Fandom

Yoko in Cyberspace with Beatles Fans

Gender and the Re-Creation of Popular Mythology

Christine Scodari

In 2003, a discussant on the Usenet newsgroup devoted to the Beatles contributed the following:

I had a nightmare last night. I woke up screaming. I dreamed that: Paul, with the help of the BBC, produce[d] a movie that claimed to be the “real” story of the Beatles. We all learned how […] Paul was the real talent behind the Beatles[….] Paul was the force that turned John Lennon’s half-baked scribble of songs into the classics they are today[….] In response, Yoko release[d] a statement of outrage and announced plans for her own movie about the Beatles. She states in her press release: “John always said that I was the fifth Beatle, and if anyone knows the truth to this story, it is me” [….] The movie will show how Yoko was the force that turned John Lennon’s half-baked scribble of songs into the classics they are today.1

This message illustrates the propensities of those John Lennon fans who display gender-inflected subjectivities in relation to their idol and antagonize other Beatles fans by rendering his closest real-life partnerships as inauthentic. As popular texts, genres, personalities, and their original enthusiasts age, the prospect of waning significance and the influx of younger cohorts of followers amplify and multiply such tensions. Computer-mediated communication accentuates this effect and, as the millennium approached, began to broaden and diversify creative and interactive modes and opportunities for preexisting fan cultures, allowing meanings and mythologies to be recycled, contested, and/or re-created via such activities as the archival of fan art and fiction, Web site creation, and discussion board and chat participation.

Fan practices entail the maintenance, adoption, negotiation, and/or refusal of hegemonic methods and messages. A fan community’s dense, distant history escalates such struggles for meaning. Beatles cyberfans, as a prime example, labor to shape the canon and mythology of this group, its music, and its cast of personae so as to privilege their favored subjectivities, thereby implicating, among others, gendered power relations of sexuality, sociality, and romance.

This essay contextualizes key issues before discerning the prevailing, gender-related subjectivities of Beatles fans as exemplified among a decade’s worth of postings on rec.music beatles (RMB), one of Usenet’s myriad, asynchronous discussion groups. Postings were unearthed via the Google Usenet search engine (groups.google.com). Contestations of meaning and subjective preferences are tracked and theorized, the influence of computer-mediated communication upon such practices is pondered, and gender is examined as a focal point around which fan investments and, by extension, social and political bearings, continue to be negotiated.

The “Yoko Factor,” Cyberfandom, and Neutrosemy

Many gender issues associated with Ono’s controversial status in Beatles culture and fandom crystallize in terms of the “Yoko Factor,” which is the “inevitable moment when you’re dating a guy in a band and he lectures you about Yoko Ono, the message being that women are a suck on male creativity” (Marcotte 2005: n. p.). However, some insist that Ono was ahead of her time, both positively influencing Lennon’s work and paving a way for alternative music and women’s involvement in it (Gottlieb & Wald 1994; Marcotte 2005; Prose 2002; Wiener 1998). If, as Stark (2003: 3–5) insisted, much of the Beatles’ initial popularity was based on female fans’ resistive appreciation of their “feminine” group dynamic or “collective synergy,” it is nonetheless questionable whether it is also resistive for these fans, even decades later, to fixate on one woman as the primary obstacle to continuing, positive reminiscence of this dynamic.

For adherents of the “Yoko Factor,” the particular cast of personae do not seem to matter. Some fans of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman whose 1994 death was ruled a suicide, play off and perpetuate this discourse in conspiratorial chatter and even a book (Wallace & Halperin 2004) postulating that his wife, actor-musician Courtney Love, solicited his murder.

I unpacked analogous phenomena by investigating fans of science fiction television as they engage online (Scodari 2003a; Scodari & Felder 2000). FOX’s hit series The X-Files (1993–2002) was groundbreaking for its genre and target audience in rendering the professional but potentially romantic partnership of a man and woman in roughly egalitarian terms. However, perhaps because the genre predisposes its audience to patriarchal avenues of interpellation, many fans of both sexes preferred the male hero, Agent Mulder, to the female hero, Agent Scully. Mulder devotees posting on either of two X-Files newsgroups (alt.tv.x-files; alt.tv.x-files.analysis) regarded Scully’s professional challenge of her partner as “obstinate, insensitive, and lacking in appropriate deference” (Scodari & Felder 2000: 243). One male “Mulderist” bemoaned Scully’s very presence as inhibiting “Mulder eyeing […] someone else” (241), another remarked that Scully would make “such an awful significant other to any but the wussiest of men” (243), while a female fan declared, “I have a problem with Scully […] and the last thing I want is to see Mulder kissing her, or telling her that she’s his everything. […] She doesn’t deserve him” (243). Many such fans also reacted to a decision by creators to continue the series after David Duchovny (Mulder) resigned by heaping venom on the character that replaced his and the actor who portrayed him. This is yet another gendered, hegemonic subjectivity—that of positioning one masculine persona as competing with and superior to another.

Countless fans of the Sci Fi Channel’s Farscape (1999–2004) and Star-gate SG-1 (1997–) also impugned these series’ female heroes, particularly in response to actual or potential romances between them and esteemed male heroes (Scodari 2003a). I described a female cyberfan of Farscape who complained that her idol, hero John Crichton, displayed a “god complex” in investing hope and love in the soldier Aeryn Sun, his shipmate and romantic interest, whom she considered to be too headstrong and therefore unworthy (121). Female fans of Stargate SG-1’s male heroes, Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson, resented the admirable traits and screen time given to the female hero, military officer and physicist Samantha Carter, as well as perceived attempts by creators to inject “sexual tension” into the otherwise professional and platonic relationship between her and O’Neill, her unit commander (123–24).

Many of the female fans who revere male heroes and devalue their female counterparts also tend to write and/or read slash fan fiction featuring male characters. Slash is homoerotic fiction that can be composed by gay, bisexual, or lesbian fans about characters of their own sex, thereby challenging heteronormativity. However, my inquiry (Scodari 2003a) shows that the more typical slash authored by women about male personae can often be motivated by patriarchal, hegemonic stereotypes of competition among women over men that lead to regarding even fictional female characters as rivals to be marginalized and disparaged. Female fans adopting such a subjectivity, that of fantasy lover or confidante to a male hero, consequently clash with those in the audience eager to identify with female heroes in ways that resist tendencies of popular culture texts and creators to reproduce male dominance.

This same body of research (Scodari 2003a; Scodari & Felder 2000) disputed claims by some scholars (see Brown 1994; Fiske 1987; Jenkins 1992) that the practices of “active” fans are oppositional by virtue of generating pleasure and resistance to producerly authority. Kellner (1997: n.p.) warned that “resistance and pleasure cannot […] be valorized per se as progressive elements of the appropriation of cultural texts” and that “difficult discriminations must be made as to whether resistance, oppositional reading, or pleasure in a given experience is progressive or reactionary, emancipatory or destructive.” So, it is vital to acknowledge when some fans’ devotions and/or practices undermine the equally or more oppositional meanings and desires of others. Additional study (Scodari 2004, 2005) seconded this perspective and the notion that while “cyberfandom makes private meanings a bit more public,” it also “forces marginal fans to confront the denigration of their tastes by authors and other fans” (Scodari & Felder 2000: 254). As Interrogate the Internet (1995: 127) predicted, “the structure of the technology and the content” would coincide with values predominant in the “broader cultural context.”

The following analysis of Beatles fandom as it has circulated on the Internet reveals parallels to the gendered subjectivities demonstrated or implied above, even if much to which Beatles fans are committed has its roots in “real life” rather than fiction, and entails a multiplicity of texts and paratexts emerging over more than four decades. Indeed, Sandvoss (2005b: 832) has theorized “neutrosemy,” a state most readily achieved by texts that defy the neatly defined boundaries typical of a book, film, or television series, and that are of a “mediated and distanciated nature.” Neutrosemy exists when there is so much textual openness that “actual signification value” is neutralized and overtaken by “fans’ existing schemes of perception and horizons of expectations” (832, 835). Thus, texts, para-texts, and fan discourses coalesce to reveal more about the identities, desires, and histories of readers than about particular texts, contexts, creators, or mechanics of production.

“The Beatles” as Text, Cyberfan Negotiations, and Gendered Subjectivities

Neutrosemic potential invites consideration of what constitutes “The Beatles” as text. On a primary level, there are the television and radio performances, movies, songs, recordings, and other creative offerings with which the group or its members as solo agents were involved. On a secondary level, there are the immediate, paratextual elements such as packaging and other promotional materials, articles, news stories, reviews, and interviews relating to the primary-level texts. Third are paratexts and metatexts of a more remote sort, such as other interviews, news stories, and articles, as well as retrospectives, biographies, docudramas, documentaries, and theatrical productions based on the professional and/or personal history of the group and/or its members. Fourth are fan discourses that deliberate the other, various levels of text. Within this array are appreciations of “fact” concerning the Beatles, with some less constructed and contested, such as release dates of albums, that the Beatles first visited the United States in 1964, that John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman, and so on. Deliberations of less straightforward questions such as who broke up the Beatles or who was the creative force behind the Beatles are more telling with regard to gender, other issues of power relations, and the “existing schemes of perception and horizons of expectations” of fans (Sandvoss 2005b: 835).

Fan discourses themselves attest to the multiplicity and types of relevant texts and the elasticity of meaning regarding the Beatles. Here, one RMB poster attempted, in 1998, to differentiate between primary levels of text and others in determining matters of “truth”:

How are we going to prove whether Yoko is a bitch or not a bitch? How are we going to prove whether or not Paul was a clod for his comments about John’s murder? […] As far as caring who had blisters on their fingers […] that’s a different thing altogether cause it was the lyrics of a Beatles song.

Moreover, fans can recognize and debate many of the perceptions, conditions, and motivations that lead to tangential talk as well as rake over some of the more controversial, Beatles-related matters. As an apparently male RMB poster argued in 1998, “There’s a much simpler explanation for why things such as Yoko and Bill Clinton come up. There’s nothing new under the sun in Pepperland. When the bones have been thoroughly picked over, the carrion birds have to feed on something.” In rebuttal, another fan sought to justify such conversation while simultaneously making a flattering comparison: “In fact, we’ve not even scratched the surface. Two hundred years later in Freuderland [Germany] [and] we’re just starting to make some headway with understanding how Beethoven work[e]d.” Amid a discussion thread in the year 2000, another user raised a more depressing prospect for Beatles fans, and one that could also amplify contentiousness about highly debatable issues: “[A]s far as lasting, measurable impact on music today, you and I, both Beatles fans, have to admit that the [B]eatles’ influence on music is steadily dwindling, esp. with the rise of hip-hop/rap music, which has practically no heritage in [B]eatles and traces its roots back to James [B]rown, Parliament, and Grandmaster [F]lash.”

Scholarly accounts also have difficulty pinning down the ideological meanings of “The Beatles.” Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs (1992) lauded the freedom, sexual and otherwise, that the early Beatles inspired in young female fans, but dramatically limited the time frame and “text” of the Beatles in doing so. Similarly, Wolfe and Haefner (1996) conceived of Beatles fans as forging what Grossberg (1984a) termed an “affective alliance” that enables them to endure within dominant culture, but restricted their study to analyzing college students’ interpretations of a single, relatively innocuous song and recording. Frontani (2002) chronicled struggles among the editorial staff of Rolling Stone magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s concerning whether the Beatles truly epitomized countercultural values.

The existence of such textual and ideological slipperiness shifts critical focus to the subjectivities from which Beatles fans negotiate meanings. The standpoint from which fans regard textual personae as romantic fantasy objects, for example, intensifies when the idolized persona(e) and any perceived competitors are not fictional characters but have real-life referents.

One such faction of Beatles fans tends to romanticize and/or homo-eroticize relationships among the Beatles, especially between songwriting partners John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A few of these fans compose slash stories envisioning such dalliances, often set in the red light district of Hamburg, Germany, where the prefame Beatles honed their craft. Selection from a potpourri of texts and a desire to safeguard and celebrate masculine homosociality can be seen in the following 2002 RMB post:

Of the four Beatles, Paul is my favorite. But I really love John too. Actually, I love and respect all of them—and would love to think they all loved each other. […] Paul has said many wonderful things about John. […] So we have one side of the story and not the other. […] Other evidence of the strength of their relationship is seen in photographs. There seems to be quite a few pictures where John actually looks quite affectionately at Paul. […] [R]eading [McCartney’s] Many Years from Now and Get Back and Hunter Davies’ books actually provided me with a better understanding of their relationship.

In response, an apparently female discussant wrote,

I think John and Paul loved each other like brothers. You can fight so viciously with someone you care enough about to get that mad at in the first place. […] When it came to songwriting and making the music happen, they were like one entity. That kind of synergy has deep roots. […] But I don’t doubt that it went way beyond music. They were soulmates (*not* in a sexual way!).

Cognizant of but careful not to lend credence to other fans’ eroticization of John and Paul’s collaboration, this poster echoes the first in valuing the feminine bond between male personae, thereby conceiving them as one unit and implicitly placing others outside this parasocial (or parasexual) relationship, and the relationship between fan and idols, as interlopers.

For many such fans, one of these others is surely Yoko Ono. Aficionados of Beatles homosociality are positioned to perceive her as a threat, as are those Paul McCartney fans who interpret her actions in boosting Lennon’s legacy (and her own) as a vendetta against their idol and as are Lennon admirers such as the one whose words began this essay, whose parasocial or parasexual attachment to the departed icon situates them to regard both Ono and McCartney as trespassers and usurpers. These stances reflect legendary squabbles among factions, particularly since the Internet added worldwide immediacy to the mix, in the sense that each bloc projects its disputes with other fans onto these fans’ favored personae. Thus, a Lennon fan might associate a “snarky” remark about Lennon made by a McCartney fan with McCartney himself, a sign of neutrosemy in which the distinction between a “text” and reader-audience proclivities is blurred.

To the extent that they exist among Beatles fans, defenders of Ono are often those Lennon devotees who are unwilling to divorce his apparent allegiances from their own, and who support her out of respect for him even if they cannot commend her artistry. Also, for some fans who seek to promote Lennon as the most creative, most cutting-edge Beatle, Ono’s connection to the avant-garde art world emerges as a point of argument. Wiener (1998) has added scholarly weight to such a thesis, lauding Ono’s influence on Lennon in favorably distinguishing his post-Beatles work from that of McCartney, Harrison, and Starr. The assertions of several fans participating in a 2000 RMB discussion thread reflect such stances:

I think it’s pretty easy to dump on Yoko here. […] However, her idea [of advancing the medium] is a MAJOR force in modern or post-modern art.

I see her as John’s widow, one that inspired some of John’s BEST work. […] I’ve heard it said that there is no greater insult to John than to hate his wife. […] As far as Yoko’s music […] well, I agree with what Mozart wrote in a letter to his father, “Music must first be pleasing to the ear.”

What’s always been more obvious to me, is what Yoko meant to John. Amazing people can’t accept that, when he made it abundantly clear in his songs, interviews (the few I’ve read, that is), and photographs. I assume her point of view showed him a new & different way of looking at the world. Why anyone would disparage & belittle that is beyond me.

Dissenting opinions emanating from other Lennon and/or Beatles followers included,

Well, if not for the Beatles […] Yoko would not have furthered the medium as far as she did. […] right? People […] didn’t know who the hell she was until she was with John Lennon.

Yoko claimed, however, that the Beatles were pedestrian, and that SHE was the revolutionary one!

I think her art is questionable as far as talent is concerned and borders on offensive at times. […] I know that the croissant crowd is going to say otherwise.

Efforts to fix the Beatles’ canon and lore so as to establish a single group member as leader and primary creative force have gender-related implications. Strong idolization of a Beatle can engender avowals of his exalted role in hierarchically masculine terms that, in turn, reflect parasocial and/or parasexual subjectivities. Such debate generally centers on Lennon vs. McCartney, with Lennon fans seemingly more proactive in their claims and McCartney enthusiasts adopting a more defensive posture. First, as suggested earlier, Yoko Ono’s role in Beatles history can be employed to advance a pro-Lennon case. A 1998 exchange between a Lennon advocate and a McCartney fan illustrates this first perspective and its rejoinder:

Yoko knows more about being married to John Lennon than anyone here will ever know. […] To assume, or even believe, that we know better than she in many of these areas, is too bizarre to comment upon.

Here’s the thing. It’s not that we think WE know better, but that we think Paul does…. Are you saying that since Yoko “is” an expert Paul WAS merely a sideman for John? Because essentially this is what Yoko meant: “[John] used the Beatles to change the world, with help from the other three, of course.”

Second, as with the sarcasm that launched this article, both Ono and McCartney can be regarded as pretenders to the throne, with the significance of either or both disputed in any given discussion. This mirrors the perspective of those fans of The X-Files’ Agent Mulder who impugned both the program’s female hero and Mulder’s male replacement (Scodari & Felder 2000). Such a position can be appreciated in the following 2003 debate among several posters in which McCartney’s merit as an authentic, nonderivative musician is challenged without specific mention of Ono but, nevertheless, by echoing sentiments often attributed to her:

Paul had more generic, formal music training as a kid. This was because his father was a part-time jazz musician.

Ya know [name of first poster], you really *don’t* HAVE to diminish Paul to exalt John every single time.

He [the first poster] must have leadership issues in his childhood […] because being a “leader” is so important to him. […] Maybe [name of first poster] will someday be able to resolve his personal issues and then see John in a more realistic light.

“Formal training?” He [Paul] couldn’t read music. What “formal training” did he have?

At the end of the day, I am far more impressed with things like John’s: “Happy Christmas—War is Over” classic, “Girl,” “Because,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” […] on a musical level than I am with [Paul’s] “The Long and [W]inding song,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “Hello Goodbye” […] or “Ebony and Ivory.”

That’s called “cherry picking” and I can do it too.

Before Lennon’s death, McCartney defended his “pop” turf with complete pride. […] Only after Lennon’s death, he decided to reinvent his image as the Beatles avant garde guy […] by pirating Lennon’s material.

The feminine collectivity said by analysts (Ehrenreich, Hess, & Jacobs 1992; Stark 2003) to appeal to female fans and hegemonically masculine values of hierarchy and competition are evident in the above expression and rebuke of an urge to proclaim the subject of one’s devotion to be the most esteemed and skillful male in a company of men. The exchange also illustrates that some fans, in pointing to other fans’ apparent need to determine a leader, its roots in childhood experience, and a tendency to “cherry pick” evidence, recognize not only hierarchical thinking but attributes of neutrosemy—namely, “select[ing] given parts while disregarding others” according to one’s “existing schemes of perception” (Sandvoss 2005b: 828, 835).

Conclusion

In analyzing the fans of Bruce Springsteen, Cavicchi (1998: 135) remarked, “Indeed, by studying fandom, I have, in many ways, been studying people and who they think they are.” Yet, it is easier to recognize overarching themes in Springsteen’s oeuvre on which his fans can and often do focus than in the very eclectic back catalogues of the Beatles as group and solo artists. Neutrosemy appears, consequently, even likelier to situate the deliberations of Beatles fans.

This investigation of Beatles cyberfans and their struggles to create and re-create popular mythology unpacks a neutrosemic condition in which a popular artifact framed by dense, distant history, enmeshing a multiplicity of texts, ceases to effectively govern signification. Instead, the predilections of fans are projected onto said artifact.

This is not to say, however, that ideology plays no role in the negotiation of meaning surrounding a neutrosemic cultural object. In this case, we observe gender-related subjectivities that, for the most part, reproduce hegemonic, patriarchal power relations. Female fans’ celebration of the Beatles’ alleged feminine collectivity, advanced as emancipatory by some commentators (Ehrenreich, Hess, & Jacobs 1992; Stark 2003), here presents as feminine but not feminist. Disillusionment with the fact and perceived manner of the group’s breakup is projected onto a single female persona—Yoko Ono. The resulting “Yoko Factor” assumes a misanthropic role for any woman purported to be pivotal in the life of one or more members of a venerated male collective. Parasexual fantasies are also implicated, in that a segment of these fans, as with their counterparts in fandoms devoted to narrative texts, envision homoerotic relationships among male idols so as to preclude and devalue female “rivals.” Either way, hegemonic stereotypes of women are invigorated, and the preferences of other fans counterhegemonically interpellated by influential female subjects are dismissed. On the other hand, those whose wont is to distinguish a single male as most accomplished and crucial to the success of a group and/or artifact expose a hierarchical, competitive subjectivity based in hegemonic masculinity.

The significance of this study reaches beyond the specific case, as the parallel tendencies evident in my previous research on science fiction television and its fans indicate (Scodari 2004, 2005; Scodari & Felder 2000). Moreover, there are implications for determining methodology in critical media studies, in that a state of neutrosemy with respect to many a popular artifact can obviate close textual analysis and recommends empirical scrutiny not only of fans’ readings but also of their everyday lives, from which subjectivities emerge via myriad variables, play out in social relations, and potentially reveal larger hegemonic operations. Considering the heuristic trajectory of this analysis and my prior work, it would follow to perform an ethnography of fans who migrate from fandom to fandom, adopting a similar, ideological subjectivity within each, as occurs with female enthusiasts of homoerotic, “slash” tales featuring male icons.

As for the computer-mediation of fan culture, this investigation also corroborates others I have performed, in that such mediation magnifies frustration and conflict among fans, thus mitigating potentially liberating rewards. As Interrogate the Internet (1995: 127) warned, cyberspace is not immune to, and is hard-pressed to challenge, the “broader cultural context.”

NOTE

1. IRB regulations for this chapter restrict provision of identifying information for all fan quotation.