Fan studies and/as feminist methodology

Feminist cultural studies and feminist theory in genealogies of fan studies are taken for granted. However, the implications of feminist methodological and epistemological frameworks within discussions of fan studies methodology are more often inferred than directly stated—or cited. Examining the parallel debates taking place around knowledge, power, and reflexivity within feminist theory, feminist cultural studies, and fan studies illustrates how key methodological approaches within fan studies are deeply grounded in feminist epistemology and ontology. Building on theorizations of the dual positionality of the acafan alongside feminist theorizations of self-reflexivity permits an exploration of how acafandom aligns with feminist methodological frameworks regarding researcher fragmentation and reflexivity. Emotion and affect are important concerns for acafan scholarship to address, as they align fan studies with feminist traditions of personal and autobiographical writing that privilege subjectivity as a legitimate source of knowledge. Explicitly reframing fan studies within this theoretical and methodological context augments the understanding of many of the fundamental beliefs and principles underpinning the production of knowledge within fan studies, and helps refine the critical language used to frame and describe scholarly methodologies.

State Control and the Online Contestation of Iranian Female Spectators and Activists

Drawing on feminist cultural studies, this article critically analyzes the interrelationship between state ideology and gender policies in the sporting domain with a particular focus on the prolonged interdiction of Iranian female spectators from stadiums. Data were collected from online social spaces such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The findings suggest that in the absence of free and democratic public spaces for negotiation of their rights, Iranian women have increasingly used social media and online campaigns as enabling platforms to partake in a communication discourse, raise awareness, practice democracy, mobilize masses, and protest against social injustice.

Latina Adolescent Becomings: Interrupting (Un)Silenced Spaces Into Entangled Modes of Resistance

This research project focuses on embodied and engendered liminal experiences of Latina adolescents through ontologies of becoming as a space to generatively and critically expand notions of resistance and activism. Specifically, this article seeks to reconceptualize Latinas’ identities and subjectivities outside current (and silenced) understandings of their border-crossing journeys and the subsequent trauma of living in the United States as undocumented immigrants. Finally, a Chicana/Latina Feminist Cultural Studies (FCS) framework creates “parallel genealogies of thought” that disrupts methodological Eurocentric perspectives and entangles postcolonial agentive thought.

Introduction

This special section on “Degendering the Driver” explores how gender intervenes in the potential shift from a driver-centered to a driverless car culture. It focuses on representations of imagined futures—prototypes, media images, and popular discourses of driverless cars. Following the tradition of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, we ask in our introduction how these new techno-imaginaries of autonomous driving are gendered and racialized. We aim to explore if the future user of an autonomous car is gendered or degendered in the current media discourse. The four articles explore what kinds of images are used, what promises are made, and how the discourse about autonomous driving is influenced by gendered norms. Some authors emphasize that self-driving vehicles could encourage pluralized forms of masculinity. Nonetheless, all authors conclude that driverless cars alone will not degender the driver but rather encourage a multiplication of gendered and racialized technologies of mobility.

Hvorfor lykke, hvorfor nu?

The Promise of Happiness, from which this article is taken, is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.

A Feminist Love Letter to Stuart Hall; or What Feminist Cultural Studies Needs to Remember

I need to preface these brief remarks with a caveat. I was to write of Hall’s contribution to forging feminist cultural studies, the intellectual project I have felt affiliated with across my academic life, and certainly that which has inspired and formed me. But I don’t feel entitled to write of ‘feminist cultural studies’ in the way that others, such as Lucy Bland, Janice Winship, Angela McRobbie and Charlotte Brunsdon can. I wasn’t there when the Women Studies Group at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies struggled with ‘the dilemma’ of ‘whether to conquer the whole of cultural studies and only then to make a feminist critique of it, or whether to focus on the “woman question” from the beginning’. The group did conceptual work across the disciplines of history, anthropology, psychology and literary studies, and grappled with theoretical movements influenced by figures as varied as Lacan, Marx and Foucault and across sites such as popular culture, regimes of gendered work and eighteenth-century novels. At the same time, and in their words, ‘the Group also felt it wanted to do concrete work rather than engaging theoretical wrangles’. Across the chapters in Women Take Issue I see dedicated feminists poring over texts, their own and others, and then heading to the streets, the factories and girls’ bedrooms to understand how, where and with what effect gendered relations were being reproduced. It is a picture of scholarly intent a bit at odds with Hall’s description in hindsight of how feminism roared into the project of cultural studies:For cultural studies (in addition to many other theoretical projects), the intervention of feminism was specific and decisive. It was ruptural … As a thief in the night, it broke in, interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies.

Feminist Cultural Studies: Uncertainties and Possibilities

This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. Our concerns crystallized during the spirited feminist responses to a fiery roundtable debate on Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) in New Orleans in November 2012. At that session, one audience member after another spoke to what they saw as the unacknowledged appropriation by PCS proponents of longstanding feminist—and feminist cultural studies—approaches to scholarship and writing. These critiques focused not just on the intellectual moves that PCS scholars claim to be making but on how they are made, with several audience members and some panelists expressing their concerns about the territorializing effects of some strains of PCS discourse.