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.

[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“)

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.

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“)

What perhaps struck me most about LeakyCon was the fluid approach to celebrity on display throughout. I first noticed celebrity as a theme in an early session on millennials and religion. In this session, led by Reverend Heather Godsey, the mostly millennial-age audience discussed the motivating inspiration they find in the “Starkids” theater troupe, made famous for their musical theater adaptation of Harry Potter into A Very Potter Musical (AVPM). AVPM (and its two sequels, the last of which debuted at LeakyCon, 2012) are lynchpins of the Con, and the large Starkids cast may very well be the con’s most beloved stars. Fans expressed admiration for the Starkids troupe, but not a distanced idolization. Fans conveyed a sense of intimate recognition; they saw the Starkids as modeling an accessible way of being (creative) in contemporary digital culture. In Reverand Godsey’s words:

It’s funny, in corporate fandom, like Doctor Who or Glee, there’s this sense that these are my idols; they’re on a pedestal; they’re up there. There’s a sense that Starkid is not on a pedestal. That the fandom looks at them, and says, “You are me. And I am you.”

The fifty or so young adults gathered in the room were eager to respond to this perspective. One audience member commented on the fan terminology “Starkid” itself, which encompasses both the theater troupe and their fans: “I kind of think that’s the reason why Starkid fandom just calls themselves Starkids.” This comment marks a difference between the Starkids fan self-conception and the majority of fan terminology in which terms for a fandom (Whovian, Gleeks, Sherlockians) do not automatically encompass the producers of the source text. So Starkids (fans and troupe together) have co-created a shared network and, arguably, community.

The conversation among congoers in this session did not uncritically celebrate or accept as “authentic” this sense of likeness between Starkid Troupe members and fans.. While they agreed that they admire the Starkids and take pleasure in being part of the shared category, they emphasized the fact that this seeming accessibility masks more complex differentials. They described how as LeakyCon goers they must navigate a tricky terrain. They must figure out how to express admiration without erasing boundaries in such a seemingly intimate sphere. As another audience member put it:

In a way, that almost makes the fandom harder to navigate, though. Where it’s like: I admire you a lot, and I feel like I know you but I don’t know you, and so it’s like awkward sometimes to try to figure out how that works.

These blurred lines of celebrity/microcelebirty (or perhaps we need a more fluid term to describe visibility in this age of self branding where it seems everyone has the potential of being a star) were on display throughout the Con in a range of different ways. Sure there was some sort of more traditional hierarchy of stardom at play, with categories determined in part by media (Harry Potter film stars, BTVS television stars, Anthony Rapp of Rent fame), reach in millennial culture (Hank Green), and centrality to fannishly popular media texts (the Starkids and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries). But at the same time, there was a palpable sense that the most beloved stars across these categories were those closest in spirit to their fans.

We often heard the question at panels, from fans directed to the actors or producers: “What are you a fan of?” These questions (also somewhat familiar from Comic-Con and the like) always seemed to me purposefully designed to erase the divide between the stage (with the panelists and microphones) and the audiences sitting on folding chairs in front of/below them. Those actors and producers that answered the most easily with robust details were clearly met with audience joy (for example Daniel Vincent Gordh, who plays The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’ Darcy, not only said he’d be an academic if he couldn’t be an artist, but also rather adeptly, at least to this non-gamer, showed his cred as a gamer). Some did not even need to assert their identities as fans and geeks; it was simply a known and contributing factor to their celebrity. The Starkids gained their fame through creating what amounts to a work of musical theater Harry Potter fan fiction, and likewise The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is understood by many as a work of Pride and Prejudice fan fiction as much as it is an adaptation.

This positioning of the Con’s stars (or “special guests” as they were officially called) was perhaps most dynamically rendered in the con opening ceremonies number, which we discussed in our opening post.

This performance merges multiple fandoms and geekdom in a collective celebration of love of popular and audience culture. This number achieves its sense of multifannish queer multiplicity and collectivity through its casting of the con’s stars as different characters/fandoms, and specifically through their knowing performance of fandom (or their performance of knowing fandom). The lyrics transform the many subcultural references framing queer identity in Rent’s “La Vie Boheme” to fannish/geeky references, and ask that the various stars sing quickly in fannish slang, expressing fan emotion. My favorite line (and the line that drew the biggest laugh) offered the inspired rhyme of “cumberbitches catching snitches.”

I find this performance both moving and fascinating in part because the stars position themselves as members of the collective queer community of multifandom, seemingly erasing power differentials and embracing fannish mindsets, including a celebration of fannish creativity in what can be read as a larger cultural and social stance.

In my following posts I’ll talk more about that last point: the significance of the embrace of fannish production and transformation on the part of actors and producers within the context of Leakycon’s collective multifannish ethos.

A Lizzie Bennet Diaries cast video that accentuates these blurred lines between star and fan.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– 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“)

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“)