Critical Race Fandom and the Pedagogy of Fail

• In Event: Dissenting Audiences: Networked Pedagogies of Race, Gender, and Labor in Digital Media

Abstract

As social media has come to permeate dominant culture, terms and practices originating in internet subcultures have found their way into mainstream media and everyday life. Among them is the language of social justice that has become popular shorthand for feminist and anti-racist activism on and offline. Mobilized in contexts ranging from the Movement for Black Lives to debates about safe spaces and freedom of speech on university campuses, digital demands for social justice are often expressed in creative forms that draw from popular media. This paper draws from early work on a new book project that explores the digital production of knowledge about gender, race, and disability through social justice discourse in online fan culture, exploring ways that the creative production of media fan cultures has preceded and shaped the development of contemporary digital politics. A complex overlap among the aesthetic, affective, and political is a hallmark of fannish knowledge production we must understand in order to make sense of the chaotic contemporary digital media landscape. Through the creation, circulation, and reception of fan-made works, media fandom has developed complex methodologies for social justice activism, bringing together concepts from feminist, queer, critical race, and disability studies with the intense affective investments that being a fan entails.

My talk focuses on discussions of race among science fiction fans, focusing on an explosion of argument in science fiction fandom that would become known as “RaceFail 2009.” I argue that its dramatic results can tell us much about the operation of racialized gender in ostensibly progressive pockets of online culture.Beginning with a blog post on cultural appropriation by a moderately well-known white science fiction writer whose response to critiques from fans of color turned inflammatory, RaceFail expanded into a vast, dispersed set of discussions, dialogues, arguments, and LiveJournal flamewars. It would eventually lead not only to convention panels, formal publications, and creative works but also to a set of terms, images, and theoretical frameworks that would be taken up in multiple networked publics connected with science fiction fandom. Drawing both on archival material collected at the time as well as on interviews with participants, I explore the ways that RaceFail 2009 operated as a site of pedagogical intervention from fans of color who sought to reorient the presumptive whiteness of the cultural space in which they participated. In naming the continual perpetuation of white supremacy in their community as “fail,” they opened the possibility for a fan community premised on the success of racial justice.

Author

• Alexis Lothian, University of Maryland at College Park