This is the final part of a seven-part series about the 4^th LeakyCon convention held in Portland Oregon June 27-30, 2013.

In my previous post, I talked about the way in which stars/special guests at LeakyCon aligned themselves with fans and expressed their appreciation of fan creativity. We can see this shared position informing the various forms of storytelling and creative performance highlighted at LeakyCon, from the many group sing alongs and the collective singing of thousands of Starkids attendees, to the Lizzie Bennett Diaries (hereafter LBD) spin off Welcome to Sanditon (herafter Sanditon). Continuing an approach that LBD experimented with, Welcome to Sanditon (a web series adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel) invites viewers to become not just players but actors and writers, creating their own characters, subplots, and videos. In Sanditon, Gigi Darcy (Allison Paige, reprising/continuing her role from LBD) brings the Domino vlogging application (first introduced in LBD as an enterprise of Darcy’s company, Pemberley Digital) to the fictional town of Sanditon, where she encourages its residents to vlog about their experiences and perspectives as town members.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

[Web Series Welcome to Sanditon’s first episode includes an invitation for viewers to become part of the storyworld.]

Viewers can use the Domino “application” (a portal accessible through the series’ central web site) to upload their own vlog entries, in which they create backstories and plotlines for themselves within the larger Sanditon universe. By uploading to the site or tagging posts with the hashtag #sanditon, viewers’ vlogs become available for others to see. In turn, official episodes of Sanditon have regularly included a selection of viewer-created content. At the LBD press interview, Paige described the dynamic of audience contribution to Sanditon as follows:

Not everybody gets to be on a television set, or movie, or web series, but these people will send me thank you’s saying “I get to be part of something, I get to be an actor, I get to tell my story and you guys gave me a place to do that.” … And they’re so creative in the things that they come up with — the places and the businesses… It’s just amazing to see these people’s thoughts and now they have a place to do that and they get to be an actor, and they get to be an artist, whether they’re writing or creating, they get to be artists right along with us, and that’s just like, awesome to watch.

I especially appreciate Paige’s comments here, because she recognizes the privileges of access and attention afforded professional productions. Of course, fans create and coordinate and publish on their own already, and I don’t think that Paige meant to suggest otherwise. But the thing about both LBD and Sanditon is that they acknowledge the vibrancy and richness of fan production. Rather than attempting to rein in all that unpredictability, these web series become hybrid productions, to different degrees, integrating fan creativity in substantive ways while still progressing a particular, defined story and set of performances.

In our discussions of transmedia storytelling over the past few years, we’ve seen a tension between transmedia creators wanting to both invite fan interactivity and to protect their official artistic control. Both LBD and Sanditon strive instead to develop artistic visions within innovative ecosystems that allow fan creativity, in all of its diversity, to flourish. Bernie Su, co-producer of the LBD and executive producer of Sanditon, described his current reaction to the project this way:

As an artist, you see that, you create this thing and you inspire [fans] to do this art and play in the world, and it’s pretty intoxicating. At the same time, also as a storyteller, it’s hard, I know it scatters the audience a bit, so I’m not going to say it’s all great. It’s just really neat to see them play in the space. So going into Welcome to Sanditon when Jay (Bushman) and Margaret (Dunlap) were plotting everything, they wanted to really experiment with what we started already [in LBD] , and they were like “we’re going to bring them all into the text and have them become–as Allison said– actors in this world, players in this world, and see if we can enhance the story that way.” And you know, to be honest, I think it’s a little polarizing, we’re getting pros and cons, I think a lot of the fans just really want to see what happens, and some of the others are just really embracing this whole fictional world that they can be part of, kind of like an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game), and for me personally I’d say I’m still a little… I don’t know if this is really effective, but it’s really fun.

Bernie Su’s ambivalence here captures well the challenges faced by media creators seeking to integrate the energy and creativity of fan communities into their storytelling. And while part of me (the part that is always ready to proselytize the amazing creative value of fan production) wishes that he were less ambivalent, I find real resonance in his description of tensions of creating work in a digital sphere that is simultaneously multi-niche and mainstream, balancing fans who come in ready and eager to produce with those who want to immerse themselves in a beautifully told story. I do hope that Su will continue to chase the fun and intoxication of encouraging fan creativity, and that others will follow in his footsteps with similar projects, because I believe that the rewards in such hybrid creative works are worth the risks.

Indeed, LeakyCon’s value to me lies in its participants’ willingness to forgo boundaries and to explore what new connections happen as a result of creative mergers and blendings. As a scholar and a fan interested in bridging the perceived divides between professionalized academic and popular media literacy as well as between production and theory/history/studies, it was invaluable to see this ethos of creative synthesis in action. To me, LeakyCon offers a model for a certain braveness, a willingness to create and to experiment with new ways of making meaning (and making change!) in our contemporary popular and vernacular culture. That’s something I hope to take away from LeakyCon and to carry into my own work moving forward.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)

This is the sixth of a seven-part seven about the 4^th LeakyCon Fan Convention held in Portland, Oregon, June 27-30, 2013

Men were the minority at LeakyCon among fan attendees but they represented about half of the invited performers. I was especially intrigued by the way masculine norms were altered to suit the desires of LeakyCon’s primarily young, female audience. As I discussed in my last post, attendees value the con so much in part because it provides a public space for them in which they are not primarily defined by their sexuality or treated as sexual objects. Normative, phallic masculinity is the one identity category that is not welcome at LeakyCon. Male-identified performers modeled more open, inclusive, and genderqueer versions of both straight and gay masculinity. They embraced “feminine”-coded genre practices, featured feminist and gay/queer narrative content in their shows, celebrated fans’ active participation, and enthusiastically addressed the romantic/erotic interests and concerns of this particular audience. While male performers popular with adoring young female audiences are often characterized (condescendingly) as sexually non-threatening, this dismissal disguises the larger threat they represent: while such masculine performances are indeed unthreatening to young women, they are deeply threatening to gender/sexual social norms and hierarchies. Many of LeakyCon’s performers have substantial followings; they have largely developed distinct personas outside the con in a variety of arenas: social media, fiction, theatre, and television. Their commonalities were put into relief when they were gathered together at LeakyCon, and these shared characteristics suggested an alternative, genderqueer masculine brand that – although largely subcultural – is clearly making a significant impact on millennial culture.

I first noted this type of masculine performance two years ago when I described Glee’s straight-identified star Darren Criss as modeling a kind of genderqueerness in his own star persona, one that reinforced Glee’s “radically fluid adolescent masculinites.” Part of my reason for attending LeakyCon, initially, was to see whether the theatrical troupe The Starkids, which Criss co-founded, shared his gender-blurring, playful performance style. Indeed they did, but so did the other male performers at LeakyCon. In addition to the Starkids, these included, most prominently, Rent star Anthony Rapp; some of the actors who play Glee’s Dalton Academy Warblers, who hosted wildly popular sing-a-longs; Tom Lenk,  (Buffy’s “Andrew”), who performed his show, “Nerdgasm;” and LeakyCon regular and favorite Hank Green, who this year combined “wizardrock” performing, Nerdfighter gatherings, web-advice panels, and Lizzie Bennett Diaries discussions (Green co-created LBD).

Of these, social media personality and web-series producer Green represents the public intellectual division of LeakyCon’s masculine brand.  His video blogs (“vlogs”) with his brother, Young Adult author and frequent LeakyCon participant John Green, inspired their Nerdfighter fans  to proudly assert their own identity as a nerd community (“DFTBA”!). In this popular vlog, “Human Sexuality is Complicated,” Green subverts masculine norms by presenting a non-binary, queer-theory-friendly explanation of human sexuality in a remarkably compact and accessible manner, notably situating himself along a gender/sexuality continuum in which he acknowledges the “womanly parts of me”:

The physical experience of being in a LeaykCon audience feels like a reimagining of populist theatre without the sexism, insularity, and surveillance that has often limited the value of such public spaces for women and queer people. Feminism and gender/sex non-normativity are explicitly a part of LeakyCon’s definition of egalitarian community, and hence become part of the performance aesthetics as well. Audience participation in total or in part is expected and encouraged. Performers emphasize the shared emotional experience of the players and the audience rather than the celebration of an individual performer. These fangirl popular aesthetics are genderqueer, but they are not camp; they require a sincere performance style. This distinction was evident in the Closing Ceremonies of the Con, which featured the “slash” (non-canon) wedding of two Harry Potter characters (performed by Dumbledore), Sirius and Remus, the couple who fans had voted that they most wanted to see wed. Even in this light-hearted sketch, the actors knew to perform their vows earnestly; their performance tied romantic and erotic behavior together, very like much of the fanfic this audience both reads and writes (vows begin at 6:17):

At LeakyCon, the primary generic frame is the musical. The ubiquitous sing-a-longs — both scheduled and spontaneous – are the most intensely emotionally involving entertainments, and the Starkids musical parodies provide the songbook that everyone knows. Of all LeakyCon’s players, the Starkids’ large troupe and devoted following have done the most to establish and sustain the con’s neo-masculine brand and community feel. As a popular genre, the musical has a democratic appeal, but Starkid shows further that potential by combining accessible songs, non-gendered (primarily group) dancing, and sincere emotional affect (“heart”), with feminist narrative content and the decentering of the heterosexual couple in favor of an inclusive group of friends. Although their shows feature every kind of drag as well as explicitly gay characters, these are never used as simply comic devices; rather, Starkid shows are character-driven and focus on emotional growth through loving companionship. Traits associated with dominant masculinity (grandstanding, bullying, desiring power and control, rigidity, exploitation of others, narcissism) are critiqued while desirable manhood is defined, by contrast, as the attainment of maturity through love. Falling in love is thus presented as more difficult and dangerous for male characters than battling their enemies because it forces them to break with masculine norms and open themselves up to emotional vulnerability. In the fan-favorite, canon-queering song “Granger Danger” from AVPM (2009) both Ron (Joey Richter) and Draco (brilliantly played, in drag, by Lauren Lopez) realize, fearfully, that they are falling love with Hermione: (skip to 1:38):

“Granger Danger” sets Ron on the road to mature manhood, but he doesn’t attain it until the third musical, VPSY (2012), in ‘I’m Just a Sidekick”:

While it is impossible to know how much of LeakyCon’s revised masculine brand will persevere or how it may be changed in the process of mainstreaming (Darren Criss’s career remains intriguing in this regard), it has been an undeniably affecting and inspiring model for thousands – if not millions — of fangirls (and fanboys), who are able to celebrate it through their own performances of masculinity at LeakyCon, such as this Starkid flashmob:

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

Much of our writing about our LeakyCon experience so far has explored a perceived blurring of previously assumed cultural categories at play in LeakyCon, including a destabilization of identity categories, a merging of fan, geek, and nerd in a general celebration of “awesomeness,” and a conflation of niche and mainstream, subcultural, and pop cultural. In my previous post, I spoke specifically about a blurring between celebrity and fan that permeated many of my LeakyCon experiences. I focused primarily on the ways in which stars positioned themselves as fans by demonstrating their fannish cred.

But performing fannishness was not the only ways stars blurred the line between fan and celebrity and destabilized the fan/celebrity relationship. They also frequently expressed their love for and awe of fan creativity and fan investment. They described fan creativity as similar to their own experience as budding artists, and talked about the way in which fan work has inspired and influenced their current creative endeavors. At a panel for press questions, I was able to ask the cast of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries about their responses to the fan creativity elicted by the web series. The cast’s replies emphasized the way in which the creative work of fan production felt humbling and awe-inspiring to the actors, and also reflected their own experiences as aspiring cultural participants and artists. Ashley Clements, who plays the series’ title character, talked about how she was herself inspired by the creative inspiration fans drew from the web series: “I mean it was always incredible when our show inspired people to make anything, from fan art to fan fiction to videos and to all the dolls and anything. It was just inspiring that we inspired them to make something.”

In a similar vein, Daniel Vincent Gordh (William Darcy in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries) talked about the impetus behind fan work as akin in spirit to the type of creative calling that inspired the cast members to be artists.

We all have things like that, art (that)… inspired us at some point during our development… in such an impactful, deep way… that it inspired our creativity, and I think is the reason that we’re doing this… I think that this is part of the general nature of art and how it operates in our society. But there was the part of awe that *we* were the ones doing this, it’s … a kind of a coming of age, almost, for me as an artist at least to be like “oh, and now I’ve gotten to a place where we’re able to release this and it’s continuing the cycle.”

Gordh’s words cast fans and actors as similarly artistic and creative minded but perhaps at different stages in their realization of (or professionalization of) this creativity. While this might suggest an erasure of the differences between professionalized creative labor and fandom’s logics of the gift economy, wherein fan artists don’t necessarily strive to become professional artists, I did not sense an overriding assumption that all fans want to be professional artists or are only at the beginning of their path to do so. Rather, fan creativity and professional creativity seemed to be recognized as concurrent and complementary modes of cultural expression in contemporary popular culture.

The most memorable story I heard over the whole Con was in Mary Kate Wiles’ response to my question about fan work. (Wiles played Lydia in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; I’ve written about Wiles’ web series work and relationship with fans here.) She described an instance in which a particular work of fan creativity directly influenced her own performance choices in a key episode in LBD:

My favorite experience, along with seeing fans talk to the characters on twitter or whatever, was that on the morning that we were to shoot the episodes when Lydia finds out about the sex tape and is recovering from that, I found a fan fiction that was about Lydia and Wickham’s relationship. And I read it that morning, and it was so much like what I had pictured in my head, and in it Wickham gives her a necklace. And because I had read it that morning and was going to shoot that afternoon, I ended up picking a necklace that was to be from him. And that was such a crazy thing for me to experience, having made work that made someone else make something that then inspired me… how cool is that? That you’re getting to interact with your audience in a way that contributes to your own storytelling. I think it’s just so beautiful, and it’s something that you don’t really get to do, ever. You don’t get to do that on a movie or TV show. It’s wonderful that we’ve gotten to experience that.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I find myself quite compelled by this story, most especially by the notion that a piece of fan fiction could directly influence a small but significant detail in a source text. We all know of stories of fan fiction premises that have surfaced in official productions, both with and without the consent of the fan authors. But this instance, the way it was framed by Wiles, seems much more a personal response to a piece of fan artwork, in turn embedding a personal detail into a larger production in a way that isn’t even necessarily meant to translate to viewers. This anecdote offers a landscape that personalizes fans and actors as creative interpreters working together to weave popular culture, one web series/plot interpretation/wardrobe detail at a time.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

This is the fourth of a seven-part series about the 4^th LeakyCon convention held in Portland Oregon June 27-30, 2013.

For me, one of the most valuable aspects of LeakyCon was the way it provided a supportive, generative environment for adolescent identity development. LeakyCon’s oft-repeated message to attendees is that they should “feel free to be themselves,” but the authentic self of the LeakyCon attendee is clearly not meant to be a fixed or singular entity. Multiple fandoms allow for multiple, changing sites of identification, and fans are likewise encouraged to explore and perform various aspects of their selves that they largely cannot at home. At an “LGBT”-defined “meet-up,” for example, fans testified eloquently about how LeakyCon’s fandom community (and the Tumblr fan community at large) have provided accepting, inclusive spaces for them to develop and affirm their non-normative gender and sexual identities. These fans also emphasized, more surprisingly, the critical importance of fan communities as sites for thinking through the limitations of dominant cultural formations regarding sex and gender, as well as providing invaluable opportunities for them to be perceived as something other, and more complex, than their gender/sexual affiliation.

Attending the LGBT meet-up seemed especially important at this moment of national change, and I was struck by the way in which these particular LGBT youth represented a generation in transition regarding this identity category. Indeed, the very term “LGBT” was often either qualified by attendees (“I’m bisexual, but I don’t believe in the gender binary”) or explicitly rejected; many attendees preferred to identify themselves by a term I was unfamiliar with, “GSM” (“Gender/Sexual Minority”), because they felt it was both more inclusive and less fixed. These attendees described fan communities as supportive, progressive spaces for renegotiating their identities and developing alternative concepts of sexual difference. Fan-focused social media sites were their primary informational sources and Tumblr, specifically, was repeatedly cited by fans as providing the vital space for in-depth, supportive discussions on the topic of their own sexual and gender identities. As one attendee explained, “I got into the fandoms [on Tumblr] and I started to meet people who said that you don’t have to be L,G,B, or T, you can be anything in between—and I really liked that idea because I didn’t feel like I belonged to any of them.”

There was also clearly a desire among many fans for the larger cultural focus on adolescent gender/sexual identity to broaden and include other aspects of their identities they viewed as equally important. Fans spoke about having parents who were so intent on being supportive of their potential sexual non-normativity (“I think [my dad] really wanted me to be a lesbian because he’s a feminist,” noted one) that they felt pressured to declare themselves early; one adolescent was embarrassed when her sexual identity changed twice during her formative years and felt she couldn’t “come out again” anywhere but on Tumblr and at LeakyCon. Another attendee strongly valued her identity as a Ravenclaw, the Harry Potter “house” defined by intellectual work and creativity, but noted that since she has come out to her friends, “it’s kind of become the only thing I am, just that ‘bi-girl’.” Her voice rose as she continued, tearing-up: “That’s why I like LeakyCon so much, because I’m not just bisexual. Yes, I am bisexual, but I’m also a Ravenclaw and I’m a Whovian! I’m a Pokemaster! A Starkid! And so my name is —— and I’m a FANGIRL! And I am bisexual.” Like Harry Potter, the boy who lived to become something more than only that, LGBT and GSM attendees at Leakycon have the opportunity to develop multiple aspects of their identities-in-process and to be valued for all of them.

Addendum: It is impossible to know how Tumblr’s recent purchase by Yahoo may threaten the very culture I’m discussing here, although recent structural changes regarding “adult content” are cause for concern, and they drive home how much these kinds of thoughtful, nuanced conversations about sex/sexuality are currently dependent on technological and industrial infrastructure. As someone who regularly teaches classes in the history of sex, my experience at LeakyCon reinforced the importance of social media as an informational and exploratory tool for young people, especially in the United States, where access to the most basic sex education remains uneven at best.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

This is the second of a seven-part series about the 4^th LeakyCon convention held in Portland Oregon June 27-30, 2013.  Part I and the rest of the series can be found here.

LeakyCon should have been a paradise for me.  As a Ph.D student interested in industry/consumer relationships, the chance to attend a convention unified by Harry Potter(!) that celebrates reading, writing, creation, and general enthusiasm for nerdy girl culture seemed like the perfect place to explore my own fandom and experiment with fan ethnographies.

Despite the anticipation leading up to Portland, I found myself, initially, surprisingly indifferent about the experience.  As I attended panels and walked the exhibit room, I felt out of place.  LeakyCon created a world within the Oregon Convention Center that constantly went out of its way to remind me that loving nerdy things was awesome, being nerdy was awesome, I was awesome, everyone around me was awesome, and we would all become lifelong friends for sharing this awesome experience.  So why didn’t I feel awesome?

As part of this project, I acquired a press badge in addition to my attendee one.  In a space marked by collecting ribbons to exhibit one’s fan identities, I was marked as both a fan and an academic. At first, this seemed inconsequential.  Wearing these two badges articulated my identity at LeakyCon as much as wearing Hogwarts robes expressed the identities of con attendees.  Yet, I felt serious reservations about my place at LeakyCon because my academic interest and training made me an interloper and because I wasn’t a big enough fan.  The burdens of both badges made me feel that I wore neither of them well. Through my unease, epistemological questions plagued me: As an academic, can one accurately describe fans, fandoms, and conventions without being a fan?  As a fan, can one keep enough distance to provide an accurate assessment of other fans?  Does that type of academic work constitute an act of fandom or tarnish the worlds that fans create with one another?

The first day of the con, for example, consisted of a series of “meet-ups”.  In planning which of these to attend, I instinctively approached the schedule as a reporter, but methodological and ethical questions soon arose. Should I attend this con as a fan and try to experience it for myself?  Or should I collect information as an ethnographer to understand the world around me?  The easy solution seemed to be both.  However, bridging the gap between academic and fan, participant and observer proved difficult. By not being a true participant, how could I fully understand and communicate the fan experience? Moreover, I felt guilty for intruding on spaces intended for people with genuine commonalities, concerned that I could negatively affect their con experiences.

With these insecurities in mind, I decided to shift gears and try the con as fan.  However, I quickly felt inadequate. Although Harry Potter unifies LeakyCon, Rowling’s world also serves as a common space for creating more specific micro-communities based on other fandoms I did not share, such as Dr. Who, Sherlock, and the Starkids. Although my fannish love of Harry Potter and academic interests brought me to the conference, I was only really excited for the panels about my current obsession – The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD).

In addition to not sharing most of these fandoms, I don’t share in many of the fan practices that would bring one to a convention in the first place.  Although I am interested in community as an extension of individual fandom, it’s not something I seek out myself:  I don’t know the acronyms, the references, or how to use Tumblr.  My fan love is largely isolated and off-line.  I don’t want fan-fictions that expand the world or to post gifs representing moments I love most.  The world of the text itself is enough for me.  However, it was not enough at LeakyCon.  My lack of extratextual currency made me feel ambivalent about the experience and I disliked feeling distanced from those around me.

Frustrated with my indifference, I decided to do something I have never cared to do otherwise: I bought an LBD poster and got in the autograph line.  Although this experience did not erase the divide completely removing my academic badge helped me enjoy more of the con as an attendee.  I felt part of the community because I did something fans did and connected with my own fandom and friend community.  However, my best experiences of the con are hard to document in academically worthwhile ways because they are far from academic; reconnecting with my childhood best friend who attended the con, chatting with Mary Kate Wiles (who plays Lyd-dee-ah in LBD), and the impromptu singing of the theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air along with half the cast of LBD, two Glee Warblers, and a Starkid on the train to the hotel.

These experiences led me to an epiphany.  One of the most striking aspects of LeakyCon was how, by virtue of their youth, the attendees defined the space as one of identity exploration. I realized that I had that in common with them, because the con represented an important moment in my own becoming, as someone who is currently negotiating my new identity as a scholar-fan.  In fact, struggling to bridge the gaps between the badges is what I have always done in my life. I’m the only academic in a blue-collar family, one of the few television students in my department, and the lone scholar at my industry internship.

Upon further reflection, the distance I felt from the conference theme of celebrating one’s “authentic” identity as a result of my position between these two worlds was not, in fact, inauthentic at all.  I think I need to adjust my expectations and recognize that perhaps this discomfort in trying to resolve being a fan and academic doesn’t make me less of either.  I hope that acknowledging this divide for what it is will, instead,  make me a truer, dare I say more authentic researcher and fan, without compromising too much of what makes each of these identities so awesome.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

Last year, I briefly attended the third LeakyCon in Chicago in order to see A Very Potter Senior Year, the one-time-only live performance of the third and final Harry Potter musical parody by the Starkid theatrical troupe. The wait was long, and I found myself in an extended conversation with two con attendees, both 16-year-old girls. They had just come from one of several Young Adult literature panels at the con, which they described in rapturous and articulate detail, and they also insisted that I start watching the web series The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, also represented at the con. Upon sighting a few of the actors who play Warblers on Glee in our Starkid queue, they then launched into a discussion about their concerns regarding Glee’s representation of a transgender character and what they felt was its continued overall “heteronormativity.” Immediately following this conversation, during what proved to be a nearly five-hour-long show, we laughed and wept alongside the actors and the other 3,000 largely female fans.

I was impressed by the tremendous sense of community I felt at LeakyCon, as well as the seamless and untroubled combination of intellectual and emotional engagement with popular culture. I persuaded two fellow scholars, Louisa Stein and Lindsay Giggey, to join me in attending the next LeakyCon in its entirety. The following series of articles represents our analysis of some (by no means all) of the cultural work of LeakyCon Portland 2013. Looking back, my first encounter foreshadowed much of what marked LeakyCon strongly for us this year as well: the convergence of multiple fandoms and platforms, blurred lines between celebrity/performer and participant/audience, aspirational forms of egalitarian community based around shared fandom and continual individual validation (“you/we are awesome!), and a safe space for adolescent identity exploration and self-expression, especially for girls and queer youth.

LeakyCon began in 2009 as a Harry Potter fan convention that sought to combine academic analysis with celebratory fan activity. As organizers explained, what started as two discreet categories soon took on aspects of each other. As the HP franchise ended, organizers expanded the conference to include other texts and fandoms that their attendees were invested in, enlarging the scope of the con while retaining HP as the “mothership” fandom.

Not surprisingly, social media has been integral to LeakyCon’s success and growth (this summer offers two cons for the first time, one with 5,000 attendees in Portland and the first international con in London, August 8-11, long soldout at 1500; attendees largely buy tickets months in advance — tickets are expensive-$160/350- but all-inclusive). LeakyCon and Tumblr exploded in the fan community at the same time, and Tumblr has become the primary forum of its attendees, who maintain virtual community with each other away from the conference. Attendees indicated their multiple fandoms with tags on their badges, wristbands, and by posting their Tumblr sites and affiliations on a shared wall. Indeed, one could argue that LeakyCon is a much-valued supplement to online community for those who are able to attend, but the shared physical space gives them an opportunity to enjoy the kinds of collective social activities – singing, dancing, chatting in the endless queues – that they cannot do online and that they do not have the opportunity to do in their RL’s (“Real Lives”).

Because LeakyCon started as a conference promoting young adult fiction, its attendees are primarily teens and young adults (although some enthusiastic parents accompanied their children). Being among them, we were constantly struck by the sense, at once, of collectivity and change; this was a generation not concerned about trying to fix themselves within a single frame or role, but a group of people who were celebrating the fluidity and multiplicity of identities, pleasures, and roles that LeakyCon made possible for them to express. Their investment in multiple fandoms reflected their rejection of stable social positioning in other ways as well; they gleefully blurred the lines between gender and sexual norms, teen and twenty-year old “best friends,” high and low cultural tastes and products, and being public and private school kids, in the same way that they embraced being  performers and audience members, intellectuals and fans, and Whovians and Starkids. “My two friends and I, “ one 15-year-old reported to me, “we cover the spectrum.” I wasn’t sure what constituted “the spectrum,” but I was struck by how matter-of-fact she was about it. LeakyCon is, in so many ways, a fluid, queer space, and that’s what the fans value about it. Fandom unites them, but it has also clearly permitted them to bridge other social divides that would have otherwise been much more difficult for them, especially as the nerdy, bookish adolescents many LeakyCon fans also claim proudly to be.

The LeakyCon opening ceremonies was a perfect illustration of the multiplicity, social blurring, and queer space the con offers its attendees. Stars became fans by dressing as favorite characters: this year’s con brought together characters (and several actors) from Disney, Star Wars, Glee, The Hunger Games, Lord the Rings, Buffy, Dr. Who, and Sherlock as well as Harry Potter. These multiple fandoms represented the overlapping opportunities for fan identification, desire, and pleasure offered at LeakyCon, and the performance concluded with a remarkable affirmation of fandom’s queer space led by Rent star and author Anthony Rapp, who parodied his B’way role in a Leaky version of “La Vie Boheme.” This number depicts LeakyCon as home to a multifandom culture that celebrates all things geeky, fannish, and creative.

To writing fiction…fanfiction

A world without restriction

A prediction my friends.

We’ll be geeky through and through. – LeakyCon, 2013.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part five (“Inspiring Fans at LeakyCon Portland“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)