Fan Girls and the Media: Creating Characters, Consuming Culture

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

In the broad spectrum of popular culture, one can be a fan of just about anything: comic books, television shows, fantasy novels, movie franchises, musical artists, and so on. Because fans are fluid and ever-changing, however, defining them poses a challenge. As a result, too few scholars have yet to focus on the impact of gender in media consumption, leading to a limited portrait of what male and female fans look for. In Fan Girls and the Media: Creating Characters, Consuming Culture, Adrienne Trier-Bieniek has assembled a collection of essays that demonstrate the gendered aspect of fandom and explore the ways different forms of media challenge stereotypical ideals of how culture is consumed. Contributors examine a wide range of fan issuesfrom gendered stereotypes in the Star Trek and Twilight franchises to gender roles in Tyler Perry films and The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Other essays look at the female comedy fan community, the appeal of avenging-woman characters written by men, and the use of social media by women in the video-game culture. This collection describes how gender is present in fandom, demonstrating the need to combat the marginalization of female identities in various cultural outlets. Fan Girls and the Media will be of interest to anyone studying fandom but also students and scholars of sociology, media, and gender studies.

Reviews

The essaysTrier-Bieniek has collected examine awide range of popular culture and media topics. . . .Some of the chapterse.g., Members of the Tribe, Cultural Production and Digital Resilience, Writing Her Story, and The New Housewifeexplore gender, race, and class in contemporary popular culture, adding to scholarship that often implicitly foregrounds whiteness. Though the feminist literature includes work onmany of the pop culture phenomena discussed hereReal Housewives,Buffy, Star Trek, Orange Is the New Blackthis collection will be useful to those new to feminist media studies. Summing Up: RecommendedLower-division undergraduates; general readers. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Adrienne Trier-Bieniek is professor of sociology at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. She is the coeditor of Gender & Pop Culture: A Text-Reader and author of Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos (Scarecrow Press 2013).