culture as a Black woman fan of Black women entertainers.
3. Question 2
[3.1] How did you first encounter Wanzo's piece?
[3.2] Alfred: I first encountered Wanzo's essay in grad school. I was writing an essay for what would become Melissa Click's Anti-fandom collection and wanted to see what had been written on Blackness and fandom, broadly construed. I was, at least initially, struck by Wanzo's assertion that Blackness troubles some of the conclusions fandom as a field has theorized. Since my encounter with the essay, it has become a touchstone in the work I do around audience and fan practices.
[3.3] Faithe: I first came across Rebecca Wanzo's work while I was working on my dissertation about Black and queer YouTube web series. Her concept of African American acafandom inspired me to include my autoethnographic accounts of my relationship with web series as a fan of social media, television, and digital content creators, rather than just an academic researcher of Black popular culture. Particularly, I was fascinated by Wanzo's critique of fan studies as a genealogy that adheres to normativity, ignoring differences, when studying media fans and culture. As a result, I enjoy sharing her piece with my students who approach fan studies from the margins rather than the center.
[3.4] AJ: I stay checking my Google Scholar alerts and excitedly rushed to read Wanzo's piece when it came out. At the time, I was thinking about the gaps in my first book and looking to deepen my understanding of how race and identity shape media production, distribution, and exhibition or reception. At the time, I was in the early stages of a community-based research project, a platform for TV/video addressing intersectionality called OTV, and Wanzo's piece helped me think about how to conceptualize the very specific, local forms of viewership I was supporting through this experiment. It made me realize that one reason I have not been deeply engaged with fan studies is its lack of attention to my own fandom as a Black person, and how I was conducting the OTV experiment in part to create spaces that I was missing as a TV fan.
[3.5] andré: I only read the essay after I was well into the process of publishing my book, and I wanted to say "Yes! This!" because I was starting to find my way in academia as a Black scholar working on African American literature, and I was not really at peace with the position of "fan scholar." I wasn't reading Transformative Works and Cultures that often, because many of the norms in scholarship and in fandom that Wanzo identifies had exactly the effects she outlines on me: they made it appear to me as if existing scholarly outlets weren't the right place for the conversations about race and racism that were at the core of my interests in media.
[3.6] Sascha: Firstly, I was a stan looking for why I was stanning. As I started reading some fan studies literature, I realized something: where are the studies on Black women entertainers and their fan communities? Where was I? Wanzo's piece really gave voice to these questions and criticisms I had about the genealogy of fan studies. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation, "Stan Life, Rihanna, and the Rihanna Navy" (2014), but felt like I needed to explore the subject more in terms of race, so I kept searching. I discovered Wanzo's work later on. I am Black British Caribbean and even though the paper is on African American fandom, it still spoke to my experience as a Black girl fan and as someone trying to write/do research about the fans of Black women entertainers (I wrote about Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, and Rihanna in my MA dissertation). This piece had a profound impact on my perspective because for the first time I was reading fan studies literature that spoke to the complexities of Black fandom and being a fan of Black women entertainers.
4. Question 3
[4.1] A key theme of Wanzo's piece is that Black fans are outsiders—invisible or hypervisible others—in fan studies work as well as the fandoms that have received the most critical attention. To what degree are Black people still outsiders in fan studies, and how has this impacted your work?
[4.2] Alfred: I would rather think of Black fans not as outsiders within fan studies but rather as fans that few folks want to study. The language of inside/outside is limiting and is part of the overall project of racism, which, as Toni Morrison reminded us, is to keep us demonstrating why we should be studied instead of just simply doing our work. In that way, then, my work has stopped trying to ask the "center" to make space for me, my people, and my work, and instead, I have reclaimed and articulated my own center. I match energy—I (mostly) ignore white fan studies in the ways it has ignored and continues to ignore Black fandoms (and raced fandoms generally—even as whiteness is raced as well). As such, part of the work I do in my forthcoming book Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences is to stop worrying about whiteness and white fan studies and whether or not our scholarship and fan practices are legible or even different from what white fandom is doing. And in many ways, because of the exploitative and extractive nature of whiteness as an enterprise, I'd rather have our practices be ignored and we recreate our own center.
[4.3] AJ: I love this embrace of refusal! Your work is extending Wanzo's provocation that thinking through race in fandom undoes and reconstitutes fan studies along new analytics or points to deeper and broader concerns than most fan studies scholars engage. I stopped going to fan/audience studies panels without scholars of color. I just started to notice that the conversations were so insular, and too often fans out-shadowed antifans: so much of fan studies felt like white scholars penning paeans to their favorite (white) media products, at best with a thin critique of capitalism that ignores how its extractive nature stems from colonialism's racist practices. The stakes are just so different, often higher, for racialized fans, who often lack the same surplus of stories to choose from and whose fandom supports the undervalued labor of Black and other producers.
[4.4] Sascha: For me, it's a white supremacist colonial mechanism to not name whiteness in order to make it "inside," "natural," and "central," and that this is why as Black fans we would be considered outsiders in the first place. I don't wish to center whiteness here, but I find whiteness in fan studies gets exnominated (Barthes 1972) to retain universality. Wanzo does touch upon this when she talks about the language already used in the paradigm to describe "fan alterity by choice." When I was writing my thesis, in which I include discussions of Black feminisms, colonialism, and white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks 2000), I started to question a few terms that get mentioned quite a lot, not just in fan studies but in other disciplines too. For example, what am I diversifying? What am I included in? What social structures already exist that make me the outsider? Then I realized: I don't really want to be included if that inclusion means being included in white supremacist patriarchy. I think this was also very much a part of my own fandom and consumption as resistance to these social structures growing up. For example, being a Rihanna stan was a part of reclaiming my own diasporic Caribbean identity in a white supremacist country (the United Kingdom). Black women Beyoncé fans in the UK I have interviewed have said similar: to be represented by and consume the music of a prominent Black woman gave them a sense of self in a world where they were already outsiders. This aspect of fandom (as Black resistance to white hegemony) is something I would like to pay more attention to in my future work. Also, I think Black fans are the center of stan culture—the language use, the memes, the GIFs, that all comes from the fandoms of Black celebrities as far as I can see. We're hypervisible in that sense but exnomination in fan studies and the culture washes over that in the same way that colonization co-opts and centralizes whiteness and universalizes it. This is why it is even more important for Black acafans to write about our own fan communities—because I'm not an outsider if I reject and complicate the central social structure that makes me an outsider in the first place.
[4.5] Faithe: I completely agree with the idea that Black fans should be considered opinion leaders in celebrity culture and fandom, rather than outsiders. Barthes's concept of exnomination is similar to the scholarship on publics and counterpublics by Nancy Fraser (1990), Catherine Squires (2002), Michael Warner (2005), Sarah Florini (2019a), and others. This means that we should not study Black fans as part of a dominant public sphere but instead as leaders of their own communities that exist outside of the mainstream, yet still have the power to influence popular culture. Therefore, if we believe that Black fans are not widely represented in fan studies or included in fandoms, where can we find them, and who is studying them? I argue that we should not limit our search for Black fans to just fan studies but instead look across different disciplines and fields. In this sense, fan studies is also not the only public where we should look for Black fans, and (as noted in the response to question 4) there is potential to locate fan studies across multiple fields, disciplines, and publics.
[4.6] Sascha: I totally agree that we should not limit our search to just fan studies. I came across the fan studies paradigm via sociology and incorporate various areas of study that I have learned along the way, such as Black feminist and postcolonial theory. I also don't think we get a full picture of fan studies without the study of racial capitalism. This is to say, there's so much room for multivocality and I like the way Wanzo emphasizes this about Tricia Rose's (1994) work—having multiple ways of knowing and being "polyvocal." Because the objective voice is seen as more scholarly (Wanzo mentions this too) in sociology, I used to fear using my own voice in my work until I got to my PhD. But I realized that this objectivity was rooted in colonialism and extraction. Being polyvocal is important for us Black acafans because, for instance, I cannot talk about fandom without talking about my own Black fandom of Black women celebrities, the same way I cannot talk about colonialism without considering our own histories with colonialism. The key to locating fan studies in multiple disciplines is multivocality. There's a political possibility with this multivocal cultural analysis to challenge disciplines with colonial origins too.
5. Question 4
[5.1] Wanzo argues that diversifying fan studies requires rethinking the critical genealogies of the field and developing interdisciplinary theoretical approaches. In your work on Black fans and fandoms, how have you created connections with other disciplines and traditions? Are there any theorists or traditions you think could help broaden fan studies that you'd like to elevate?
[5.2] andré: Both fan studies and African American/Black studies are interdisciplinary, but for different reasons. Aligning them has been a challenge, because the social structures that bring Black fans to academia are different from those that have incorporated the perspectives of fans from other backgrounds into academic disciplines. One place I often start with considering media is why certain narratives and performances garner interest from Black people, and the reason in many cases is that we care how we're represented. And we also care about the opportunities that cultural work creates: Are there jobs for Black writers, illustrators, directors, stars, and showrunners? Those aspects of a given cultural work, whether it's a comic or a TV show or movie, are the basis for saying whether a given role in the creative industry is "for us," as much as they tell us whether the narrative is "by us." I think fandom and fan studies often consider racial representation in terms of whether a narrative is "about" Black people. Taking an interest in whether some space in culture validates our desire to express ourselves and apply our expertise is a prerogative that makes the question of Black participation in culture—professionally, as creatives and intellectuals—different from a more generalized concern with the participatory nature of culture that invokes audience involvement. Specifically, I'm thinking about two examples. One comes to my attention thanks to Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's work on young adult literature and education. In Keywords for Children's Literature (I'm paraphrasing), she uses the entry on diversity to write about publications aimed at young Black readers as a product of Black intellectuals' concerted efforts to displace controlling images with acts of self-definition and efforts to assert moral authority (Thomas 2021). When the word "diversity" comes up in fandom, how many people are using it that way? The other example is pop culture: in her song "Perfect, Dark," Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo raps about loving Sailor Moon as a kid and interrogating her own desire to see herself as a Black girl and a hero. She created that persona for herself as the nerdcore artist Sammus. These are viewers, readers, and creative-minded people taking matters into their own hands to renegotiate dominant meanings. They're doing it in venues where everybody can see, and their creative outlets are not where fan studies tends to look. Fan studies valorizes the insular, but with an educational or ethical imperative, you have to do your work in public.
[5.3] AJ: The interdisciplinary perspective in Wanzo's article is one of its significant contributions and innovations. Black studies is inherently interdisciplinary, and while we struggle to have conversations across fields, it does happen. Wanzo draws on film studies scholars Jacqueline Stewart (2005) and Allyson Field (2015) and hip-hop scholars like Tricia Rose (1994) to expand what we think of as fandom. Her use of bell hooks (1992) seems particularly significant; though hooks is often cited in media studies, it is primarily by scholars of color or in undergraduate syllabi, and Wanzo is right to consider her work on the oppositional gaze foundational to any study of Black reception. In my own work, I have found scholars trained in literary criticism, philosophy, and performance studies employing Black and queer perspectives to be particularly helpful. In our TWC article "Locating Black Queer TV" (Day and Christian 2017), Faithe Day and I borrowed from performance studies scholar E. Patrick Johnson's (2001) notion "quare" to describe the specificity of Black queer reception, a term he borrowed from his grandmother. Similarly, Kara Keeling's The Witch's Flight (2007) is under-recognized in media studies for her theorization of the value of Black media audiences as surplus, which we also see from scholars like Alfred Martin, Jennifer Fuller, Herman Gray, Kristal Zook, and others. Granted, many Black media studies scholars rightly point out that we are more likely to cite our friends in English, film, Black/queer/gender studies, and so forth than they are to cite us in communication/media studies, so there is a broader issue with how academia incentivizes disciplinary siloing.
[5.4] Alfred: I was trained in media and cultural studies—an inherently disciplinary field. So, I regularly draw from, build on, and cite work in sociology, gender studies, queer studies, Black studies, English, and a host of other disciplines. In some ways, I think the problem is less about interdisciplinarity and more about the ambivalence much of fan studies—and academic work writ large—has about race. Put another way, the fan studies genealogy most often drawn is white on purpose because it deliberately elides work on race and, as Wanzo says, it knows that studying race might make their "universal" claims using whiteness not so universal after all.
[5.5] Concomitantly, the onus is not on us to diversify fan studies. The onus is on fan studies to stop thinking of work on race as so very particular to have no bearing on the white work they are doing (as if whiteness were not also race). As historian Nell Painter (2011) detailed in The History of White People, who gets to claim whiteness demonstrates what a floating signifier the category "white" is in the first place. The onus is on fan studies to cite our work the same ways they cite their white fan studies friends' work. The diversification framework, in other words, places the onus for making diversity in fan studies work on those whose work has been excluded in the first place. And to quote Lorell Robinson in Dreamgirls, "I'm tired…Effie, I'm tired."
[5.6] Faithe: I have always believed that fan studies, as well as other studies related to media and communication, has a unique interdisciplinary quality. These fields can draw upon theories and methods from various disciplines to analyze their objects of study. However, I do feel that there is a need for greater diversity in the fields and frameworks being used. While fan studies research tends to be closely associated with social sciences and humanistic fields, there is more potential for the inclusion of quantitative and scientific fields in the discussion of fandom. For instance, TWC recently published "Putting Forward Platforms in Fan Studies" (Alberto, Sapuridis, and Willard 2024), considering the role that platform studies has played in the field. However, there is still more space for discussions about the impact of science and technology on issues of race when studying the internet, fandom, and social media platforms. In this context, I am reminded of the work of scholars such as Kishonna Gray (2020), who conducted research on Black women in gaming fandoms. Her research combines the study of specific technologies with an analysis of community practices while positioning herself as an acafan, and I think there is more space for this type of work that analyzes the intersection of race and fandom through the lens of community and technology that goes beyond production studies.
[5.7] Sascha: What Alfred is saying goes back to what I was saying earlier about exnomination. There has been an ambivalence about race in fan studies because language like "improper identity" and "challenge to hegemony" allows for white scholars to claim white injury. Wanzo already points this out about racial analysis. Racial analysis steals away these pleasures and privileges of the exnomination of whiteness because then you may have to confront how fans and acafans are defaulted as white; they would have to confront their own complicity with white supremacist patriarchy. You may have to confront your relationship to a text or object of fandom and how it may be encapsulated in these same white supremacist social structures. Part of that white supremacy goes back to us, Black acafans, doing the labor of diversifying and being a face of making that white supremacy look diverse.
6. Question 5
[6.1] Wanzo points to how Black fans are also often antifans, feeling ambivalent or conflicting feelings of love and distrust or discomfort. Have you seen this in your own work? Or from a different angle, how might Black scholars (or other scholars of color) be positioned as antifans of fan studies in their critiques of the field's structural whiteness?
[6.2] Faithe: One of the overlaps between my own work studying online comments and media content and Wanzo's construction of the antifan is my investment in the politics of desire, identity, and digital expressions of pleasure and displeasure. In Wanzo's writing about Black antifandom, she states that "black antifan hate-watching" includes "fans consistently tuning in to watch and comment on shows that they hold in contempt" (Wanzo 2015, ¶ 3.3). And this was important for me to understand, because when I began studying comments, I was constantly confused about why someone would take the time to write a comment about why they didn't like content, instead of just ignoring the content.
[6.3] But, as Wanzo states: "Fandom and antifandom can make African Americans part of the black community and fulfill a political duty. Fan studies scholars often talk about fandom as an act of resistance, and in the case of African Americans, love and hate of cultural productions are often treated as political acts" (2015, ¶ 3.3).
[6.4] Consequently, I began to explore how the expression of pleasure and displeasure in online comment sections can provide insights into the politics of desire and identity. Often, online comment sections are a mix of opinions, making it hard to distinguish between fans and antifans. However, affective comments, or comments that express a more visceral reaction or emotion, can provide a clear indication of someone's stance and how their comments should be coded and categorized. For example, expressions of pleasure in comments often come from viewers who want to align their identity with the content and discuss how it represents them and their desires. On the other hand, expressions of displeasure often come from people who have a different way of identifying as a Black person (or as a queer person, woman, etc.) that causes the content to rub them the wrong way.
[6.5] Therefore, when I first started writing about comments, I focused on fan comments, particularly the expressions of pleasure and positivity around Black and queer content as identity-affirming. But I soon realized that there was just as much valuable information to be found in antifandom, negative comments, and hatewatchers, particularly when it came to viewers' perceptions of how the Black community should be represented in media and what it means to be Black and queer. By combining an analysis of fandom and antifandom, I was able to develop a more nuanced understanding of the performance of race, gender, and sexuality online, and how the intersection of those identities can be perceived and policed by diverse audiences.
[6.6] Alfred: In some ways, Black reception typically begins from the stance that representation matters. Coupled with media mattering, there is a sense that to be seen in media is to be interpolated as a subject and liberated from symbolic annihilation. In addition, Black folks' use of the Black dollar, most famously during the Black Civil Rights movement, tethered activism, visibility, and consumerism. As such, this notion of hating something but consuming it anyway, as I found in my study of Tyler Perry antifans, was about ensuring the future of Black film production. Black folks have never necessarily felt it safe to check out of Black media because they understand that Blackness is treated as a commodity within the media industries, and as such is valuable only for what media industries can extract from it. So, because representation matters to Black folks and Blackness is treated as a commodity, Black folks consume media because it's Black—or what I call must-see Blackness, the civic duty to consume Black-cast media from Tyler Perry to Misty Copeland and everything in between, as a way to ensure Blackness does not disappear from the media landscape. And it mostly does not matter if Black folks hate Perry's work, know little about the particularities of Copeland's work in ballet, or love Black Panther, it is the consumption, the activation of the Black look (hooks 1992) that matters most.
[6.7] And I argue that beginning shaped Black folks' relationship to media.
[6.8] AJ: Both of your comments remind me of Al's comment earlier about the importance of refusal as an empowering fan act, even if through different strategies. The antifan registers their displeasure through active engagement, but Al's point here and about divesting from white fan studies also suggests power in nonengagement. By not consuming, we starve the products that we deem harmful of the attention that is so important for media to survive in this age. I long ago stopped watching Tyler Perry's work, less for the representations themselves, which are actually complex, and more for his business practices that disempower Black writers and workers. I try to keep my public hating to a minimum because he thrives on this attention. But knowing your work on smaller, lesser-known Black creators, Faithe, I see incredible power in publicly critiquing indie projects. These creators are still emerging, and the critique helps them develop as storytellers while also drawing much-needed attention to creators who are in deeper relationship with the community. As you and others like Moya Bailey have noted, these commenting cultures that debate representations are also critical sites for communities to process the challenges of being Black across various intersectionalities. It's so significant that the Wanzo piece shows how Blackness and race politicize fans and open up new ways of theorizing fan engagement beyond the binaries of love and hate.
[6.9] andré: I really appreciate Faithe's account of how comments provide us insight into affect as a modality through which people participate in a politicized relationship to culture. When we're attentive to what people are saying in comments and we acknowledge motivations beyond those that are supposedly noncommercial, we put some of the priorities Wanzo recommends into practice by decentering the affective norms that prevail in characterizations of presumptively white audiences. We get insights into what people love, prefer, and long for, and we see the persistent operation of misogynoir, homophobia, and transphobia, as well as anti-Blackness, through the trolling that goes on in comments. I got a reminder of this recently when I read comments on IMDb about episodes of The Expanse that feature Dominique Tipper prominently. Similarly, review-bombing directed at works by and featuring Black women, in particular, constitute antifan currents that we'd prefer not to think about, but they have an influence on what projects prosper and which ones fall through. Black fan scholars have to take these into account, whereas treatments of fandom that focus on the pleasure and creativity enacted by white fans who have taken up a position of Other electively, the way Wanzo describes, don't necessarily capture this dimension of antifandom. I also want to echo what AJ and Alfred say about the disengagement Black audiences practice: it's economic and political, as Black consumption and reception have always been. It's also just our own exercise of discernment. We're not obligated to consume and validate every instance of representation, even if we value the meaningful work that goes into making it happen. On the other hand, sometimes we feel compelled to engage with material that runs contrary to our interests in some ways precisely because of our recognition of the inherent value of Black life and labor. The African American proverb, "If you like it, I love it," speaks to that. I think that in Black intellectual practice, we've been quite adept at disaggregating identification and desire, whereas fan studies has leaned on other disciplines, like gender and sexuality studies, to do that work.
7. Question 6
[7.1] How would you like to see fan studies in general, and non-Black fan studies scholars in particular, move forward to try and continue the momentum that Black scholars have already created in diversifying fan studies?
[7.2] Alfred: I'd like to see fan studies name race at all times—especially whiteness—so that we are specific and clear about which fans we are discussing when we use the term "fan." I'd also like to see work on race and audiences/fandom be understood as seminal to the broader study of fandom and audiences. I think Wanzo's essay, in particular, should not just be seminal for those studying Blackness and fandom. Instead, the work is seminal for fan studies. Period. But I have little faith that that will happen. Whiteness maintains its power by suggesting that it is always the center. And to cede any of that ground is unimaginable (also see: white folks lost something when Obama was elected—what they lost is still unidentified). So, honestly, I am calling for us to remake our own center. Fandom studies ignores our work, so we can ignore theirs. Rather than making Jenkins and Fiske the center of our fandom studies universe, we, following Wanzo, make folks like Tricia Rose (1994), Jacqueline Bobo (1995), and Robin Means Coleman (1998) the center of ours. It becomes, to my mind, an act of radical self-care in the face of a discipline that willfully ignores race work. But perhaps I'm wrong and this work will get taken up and the field will diversify what it considers as its center.
[7.3] andré: It's encouraging when work in fan studies shows attention to scholarship in the Black intellectual tradition. Articles in the "Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color" issue, for example, cited Vorris Nunley (2011) to highlight the richness of common spaces where Black folks "invoke Black epistemologies and interpretive frameworks, transforming what would be an alienating experience created from lack of representation and erasure into one that instead produces and maintains Black subjectivities" (Florini 2019b, ¶ 2.6). Another contributor went right for the foundation of American popular culture by acknowledging that blackface minstrelsy was the first art form to appeal to mass audiences (Johnson 2019). I hope to see more consistent displays of both advanced and elementary race consciousness in fan scholarship on every subject, and by extension, I hope to see more college-educated fan fic writers and social media users displaying evidence of learning from inclusive curricula at all levels. Basically, I'm hoping that we see our allied fields like language and literature, television and media studies, education, psychology, and communications listen to and advance the work of Black thinkers. The advancement of fan studies on questions of race and racism is bound up with the unfinished work of opening up creative and intellectual professions for every kind of person in our society.
[7.4] Faithe: In recent years, fan studies scholars have worked to include more discussion of race in various texts. However, this work is often spearheaded by individuals from intersectionally marginalized identities and communities who center diversity and difference in their research (De Kosnik and carrington 2019). It's important to recognize that these topics are not confined to the margins but are central to fan culture and scholars as a whole. As someone who studies digital fandom, I've observed that many scholars tend to discuss fan communities online from a perspective that is very white, cisgender, and heteronormative, without a discussion of how the intersection of these identities also influences their point of view. Online fan communities are shaped by algorithmic recommendations, censorship, and echo chambers, which construct and constrain who can discuss specific topics and what we see (Liu and Yang 2024). In this sense, fan communities, content, and conversations can look very different for BIPOC, non-Western, queer, and/or femme fans who exist in different algorithmic spheres and enclaves, even when they are in the same fandom as their peers of differing identities (Florini 2019b). Therefore, all scholars must incorporate Wanzo's perspective by articulating where and how we enter our fandoms. Especially when studying digital fandoms, we must address how race and other identity markers influence the construction of our online experience instead of assuming that our perspective of digital spaces is democratic or homogenous (Alberto 2020). As we delve deeper into media content in the online realm, the future of fan studies should emphasize the role of data, technology, and platforms in shaping fan communities and conversations online through the lens of identity and culture.
[7.5] Sascha: Starting out by studying my own fandom and fan communities has led me to study other subjects, such as the relationship between racialization, capitalism, and colonization. This is a major signal to me that these topics are intrinsically linked in ways that need more research and in ways that should be central to fan studies. In my PhD research ("Fandom, Pop Music, and the Reproduction of Race-Gender Inequalities"), I have started to make such structural connections between neoliberal capitalism, colonial techniques of power, and fan culture. However, that research takes holding up a mirror to oneself and, in terms of race work in fan studies, that does not happen if your own race is generally not seen as a race. As others have brilliantly stated here, I would like to see a new center for the field of fan studies based on Black and decolonial epistemologies. In the UK, there is currently fan studies research on the horizon centering Black British women audiences by Black women researchers, which is a super exciting prospect for the future of a new center for interdisciplinary fan studies. Following in the footsteps of Rebecca Wanzo and Sara Ahmed (2017), to interrogate these racial complexities erased in fans studies for so long, we must be killjoys and carry on bringing in other critical languages and multivocality that disturb the status quo and utopian romance of fan studies.
[7.6] AJ: I would like to see fan studies focus more on the construction of fans instead of valorizing/critiquing the practices of the particular fan communities the authors are embedded in. The trap of the fan scholar is to generalize or centralize the fandoms they're familiar with without contextualizing that activity in a broader system that values some fans over others. What Wanzo opens up in this piece is that the category of "fan" is highly contested and more complex than fan scholars might assume because they are more focused on what they can see and observe versus what may be outside the fandoms in which they participate and the media they consume. Making this intellectual leap from practices to systems is critical in the age of AI, where the work of fans is increasingly valuable data that can generate new forms of intellectual property and creativity, which will almost certainly be used by corporations to create new products and thus new fandoms. These algorithmic systems are classifying and constructing user activity and creative work, a process we know is always raced and vulnerable to reproducing inequalities. Only by consciously grappling with how communities are constructed—calling attention to how whiteness, in particular, structures this activity—can we address its harmful consequences.