The Other Side of Fandom
The Other Side of Fandom
Anti-Fans, Non-Fans, and the Hurts of History
If a typical fan is someone who is immersed in a popular culture product, such as a television show, a movie, or even a book, and who might criticize the product from the perspective of one who wants only to make the product better, what about the viewer or reader who seems to offer nothing but active dislike? How might we understand the anti-fan who has plenty of opinions but dislikes a show so much that he or she seldom watches? And what about the non-fan who might watch only rarely but still finds the show or movie meaningful (Gray 2003: 73)?
This chapter suggests that we can learn much about a society by studying anti-fans and non-fans who are doing cultural work as they engage with, edit, or reject a variety of television programs, books, and other media in the context of the home. Using case studies based on ethnographic interviews of two sets of parents, this chapter argues that these particular anti-fans and non-fans created an ideal time-space nexus in their homes when they used media. Not only were they engaged in a process of identity formation, as Morley writes (Morley 2000) and as my colleagues and I have observed in other situations (Hoover, Clark, & Alters with Champ & Hood 2004), but they also engaged in “the indispensable dialogue with the past that accompanies any present” (Lipsitz 1990: 81) when they regarded mediated popular culture. The results recall Bahktin’s chronotopic process of exchange (Bahktin 1981: 254), when history, the parents’ experience, and cultural products were mingled and exchanged. In their dialogues with the past and their contemporary experiences, these parents created their own special chronotopes, or time-spaces, within the family home.1 In the process, they linked their homes to the larger world through popular culture. Examining how they did so can help us understand the contradictory processes that define and maintain a culture.
In these case studies, I look at two sets of parents, the Walkers and the Farmers. They are anti-fans of some cultural products and non-fans of others, and in each case they worked in their views of history, contemporary times, their memories of television when they were children, and their roles as parents when they talked about the shows. To illustrate, I focus on their distinctly different views of the television show Ellen2 and of a variety of children’s cartoons. Their views of the text were emphatically social—that is, their views of U.S. society were bound up in what they said about television shows, movies, and books. They incorporated their views of contemporary U.S. society and history into the shows’ chronotopes, creating ideal time-space nexuses, or domestic chronotopes, in their homes.
The work these two sets of parents undertook to evaluate popular media is cultural work.3 Whether this work keeps the dominant culture going or exposes its cracks is an open question, to be answered over a longer span of time. But it’s possible to look more narrowly at the parents’ cultural work as examples of Raymond Williams’s (1961, 1977) notion of a selective, interpretive process—for my purposes, a microprocess—specific to each family. This chapter suggests that the chronotopes of these two families are examples of two important but very different structures of feeling in contemporary U.S. society: a conservative, looking-to-the-past one that contains residual as well as dominant elements of the culture, and a more overtly contemporary structure of feeling that contains more dominant elements but in important ways distorts the past in terms of the present.
The ways the four parents constructed their chronotopes in this process seem very much related to Fredric Jameson’s notion of “strategies of containment,” or interpretive codes that deny contradictions and offer the illusion of narrative closure. A strategy of containment masks the “totality of history,” including the “hurts,” which are contradictions that would be unbearable without these strategies (1981: 52–53). Like Williams, Jameson conceives of people’s readings of the past as “vitally dependent on our experience of the present” (1981: 11). Drawing from Jameson’s concept, George Lipsitz observes that history contains unbearable contradictions that are graspable only indirectly, through popular culture (1990: xiii). Indeed, it was when they were asked to talk about popular culture products in the interviews that the Walkers and Farmers expressed their dissatisfaction with contemporary society and their interest in alternatives.
The setting—the family home—in which the parents did this cultural work is significant. The parents saw their homes as places to control, to make safe for their children. They wanted to keep out history that was painful to them, and they did so by barring or altering certain media products that they believed represented that history. Morley (2000: 3) observes a constant attempt to police the family home, to keep it free of alterity, as a way of defining who or what belongs in one’s family—a process of identity formation in modern life. Morley’s concern, to explore how home processes articulate with larger societal processes through television and other media, informed my own work in Media, Home, and Family (Hoover, Clark, & Alters, with Champ & Hood 2004), which describes a process of family identity formation that involves the way families engage with media. Beyond the question of identity formation as families policed their homes, the problem of historical memory continually intruded in my ethnographic interviews. This chapter is an attempt to explore the way these parents used the past to construct a safe place in their homes free of painful memories. Constructing a safe place is something fans do, creating a kind of utopian space in popular culture, “a site for constructing an alternative culture,” as Henry Jenkins argues (1992: 282). The anti-fans and non-fans discussed in this chapter do something quite similar. To create a safe place, a kind of utopia, they came up with a time-space nexus, or chronotope, particular to them, a utopia of sorts that they wanted their children—and themselves—to experience.
The Walkers
To situate the families socially: both are white, middle class in taste, by choice somewhat precarious economically, and actively critical of U.S. culture, which they equated with television. The adults in both families differed markedly in political attitudes, making all the more remarkable the instances in which their critiques of various aspects of the culture are similar.
The Walkers, who lived in a bungalow on a tree-lined street near the center of a midsized Rocky Mountain city, were trying to figure out a way to live in a culture they embraced and abhorred at the same time.4 The mother, Mara, and the father, George, preferred noncontemporary media texts and sought to build a tradition for their family as an alternative to what they saw as mainstream culture. Indeed, they considered their work as media critics a part of their role as parents, to in effect keep alterity out of their home. The Walker parents are college-educated, and at the time of the interviews in the late 1990s, the parents of two boys, ten and seven, and three girls, four, three, and two months. George had a graduate degree. Mara was not in the paid-labor market; she kept house and home schooled the two oldest children and planned to do the same with the younger ones. George worked for a Christian organization. Both were evangelical Christians, an important, emerging mainstream segment of the U.S. population.
George and Mara looked to the 1950s as a time when things were more “moral,” when “family” meant their middle-class family:5 a salaried father (above $30,000 but below $70,000) and a stay-at-home mother. They looked to the past for much of popular culture, buying or borrowing children’s books from the 1950s and early Disney movies or old cartoons. Over the previous decade, they had increasingly limited their children’s television viewing, particularly after noting that their middle child was keenly interested in any screen display she encountered at the local mall. Eventually, the television was banished to the basement, behind the closed doors of an antique cabinet. No one in the family in a normal week watched more than three hours of television, Mara estimated. Still, the Walkers were conversant with many television programs, particularly children’s, and a variety of movies and videos.
George was fascinated by contemporary media, having studied it as an undergraduate and graduate student. His background makes his yearning for the past all the more striking. Here, George and Mara are asked how they choose videos:
Mara: Part of it is knowing which ones are what we would consider safe.
George: And that even goes to books, Diane. If I see a book at the library book sale, and the title looks okay, and it was printed in 1950, I’ll grab it. No questions asked. If it’s printed in 1980, I’m not sure what kind of influences are going to be in there. I mean, I’m very cautious of our day, and the spin put on various things in our day.
George recalled a predictable, taken-for-granted atmosphere around television when he was a child that contrasted sharply with the attitude towards television that he and Mara sought to build in their home:
I’m on the tail end of the boomers [he was born in 1960] and so I grew up with the TV on. It was just on. I’d come home from school, I’d get some cereal, some Life cereal and sit down and watch whatever was on TV, for an hour and a half, two hours, till it was suppertime. I’m sure I didn’t do that all the time. I’m sure it was not daily. But it was just a regular part of life.
Significantly, the Walkers’ preference for entertainment texts from the 1950s was in part a conscious attempt to avoid all positive references to gays and lesbians. For example, they were upset that Ellen’s star, Ellen DeGeneres, appeared on Sesame Street. She intruded into a show they had assumed was “safe” because it had seemed to reflect their own very specific definition of family. Since her appearance, the Walkers had stopped watching Sesame Street regularly:
George: She did a guest. It’s sort of like, “I’m sorry. Now you are incorporating elements of the culture that aren’t appropriate to this age.” Whether or not I even agree with her. I mean, I don’t see the need to do a guest star role for somebody that does a TV sitcom.
Mara: Well, not that they discussed that issue on it.
George: Well, I’m sure they didn’t.
Mara: They didn’t.
George: But it’s indicative. That’s not a good example, but it’s indicative of the kind of things that have been incorporated into Sesame Street, and it’s sort of like, there’s better things to do with time.
DeGeneres’s appearance was “at least an implicit endorsement here of who this person is, much like any media appearance,” George added.
Clearly Sesame Street represented tension and contradiction for the Walkers, and their wariness of the show was connected to their position as anti-fans of Ellen and DeGeneres, who embodied a lifestyle they believed was immoral. They worked around the contradictions of contemporary media by watching old Disney classics, old cartoons, and videos of old movies that addressed families like theirs: nuclear, middle class, and heterosexual. They approved of these because they lacked positive references to gays and lesbians.
The Walkers’ geographic location is also an important context and helps bring their individual narratives to the social level. They lived in a conservative city in Colorado whose voters in 1992 overwhelmingly supported a successful state ballot initiative that would have barred lesbians and gay men from certain civil-rights protections. The campaigns around the measure were bitter, and four years of legal challenges ended in 1996 when the U.S. Supreme Court supported a state supreme court decision declaring the measure unconstitutional (Wadsworth 1997). Seen in this context, the Walkers’ choice of pre-Ellen entertainment was also a social decision. Since the early 1990s, gays and lesbians were often subjects of discussion and religious commentary, much of it heated and bitter. The Walkers’ efforts to exclude what was disagreeable and painful to them were so thorough that George could also insist that Ellen DeGeneres’s appearance on Sesame Street was a “nonissue for us because it’s not a daily part of our lives.” The children did not routinely watch Sesame Street—but they did not watch it because it was proscribed. The Walkers’ choice of television shows—and the way they framed them for their children—were attempts to exclude alterity. They seemed to select a tradition—to localize Williams’s term—and apply it to contemporary life despite the changes around them. The Walkers’ chronotope, then, brought the 1950s into the present so that they could control the present in their home.
The Walkers’ preference for noncontemporary television and books masked a hurt that was both painful and unbearable to the Walkers: the existence of homosexuality, a way of life their religious beliefs defined as immoral. Older cultural works were safe because they contained no representations that the Walkers recognized as referencing a family style that they fundamentally opposed. This family tried to control the present in terms of a particular moment in the past by policing the popular culture that came into their home. The Walkers’ anti-fandom was an engagement with popular culture, as they actively chose residual elements in popular culture products and worked to keep their family within this residual culture, in a chronotope that reflected the way the Walker parents wanted their children to experience the world. Bakhtin describes this chronotopic process of exchange:
The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the creative perception of listeners and readers. (Bahktin 1981: 254)
This way of engaging with popular culture was similar to the way another, very different family, the Farmers, dealt with popular culture. What follows is a look at the Farmers and the chronotope they constructed.
The Farmers, who lived in another small house in a contiguous neighborhood only a few miles from the Walkers, wrested very different meanings from the shows they watched and from their childhood television experiences.6 They weren’t fans of Ellen, having watched it only twice, but they did so out of a sense that watching would somehow help counter what they regarded as a virulent antigay atmosphere in their city. Rather, they were non-fans in the sense that a show that they watched rarely nevertheless had meaning for them. The Farmer adults, Jane and Theo, identified with the small population of liberal Democrats in their conservative region. Unlike the Walkers, the Farmers weren’t religious: Theo was an atheist, having pulled away in high school from his mainline Protestant church, and Jane had no formal religion. Like the Walkers, both were college educated, and Theo had a graduate degree. Their annual income of about $20,000 was lower than the Walkers’ and like the Walkers, they had little money for nonnecessities, though their tastes were middle class. They owned their house. Unlike the Walkers, they had a non-1950s family form: Theo’s primary duties were at home, as he cleaned, cooked, shopped, and was the main caretaker for their daughters, eight and six. He sometimes did salaried work for short periods on contract, and when the girls were in school he worked on a novel he was writing. Jane worked in a low-paying job that dealt with public policy issues.
In effect, the Farmer adults regarded themselves as non-fans of television. “I don’t really watch television,” Jane said. Theo expressed surprise that most of his acquaintances had memorized television schedules; he did not know when most popular shows were on. However, both offered deft rundowns of scenes and characters in Sesame Street and Power Rangers, past favorites of their younger daughter. Their daily viewing, though limited, was more than the Walkers reported.
Like the Walkers’ disdain for all things Ellen, the Farmers worked hard to banish one particular kind of television programming: the news. Their critique of news was based on vivid television experiences in Jane’s childhood, described as she recalled a time when television schedules were important to her:
Jane: Oh, I watched a ton of TV when I was a kid. Every night, what was on and what we were going to watch, every night…. I’d watch it by myself. I’d come home after school and do a little homework, or watch, if I knew what was on, I would go on—We’d usually watch something right before dinner. Oh yeah, right before dinner we’d watch for half an hour. Mom knew. Dad was usually very regular about coming home, so she knew the shows were over. So that never to me was a conflict, but I don’t know if she would tell you that. It didn’t ever seem to me. We had to go and set the table, and we’d go up during the commercial, and she’d let us do that, set the table, come down. Never got us out of doing anything she wanted us to do. But it was definitely a pastime. Then we’d watch our shows in the evening, whatever they might be.
Diane: Do you remember a favorite show that you had?
Jane: Umm, not any more.
The regularity, the time spent, and the seamlessness with which Jane’s watching fit with her family’s routines were much more memorable than the shows she watched. In fact, her 1950s-style childhood nuclear family structure—which included a stay-at-home mother who had dinner on the table at a set time for a salaried father with regular daytime hours—worked well with the medium, as its purveyors intended.7 Her own salaried mother/stay-at-home father family form was not designed for 1950s-style television. Instead, her children sometimes watched cartoons in the morning before school, and the closest television got to dinner was when Theo and their daughters rented movies and ordered pizza on the nights that Jane worked late.
The memory of unconflicted predictability around television took on a different character when Jane recalled watching news with her grandfather. It was through television news that Jane, who is white, first encountered images of American blacks, crime, and violence. She connected those three elements, but did not seem to draw such a negative portrait of white protesters of the Vietnam War. Born in 1958, she recalled “how mad everybody was. Remember Vietnam, the war, and the violence of all that. Especially in the early 60s, how awful that was.”
Her sharpest memory was of watching the five o’clock news with her grandfather, who “ruled” when he visited. She would listen to him being “real racist about” televised rioting. Her recollection of television was not fondly nostalgic in the way that the Walkers’ memories of old television shows were, but her interpretation of what she watched as a child had a bearing on her contemporary consideration of television. Later on, she came to believe that portrayals of African-Americans on television were false, and found her memories of her grandfather’s racist commentary unsettling. News, she had concluded, was “too disturbing” for her daughters, who were not allowed to watch news shows. They were “too violent for kids,” Theo said. “It’s too disturbing for these guys,” Jane added. “The mean-spiritedness of so much of it is so hard to understand.” Jane’s memories of watching television news reports were painful and affected the Farmers’ decision to ban television news for their daughters, as they tried to contain this “hurt” of 1960s history.
Just as the Walkers tried to shield their children from bad influences on television, so too did the Farmers work to keep out a different kind of alterity. Besides their careful avoidance of news, the Farmers policed the content of children’s cartoons. Unlike the Walkers, they found old cartoons far less safe and criticized them for the way they portrayed women and blacks. As Jane observed,
The girls really like to watch old cartoons, like Cartoon Network. And they’ll have old Tom and Jerry’s and old, you name it, it’s still on. And boy, do I notice the racism and sexism in those. Incredible! And I know that impacts them. And how women are treated. They’re always sex symbols in those cartoons. They’re always the weak person that’s gotta be saved by the main character or the hero of the story, whatever character it is. And I notice that. Some of the action cartoons that they’ll watch once in awhile, Captain Planet or something, usually have a pretty strong female character that’s equal with men. They’ll have their own special powers. But there generally is a couple of female characters in them, both villains and heroes. So I think there’s a lot more of that. You would never have seen that. It would have been highly unusual, I think, to have seen that kind of character when we were a kid.
Indeed, it would have been highly unusual for Jane to have seen such female cartoon characters when she was a young child. Jane would have been well past early childhood when a woman cartoon superhero, Wonder Woman, was created, for example (Schneider, with Pullen 2001: 76). Thus when Jane cited televised cartoons as markers of social change, she noted changes set in motion after her own cartoon-watching years and in time for her children to see what she regarded as positive role models. The sexist cartoons were residual cultural products, and Jane and Theo worked to provide a different environment than the past that produced the sexist cartoons. They did this, for example, by joking about the sexist images and action in old cartoons:
Jane: We’ll say things like, “Oh, that girl sure doesn’t know what to do!” Or, “Oh, who’d want to be that lady in those high heels!” Or something like that. And talk a little. And they’ll joke about it and say, “Yeah.” And I get the sense that they separate it from themselves, being that character all of a sudden.
In this, the Farmers’ chronotopes were in tune with the emerging-to-dominant critique of “traditional” sex roles, as their vision of the female superhero-as-role-model nicely dovetails with the networks’ additions to cartoon fare. In these ways, the Farmers’ reading of television reflected their political views, which were very different from the Walkers.’
The Walker and Farmer parents all described themselves as alert to content that was not “appropriate” for their children, and the term was so loaded with meaning that they had trouble defining “appropriate” in the abstract. They all agreed that sexual references were inappropriate for children, and that television programming contained too many references to sexual acts. The Farmers simply turned off the television when an image or story line seemed overtly sexual. The Walkers did the same. Both sets of parents also firmly believed that television was “too commercial,” as George described it. All four adults described times they’d encouraged their children to be skeptical of television advertising. The Walkers taped Super Bowl broadcasts so they could skip over the commercials—thus effectively banishing sales pitches and sex at the same time. Jane Farmer told her children about a college friend of hers who had tossed a television out a window because commercials interrupted his hockey-game viewing. All, though, took for granted that television was “commercial” and felt their job as parents was to teach their children to think critically about the commercial aspects, but not necessarily to take collective action by, for example, lobbying for noncommercial television. With these constraints, all shared a definition of home—their particular and very different homes—as a place to keep out the “bad.” Only at home, then, could they defend against the bad, and they went to extraordinary efforts to fashion time, space, and memory into chronotopes that allowed them to engage with popular culture and at the same time to interpret it in ways that seemed safe for their families.
These families’ interpretations were their own constraints on history that made them uncomfortable, as they attempted to sidestep or avoid the history they abhorred. The Walkers did this by looking back to early television and books that contained no positive references to gays and lesbians, whose ways of living they regarded with religious disapproval. In contrast, the Farmers embraced some contemporary cultural products precisely because they cast a positive light on gays and lesbians, an impulse directly related to the political climate in their city. However, the Farmers, being non-fans of Ellen, did not talk extensively about the show but instead focused on such things as the positive portrayals of women they had seen in contemporary cartoons. Both sets of parents, then, attempted to avoid the “hurts” of history by constructing narratives that had better endings—the Walkers wanted a life free of obvious homosexuality, and the Farmers wanted a nonsexist world for their daughters. Both families tried to create these respective chronotopes within the boundaries of their home, even as their politics indicated a hope that they could eventually reproduce the terms of home in the culture at large.
Anti-fans and Non-fans and Their Relation to the Culture
Through their work as anti-fans and non-fans, these parents used popular culture products to think about the past and to define themselves in the present. The Walkers used their memories socially: if we keep popular culture from the 1950s around us, we can build a home environment that bars difference by employing the same constraints as some particular safe point in the past. The Farmers also had a particular, contemporary reading of old cartoons and were grateful for new, nonsexist ones they hoped would be a stronger influence on their daughters. This is also a social use of memory. However, Jane refused to let her daughters watch television news because her memories of watching news were so painful. In both families, one can see a tendency to distort the past in order to keep it in the present. As Lipsitz observed in another context, people use popular culture to discuss core contradictions in society that were indirectly reflected in popular culture (1990: xviii-xiv).
The Farmers embraced much about television that emerged from social changes in the 1960s and 1970s that brought more middle-class women into the workforce: characters and story lines questioning the female stay-at-home role in the family; presentation of new, nonsexist social relations and female superheroes in cartoons; and appreciation for emergent gay family forms as hinted at in Ellen. This marks them as anti-fans of the “old” in television entertainment and news, as the chronotope they constructed to deal with television distanced their children from news, which they banned, and old cartoons, which they interrupted with commentary. In contrast, the Walkers embraced very little of contemporary television, and their anti-fan stance towards works that cast gays in a positive light emerged clearly in the way they engaged with Ellen and its main character. Indeed, as the gay family form began to be chronicled in Ellen and normalized elsewhere on television in Sesame Street, the Walkers tried to exorcise this social change from their household by creating their own, alternate tradition. Drawing on residual, 1950s-style cultural products, they constructed a chronotope very much rooted in the past. In doing this, they tapped into an already thriving alternative culture created within some segments of the vast Christian evangelical population, with various organizations offering alternative children’s products (such as Veggie Tales and other children’s shows sold on videos and, later, DVDs), advice about home schooling, and more overtly political efforts to limit civil rights of gays and lesbians.
It’s striking that both the Farmers and the Walkers seemed to recognize as dominant the changes in family form and the decline of sexist images in cartoons. More significantly, both sets of parents seemed to feel they could have no effect on television itself, perhaps in part because of this dominance. Both families took for granted key things about U.S. television, including its aggressively commercial nature, for example. In the end, carefully constructing chronotopes within the family home was the only way they could deal with television.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank Jonathan Gray for pointing out the connection between what these parents did and Bahktin’s concept of chronotope, or time-space. Bahktin defined chronotope as “the instrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1981: 84).
2. Ellen, a situation comedy starring Ellen DeGeneres, ran from 1994 to 1998. In its fourth season the title character came out as a lesbian.
3. The notion that audience members do cultural work follows the work of Dan Schiller, who argues that audience members are doing labor within the second of two “moments” of cultural production that center on the media as sites of institutionalized cultural production and audience members as producers “who contribute to their own self-understanding” (1996: 194).
4. The Walkers were interviewed at their home over several weeks in 1999. Their names are pseudonyms, as are all names of interviewees discussed in this chapter. Most of the interviews cited here were conducted as part of the Media, Symbolism, and the Lifecourse project at the University of Colorado at Boulder under a grant from the Lilly Endowment.
5. The nostalgic image of the “traditional” nuclear family is associated with the 1950s: father as breadwinner, mother at home with children in a middle-class, private, autonomous unit. Stephanie Coontz observes that this image was accurate, but only narrowly, as it was a “historical fluke” in the white middle class for a period in the 1950s. Most U.S. families before and since the 1950s have not fit this model, although it persists in popular culture (Coontz 1992: 28).
6. The Farmers were interviewed over several weeks in 1997. The two families did not know each other.
7. Indeed, as Lynn Spigel notes, television in the decades after World War II came to signify an ideal of family togetherness, expressed through advertising aimed at the middle-class, suburban, nuclear family (Spigel 1992: 44–45).