Briony Hannell, "Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this webisode, I'm talking to Bryony Hannell about feminist fandom, media fandom, digital feminisms, and Tumblr. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, thank you. Welcome.

This is a fascinating book. It's both, I think, incredibly sort of timely given the various kind of digital and social media moments that we're experiencing.

living through. But I think it makes a kind of a broader contribution both to contemporary feminist theory, but actually, you know, to our kind of understanding of society more generally. And I guess the place to start is where the kind of the idea for looking at things like fandom and feminism came from.

Yeah, that's a really good question. Thank you. And thank you for your kind words about the book as well. I mean, really, it was inspired by things that I was attending to experiencing coming up against throughout the 2010s, during which I was a teenager initially, and then I was at university, and later did a PhD and so on. So I was really fascinated throughout the decade by the sudden hyper visibility of feminism and feminist politics.

in both popular culture and public debate. And this was particularly evident in the first half of a decade as feminism became spectacularly visible across lots of different areas of Anglophone popular culture. So we have things like glossy magazines like Elle, Teen Vogue running special feminist issues. We have a really famous instance of Beyonce performing at the MTV Video Awards and in front of the word feminist.

Blazin' Behind Her. And then we have a lot of different debates in public life around the politics of media representation and media visibility, which are generally feminist campaigns about cultural representation. For example, campaigns to ban lads magazines or hashtags like OscarsSoWhite.

So in general, there was this moment in popular culture when feminism and feminist critiques of pop culture were really spectacularly visible and in ways that marked a departure from an earlier moment in time when feminism was seen as having fallen out of fashion and where lots of young women and girls were largely disidentifying with feminism and with feminist politics.

So I was really interested in trying to make sense of that shift, which later transmuted into hypervisibility online as well as we have the ascendancy of social media as we now know it. So the same decade also marked the visibility of hashtag feminist campaigns, you know, the most famous of which being hashtag me too.

And that in itself was also made visible by its proximity to popular culture, to entertainment and Hollywood as well. So I was really interested in all these different points of contact between popular culture, digital culture and feminist politics. And again, making sense of this as part of a departure from an earlier moment in time.

And at the same time, in my own more immediate personal experience, this entanglement of feminist politics and popular culture and digital spaces was really happening for me within the context of online fan communities, which themselves were located on the same social media platforms that were becoming a real hub for digital feminist activism. For example, like Twitter, now X, and Tumblr.

So I was trying to make sense of my own experience in these spaces where these different politics, these different cultural formats, discourses, debates were all coming together. Because for myself and for many other young women at the time, talking about popular culture through the lens of our shared interests as fans marked the first time that I felt I could properly take up a position in feminist discourse. So it was this pop culture lens that made that accessible and I was interested in trying to unpack that further.

And I think my hope was as I went to university that I would simply find somebody else who was doing that work for me. The hope was that I find someone in media and cultural studies or sociology who'd already attended to this mishmash of different kind of lenses, practices all coming together. But long story short, I didn't quite find what I was looking for. And so I decided to undertake that work myself. And now here I am many, many years later.

A sort of excellent motivation and a kind of classic gap in the field, I guess, as well. You sort of alluded to the kind of digital moment and I guess the kind of the importance of platforms. And part of kind of introducing the book and the research is probably to introduce Tumblr, which...

In the period you're talking about, and you've kind of touched on this already, is probably the kind of like golden age of Tumblr. But as you say in the book, you know, it's not kind of quite

what it used to be, nor is it completely shut down as some people seem to assume. So what I guess kind of is that platform and why was it kind of like such a good place to study? Yeah, I imagine some listeners might have used Tumblr themselves, whereas others may not have even heard of it.

So Tumblr itself, it's a US-founded microblogging platform. It was initially founded in 2007. So, you know, around the time of earlier social media platform innovation. And it's often seen as one of the last standing darlings of the blogosphere of the 2000s. And that's given it a kind of nostalgic status.

both from its inception, but also as it kind of has this strange, not quite afterlife, but this moment after its peak where it still has some usership, but far less than it once did. But the platform itself, you know, in addition to being a microblogging platform, it's also multimedia. So users can post on there and in text, image, etc.

video, hyperlink, long form, short form text and so on. And it built its initial profile of users based on its simplicity and its focus on this design and a broader countercultural appeal. So at its inception, it was really seen as a space for creatives in particular. And with that came along a kind of progressive sensibility. And in turn, it became quite popular with marginalized young people in particular.

And alongside those initial blogging features, over the years, Tumblr did integrate a range of different social networking features. And subsequently, by the early 2010s, around the time of its peak, very much an area that I'm interested in throughout the book, it actually boasted more users at one point than did Instagram or Pinterest. And given the fact that it was very popular amongst marginalized younger people and progressives,

Throughout the course of the 2010s, Tumblr as a platform became associated with this idea of social justice and with many of these different digital feminist campaigns, this hashtag feminism. And this was in part due to its multimodality because it invited users to share in lots of different formats. Yeah.

But it's also due to other unique design features that we might perhaps get a chance to talk about later. But alongside developing this reputation as a space for progressives and a space for social justice, creativity and so on, it also coincidentally became a platform that really developed a reputation as the home of lots of English speaking media fandoms throughout the decade.

So this meant that the platform itself was really bringing together in quite explicit ways, feminist communities and progressive communities and femme communities as well. And I'm really interested in thinking through this hybridization of these different spaces and discourses and contexts within the larger context of Tumblr itself.

And I think that Tumblr is a really good example of that kind of blurring of the boundaries between popular culture and popular feminism and digital culture throughout the decade. So I think it actually works in a really clear way as a kind of microcosm of some of these larger cultural political shifts that were taking place throughout the course of the decade. Alongside the platform,

It'd be good to hear a bit about your participants. And again, you've kind of touched on this already, but I'm intrigued to know kind of like who was involved in the research and particularly the thing that kind of stands out is the importance of, I guess, the kind of like the moment in their lives over that kind of Tumblr moment.

Yes. So my participants in general, for the study itself, I managed to recruit 342 people in total. And they were from 38 countries, but generally tended to skew towards Anglophone context. So lots of North Americans, folks from UK, Australia and so on. And

Unlike other feminist research of the time, which was more selective in terms of gender, I was quite open in terms of who I was trying to recruit, which meant that I had quite a gender diverse sample of participants in the study. So with a particular higher representation of transgender and gender diverse young people, as well as cisgender girls and young women.

And on the whole, the sample of participants tended to skew towards those who were younger. So I think my youngest participant was 13 and my oldest one was in their 60s. But in general, the kind of average age was someone in their early 20s or late teens. Lots of them identified as bisexual. So when I was asking them about their different demographic data, we had a kind of larger representation of bisexual people.

In particular, and the majority of them were white, although we did have a strong contingent who explicitly emphasized that they were non-white as well.

But what I was most interested in when I was recruiting them was the most important selection criteria to speak in methodological terms was that they identified as feminists. And I was really interested in speaking to people who felt that in some way their experiences on Tumblr or through the lens of fandom and fan community and fan practices had been a significant factor in terms of their own journeys as feminists, their own experiences

experiences coming to see themselves as a feminist subject, coming to identify with feminist politics, feminist practices, figuring out what that might mean in their own lives, how they might enact that, how they might cultivate it, how they might contest it.

So I was really interested in thinking through how that might become like a conduit for these really pivotal moments in the feminist journey around becoming a feminist, enacting a feminist identity, continuing to learn about what feminist politics are, what they do, who they're for, how we might change them and so on. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I was going to ask you next, actually. What were some of those, I guess, kind of like...

narrative stories, almost kind of like biographies of their sense of not just being feminists, but as you say, their kind of stories of becoming feminists. Yeah, so I was really interested in that as a key trope or narrative in lots of feminist writing, lots of feminist identities, lots of

People can articulate distinct moments in their lives where they started to experience this transformative shift in their sense of self. And that's something I wanted to attend to during the data collection. So I invited people to actually tell me a story about how they became feminists. And I was interested in thinking through the extent to which their encounters with popular culture through the lens of being fans of popular culture may or may not play a role in that process.

So after working my way through the stories that they told me, I identified a number of different key themes in these narratives about how they became feminists. And the first theme concerned the role that popular culture can play pedagogically in terms of making feminist discourses and making feminist analysis less alienating and more accessible. So here people were talking about the fact that encountering feminist media critique and encountering feminist cultural critique on Tumblr, where people are routinely sharing debates about

and analyses of issues around, for example, media representation. That allowed these young people to actually start to make sense of what feminism might mean. It allowed them to actually engage with and interact with these concepts that previously might have seemed quite far removed from their own experiences.

So I became really interested then in unpacking the role that popular culture in particular might play as a shared reference point or a lingua franca, so to speak, to help make feminist debates and feminist theories much more accessible to a population who may otherwise not have encountered them in the same way.

And the people who use this discourse to talk about their own experiences of becoming feminists, they talk about this moment as really life-changing and transformative for them. So the way that they talk about their own identities or biographies involves emphasising this idea of a decisive shift where their encounters with these feminist beliefs are fundamentally transforming their sense of self.

And then we have other narratives where people actually say that they've longer, they've long had beliefs that are more consistent with feminism. So people often talk about themselves as being frustrated when they were growing up about observing inequality. They might have felt some sort of status frustration about their own social position and in various ways.

And it wasn't until they were able to encounter the discourses of feminism and feminist politics through the lens of a platform like Tumblr, they were actually able to name these pre-existing beliefs, ideas and dispositions.

So compared to the earlier narrative, they weren't really talking about this notion of transformation. They were really instead saying that it was more of an experience of recognition, of affirming an existing belief, an existing disposition. Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. There

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That comes through really, really clearly actually in a slightly later part of the book where you talk about the kind of sense of community that's formed, you know, a community that kind of shares cultural production. It shares like, you know, kind of memes and jokes, but it also shares, I guess, a kind of an education project as well. And I was particularly taken by that kind of sense of

imagined community. And I suppose like a question that follows from that were, what were some of the experiences? What were some of the kind of stories of, of belonging? You know, you've touched on that already with that kind of moments of, I guess, recognition. But yeah, what, what were some of those I guess kind of narratives and tales of feeling like they were part of something, a feminist community on Twitter, on Tumblr? Yeah.

Yeah, I remember being really struck by this when I was working my way through the first round of data collection because I knew from my own experience as an insider in this space that it had been really meaningful in my own life. But people shared some really profound, emotional and extensive stories about how much it had meant to them in their own lives.

And I became really interested then in the sociology of belonging and finding strategies for trying to excavate some of the ways that they were really talking about how they felt a sense of belonging in this context. Because belonging is often quite taken for granted. So it's something that you often have to excavate by reading in between the lines. And it's here that I really found the idea of an imagined community to be very productive for making sense of that.

And when I'm using that term emergent community, you know, obviously we have the legacy of Benedict Anderson who offers that concept and that's the origin there. But I was interested in the ways that that might get taken up through the kinds of patterns in terms of how people would talk about this sense of recognizing shared practices or shared feelings and identities and norms.

And for some people, they were imagining the community of feminist fandom on Tumblr as a kind of transnational or trans-border community. So using quite utopian language to characterize their encounters with people from different regions or countries or social positions than their own.

And that is something that I try to engage with a bit more critically and think through what gets lost in that utopian vision. But another key thing that came up again and again was this term of being like-minded. So the term like-minded did a lot of heavy lifting in these stories about how they felt a sense of belonging. They were talking again and again about, well, it's where I feel like I can find like-minded people. I can be myself. I can find people who feel the same way about things.

And I was really interested in the kind of work that that term was doing then. And I ultimately decided that it was really referring to a kind of shared affective practice or shared emotional states and dispositions. Ultimately, because people kept talking about this as really referring to feeling the same way as others. And I talk about this as really relating to the way that a feminist disposition can structure the kind of shared feelings that might circulate in this space.

So we talk about how Tumblr is often characterised

regarding this sort of ambivalent mix of feeling passionate on the one hand about pop culture and also feeling a lot of anger and frustration. And I said that within the context of feeling like-minded and feeling the same way as others, that feminist disposition that often shapes when we feel celebratory towards things, when we think things are going well in terms of cultural representation and recognition. And it also shapes when we feel frustrated and angry and feel wronged and misrecognized.

So I really became interested then in this emotional role of, I can imagine, a community on a platform like Tumblr. Again, something you've just touched on was going to be a sort of follow-up question, which is as much as this, I guess, was a kind of incredibly positive thing,

and kind of generative, constructive community. There were conflicts. There were, I guess, kind of barriers to being included. And there were, as almost all things on internet spaces and platforms, various forms of conflict. And I wonder if you've got, I guess, if not like examples of conflict, because that's probably not the right question, but more a sense of how...

how exclusions, barriers were kind of negotiated and how I suppose the kind of the community was able to sort of carry on for such a long time. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I did. So this is one of the things that I was coming up against, actually. The way that narratives about fandom and feminism on Tumblr were often very celebratory. And I was really attentive to what gets lost when we only focus on the good. So I really tried to make a very concerted effort to attend to the different forms of exclusion that were occurring and thinking through what the outcomes of those forms of exclusion were.

So there are a few different kinds of exclusion that occurs, very wide ranging, and it would be impossible to cover all of them in the scope of the book.

Some of the initial ones that occurred to me were regarding the fact that given the very anglophone nature of this community on Tumblr, and part of this reflects my own linguistic background, but lots of the popular cultural texts that they were circulating around were originating from North America, from Western Europe. And that presents certain cultural barriers in terms of the hierarchies around media flows. But it also presented language barriers.

And those language barriers were compounded by the real importance in a lot of feminist discourse on being very intentional about the language that we use.

And this often led to quite specific practices around community policing. So while fandom itself is quite infamously known for being a site of conflict, either within specific fandoms or between specific fandoms, that is intensified within the context of being in a space that is explicitly committed to a politics of social justice and a feminist politics, precisely because there is a greater attentiveness to trying to adopt practices to try and preserve or protect this space

ostensible sense of safety in these spaces. And this is what really gives rise to what's referred to as call-out culture on Tumblr, you know, a term that's actually become...

I think it resonates beyond the context of Tumblr, but especially in the 2010s, this was really quite distinctly anchored to Tumblr in particular. And many users do experience call-out culture as quite alienating and exclusionary. And while call-out culture itself, it has origins in activist practices, this idea of it's a kind of internal community management culture.

This can be intensified in digital context, you know, where various different functions on a given platform can lead to what we call context collapse. And lots of the people who I spoke to often experienced call-out culture as quite alienating and as a kind of social scrutiny and social surveillance. And they often experienced it as a kind of expulsion. So there was some quite complex stories that came out through the process of my data collection where people were talking about these things

patterns of engagement and then withdrawal throughout, you know, the course of say a decade of their time on Tumblr. Um,

But beyond that, I also talk about the different ways that call out culture is mobilized because I think there's a risk of being too simplistic in thinking through these kinds of accountability mechanisms or internal community management mechanisms. Because I also identified instances where these sorts of logics and practices were often mobilized disproportionately against fans of color.

So this is where fans of colour were often met with racist hostility when they tried to identify patterns around racism and whiteness in fandom. So this again exposes some of the fault lines of that utopian vision of something like Tumblr and actually shows that while spaces like this might be quite open to talking about issues around gender and sexuality, they're often far less willing to talk about issues around racism

whiteness around race, ethnicity and racism. So there are very different kinds of exclusion that were evidenced throughout the data and it's quite a hard task to try to make sense of all that. But I really settled on race and whiteness being particularly significant for making sense of this context. I mean, the sort of tumbliness

of the research I think is really important. And as you've sort of been talking about there, on the one hand, you know, the platform like

allowed or afforded certain kinds of behavior like, you know, trying to have particular sorts of inclusive discourses, but also set up, you know, kind of barriers to particular groups and really like marked off topics that were like, well, you know, maybe we're going to steer away from that. And I guess the kind of...

Towards the end of the book, you get into this, the kind of sense that some of what was happening was a kind of, and I've mentioned this already, like an education project almost, you know, a sense of kind of learning in some ways, but also teaching as well. And, you know, the kind of discourses,

of inclusion and exclusion, I think is a really good example of this, as is that kind of sense of becoming a feminist and new kind of moments of recognition. And I'm intrigued, I guess, to know what your sort of take is on, you know, Tumblr as both a kind of learning and a kind of education space in the form it was when you were doing the research.

Yeah, I think it was fundamental. And the pedagogical impulse on Tumblr is really, really key to consider because lots of users would, you know, cultivate a sense of themselves in that space as having an obligation to engage in a continual process of learning, but also to engage

pass on their own knowledge to others as a kind of gift exchange. And this also relates to some of the broader understandings of what feminist identities are, what they do, how you practice them, that I talk about earlier on in the book. And I really emphasize that a lot of the narratives around what it means to be a feminist really emphasize that to be a feminist is to occupy an identity position that is always in process.

So this idea that your feminism is always changing, it's emergent, you're constantly reassessing, reevaluating, learning, challenging, reformulating your understanding of it. And I think this later comes through towards the end of the book when I'm talking about how that sets a fundamental precedent for being so committed to learning.

And I found Tumblr played a really important role in terms of offering spaces for learning about issues around social justice, around feminist politics, and particularly around the politics of recognition and the politics of representation. It provided a format for that that many young people really very explicitly emphasized to me they were not accessing elsewhere. So rather than seeing this as supplementary, I'm actually saying that it's an essential place where some of this learning happens.

And on Tumblr, I think that what's really key to that is that it's very informal. So it's less alienating precisely because it's interest-based. You have the shared language and the shared interest regarding popular culture to make some of these ideas more accessible. And lots of people talk about this as laying a foundation and building their confidence in making sense of different issues regarding social justice and then going from there.

So lots of the people that I spoke to throughout the course of doing my field work really emphasized that the learning they'd engaged in and the teaching that they in turn had passed on to others had been really transformative for them and had been really empowering. And for me, this learning provided one of the key avenues potentially for

for an alternative to the kinds of exclusion that were documented elsewhere in my data. And I talk about then the need for remaining committed to learning, even in the face of certain kinds of sanction or calling out or expulsion, precisely because learning provides one way of trying to bridge that, to try to bridge some of those kinds of difference that had led to those conflicts to begin with.

And what was also really interesting was the way that different kinds of participants made sense of their role as teachers as well as learners. And often that was configured along the lines of age as well. So slightly older members of the community felt that they were more equipped and better positioned to try to pass on feminist knowledge, to redistribute feminist knowledge.

But down beyond those who occupied quite key roles as educators, where they would play important roles in archiving existing knowledge. So archiving existing fan creations, archiving resources, making things particularly visible, running blogs dedicated to feminist analysis and feminist critique.

Others also talked about smaller scale acts of learning and then feminist teaching, for example, by simply passing on other information. So there were these much smaller practices, like simply resharing a list of, let's say, posts that have links to open access feminist literature. They saw that as a smaller role that they could play. So lots of the people that I spoke to articulate quite clearly.

a distinct like sense of civic responsibility and political responsibility in terms of their role in this broader environment of learning and feminist teaching as well.

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We've mentioned a couple of times that Tumblr, I suppose, isn't the platform that it was when you were conducting the research and indeed when you were kind of involved in that community. And one of the questions that kind of flows from that is partially a question of, well, where else could you find this kind?

of community online. You know, there's various other social media platforms that aren't the same as Tumblr for technical reasons, but also, you know, are not probably appropriate. And indeed, you know, might be quite hostile to the creation of feminist community. And I just wonder, I guess, kind of,

Does the book capture a moment and a community that's gone or is there a sense of kind of other forms of feminist community and solidarity being built in other platforms, other spaces?

That's a really good question. I think that one thing I really have tried to make sense of, especially in the time since I finished writing the manuscript for the book, is whether this was a transient moment and whether there is a certain pastness to what I detail. And I think that Tumblr will never be what it was, you know, in part just because of the broader context changes. So I'm very mindful of

The wider context in terms of gender politics and feminist politics has changed markedly since the 2010s. We're no longer in this moment where we have this hyper visibility of lots of different versions of feminism circulating in popular culture. We actually have an increasingly reactionary moment that we find ourselves in. And I think that's getting worse day to day as well. And I think that is very constraining in terms of what becomes possible.

I also think that the larger social media platforms that young people are using now really privilege visuality rather than multimodality. So, for example, TikTok with its algorithmic timeline and intense focus on visuals and embodiment and, you know, the particular individual in front of the camera. I don't think that that affords the same possibilities for more deliberation and discussion.

There are also issues with the way that platforms like TikTok are designed and intended to be navigated. So with the algorithmic feed, you know, the algorithmic is king, the algorithm is king. In that regard, it's a lot harder to perhaps navigate back through a user's profile and engage outside of real time with the kind of content that they're sharing, which is something that Tumblr really privileged through the tagging system that allowed a user to kind of

make their way through someone's archive, look at the different analyses and resources that someone shared over time. I don't think that the social media ecology right now really allows for the same space to do that. I think it's much more focused on immediacy and visuality that presents real barriers in terms of

what contemporary platforms might offer. But that, of course, doesn't mean that meaningful feminism and feminist activism and feminist discourse is not taking place on there. I just think that the forms that it's taking are very, very different to the kind of things that I detail in the book.

And that's where I think the book serves as a really interesting vignette of this quite specific and particular moment in time, not just for feminist politics and its relationship with the popular and its relationship with certain digital cultures, but also in terms of Tumblr itself.

You know, and thinking about the afterlife of this platform that once occupied such an important role in terms of how social justice was perceived on social media is now no longer front and center in the way that it once was. But I'm also interested in making sense of the afterlife of the platform. So I've been thinking a lot recently around this broader moment of crisis.

Arguably in social media, particularly since Musk acquired Twitter back in 22, because I noticed that that actually led to a resurgent nostalgic discourse about Tumblr. And I've seen that happen again since we've had more recent moves from Meta and other big tech companies that are very anti-feminist in the kind of proclamations that are being made and the policies that are being implemented.

So I think it's not insignificant that Tumblr is still alive, maybe not as lively as it once was. And the role that it has in the popular imagination in a much more nostalgic way now. And it seems this kind of remnant of what once was and what once could have been. I suppose a sort of concluding question, which is about your own research, that point you just made about

It's platform nostalgia, you know, a kind of a concept. That's probably quite a good title for a book, actually, if somebody's written that already. But at the same time, that kind of moment, you know, there is a logical kind of conclusion, isn't there, to that moment of your research? Yeah.

and thinking about, I suppose, that like effective kind of point when people are thinking back about Tumblr. So what are you doing in terms of kind of now and next? Are there similar kind of themes of Tumblr

cat forms, feminism and kind of broader community building questions or are you doing other stuff in this kind of digital sociology space? So I've got two key interests at the moment. The first of which is trying to make sense of this moment of Tumblr nostalgia. So I'm indebted to some of the existing work

from Katrin Tiedenberg and colleagues who wrote a really fantastic study of Tumblr that Polity published. And they do talk about some nostalgia for Tumblr in that. And I'm really interested in taking up that idea further now in this post-2022 moment after Moscow Choir's Twitter. So I've been trying to make sense of how not only other social media users are articulating this nostalgic discourse, but also how the platform itself

is trying to cultivate and court that nostalgia. So I'm really interested in thinking through some of the platform politics of platform nostalgia, especially for a platform that was previously declared dead, but seemingly isn't quite dead yet. So that's on the one hand, that seems to be the kind of natural sequel to this study. But on the other hand, I'm still interested in these larger questions around contemporary feminism, gender relations, social media.

So I'm currently doing a bit of work on TikTok and thinking about some of the ways in which more reactionary kinds of feminisms are articulated. And I'm also going forward, hoping to look a bit more at this idea of the post-digital and thinking through the ways that younger people are thinking through gender relations and this increasingly toxic turn in gender relations of the 2020s.

Not just online, but in terms of thinking about the role of the digital plays in more embodied and more local settings as well, like, for example, the school and so on. So these broader themes and thinking about platforms, feminism, gender politics, young people that I'm still working my way through across a few different avenues right now.

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