Feminist fandom from paper to pixel: Charting a brief history of girls’ and young women’s fannish feminisms

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

One of the central tenets of feminist scholarship is an understanding that ‘making media’ and ‘doing feminism’ are closely linked. Accordingly, feminist scholars working across cultural studies, media histories, and media and communications have framed girls and young women as active consumers and producers of cultural texts, formulating a powerful challenge to deeply ingrained narratives framing girls and young women as passive consumers of mass culture on account of the intersection of their age and gender.

In the twenty-first century, this impetus has increasingly taken shape through an emphasis on girls’ and young women’s roles within participatory digital cultures (and their concomitant ties to highly feminised transformative fandoms and fan practices). This has punctuated debates about the slippage between fannish media consumption, social justice, and feminist media critique. Yet this understanding of the slippage between fannishness and feminist critique – or feminist fandom – as a supposedly “new” phenomena distorts the long-established relationship between girls’ and young women’s feminist and fannish identities via media-(re)making, popular cultural critique, and cultural production. In the Anglophone context this relationship congeals historically across three key textual forms: the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century scrapbook, the twentieth-century zine, and the twenty-first century blog.

However, given the devaluation of girls’ and young women’s textual cultures, charting the histories of these forms is impeded by their large invisibility within the archive. Building upon media historian Amelie Hastie’s (2006) notion of ‘miscellany’ as a method that allows us to retrieve girls’ and women’s histories across dispersed forms and writings, this literature-based chapter brings together miscellaneous accounts of girls’ and young women’s textual cultures from across fan studies, feminist cultural studies, girls’ and women’s media histories, and more. In doing so, this chapter charts the historical and textual continuities between and across the scrapbook, the zine, and the blog as spaces for girls and young women’s archival memory work, popular cultural critique, community building, information sharing, and fannish creative expression. There is much to be gained from this method as it enables us to better historicise, contextualise, and analyse contemporary transformative fandom and its position within a historical continuum of highly feminised, and feminist, media-making practices marked by a distinctively fannish closeness to popular cultural texts.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGirls’ and Young Women’s Textual Cultures Across History
Subtitle of host publicationImitation, Adaptation, Transformation
Place of PublicationLondon
PublisherRoutledge
Publication statusSubmitted - 2025

Publication series

NameChildren’s Literature and Culture
PublisherRoutledge

Keywords

  • girlhood
  • girls studies
  • participatory culture
  • women's history
  • girls' history
  • culture
  • cultural studies
  • youth
  • childhood
  • youth culture

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