Today’s Go-To Piece of Criticism comes from Suzanne Scott, and it’s a wonderful quote from a book that is not cited enough, I think, in fan studies, despite being an absolutely critical underpinning of the field. Girls and Subcultures by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber shifted the whole field of subculture studies, which previously really only talked about male subcultures because those were the ones that were visible in public space: bikers, mods, rockers, Teddy boys, punks etc. It was McRobbie and Garber who pointed out that female subcultures tended to operate very differently…. Suzanne Scott herself is one of the most significant scholars to build on this work: her book Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU 2019) looks at the ways in which women and girls are still seen and treated differently when they do fandom. –FC
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“The objective and popular image of a subculture as encoded and defined by the media is likely to be one which emphasizes the male membership, male ‘focal concerns,’ and masculine values. […] Female invisibility in youth subcultures then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle, for a variety of reasons.”
“It might be suggested that girls’ culture of the time operated within the vicinity of the home, or the friends’ home. There was room for a great deal of the new teenage consumer culture within the confines of the girls’ bedrooms. Teenage girls did participate in the new public sphere afforded by the growth of the leisure industries, but they could also consume at home, upstairs in their bedrooms.”
From “Girls and Subcultures” by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1977)
I view much of fan studies as a direct response to McRobbie and Garber’s call to arms, course correcting the “structured secondariness” of women in accounts of subcultural participation by centering the practices of girls and women in the field. Despite being written in response to a very specific moment in the development of media subcultures and scholarly accounts of them, I return to McRobbie and Garber’s essay again and again, finding it newly resonant and inspiring each time. Most recently, I was drawn back to their discussion of the ways that girls’ participation in and expression of subcultural identities might be contained to their bedrooms in an effort to theorize high end cookware aimed at aging and affluent fans and domestic spaces like the kitchen as an emergent space for fannish expression. The authors push us to think broadly about how identity (situated at a specific sociocultural moment) shapes reception within subcultural communities. They also pointedly prompt us to think about how our positionality as scholars shapes the work we produce, demanding that we be attentive to the less visible but nonetheless vibrant practices of media consumption that escapes our immediate view as researchers, and cautioning us against the “vicious cycle” of erasure that not moving outside of one consistent account of a community can perpetuate.
– Suzanne Scott, Associate Professor
(University of Texas at Austin, Department of Radio-Television-Film)
Posted: Francesca Coppa