Henry Jenkins (2006: 247) has commented that a potent “balance between fascination and frustration” with the source text drives fan labor, sparking fannish critical and creative activities which seek to unpick the text and to refashion it...
moreHenry Jenkins (2006: 247) has commented that a potent “balance between fascination and frustration” with the source text drives fan labor, sparking fannish critical and creative activities which seek to unpick the text and to refashion it as well as to celebrate it. The activist turn within social media-based fandom has tended to politicize this critical/creative process, especially in female-majority fandom spaces such as Livejournal and its successor Tumblr.
HBO’s Game of Thrones, the adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series of fantasy novels, is a lively locus of fan activity in these spaces. Much Game of Thrones fan labor on Tumblr — critical commentary, art, graphics, and fiction — has focused upon the show’s treatment of its more controversial female characters. Game of Thrones as a TV adaptation arguably inherited and amplified the representation dilemma of its source material. Feminist critics and consumers have applauded Martin’s novels and the for their rich variety of complex, agentic female characters, and critiqued them for issues including objectification, rape used as a plot device and uncomfortable intersections of race and gender.
The growth of participatory culture has led to a well-documented mainstreaming of geek subcultures: mainstream consumers are increasingly expected to consume media in fannish ways. The networked culture of social media also brings discourses of media fandom, feminist activism and consumption into contact with each other in other ways. Progressive politics and activism are increasingly a prominent part of fandom spaces on platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, and performance of increasingly bear cultural capital within these fandom communities.
The resurgence and refashioning of second-wave feminist discourse for twentieth-century networked culture poses particular questions where media consumption is concerned. The “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon” (Mulvey 1975: 7): the political act of refusal to consume and take pleasure in mainstream media, which was challenging enough in the 1970s, becomes almost unworkable in a modern hyper-mediated consumer culture. Much modern feminist media criticism addresses this dilemma, but within fandom cultures it is arguably amplified. The source text becomes a good/bad object, a fascinating and frustrating locus of sometimes-contradictory mixtures of passionate celebration and criticism.
Feminist fandom debate within Tumblr Game of Thrones fandom has coalesced around two characters in particular who are often opposed: Arya Stark, who learns sword-fighting and disguises herself as a boy, and her sister Sansa, whose initial princess fantasies give way to stoic endurance and cunning survival strategies in the hostile environment of a medieval court. Fan debate which intersects with the feminist blogosphere reaches past the initial question “Arya or Sansa?” to a variety of often contradictory positions clashing in the open field of public social media. Feminist fan labor in Game of Thrones fandom often asks two questions: how can we ask for more from media representation? And how can we respond better to representation as it is? In the process, it feeds into a wider debate in both feminist and fandom social media spaces about what a modern feminist ethics of media consumption might look like.
