Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr

(Paperback)

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Description

Examines how fannish and feminist modes of cultural consumption, production, and critique are converging and opening up informal spaces for young people to engage with feminism.

Adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and bringing together media and communications, feminist cultural studies, sociology, internet studies and fan studies, Hannell locates media fandom at the intersection of the multi-directional and co-constitutive relationship between popular feminisms, popular culture and participatory networked digital cultures. Feminist Fandom functions as an ethnographic account of how feminist identities are constructed, lived and felt through digital fannish spaces on the micro-blogging and social networking platform, Tumblr.

Reviews

While the pedagogical value of digitally-mediated fandoms is often asserted, here Briony Hannell critically engages with the complexities and contradictions of how a feminist pedagogy functions in online fan spaces. Through its exploration of a range of practices and debates from reflexive un/learning to SJW fatigue in these communities, this book complicates exclusively celebratory claims about fandoms links to rising feminist consciousness. While Hannells arguments are deeply attuned to the socio-technical features of Tumblr, her sophisticated theoretical, methodological and analytical approach is an exemplar of critical and nuanced digital feminist media analysis that makes this book a must-read in the field. * Alison Harvey, Associate Professor of Communications, York University, Canada, and author of Feminist Media Studies (2019) *
Fandom as a pathway to feminism is understudied, yet after reading Feminist Fandom, the two seem inseparable. This book offers a compelling account of the intersection of digital cultures, feminisms and popular culture. As such, it is a recommended reading for scholars in participatory culture, audience studies, gender studies, feminist studies and fandom studies. This is a book about the power of stories, the importance of Tumblr as a platform of first-person narration and the centrality of storytelling for social movements and their reinvention. * Katrin Tiidenberg, Professor of Participatory Culture, Tallinn University, Estonia *

Author Bio

Briony Hannell is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. She was awarded her PhD in Politics from the University of East Anglia, UK, in 2021, and worked at the University of Sheffield from 2021 to 2024. Her research interests are in feminist cultural studies, sociology, media and communications, and internet studies. She has previously published in Girlhood Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, Feminist Media Studies, Celebrity Studies and The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication.