Feminist Fandoms

Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandoms: Media Fandom, Digital Feminism, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is an ethnographic exploration of the culture of feminist fandom found on the titular social media platform Tumblr. Hannell uses interviews with 342 participants to explore how the platform has developed a culture of feminist consciousness-raising which has, the book argues, helped define fourth-wave feminism. Fourth-wave feminism, Hannell suggests, is particularly concerned with media representation, and Tumblr fandom’s emphasis on analysing media representation and how that representation reinforces or resists structuring categories of oppression makes it a centrally important space in understanding feminist cultures that developed from the 2010s onward. As Hannell writes,

analysing and critiquing social and cultural phenomena through a feminist lens […] is one of the core practices of fourth-wave feminisms. Feminist critiques of popular culture have become so pervasive that they have come to constitute popular culture. (p. 11)

The text is separated into four chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Becoming feminist: Fandom and feminist identity work’, explores how Tumblr provided/provides an entry-point into feminist discourse for young users, with Hannell’s participants’ ‘self-narratives of feminist becoming [offering] insight into the significance of ubiquitous and everyday engagements with feminism through interest-based online DIY cultures in the formation and development of young people’s feminist identities’ (p. 29). Chapter 2, ‘Belonging as a feminist fan on Tumblr’, explores Tumblr in the popular ‘imaginary’, examining the spatial and ideological implications of the users’ attempts to craft a ‘safe space’. Chapter 3, ‘Non-belonging and exclusion’, complicates the more positive depictions of the platform in previous chapters, with an emphasis on how hierarchies of whiteness and heteronormativity continue to structure its fandom discourse in subtle ways. Chapter 4, ‘Fandom and/as feminist pedagogy’, provides a fuller, more complex and ambivalent discussion of Tumblr as a place for feminist pedagogy.

The tensions in the text over the ideological nature and pedagogical value of Tumblr as a platform reflect ongoing and unresolved ambiguities over the site – and recent fandom groups in general – within feminist and queer studies. Tumblr has on one level been understood as an important space for increasing awareness of social justice issues; as Abigail Oakley notes, it has been ‘recognized for its contributions to conversations about heteronormativity and nonbinary genders and sexual orientations’.[1] But it has also been criticised for reinforcing unseen hierarchies. As Andre Cavalcante has explored, its ‘utopic potential’ has been undermined by its ‘position within a corporate structure that prioritizes profitability’.[2]

Hannell grapples with, but does not intend to resolve, questions over Tumblr’s utopic possibilities versus its potential homogeneities, as well as its ability to deconstruct hierarchies versus its tendency to reinforce them. Certainly, Hannell is interested in the consciousness-raising possibilities offered by Tumblr, and most of the book’s interview participants share stories of how the platform helped them articulate their own identities and educate themselves on issues around gender, sexuality, race, and inequality. As Hannell notes, participants largely describe fandom as ‘providing the language, social structures, shared interests, and shared cultural signs, frameworks, and symbols through which participants come to understand and make sense of feminism’ (p. 33). In familiar terms, slash fiction is described as helping participants understand their sexual identities while fandom discourse posts provide educational value in discussions around issues of sexism and gendered violence. Fandom discourse and the production of fan works are portrayed not as static items but instead as a process of constant reworking alongside developing understandings of intersectional feminist practice.

Still, criticisms of the platform are also present. In fact, Hannell’s monograph can be contextualised within several recent writings that attempt to understand both online fandom’s utopian possibilities and its shortcomings. Andre Cavalcante has previously described how progressive communities on Tumblr ‘simultaneously generates the spectre of a “queer utopia” – a space where queer potential flourishes and more expansive ways to think about the future materialize – and queer “vortextuality” – an experience of being sucked into an online black hole with severe limitations’.[3] Hannell is specifically interested in these discussions through the lens of feminism as an active process. She coins the term ‘SJW (social justice warrior) fatigue’, an invocation of the right-wing gestalt term for progressives. Here it describes a sense of exhaustion at the work of doing feminism – an exhaustion that seems inherent to this mode of social action as in a state of constant reworking. As Hannell writes:

SW fatigue emerges because the feminist fan-as-S]W is herself tired. Feminist fandom, by virtue of its feminist politics and its emergent nature, is necessarily fraught and is deeply affective. It is also a site of contestation, as I have noted throughout this book, over the meanings of feminism/s. An engagement in this project can be emotionally intense and tiring given the affective and relational labour, alongside the belonging work, required to sustain it and protect its most vulnerable members. (p. 96)

The use of ‘social justice warrior’ instantly underlines another quality of this text: its subtle and nuanced nostalgia. Despite the term SJW still being heavily in use as recently as the late 2010s, it has quickly become outdated nomenclature. It dominated internet discussions during the previous decade and has now become synonymous with that decade. This retrospective aspect of the book is complicated, however, by the fact that the same cultural dialogue continues largely unchanged, but with new terminology. The 2010s, then, take on an interesting kind of nostalgia. Hannell overtly discusses this sense of Tumblr nostalgia. As she notes: ‘my ethnographic analysis of feminist fandom on Tumblr has subsequently enabled me to examine the lived experience of a transitory and ephemeral moment in the sites history’ (p. 162). Nostalgia usually implies a longing for a simpler time, but in the framework of spaces like Tumblr in the 2010s, it evokes both a time of rapid consciousness-raising and an ensuing sense of extreme culture war fatigue.

Despite Hannell’s nuanced understanding of the platform’s positive and negative connotations in the cultural imaginary, some notable critiques of the activism that percolated in the period are absent. The absence of critiques from trans feminist voices, a demographic largely unexplored in the text, is particularly felt. In 2015, Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s ‘Hot Allostatic Load’, while not directly about Tumblr, effectively captured the inter-community abuse found in many fandom-progressive circles, describing the way such communities were prone to creating unpersons out of those who did not follow shifting social rules, and arguing that it was often trans, POC, and disabled members who were most easily discarded.[4] The lack of gesture towards these or similar critiques does feel like a deficiency in the text, and is representative of a wider lack of knowledge of trans feminist readings. Trans feminist writers have also been key in discussions over Tumblr’s adult content ban and its effects on marginalised communities who use the platform. Tumblr has been described as a ‘trans technology’ that allowed ‘trans users the changeability, network separation, and identity realness, along with the queer aspects of multiplicity, fluidity, and ambiguity, needed for gender transition’. However, the adult content ban has been criticised for censoring this information, sending a ‘clear signal to trans communities that they were no longer welcome’.[5]

There is a clear conscious decision made in Hannell’s reading to not focus on specific moments of fandom discourse, and as such the analysis avoids any discussion of moments that have become enshrined as the beginning of epochal ‘toxic fandom’ eras. This is a valid decision, as it both prevents a play towards non-academic fandom mythmaking and fits with the macro, anthropological style of the writing. Still, discussions of these cultural pivot moments can be important insofar as they provide depth to the sentiment already shared in the text by many participants: that over the course of the 2010s, a purely utopian vision of Tumblr progressivism became harder to justify.

The text’s understanding of the ways in which whiteness continues to be dominant in the culture of the platform is stronger. Hannell’s interview participants describe in valuable ways the platform’s continued privileging of whiteness and the effect this has had on both fan discourse and the production of fan works. As one participant notes:

I am worried that fandom … is subconsciously training people to write, think, and care about white men more at the expense of everybody else. In most fandoms, a m/m fic about white boys will get the most views, kudos, likes, reblogs, whatever. (p. 101)

Hannell does an excellent job of curating participant interviews throughout, and the interviews around issues of race are particularly well-chosen and illustrative. Interview participants and Hannell identify the calcifying effect of white fragility within Tumblr fandom spaces, with one participant describing that, on issues of race, ‘Tumblr has grown into this place where a conversation can’t happen without insults, people don’t like to feel uncomfortable and want to learn, but part of that is learning to deal with their own guilt instead of lashing out’ (p. 101).

Hannell similarly provides an overview of how ‘the dominance of monolingual English speakers within feminist fandom on Tumblr, particularly from Anglophone nations in the Global North, proved daunting for a number of my participants who speak English as a second, or even third, language’ (p. 98). In this way and others, Feminist Fandoms is a document that helps illustrate the structuring systems that exclude and minimise voices on a platform that has become associated with progressive consciousness-raising. It provides a multivalent exploration of what the platform has meant to specific people, and how it has allowed users to articulate their identities, while also reflecting dominant hierarchies within society. One hopes that this is the first of many more explorations of the platform – Tumblr’s significance in the political framework of young people in the past two decades is inarguable. But as an opening long-form text, Hannell has provided a carefully researched and expansive look at the topic.

River Seager (independent researcher)

References

Cavalcante, A. ‘Tumbling Into Queer Utopias and Vortexes: Experiences of LGBTQ Social Media Users on Tumblr’, Journal of Homosexuality, 66:12, 2019: 1715-1735.

Haimson, O., Avery, D., Capello, E., Richter, Z. ‘Tumblr was a trans technology: The meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies’, Feminist Media Studies, 2019.

Hannell, B. Feminist fandoms: Media fandom, digital fandoms, and Tumblr. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

Heartscape, P. ‘Hot Allostatic Load’, The New Inquiry, 11 May 2015.

Hoch, I., Stein, L., Cho, A., and McCracken, A. A tumblr book: platform and cultures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020.

Oakley, A. ‘A Conversation about Gender/Sexual Variant and Transgender Labeling and Networking on Tumblr’ in a tumblr book: platform and cultures, edited by A. McCracken, A. Cho, L. Stein, and I. Hoch. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2020: 293-300; 296.

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[1] Oakley 2020.
[2] Cavalcante 2019.
[3] Cavalcante 2019, p. 1.
[4] Heartscape 2015.
[5] Haimson & Dame-Griff & Capello & Richter 2019.