I really loved the readings this week. Seiter’s chapter in relation to Andrejevic, I am thinking about audience identity formation with media, specifically television, and ethnographic studies. Seiter highlighted the shortcomings and problematics of ethnographic methodologies. I loved that Seiter said that ethnography is rooted in colonialism. Too few people make that acknowledgment in my opinion. Ethnography tends to be essentialist in nature. The researcher/interviewer is perceived to be gathering information, listening and recording, and then contextualizing data to offer some insight into a culture and/or people. However, in my view, the role of the ethnographer has rarely been about finding a story and more about crafting one. The ethnographer rarely acknowledges their own implicit biases nor do they address that their ambition and desire to “discover” shapes their own perspective. Seiter points this out in her analysis of the case study for The Cosby show. The interviewers wanted to have a discussion around race in post-Civil Rights era America and used the show as a facade to do so. This, in turn, led to a lack of focus on gender in their study.
To complicate this more I am thinking about how (in)effective ethnographic methodologies are in guiding our understanding of modern fandoms? Fandoms are an interesting kind of audience in how they form. It is the transition from passive spectator to an active participant in the medium as Seiter and Andrejevic point out. In order for this transition to take place, it requires, in my opinion, to form an identity that would align not just with a particular film/television series, but with a dominant group as well. It is adopting behaviors and ideologies that are cohesive to some degree with the dominant group. In some cases, race, gender, sexuality are not integrated into that dominant culture which would mean, of course, that white heteronormativity would be what each member of the fandom is integrating into. How can ethnography contend with that? What does it mean to be a fan of franchises like Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek, for example, when race, gender, and sexuality are largely homogenous? How does the non-white, male, cis-gendered heterosexual fan negotiate their own presence in these fandoms? I’m not sure if I am making any kind of sense and I apologize if I am not but I have many questions and thoughts.
This is such an interesting post and it has me thinking about how fandoms might relate to Stuart Hall’s ideas about dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings. As you point out, the more actively one participates in a fandom, the more likely one is to be integrated into the ideology of white heteronormativity that the fandom likely perpetuates. By that logic, would it be fair to assess that readings that negotiate or oppose this ideology become increasingly less feasible the more a fandom solidifies or the more one participates in it? In fairness, I don’t want to make any unfounded assumptions about how people engage with fandoms, nor do I want to assume that all fandoms innately perpetuate hegemonic ideologies by mere virtue of being fandoms. But it seems reasonable to speculate that the larger a fandom grows, the most centrist and hegemonic its politics will become given its need to mediate such a vast membership. If that is the case, perhaps it is preferable to operate as a fan outside the realm of fandom. That way one is in a position to interpret a text freely without the pressures imposed by the fandom’s collective consensus. At the same time, I imagine that the appeal of a fandom is the sense of community it provides. So, how can one communally engage with a popular piece of media without having to adhere to the white heteronormativity perpetuated by a fandom? Or, perhaps more aptly, where have such forms of community engagement already emerged that most scholars have simply not thought to look?
ReplyDelete