A benefit of studying so-called bad feminine media objects is that the debates around poetics and quality are vacated leaving us to look at it however we would like. And while some are in the business of (rightly) reclaiming the beauty of the bad text, there’s something almost liberating about letting it be, immersing one’s self in that which seemingly disqualifies it from study. In the case of the category Elana Levine borders around “Passions” in her edited collection Cupcakes, Pinterest and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century, the contributors all honed in on examining the pleasures women experience and navigate through commodified texts targeted to them. Levine’s instinct in putting these pieces in conversation with one another was spot-on in the realization that although all of the contributors analyzed different pieces of feminist media, the connecting tether among them was how they all explored how women used these texts to negotiate their own identities and desires in this post-feminist era.

Imagining that an affective response like pleasure that is not purely founded in celebration of a television show or a book series targeted to them but also in the joy that comes from critiquing those very texts is an act rarely allowed women in twenty-first century media. Our hot takes and think pieces easily reduce nuanced conversation down to simplistic binaries of “if this is good or bad for women” with the notion of a woman liking bad things as revolutionary.

But what if women—all kinds of women—have been enjoying the bad all along? And what if, as posited by Melissa Click in her “Fifty Shades of Postfeminism: Contextualizing Readers’ Reflections on the Erotic Romance Series” chapter, the pleasure for women readers of this book franchise emerge after using this text to think through their own behaviors if allowed to imagine themselves as the heroines of this story?

I submit that the goal of the “Passions” category is to answer that very question. Jillian Baez’s “Television for All Women? Watching Lifetime’s Devious Maids,” maintains that depending on if the female viewer is Latina or white, the question of who they imagine themselves to be in the series generates a bifurcated set of pleasures. I like how Baez notes that, “while most female fans are watching Devious Maids as a source of feminine pleasure derived from its similarities to the generic qualities of Desperate Housewives, Latina fans view the series for its Latina cast and storylines that humanize female domestic workers.” Thus the joy for Latina audiences comes from these characters’ specificity as domestics who are also allowed these fantastical moments of power that transgress the servitude so many Latina women must navigate in their own lives.

Similarly, the piece I wrote, “ABC’s Scandal and Black Women’s Fandom,” takes up the question answering how black women identify with a black character also blurred between the stuff of fantasy and the bodily reality of a black woman enshrined in the spirit of colorblindness. The answer I explored was that through a process of gap-filling online labor from discursively making her hair a frequent topic of discussion to rewriting dialogue in the register of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and writing fanfiction around her being the object of desire between two powerful white men, black women fans are able to cultivate a more dimensional and culturally representative version of Olivia Pope.

The final point I make in the chapter ties to the work Erin A. Meyers writes in “Women, Gossip, and Celebrity Online: Celebrity Gossip Blogs as Feminized Popular Culture.” I end the chapter with a small discussion on a “real person” ship within the Scandal fandom—the Terrys (a portmanteau of the two leads Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn) and how while the desire around this couple is not wholly based in the need for them to be true but rather in how it helps some black female viewers to strategize ways to keep Washington at the center of the fandom. This coupling, largely the stuff of gossip, tethers to one of Meyers’ central tenets of the importance of gossip as communication: “Gossip is not simply the pursuit of truth. It is a process of narrativizing and judging the contrast between the public and private celebrity image as markers of larger social ideologies, particularly around gender, race, sexuality, and class. While such talk is not inherently resistant to dominant norms, the fact that it offers a space where women’s concerns are negotiated and made meaningful makes it, and celebrity culture, important sites of cultural analysis.” The pleasures of what it might mean for Goldwyn, a name that’s a part of Hollywood history to be coupled with Washington, a type that represents the best of black womanhood are more than can be expressed in this piece.

What’s more, Meyers’ article ties us back to Click’s contribution in that both describe the pleasures that accompany the ways women look at female celebrities in the same ways they may look at Anastasia Steele: models for who they may simultaneously want to be and also reject.

Women’s passion told through the lens of women’s pleasure is still in its infancy as an object of research. But I think the pieces here serve as a wonderful start in the study.

Beyond aca-fandom, what do fan practices and academic labor contribute to our understanding of one another? Can these labors of love lead to coalition building across industries?

I have been engaged in a lot of discussions about participatory labor and new media lately (both in official and unofficial realms). Repeatedly, I am struck by how rarely those of us that study fans, resistance, and the free labor of online produsers (to use Axel Bruns’ neologism) see ourselves in our research participants outside of the realm of aca-fans. Recognizing the contestations surrounding the term “aca-fan,” I would argue that all scholars are fans of our research objects. If not, why would we bother? Film scholars have to be fans of film to subject themselves to hours upon hours of watching. Rare is the political communication scholar who is not, deep inside, a politics junky (the enactment of addiction language being common in many a fandom). As Jonathan Gray has pointed out, people can be fans of news though media audience studies rarely discuss the phenomena.

Certainly not all scholars are fans in the traditional sense, but they are expected to be media consumers if they want to speak with authority. This expectation, true of fan cultures as well, can be exclusionary. Studying industries or audiences do not necessarily have to consume the media at the center of their analysis (/tip o’ the hat to T.L. Taylor on that point). Analysis of texts requires familiarity with form, genre conventions, and acknowledging medium specificity, true. That is a far cry from assuming every game scholar owns the latest release or that every television scholar has watched (and liked) every acclaimed series on the air.

Even when scholars don’t claim to be fans of a medium, we are fans of research, theories, subjects, and fields. Fan, moreover, need not imply the uncritical love-fest of pure celebration. Critique,  at it’s most productive, involves the hope that that which we love could be so much better. Many digital production practices, from slash fiction to fan sites to hate watching, are acts of pleasure. As Lisa Henderson discusses in talks on her new book Love and Money, what would our research look like if it looked more like our acknowledgement sections? Can we love our research more?

When analyzing “fan practices,” by treating these as objects of study, researchers sometimes lose sight of how our experiences as scholars overlap with fandom. Beyond the love and pleasure connection, can we think about the struggles we share with the fans/audiences/industries that we study. I have heard many scholars rightly critique the exploitative if simultaneously resistive nature of “participatory culture.” Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, for example, argue that the contemporary games industry has been built upon the “playbor” of its audiences.

Research, in the best of situations, is a labor of love. We produce a massive amount of unpaid labor in pursuit of the ecstasy of the research breakthrough. So do fans. As I watched the new SyFy series Heroes of Cosplay, I was struck by the massive financial investment the cast undertook, from making their costumes to traveling around the country, for the chance to win awards that may or may not have big payouts. This was largely justified by claims that cosplay could lead to career advancement. It seems odd at first… until you consider how many of us pay to attend conferences (with or without institutional support) with the promise that it will advance our careers. We give talks, write articles, edit anthologies, advise students (in and out of our institutions), all in the hopes of “making it” and/or contributing to the field. At least that is what we tell ourselves. When we wonder why fans do similar labor, can we gain insights from why we engage in projects that many of us have trouble defending to friends and relative outside of academia?

Thinking more broadly of the implications of these similarities, I have been to several conferences in the past year that have brought together game scholars, industry representatives, and artists/designers. Talking across these industries sometimes feels difficult, because we are all (as humans) so invested in our point of view that we want others to understand what our side has to offer. Alternatively, we want others to tell us what to offer them. Building on decades of critiques of such colonizing approaches to political movements though, does coalition politics offer a better frame? For example, I think many of the problems of the mainstream AAA games industry, as it is often constructed, are the problems of academia as well. The mainstream games industry like mainstream academia is largely built upon exclusion and competition. Those of us who don’t fit comfortably with the class/gender/sexuality/race/embodiment/etc.,  norms acknowledged by our respective industries are often forced into a compromise if we stay within them or charged with an uphill battle if we want to change them. Both industries have to defend their own relevance, in a way that further promotes exclusivity and hard lines between insiders and outsiders. Both industries have been guilty of exploiting contingent labor, systematically excluding marginal voices, and fetishzing their own cannons. Both often have conferences that often price out contributors that could shake things up, and then complain that they don’t have anyone skilled in doing things differently. Both rely on certification systems that are tied into exclusionary and oppressive systems for access to employment.

When we are frustrated with another industry we sometimes simply dismiss it. I have heard scholars dismiss industry perspectives, industry representatives dismiss scholarship, indie designers dismiss both (in all cases sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly). When we are frustrated with our own industry, we try to figure out how to fix things, or leave. In acknowledging our similarities, however, perhaps the time has come to think more concretely about how we can help each other fix the systemic problems we all face.

I tune in every week for the joy of watching Ozzy’s genuinely moral, selfless, humble, and spiritual game contrast with Coach and Brandon’s hypocritical one. Both gaming strategies involve aspects of excess, but the different ways to bring excess into the game speak to the split between Ozzy’s genuine game and Coach and Brandon’s phony game. Coach and Brandon’s excess ultimately comes through over-the-top performances of religious faith, which humorously and ironically point out Coach’s ego-centered motives and Brandon’s mentally unstable personality during moments when they claim to be charitable. Coach’s numerous prayer sessions are less about serving God and more about rallying the tribe to put faith in him as a leader who dictates what cast members to vote off, with the end goal being to put Coach in the final two with someone who would receive fewer votes in the final tribal council. While Coach tries to bring his tribe members together through prayer—a gaming strategy of unity, he strategically plays the game just as much through one-on-one or two-on-one secretive meetings where he manipulatively plots out whom to send home, how to blind side the competitor, and how to have the numbers always work to make him least vulnerable. The tensions between Coach’s ego-centered goals and ego-less claims come to a head in excessive moments, such as when the cast members had to paint themselves for a challenge. Coach painted a cross on his face, prayed during the physical competition to serve God properly, and then quickly gathered his team together for a prayer after they won, making sure he was in the center of the prayer circle.

On the other hand, Ozzy is a servant leader, which is central to many religions. Ozzy’s leadership comes through not in making sure that the numbers will serve him to advance to the next round but by sacrificing his body and potentially his place in the game so that his tribe can continue on successfully. At the first tribal council after the merger, Ozzy offered his immunity necklace to Savaii tribe member Whitney so that she could be saved and so the tribe wouldn’t be hurt. Ozzy also came up with the brilliant strategy to send himself to Redemption Island instead of the tribe voting for Cochran, which it wanted to do, so that he could win the challenge at Redemption Island and then later rejoin Savaii after the merger and give them a numbers advantage. (This worked out, but the merged tribe later sent Ozzy back to Redemption because Cochran turned on Ozzy and others.) A moving moment on this season occured when the members of Upolu sent Cochran to Redemption Island, and Ozzy greeted Cochran with kindness, charitably offering him a space in his covered sleeping area. Most people would have shunned a rat like Cochran who ruined their tribe.

Ozzy is the most moral and ethical competitor in this season of Survivor, but the series delightfully packages him in epic scenes of transcendental religious communion with nature. Ozzy’s been on Redemption for a while, and he’ll probably play his way back into the game. Episodes with Ozzy on Redemption show him communing with nature, swimming with fishes, and climbing to the top of hundred-foot high trees. Long haired and long bearded, Ozzy looks like Jesus. He constantly offers tribe members and people on Redemption Island fish, a symbol of Christian faith. Ozzy is so excessively coded as a Christ figure that his fans are awaiting his resurrection from Redemption to the game.

There are often religious people on Survivor, but there have never been so many of them offering us so much viewing pleasure. For instance, last season when several tribe mates joined together for prayer and Biblical interpretation, eventual season winner Boston Rob looked at them like an alligator calmly waiting in the water to attack his prey and noted that, even though he’s religious, religion has no part of this game and he’ll send them packing. He was right for that season. But things change between seasons. Last season I cheered for Boston Rob’s cunningness; this season I’m rooting for Ozzy. His selfless, humble, packaged-in-excess spiritual style has won me over.