[This is the final of a three-part series highlighting some of Hannibal‘s unique contributions to the television world, in commemoration of its final week on NBC. Black-and-white art by travelersfarfromhome. See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and please note that this post contains spoilers through episode 3.2]

I became interested in watching Hannibal after I attended a panel about the show at a fan convention geared towards young women. This panel represented the active fans that the show’s Tumblr had helped cultivate, the “Fannibals.” I was struck by how much they spoke of their love for the show’s female characters. Generally in programs with two male leads—especially shows with horror elements—female characters are peripheral and don’t stay alive for very long. Hannibal is ultimately also limited in this way—an issue that Hannibal actor Hettienne Park (Beverly Katz) has eloquently addressed—yet Hannibal still has many more recurring, sharply drawn female characters than do other shows of its genre (Supernatural, True Detective). Showrunner Bryan Fuller changed several key male characters from the source material (Alana Bloom, Freddie Lounds) to female characters and created a number of new female characters (including women of color). These decisions opened up many new points of identification for female viewers. As a result, Hannibal has expanded the cultural work of this gothic horror text and the resonance it has for contemporary female fans.

Here, I am focusing specifically on Hannibal‘s portrayal of teenage killer/survivor Abigail Hobbs because she has been so prominent in the fandom, particularly on Tumblr, a space where fandom and feminism frequently intersect. On Tumblr, fans’ larger cultural critiques focus on such topics as women’s devaluation through feminization and sexualization, particularly in the media; poor institutional and familial responses to women’s trauma; and the pathologizing of female deviance. For many of these viewers, Abigail Hobbs provides not only a point of convergence for these concerns but, in many ways, validates them.

Hannibal‘s grounding in gothic horror defines the kind of critical work it can do. As a genre, horror foregrounds deviant characters and thus puts the normative into relief. The subgenre of gothic horror has always had particular appeal for women, in part because its romanticism privileges emotional intensity over rationality, which in turn has the potential to de-naturalize the “rational” institutions and oppressive structures of patriarchy. The “monster” character central to the gothic often appears, initially, as an attractive male, a symbol of professional expertise, generous paternalism, and romantic sincerity, but these qualities are revealed to be deceptive and threatening to women.

Fuller invokes these gothic horror tropes in Hannibal in ways that particularly serve today’s female and feminist fans. For example, Fuller pledged not to show sexual violence toward any female characters on Hannibal (another change from the source material), a move that has impressed his female audience and has given the show’s feminism real weight. This is not to say that the show does not depict eroticized violence. Like a vampire, Hannibal exerts a sensuous appeal and he derives pleasure from bloodletting and feeding. Significantly, as in vampire narratives, the site of Abigail Hobbs’ penetration is displaced onto her throat. This permits the show to allude to sexual violence without engaging in representations of rape.

Abigail Hobbs is a central figure of Hannibal‘s first season, and her presence haunts the text (literally and symbolically) thereafter. Abigail is initially introduced as a traumatized girl whose throat, in the pilot, is slashed by her serial-killer father (an attack from which she recovers). She brings out paternal feelings in Hannibal and Will, yet as the season progresses, she kills a man (impulsively, but in self-defense) and reveals that she served as a procurer for her father, luring adolescent female victims to him. She is smart, socially alienated, suspicious, reserved, and plagued with worry that her father’s hunter/killer training (whether organically or through socialization) has made her a monster too. Abigail’s social deviance as, at once, a trauma survivor and a killer, has made her a source of identification and love for many fans, who have devoted Tumblr sites to her, written fanfic about her, and created art featuring her. Abigail’s fears are vividly conveyed in this fanvid by kiki_miserychic [warning: graphic violence]

Reading Hannibal through Abigail’s point of view, we see how men in the text constantly misunderstand, abuse, patronize, deceive, and undermine her. With the exception of Hannibal, men do not see her as a complicated person. Will views her only as either a childlike victim or, later, as a pathological killer; she resists his paternalism very directly: “Just because you killed my father, doesn’t mean you can become him.” Likewise, we see how patriarchal structures (the justice system, the family) only serve to further traumatize her. She lies to the FBI and the police because she knows the criminal justice system would not put her crimes in context, and we know that too; the recent decision to try two 13-year-old girls as adults for attempted murder—the Slender Man case—points to the inability of the justice system to countenance violent girls. Hannibal also highlights Abigail’s persistent attempts at self-definition and agency, including an attempt to ensure her financial independence from Will and Hannibal by selling her story to journalist Freddie Lounds. Fans indicate their approval of these moments by reblogging “Abigail’s sassy face” on Tumblr.

Ultimately, however, Abigail cleaves to Hannibal because he does see her complexity and value (the ability to truly “see” another person is a significant theme in the series) and because he puts himself outside of the law, openly rejecting the social norms and boundaries that oppress her. Both Hannibal and the gothic horror genre provide fantasies of escape from social oppression, and a lot of the Fannibals’ dark humor comes from their pleasure in fantasies of deviance and subversion. For example, Abigail’s role as the daughter in the “murder family” with Will and Hannibal is the subject of much fan creative production.

At the same time, Hannibal provides a cautionary tale that taps directly into young women’s concerns about daily survival under patriarchy. In a contemporary context, Hannibal is the textbook abusive parent or lover who literally traps her, and Abigail’s abuse, captivity, and eventual death at his hands is the central tragedy of the series. But it’s because Hannibal allows viewers to see her struggle that her death has the significance and resonance that it does, haunting both characters and viewers.

Post by Allison McCracken and Jennifer Kelly, DePaul University

This summer, we have been presenting our research regarding the ways that many small, niche fan conventions have constructed feminine/feminist and queer safe spaces for young women and queer youth, providing alternatives to larger, more corporate cons that are dominated by white men and often lacking in the intense sense of community fostered by the smaller cons. The cons we analyzed were DashCon, GeekGirlCon, and LeakyCon. Of these cons, LeakyCon was the biggest (at 5,000). At the end of last year’s con, its organizers announced a brand change from “LeakyCon” (which began as a Harry Potter-themed con, but had become multi-fandom) to “GeekyCon.” It was clear from last year’s LeakyCon that more obvious corporate sponsorship and alliances were developing (particularly with Tumblr, whose signage dominated the main hall last year), and in our recent conference presentations, we wondered how this change in branding might affect the kind of feminist community feeling of previous LeakyCons.

The answer is, quite a lot. This GeekyCon was notably conflicted in a number of ways, the result, we think, of its organizers’ attempts to address feminist concerns within the larger fandom world and maintain a sense of safe and “positive” community space while, at the same time, also expanding its brand to include more commercial content by showcasing white, male panelists and performers (presumably cis and straight) and attracting audience members who reflected these same identity characteristics. The tensions between commerce and community, avowed feminism and queer inclusion in a con environment more inviting to men and boys, and a focus on “positivity” while lacking diverse representation among guests and attendees resulted in con that, despite some laudable progressive actions, generally felt lacking in the critical edge, community feeling, and affective resonance of past LeakyCons.

LeakyCon’s organizers, mostly women who are all self-identified feminists, have long taken a leading role in con inclusivity and participant safety. This year, GeekyCon took steps to validate its many transgender, genderqueer, and/or non-binary identified attendees, including providing gender-neutral bathrooms for the first time. In addition, transgender participants were actively involved in many con panels, not only those related to LGBTQ issues. The body positivity panel notably included a fat body positive activist for the first time. In addition, the con’s well-known policy against sexual harassment was affirmed and expanded this year through the con’s inclusion and support of the newly-formed “Uplift” organization. Uplift was founded last year by three female college students to combat sexual abuse in online communities and in direct response to a series of recent testimonials by many young women of such abuse by male performers in the Doctor Who and Harry Potter fandoms. Finally, GeekyCon has also become one of the sponsors of the “Positive Fandom” movement that focuses on creating safe and constructive fan spaces.

Such welcome developments at GeekyCon, however, were often overshadowed and at times undermined by the con’s more commercial turn and its reduced female voices and participants, particularly in the big mainstage events. Panels were sponsored by corporations such as Wattpad, PenguinTeen, and Tumblr; although these commercial groups are reflective of and popular with GeekyCon’s participants (indeed, their representatives identify as fangirls and feminists), their increased presence in “safe” venues at times undercut the sense of intimacy and community GeekyCon has long fostered. For example, one popular group meet up during the con’s first session began with a message from a Wattpad representative.

More troubling was the commercial branding of GeekyCon with an adaptation of Missy Elliott’s song “Get Ur Freak On” called instead “Get Your Geek On,” which was performed both in promotional materials and during the con’s opening ceremonies and other events by majority white, largely male participants (the one black male could not help but seem like a token). This kind of cultural appropriation at a con already lacking in racial diversity was disconcerting, and the song’s dance club feel was also out of step with GeekyCon’s audience, who affiliate themselves more with pop and Broadway musical genres and aesthetics. GeekyCon is not lacking for songwriters among its performers; a more organic theme song would better encourage community building and affective response, which was notably lacking.

This sense of the con being literally out of tune with its audience was most obvious in its first-time use of an outside DJ at the annual Esther Earl Rocking Charity Ball. Instead of focusing on current pop songs and fan favorites, the DJ offered often undanceable club music that this audience didn’t know. The ball’s finale also skipped the annual tribute to the staff that has been an important affective moment of community in past years. There were many complaining fan tweets during the ball about the music and, as a result, less participation and emotional involvement overall.

In addition, although organization leaders used the term “positive fandom” in relation to safe space, there was a distinct disconnect between their use of the term and panel presenters generally, who defined “positivity” primarily as a lack of negativity. This shift resulted in silencing rather than enabling the kind of social critique that has characterized past cons and was particularly detrimental in relation to the marked increase in white, presumably cis and straight men at this con. Therefore, the invocation of “positive fandom” often rang hollow because it primarily came from people who inhabit a position of privilege (it is easier to be positive when you are not under attack) and was often accompanied by their professed unwillingness to speak about issues such as rape/racism in fan texts because they “don’t have the authority” to do so. Thus, the con’s focus on “positivity” and lack of diversity often worked in tandem to enable the marginalization of representational and community concerns vitally important to these fans.

Although GeekyCon’s organizers never planned to be primarily a female space, they have embraced and benefited from the “girl power” ethos. Certainly, we have always found the con’s radical potential linked to its privileging of women and queer people. Although GeekyCon is currently experiencing the understandable growing pains of rebranding, we very much hope it won’t lose those elements that have made it such a valuable feminist space.

The Road Warrior (1981), the second of George Miller’s Mad Max series, opens with a voiceover (The Feral Kid) explaining how a global war for fuel-toppled nations and decimated the earth, leaving only an empty wasteland, where survivors compete for precious resources in a life-or-death struggle. “Footage” depicts talking-head politicians, images of the massive war (uncannily familiar, as they resemble images from WWII), and, finally, the result: total anarchy, in which gangs terrorize the highways, killing innocent “civilians” for fuel. The sequence ends with an image of the film’s hero, Max (Mel Gibson), standing alone on the empty road in his boots and black leathers, larger-than-life in the boy’s memory. The latest installment of the series, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), employs a voiceover at the film’s opening as well, but this time the voice belongs to Max (Tom Hardy), haunted by his dead daughter, as he explains the one remaining goal after the collapse of civilization: survival. Like Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior, Fury Road returns the franchise to the road and to its drivers, reinvigorating the cult series with forceful energy, spectacular chases, and breath-taking imagery.[i]

The Road Warrior (1981)

Though it’s a sci-fi-fantasy series set in the future, Miller’s films draw heavily upon conventions and motifs of the Hollywood western and the road movie, grounding the post-apocalyptic fantasy-nightmare plot in the familiar mythos of the American frontier, yet complicating and updating it in significant ways. It is that graceful melding of the past, present, and future—even in the low budget, sometimes-clunky original movies—that gives the imaginative Mad Max franchise its continuous import and allure.

Mad Max as Western

Much like the western cowboy hero, Max is a loner, a man with a violent past, who travels alone and acts according to his own moral compass, which eventually guides him to help the community of settlers who cannot adequately defend themselves. The series also employs the aesthetics and stage of the open frontier (noticeably bleaker in the Australian-made Max movies); villains who desire all of the resources for themselves (as in Shane (1953), complete with adoring boy); and the sense that it is in this open, unsettled space that our collective future will be determined. In Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the western motifs become paramount—and problematic—as Max encounters a sleazy, corrupt settlement and naïve, helpless tribal characters that resemble Native Americans/Aboriginals, with headdresses, spears, and mohawks.

Interestingly, the Mad Max movies have more in common with spaghetti westerns than Hollywood westerns. Far more cynical than Hollywood westerns, spaghetti westerns, primarily made by European directors in the 1960s and ’70s, are laden with irony and with quirky characters; feature tough-as-nails, anti-social anti-heroes (Max is even introduced as “The Man with No Name” in Thunderdome, a clear reference to Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone westerns); and tend to be highly violent, with endings that resist full resolution. The Mad Max series fits this rubric, with its nearly silent, stoic stars, oil rigs that turn out to be filled with sand, graphic displays of violence, and ambiguous conclusions that necessitate sequels. Like the spaghetti western, then, Miller’s series both borrows from and undermines its genre, in this case, the road film, toppling its ideology and offering a drastically bleaker vision of what the road represents.

Mad Max as Road Movie

In the Hollywood road movie, a direct descendant of the western, the open road substitutes for the American frontier. Like the West, the road in such films and texts (Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise, On the Road) promises opportunity, freedom, and renewal, though it rarely delivers on these promises. Traditional road films typically begin with a tremendous sense of excitement and energy as the drivers take the road (cue Steppenwolf), but end in horrific displays of death and destruction as the road becomes a site of danger or runs out altogether. Although the horrific destruction at the end of these American films may belie a sense of anxiety regarding unfettered freedom, the road does lead somewhere, and its travelers usually evolve along the way.[ii]

In the Mad Max series, however, the road appears more circular than linear, leading nowhere in particular, or sometimes right back to where it started, begging the question as to what purpose the journey—and the great death toll along the way—served. Stretching through a desert wasteland where few destinations remain in the post-apocalyptic landscape, the road in these films functions less as a path and more as a nihilistic, never-ending battlefield, where survivors of the global war compete for precious natural resources and the war boys gladly sacrifice their lives for the glory of Valhalla/God. In Miller’s first film, Mad Max, the road battles are even more gruesome, as a sociopathic biker gang (taking a page from Brando’s gang in The Wild One (1950)), kills and rapes along the highway for no other purpose than amusement.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Whereas in Hollywood road movies, the drivers run into danger when they get off the road (typically in the form of ignorant, dangerous rednecks, i.e., people who have not traveled enough), in the Mad Max films, as seen in the thrilling, grisly chase sequences, the protagonists are most vulnerable while on the road. But as there is nothing valuable off the road, the road remains the only impossible possibility, and the sense of the road as connecting places dissipates into an understanding of the earth as a nearly monolithic desert. In Fury Road, after discovering the Green Place is no longer habitable, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), taking Max’s advice, turns the rig around, retracing the hard-slogged steps to return to The Citadel, their original point of departure. Such pessimistic portrayals of the road across the series dismantle the Hollywood road film’s mythos of possibility, infusing the genre with grim, contemporary concerns regarding the downward spiral of environmental abuse and potential global annihilation.[iii]

Just as Miller’s first three films referenced the 1970s fuel crisis and predicted a global war for oil, Fury Road bears unmistakable allusions to the ongoing war in the Middle East, where the West is engaged in an interminable battle for influence—and fuel—against extremists waging a holy war. The road as battlefield rather than frontier alters not only the purpose of the journey, but also its travelers, who are more accurately warriors in Miller’s road films than drivers. Indeed, Aunty Emity (Tina Turner) calls Max a “soldier” at the end of Thunderdome (recall Max is a rogue Special-Ops cop in the first film). The series offers a gendered account of warfare and the roles men, women, and children play in warzones; updating this, Fury Road takes the feminist characters from the previous films and creates the strongest female warrior of the series yet, Furiosa, who, is equal to or even dominant to Max. The films also portray consequences of warfare, not just in the wasted landscape and the high body count, but also in the many orphaned children that populate the series, and in Fury Road, the female sex workers.

Praising Fury Road, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker recently claimed that the original series doesn’t hold up.[iv] But I don’t agree: while Thunderdome undeniably strayed too far from the formula, his comment overlooks the first two films, especially The Road Warrior, which remains, even after the latest installment, perhaps the strongest of the series because of its masterful pacing. Recognizing Road Warrior‘s superiority to the other two, Fury Road‘s creators stuck closest to it, keeping the dialogue to a minimum and adding beautifully stark scenery and a helpful explanation of the war boys’ devotion to their tyrannical leader and his cause. The series continues to be a cult classic not only because of its apocalyptic sci-fi scenario and delightfully campy aesthetics, but also because the series re-appropriates two strong generic traditions, the western and the road movie, and redeploys them to create an environmentally catastrophic vision of the future that we—and our shortsighted ideologies—could create.

[i] Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) took an unfortunate turn off the road, setting most of its story in settlements, and only resumes the compelling energy of the series during the final chase sequence.

[ii] For an in-depth analysis of the road movie and its evolution over time, see David Laderman’s Driving Visions (Austin: U of Texas P, 2002) and Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, The Road Movie Book (New York: Routledge UP, 1997).

[iii] Certainly, other road films, notably Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Paris, Texas (1984), portray the road as lacking hope, rather than promising it, but Miller’s series contains more specific, contemporary political allusions.

[iv] Anthony Lane, “High Gear: Mad Max: Fury Road,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane

Brox Sisters Listening In. Courtesy: Library of Congress Online Prints & Photographs.

Post by Shawn VanCour, New York University

This is the twelfth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

This series has offered much well-deserved praise for Michele Hilmes as a scholar, professor, mentor, and colleague, detailing her profound impact on her department, students, and field. I heartily concur with these sentiments but for the present post shift from a concern with “Hilmes” the person to what we might call the “Hilmesian” – by which I mean a certain set of observable tendencies in historiographical technique. I use the word “technique” here in the sense of a regularized set of formal devices deployed toward consistent ends within and across a body of work. What are the defining techniques of Hilmesian historiography, and to what end do those work?

In an effort to open this line of inquiry, I will focus on the technique of the “historical closeup.” For sake of space, my examples are limited mainly to the pages of Radio Voices, although the technique is by no means limited to this work (nor to the work of Hilmes alone). The questions I ask here are twofold: 1) how does the historical closeup work in Hilmesian historiography, and 2) what does it do?

Well-worn cover of Radio Voices. Courtesy: Kathleen Battles.

1. Ghost Stories (History as Spectrology)

One of the most telling passages of Radio Voices comes at the end:

Historians must continue to investigate the boundaries between what is known and what has been excluded from knowledge, what is heard speaking loudly in our largest public forums and what remains pushed to the sidelines, silenced or muffled in our historical accounts – and must continue to analyze the purposes and effects of such selections [. . . .] History is always ideological . . . . written by historians whose training, purposes, and basic assumptions and selections intertwine with present-day needs and preoccupations, and it finds a readership based on similar affinities (RV 288).

We are to listen, then, to the margins of history, to the voices silenced in existing accounts. Elsewhere in Radio Voices, this is cast as a strategy of Foucaultian reversal, or looking past the “smooth face of consensus” in the dominant discourse to recognize “the ruptured and seamed lines of tension and resistance that consensus seeks to conceal” (RV xvii). Equally important, we are asked to question the ideological underpinnings of our own, revisionist historiography: under what conditions may alternative histories be written, what forms may they take, and what modes of solidarity can they foster?

Radio Ghost. Painting by RovinaCai (2014).

While written under the sign of Foucault, there also lies within Hilmesian historiography a trace of a Derridean spectrology – an asking after what haunts our speech and clings to it as its very condition of possibility. What we are listening for here is not the voices of those who speak from a space “outside” the dominant discourse, but instead those who exist as absent presences within it, whose “silencing” or “muffling”  is the condition for the dominant speech to itself be heard clearly. We listen for the murmurs of ghosts.

The goal here is not simply to restore these spectral voices to a past from which history has erased them, but rather to help their speech find a place within the dominant discourse of the present, creating conditions in which they may both speak and be heard. In Derridean terms, “[the scholar] should learn to live by learning . . . how to talk with [the ghosts], how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself . . . in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters . . . even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet” (Specters 221). This closing element of futurority (the “not yet”) is critical: the ghosts of history cannot, by nature, fully arrive within the present – they murmur, indistinctly, and it is the task of the historian to help find a place for their stories.

2. Dirty Optics (The Historical Closeup)

What, then, is the historical closeup, and how can it help us bring the ghosts of history into full presence? Here we may turn to Siegfried Kracauer’s book, History: The Last Things Before the Last, which he frames for his reader as the continuation of a line of inquiry first opened in his earlier book on film theory:

Recently I suddenly discovered that my interest in history . . . actually grew out of the ideas I tried to implement in my Theory of Film . . . . I realized in a flash the many existing parallels between history and the photographic media, historical reality and camera-reality (History 3-4).

First among these parallels was a tension between what Kracauer described as the “realistic” and “formative” tendencies, or competing needs to both respect and rework the reality documented by the camera or historian. However, as he was quick to note in his film book, “Objectivity in the sense of the realist manifesto is unattainable” (Film 15). The rendered reality was instead always inescapably shaped to some degree by the photographer-historian’s own subjectivity and larger concerns of his or her time. There is no possibility of a pure optics in Kracauer; there is no innocent or uncontaminated historical gaze.

New perspectives: Galileo’s telescope. Detail from painting by H. J. Detouche (1754).

The second major tension negotiated by both the filmmaker and historian, for Kracauer, is that both “must . . . move between the macro and micro dimensions” (History 122). In his film book he had pointed toward “Griffith’s admirable non-solution” of alternating between long shots, which offered subjects and actions in context, and closeups, “which do not just serve to further the action or convey relevant moods but retain a degree of independence” (129). For historians, the closeup retained this same power to deform the larger totality of which it was a part:

As I see it . . . [we should] concentrate on close-ups and from them casually . . . range over the whole, assessing it in the form of aperçus. The whole may yield to such light-weight skirmishes more easily than to heavy frontal attack (History 134-35).

The goal here is political, challenging received histories to gain critical insights on the present. This aim is achieved not just at the level of content, but also of form, exploiting the disruptive power of the historical closeup.

3. The Hilmesian Closeup

Who or what forms the subject of these closeups in Radio Voices? They are multiple, including particular programs (from Amos n Andy to Real Folks and An Open Letter on Race Hatred), performers (from Samuel Rothafel to Wendell Hall and Jack Benny), writers and producers (notably, below, Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, Jane Crusinberry), and advertising agencies (J. Walter Thompson). In some cases, these are familiar figures whose examination in closeup serves to denaturalize the dominant narratives in which they have been traditionally inscribed, letting them begin to speak otherwise. In other cases, they are spectral presences, the muffled voices of those whom history has erased, invited back into the picture to say their piece.

1930s Magazine ad: Super Suds brings you NBC’s Clara, Lu & Em.

As an example of the Hilmesian closeup in action, we may look to Chapter 6 of Radio Voices, titled “Under Cover of Daytime.” As with most chapters in this book, we open in long shot: whereas the early 1930s saw shows like The Goldbergs, Myrt and Marge, and Clara, Lu and Em running alongside more general-interest programming in the evening, as network radio expanded, women’s programming assumed a more “subordinate position” in daytime hours and was widely disparaged by critics for its sensationalism and crude commercialism (RV 151). From here we move into an even wider shot, as Hilmes discusses early twentieth century consumer culture’s production of what advertising historian Roland Marchand calls the “feminine mass,” seen as over-emotional, easily manipulated, and lacking in taste. At this point, an initial thesis is advanced: the relegation of more “feminized” and overtly commercial programming to daytime hours served a double containment strategy of 1) controlling women’s voices and 2) reconciling network broadcasting’s competing mandates for private profit and public service (152-3).

L-R: Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, Jane Crusinberry.

Three successive closeups of soap producers Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, and Jane Crusinberry complicate this picture and work in dialectical tension with the opening long shots, showing how the daytime containment strategy at the same time created a space in which women and women’s issues could achieve greater public visibility and cultivate the solidarity needed for the formation of an effective “counterpublic” (RV 159). A closing return to long shot moves back to the previously posited daytime/nighttime division, the intermediary passage through a series of closeups having now challenged what at first appeared to be a strategy of subordination. What lies “Under Cover of Daytime” is not just the persistent commercialism that formed the seedy underbelly of network radio’s surface-level public service commitments, but also the creation of a protected public space in which women could build solidarity and begin to mount challenges to a dominant discourse that had traditionally excluded them. The voices of radio were not just those of male-dominated evening dramas and comedy/variety shows, but also those of daytime women’s programming, which are no longer forgotten or dismissed but now recognized for the serious cultural work they performed.

Nearly every chapter in Radio Voices follows this structure: a “big picture” presented in long shot with larger cultural contextualization leads to the formation of an initial thesis that is then strategically unsettled or modified through the technique of the closeup. The closeup becomes a means to resist or challenge the master narratives and sweeping views to which cultural history might otherwise be prone, a means of politicizing the telling of history at the level of form. It is a technique, I would suggest, that we also find deployed across other works by Hilmes, as something properly Hilmesian, though importantly, not the exclusive property of Hilmes. The historical closeup remains a vital tool for a critical cultural historiography that aims to restore the voices of those silenced in the past and create a space within the present in which they can be heard. Its Hilmesian deployment offers a valuable lesson in how to rewrite history, change the dominant discourse, and begin to make room for our dead.

Post by Piers Britton, University of Redlands

As I started planning this post, a few days before the general release of the second Avengers movie, issues of authorship and creative control—and attendant problems of narrative cogency in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—already seemed to offer a fruitful basis for comment and reflection. Not for the first time in his career, Ultron’s writer-director Joss Whedon was telling stories of conflict between himself and studio executives. At first remarks were notionally at his own expense: he jokily characterized the development of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as his misunderstanding of the studio’s brief for his three-year contract. Apparently his abrupt withdrawal from day-to-day creative involvement in the ABC series was the result of Marvel’s primarily wanting him to focus on the Avengers sequel. In the wake of Ultron’s release, in a podcast for Empire, Whedon painted a starker picture of creative differences that apparently opened up during production of the movie. He claimed that Marvel executives held to ransom the more surreal and intimately personal passages in Ultron, namely the vignettes of the heroes’ troubled visions brought on by Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and the sequence at a secluded farmhouse, owned by Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), which allowed for various ruminative two-handers between the principal characters. These are arguably the most “Whedonesque” segments of the blockbuster. According to Whedon, the Marvel team was preoccupied with scenes that tied into, and teased, future MCU movies, viz., those showing the mantic Thor bathing in the Waters of Sight. In short, Whedon offered a narrative of conflict between authorial sensibility and industry logic – Age of Ultron as an internally coherent, emotionally resonant text versus Age of Ultron as an iteration in a cycle – and thus a de facto preview of forthcoming attractions underscoring the fact that the MCU is “all connected.”

Almost at once this narrative of authorial conflict was overshadowed by a more immediately newsworthy one, which again spoke to tensions between individual entries in the MCU super-franchise and the avowed interests of Whedon as a writer and director. On May 4^th Whedon terminated his Twitter account, immediately exciting speculation that this was a response to an online “backlash” against Ultron’s portrayal of Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). During the subsequent week a wide array of commentary centered on Whedon’s avowed feminism, and whether or not his treatment of Romanoff in Ultron upholds or (as was more widely opined) undercuts his claims to be a feminist. Objections to Whedon’s treatment of Black Widow focused on a series of plot elements, and one specific line of dialogue. Among other things critics objected to Romanoff’s being romantically paired with Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), to her being cast as the stereotypical caregiver—taming the Hulk with a lullaby, “cleaning up” after the “boys” in the team, etc.—and to her “domestication” in the scenes at Barton’s farm. While at the farm she discusses with Banner the possibility of their settling down, and we learn that she was rendered sterile in a particularly nasty graduation ceremony at her assassins’ academy. According to Todd VanDer Werff’s transcription at Vox, the line runs as follows:

They sterilize you. It’s efficient. One less thing to worry about, the one thing that might matter more than a mission. It makes everything easier — even killing. You still think you’re the only monster on the team?

The line is ambiguous in its import: at best, as VanDer Werff speculates, it is a clumsily constructed attempt to suggest that Romanoff is a monster by virtue of her whole career as a spy and assassin; at worst, as many claim, it atavistically reinscribes notions of a woman’s humanity being defined solely by her capacity to bear children.

I don’t want to dwell on the various positions in the Black Widow debate per se, but I do want to reflect on the fact that I did not myself experience the film as sexist in its portrayal of Romanoff. Structurally, scenes that showed her domestic side or stressed her emotional vulnerability did not strike me as out of balance with the scenes that showed her as single-minded, rational, intensely courageous and supremely competent in her professional life. Nor did the manifestations of her self-doubt and uncertainty about life choices seem to me egregious in comparison with the corresponding treatment of her fellow (male) Avengers. However, there’s no doubt that my neutral-to-positive reading of her portrayal at large, and the “monster” line in particular, was determined by my willingness to give Whedon the benefit of the doubt – which in turn is based largely on my prior knowledge of his television work. In other words, in spite of my scholarly interest in the MCU as brand, by default I read Age of Ultron primarily as a Whedon text, not a Marvel text. The same seems to be true of his detractors: in spite of the odd attempt to read the furore in the context of Marvel’s endemic gender asymmetries, excoriation of Ultron’s sexism has for the most part been couched in terms that presuppose Whedon’s primary authorship.

So has Whedon’s self-identification as a feminist, and his reputation as at least a would-be feminist writer, served perversely to obfuscate larger patterns of authorial bias, drawing attention away from Marvel Studios’ problematic representations and exclusions of women? In the short term this may be the case, but probably not over the long haul. While the billion-dollar success of Ultron will likely do little in production terms to encourage reevaluation of storytelling strategy and values in the MCU, from a reception standpoint this latest cause célèbre seems almost certain to be historicized as part of a pattern. If we compare the sluggish, scattered responses to the undermining and cheapening of female characters in the last Bond movie, Skyfall (Mendes, 2012), the groundswell of frustration at Marvel’s institutionalized sexism—articulated most recently by one of Ultron’s male stars—suggests that Marvel’s new breed of tent-pole movie is likely to be a prime locus of critique on issues of balanced and diverse representation for some time to come.

This quote supports the conviction that girlhood and its artefacts are resources for feminist media production and critique. It’s a foundational argument advanced by Angela McRobbie, Mary Celeste Kearney, and other feminist scholars who work within cultural studies, a discipline that investigates the ambivalent politics of everyday life through subjects’ engagement with popular media. Alongside figures like Kathleen Hanna and Wendy Mullin, Gordon’s reclamation of girlhood and girlishness speaks to her connections with riot grrrl and third-wave feminism, movements that deconstructed visual signifiers attached to various feminine archetypes—the flapper’s bejeweled accessories, the housewife’s shirtwaist dress, the Girl Scout’s jumper, the mod’s miniskirt—to question womanhood’s regulations.

As a musician, Gordon challenged rock’s hegemonic masculinity as the unassumingly female and deliberately “feminine” presence within Sonic Youth’s all-male line-up. For one, her deadpan singing and conceptual songwriting frequently voiced women’s concerns about anorexia, harassment, mother-daughter relations, essentialism, commodification, and desire’s sharp edges. Gordon, born on the West Coast to an academic family and bestowed with an art-school education, shares these traits with Pet Shop Boys’ frontman Neil Tennant, who used the grammar of disco to illuminate the politics of the closet for upper-middle-class Englishmen during the AIDS epidemic only to be accused of “just” talking over a beat. As a result, Gordon fought for legitimacy, first through her parenthetical approach to playing bass and later by shredding with guitarists Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, two players of a connotatively male instrument that she once memorably described in a tour diary as “thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat.” Finally, her relationship with Moore frequently served as evidence that feminism preserved marriages between creative professionals.

Plenty of attention has already been paid toward Gordon and Moore’s divorce and its impact on Sonic Youth’s demise, which Girl uses as a framing device. Gordon writes about the disillusion with withering, Didion-eseque brevity as “just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure—a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life” during an account of the band’s final concert at the 2011 SWU Music and Arts Festival that opens the book (3). She concludes by detailing the prolonged betrayal of Moore’s affair, deep, fresh reserves of anger lacerating her prose as she recalls announcing the separation to their daughter, Coco, at the beginning of her senior year of high school.

A recurring theme in Gordon’s memoir is her frustration with the cycle of questions she has been asked throughout her career. One informs its title (as in: “what’s it like to be a girl in a band?”). Another—variations on “can women have it all?”—haunted Gordon as journalists fixated on their normative impressions of her identities as a wife and mother. Focusing on the end of her marriage and band would seem to be the root for more oft-repeated, dead-end questions to a woman who continues to make music and art. Therefore, it’s notable that in the middle of Girl, Gordon observes that X-Girl, a skater-themed clothing line she ran with Daisy Von Furth in the mid-90s, “gave me far more notoriety than Sonic Youth ever did” (199).

Vulture’s Lindsay Zoladz observes that Gordon’s oblique approach to songwriting informs her storytelling as a memoirist. As a result, Gordon does not elaborate upon her foray into women’s apparel, nor contextualize it alongside her subsequent collections with Urban Outfitters and Surface to Air. She also tethers X-Girl to familial obligations—she was pregnant throughout its first year of production, she used the money she made from selling it to Japanese company B’s International to purchase her family’s home in Northampton.

However, part of Gordon’s contribution to rock music—what makes her the “Jet Set” in Sonic Youth’s 1994 album, Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star—is her attention to womanly self-fashioning. The frisson between gender performance and pop culture’s absorption into everyday life is central to Gordon’s image, a point Pitchfork contributor Molly Beauchemin makes in her piece on female rock musicians’ Instagram profiles. It’s how the X-Girl logo appeared on DJ Tanner’s long-sleeve t-shirt in a late-season Full House episode, and why I recognized it from reading Seventeen before I could identify the opening chords to “Kool Thing” or Gordon’s menacing whisper.

Thus, Girl presents a question: why might fashion design matter to recording industry professionals? Ever the bricoleur, Gordon decorates her prose with collages of various style icons—Jane Birkin’s louche bohemianism, Françoise Hardy’s urban coquettishness, her mother’s post-Beat utilitarianism, the clean lines of prep school attire she hated as a teenager but revised with mod’s graphic impact and punk’s lean androgyny for X-Girl. Such references bear some resemblance to what Caitlin Yunuen Lewis describes in her star study of Sofia Coppola as “cool postfeminism,” a cultural phenomenon where articulations of “white femininity’s ideals have become ironic and marketable, as have its ‘darker’ opposites, the sexual and moral transgressions that were once most threatening to it” (195). At the very least, it offers a term to describe how Gordon applies and discards certain ethnic sartorial traditions or uses “tranny” to describe designer Patricia Field’s aesthetic. But Gordon’s quotations read as influences in the same way musicians talk about their favorite records and gear. At least they could, if Gordon were asked to discuss her interest in fashion and music as mutually constitutive outlets for creative expression. By elliptically recalling her life’s events, she raises such questions for others to ask.

In recent years, the superhero genre has been doing better regarding female characters. Comics publishers for example are announcing more titles with believable female protagonists, finally becoming aware of their increasing female readers. However, historically the genre itself, which includes not only comics but also adaptation films, has always had problems with their female representations in the past that still exists now. Marvel Studios, after ten films have yet to give their viewers a female protagonist. The next two new superheroes scheduled to have their own films next are Ant-Man (2015) and Doctor Strange (2016), who are again, male, and it is not until 2018 that a Captain Marvel film will be released with a central female character. Film adaptations of DC Comics’ heroes are no better. In the last decade, what we have gotten are several Batmans and Supermans, with a bit of Green Lantern and Jonah Hex. Despite Wonder Woman being one-third of the Big Three in the DC Universe, she will only be finally introduced on movie screens in Batman v Superman next year. Her own film is not scheduled until the year after that.

Lack of representations is not the only problems female characters in superhero comics have faced and are still facing now; stereotyping has always been an inescapable issue. One of the most famous stereotypes that women are confronted with is the Damsel in Distress, which is a theme briefly explored in the second episode Agent Carter. As Peggy sneaks up behind a man who drives the truck that is believed to have delivered Howard Stark’s stolen weapons, the Captain America radio show plays in the background. In the radio show, Peggy is no agent or officer, but a “beautiful triage nurse” who is taken hostage numerous times, doing nothing but forever wait for Captain America to come rescue her. The sound effects for the radio show’s Captain America punching out his enemies created by smacking a chunk of meat syncs perfectly with Peggy’s kicks and hooks. When radio show Peggy encourages her Captain to “hit him again,” it is the actual Peggy that obliges, thus in a strange way, saving herself. Finally, when the radio’s Captain America asks if “Miss Carter” is all right, Peggy looms over the man she has easily beaten (on her own), asking in disbelief if that is “all [the man]’s got.” By syncing the fighting scene with the radio show, Agent Carter allows Peggy to knock out her own hopeless Damsel in Distress double, as well as present to the viewers of the show the ridiculous unreality of the stereotype, and how outdated it is.

Unfortunately, constraints of female characters do not end with stereotyping either. It should be mentioned that whatever stereotype the heroine is subjugated to, in many cases they are reduced to the plot device named “the love interest,” and rarely are they privileged with full stories of their own. After all, how many of us are fully familiar with back or side stories of Lois Lane or Mary Jane Watson like we are with Superman or Spider-Man?

However, this is what makes Agent Carter interesting: “the love interest” is where Peggy Carter started. There is no denying that Peggy was amazing character when she first appeared in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), but the film was a Captain America movie. She was his love interest in which viewers were given merely minimum information about her character, mostly in relation to Captain America’s tale. Yet Agent Carter sheds light onto this love interest, giving her more than her relationship with Captain America. The series portrays her as a fully developed character who is struggling with her emotions, career, and undercover work. We see a woman who gained strength but also suffered a tragic loss with the war, trying to build a life of her own where she does not quite fit in. She is unsure of herself and her future, but everything changes when she is given a mission to prove Howard Stark’s innocence. With this newly found mission to bring justice to her friend, Peggy Carter rises as a superhero. Agent Carter is about Peggy Carter. Captain America, one of the most famous superheroes in the world, is her back-story.

Therefore, not only does the series criticize sexism in society by presenting their viewers with Peggy’s unfair treatment from her sexist co-workers or male customers harassing her waitress friend, she fights sexism of her genre by challenging stereotypes that has existed for decades. Unfortunately there have been talks about the series’ low ratings and possibility of cancellation. I sincerely hope this will not happen, for Agent Carter, with Peggy effectively knocking down false beliefs about women, sets an excellent example for future female protagonists and superheroes that may face similar struggles in the superhero genre.

When the young British celebrity Peaches Geldof was found dead at her home in April 2014, early speculations frequently pointed the
finger at anorexia, suggesting that her low weight and dramatic weight loss could have played a causal role in her untimely demise (aged 25). Indeed, the apparently high incidence of anorexia – which is still positioned predominantly as a female problem – within female celebrity culture is suggestive of the ways in which the latter can be seen to function as an arena which offers hyperbolic representations of femininity. Female stars and celebrities live under a constant media spotlight of surveillance which in turn demands a prescriptive regime of self-maintenance, and thus can be seen to represent an extreme version of the condition of femininity within patriarchal culture (Holmes and Negra, 2011). Furthermore, the emphasis on eating disorders as somehow an ‘inevitable’, naturalised and expected discourse in female celebrity culture at least gives space to the argument that eating disorders are culturally produced (by, for example, the pressures placed on female celebrities in terms of the dominant corporeal norms of the entertainment industries, which in turn reflect back upon the cultural norms and pressures surrounding the feminine body more widely). Although medical explanations of anorexia do not entirely exclude the presence of cultural or social factors, their definition of the eating ‘disorder’ – itself a medical term – as a mental illness places greater emphasis on psychological and ‘individual’ causes. In addition, mainstream treatments of anorexia – the limited success of which is widely noted – invariably pay no attention to gender at all.

I never really thought about this fact when I spent the summer of 2009 in a residential clinic for the treatment of eating disorders, a period which marked my 20^th year as a sufferer of anorexia. Working as a lecturer and scholar in Media, Television and Cultural Studies, I had long since been aware that there existed a large body of feminist research on anorexia, but despite identifying as a feminist since my undergraduate  days, and adopting a feminist approach in many aspects of my research and teaching, I saw this as an academic terrain to avoid. I understood that feminists preferred cultural rather than biological or psychiatric explanations of eating disorders, and I imagined that the media was presented as a prime causal factor here. I felt insulted by the suggestion that I was simply pursuing an excessive imitation of the slender ideal, which simultaneously positioned me as a vulnerable or ‘passive’ media reader. I also didn’t want to give any more headspace to anorexia, which already dominated my every waking hour: to me, it was my life, my everyday hell, and not an object of scholarly enquiry or debate.

But in 2014, and five years into my recovery (the clinic worked for me, although sadly not for many of the friends I made in there), I got curious, and I began to read about feminist approaches to anorexia, staring with many of the foundational books in the field  (e.g. Orbach, 1978, 1986, Lawrence, 1984, Chernin, 1985). The work was more rich and complex than I imagined, yet despite the fact that some of the early books were penned by women who had experienced anorexia, or who had worked directly with sufferers, I baulked at the apparent assumption of commonality between all women, as well as the tendency to insist on one particular political interpretation of the anorexic body and experience. This was particularly so given the suggestion that the anorexic was seen as essentially unaware of the political contours of their problem or ‘protest’ (e.g. see Bordo, 1993: 159). This tension between how feminism speaks to the experience of ‘woman’, and the ways in which it cannot ‘be taken as a password misleading us into false notion of “oneness” with all women purely on the grounds of gender’ (McRobbie, 2000, 127) has been widely discussed within feminism. But it remains the case that the emphasis on political solidarity and common experience has historically retained an effective political charge within the feminist movement. Indeed, whilst I felt angry, frustrated (and initially somewhat patronised) by the feminist literature on anorexia, I also began to feel a sense of growing identification as I recognised myself on page after page. I realised that much of the feminist claims rang true for me and my own anorexic trajectory, and as a result, I got angry about how my two decades of suffering might well be explained by recourse to gender subordination.

I felt that this apparent tension between my identities as (former) anorexic and feminist, and the complex, uneasy, frustrating and rewarding fit between them, was worth writing about, and in using authoethnography, I wanted to capture the contradictory ways in which the critical feminist work on anorexia spoke to me. Yet in writing this blog now in February 2015, I am aware of how my perspective on the feminist work has changed yet again: I now harbour even less anger and ambivalence about my own relationship to its claims, and I find the work increasingly persuasive, illuminating and even empowering. Such research has enabled me to undertake a political re-evaluation of the ways in which I was treated (and mis-treated) as an anorexic, seeing the medical definitions and interventions as deeply ideological, subjective and thus open to challenge. Indeed, writing the original article made me remember – although I had never really forgotten – the political travesty of the fact that thousands of girls and women are starving themselves, every hour of every day (and that many more are developing anorexia as I write these words).  Why such sufferers are unlikely to encounter feminist interventions of anorexia, why they should and how they might do so in the future, is the ambitious focus of my next piece.

[For the full article, see Su Holmes, “Between Feminism and Anorexia: An Autoethnography,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/12/19/1367877914561831.abstract]

At the moment, the Internet is overflowing with new music streaming services. Spotify, Wimp, Beats Music, and Deezer are only a few examples from a popular media format for finding and listening to music. The business idea is to sell subscriptions for the services, containing a large selection of music. The person subscribing can then personalize the collections by making their own playlists and saving favorites on the streaming service. No files are downloaded, but the data is streamed and if payment stops, the access to music will disappear. At the same time, music blogs and file sharing are still available sources of music online, complementing rather than competing with the streaming services.

While young adults participating in interviews about their music use online are overwhelmingly positive regarding the availability of music on the internet today, they also argue that it can be hard to find the music they want to listen to since the amount of music online is endless. The role of guidance—through the streaming services’ interfaces as well as by named experts, music nerds, and persons knowledgeable about technology—is therefore perceived as important. Perhaps the experts take on an even more important role today because of the enormous access to all kinds of music?

Expertise in the area of music and technology has often been ascribed to men and understood as being something masculine. Through the history of popular music artists, producers, journalists, and listeners, those valued as good and important have often been men. Roles as experts like talent scouts and music journalists who have influenced what can be labeled ‘good music’ have contributed, through their positions, to symbolically rule the taste of the music industry. To fill these roles, persons have often been men/masculine and expected to be men/masculine. While women and femininity—especially sexy femininity—has always been used to sell records, music promoted with femininity has often been devalued. So has, often, music defying gender binaries in different ways. This can also be said about music by racialized others and music loved by the working class—music that has not been considered ‘good’ by contemporary critiques. Many devalued genres have been reconsidered and reevaluated in a later historic time, such as jazz and Motown. Much like the role of the music expert or music nerd, the technologically savvy person is often understood as man or masculine. In the area of music, the high fidelity lover building his own speakers as well as the home producer, using computers or a home studio to produce his own music, are known figures—figures that combine technological skills with masculinity and music knowledge.

Thus, when the expert with particular and technological competence in general is regarded as important in order to find and listen to music online today, the field of music consumption is gendered. It is not gendered in a simplistic way—not all experts and technologically savvy persons are men—but when young music consumers talk about music listening online, they understand expert roles and technological competence as something masculine. Interviews show that the persons ascribing technological knowledge to themselves, and using specialist jargon when discussing hardware and software for music listening, were mostly, but not only, men. Also, when asked who had influenced their music taste or who gave them music, dads were mentioned in many interviews, and many young women referred to boyfriends, while moms were less frequently brought up, and girlfriends were not mentioned as musical influences at all.

On streaming services that are presently popular, there may be named and appointed experts fore-fronted in the interface. But there are also algorithms recommending music to listeners and these are not neutral engines. The services are often connected to other social networks (such as Facebook) where your friends may pose as experts. What may at first seem like vast libraries of music are really services spreading opinions, pictures, sounds, and ideas collected from other media, software, and famous, as well as ordinary, people.

It is beyond doubt that women today use the internet for all purposes, including music consumption and gaming (another form of popular culture associated with masculinity). Still experts, music nerds, dads, and boyfriends are points of reference when it comes to good music and technological knowledge. How can this contradiction be understood? The idea that equality is promoted automatically in online cultures—since everybody has access and thus the ability to reach the same position—is clearly incorrect. While digital media permeates our society in new ways, the power imbalances in terms of who is considered an expert in online music use seem familiar. I would even take this reasoning one step further: the expert plays a highly central role for music consumption online, as the interviewees believe. Experts guide others by recommending new music, creating playlists, and writing music blogs. Could the expert be getting even more important in digital music use? If that is the case, and experts are still in different ways perceived as masculine, then guidance for music-use online may be doing the opposite of promoting equality: reinforcing differences.

[For the full article, see Ann Werner and Sofia Johansson, “Experts, Dads and Technology: Gendered Talk About Online Music,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication]

Ann Werner is Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University, Sweden

We have been to three girl-focused cons this summer and fall: LeakyCon, DashCon and GeekGirlCon. These cons are non-profit, largely run by volunteers, and provide alternative geeky spaces to male-dominated cons. These cons extend the work of social media such as Tumbr by providing safe public spaces where feminist, feminine, and queer young people can gather to create communities that validate and encourage creative play, fannish passion, and critical thinking. The cons devote a great deal of attention to social inequalities faced by women, intersecting issues of sexism with racism, homophobia, classism, and related biases regarding ability, religion, educational level, and cultural capital. The socially critical content of these cons have demonstrated to me that we need to redefine what we mean by  “public” education. The organizers and participants of these cons are fashioning their own liberal arts education spaces. Many of the young panelists at GeekGirlCon made the point that they learned about feminist criticism, intersectionality, and social inequities from social media and at cons, not from the traditional public education system.

The role of social media and these types of cons as sites of critical thinking, community building, and social justice training for women has become increasingly urgent, most recently demonstrated by the nationally publicized attacks on Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic of video games on social media. Sarkeesian represents this new kind of public educator who seeks to make her work democratically accessible, and she was GeekGirlCon’s opening speaker. GGC hired extra security for the death threats that immediately followed the announcement of her appearance, but the attacks against her, like the more recent threats surrounding her at the Utah State University, were not only leveled at Sarkeesian but at her audiences. The GeekGirlCon hashtag (#GGC14) on Twitter was taken over by Sarkeesian trolls, and any attendee who tweeted in support of Sarkeesian or used the #GGC14 hashtag also received threatening messages directed at them, individually. As numerous panelists and attendees made clear, anyone with a feminine-perceived username is the recipient of hate on many social media platforms.

It is vital, therefore, that we view Sarkeesian’s work and the hostility directed at her as not an anomaly, but part of the greater structural misogyny and inequity embedded in and perpetuated by American public institutions. Public education largely does not address social inequalities and erases many identity categories (LGBTQA and transgender most obviously in k-12). There is virtually no sex or rape culture education in schools. Humanities and creative arts programs are increasingly marginalized at both k-12 and college-levels. Career counseling, networking, leadership training – particularly for women and social minorities seeking to enter fields dominated by white men – is generally unavailable.  It is not surprising that feminized spaces such as these cons and select social media sites have become so important to young people; we have heard countless testimonials to this fact from young women at every con.

This was GeekGirlCon’s fourth year, and it has grown in both programming and attendance, with an estimated 7,000 participants this year. GGC is distinguished by its localism. Like other cons, GGC has a robust year-round social media presence but unlike them, GGC is based in Seattle and is able to foster relationships with local schools, industries and businesses and maintain a community presence throughout the year; in this way, the convention itself can be viewed as a catalyst that brings the local community together but also facilitates an extension of its female-centered space.

Used with permission

The age range of attendees at GGC was broad, from pre-teens to women in their 20s and 30s; many children were accompanied by their parents, and thus there were more men than at other Cons. In addition, although GGC encouraged cosplay and devoted panels to fangirl topics such as feminist media criticism and slash, GGC addressed other aspects of the term “geek.” For example, GGC highlighted women’s role in the sciences and offered a DIY “Science Zone,” where attendees were guided through experiments by female science educators. GGC also offered several workshops, booths, and panels that addressed professional career and networking strategies and opportunities for women and girls, particularly those seeking to enter technology, engineering, and science fields. Local industries and educators who support GGC’s mission offered career advice and support.

Panelists continually noted the importance of “finding a support group of other women” for any career pursuit. Indeed, some of the most interesting career discussion came from a new generation of female media journalists. They spoke of their experiences negotiating a media landscape in which their feminist critical perspectives and knowledge of fan cultures were not always welcome by editors and their published work often provoked gender-based hate. At the same time, these fangirls emphasized the importance of the fan community as a resource and support, and they encouraged attendees to draw on the skills they have learned as fans –writing, editing, graphic design, media analysis – in building their careers. One particularly popular and insightful panel on this topic is linked below.

“M from Feels to Skills panel”

GeekGirlCon also distinguished itself by holding two panels explicitly devoted to fat identity and resources. The “Fatness & Fandom” panelists represented a range of fat body types and was also the most racially diverse panel that I (Jen) attended at GGC. Fat fans spoke of being snubbed and erased by manufacturers of geeky clothing, a hot topic within plus-size communities because of the lack of availability of well-made, fashionable plus-size clothes. This panel was a great example of the local presence at GGC, composed of members of PNW Fattitude, a meetup group for fat women in the Pacific Northwest. Taking part in this panel allowed the group to leverage the larger voice of GGC to spread awareness of issues that fat fans face and to allow more people to learn about the group itself. Following the event, panelists invited attendees to an in-person meetup across the street. PNW Fattitude thus allowed attendees to see successful example of sustainable community at GGC.

This article by Allison McCracken was research and written with the help of Jen Kelly.