Post #4
In his article titled “Masculine Pursuits?: Gender, Generation, and the Fan Collector,” Lincoln Geraghty talks about how “affirmational” and “transformative” modes of fan engagement traditionally have been gendered terms in the fan community. Affirmational fan practices include things like obtaining extensive knowledge and trivia of any fandom they are a part of, collecting items like memorabilia or DVD box sets, and overall gaining a mastery over the content. This is typically seen as the more masculine form of fan engagement, things that align with the original meaning that the creators intended for the text. Transformative fan practices are typically held by females in this model, and they are practices that challenge or change the intended meaning of the text for the fan’s purpose, like writing fan-fiction, or vidding, things that change the original narrative.
When you gender these terms however, you can lose a large part of the community that either breaks these gendered norms or can be categorized as both. Geraghty talks about how typically “masculine means aggressiveness, competitiveness, and a desire for mastery, and feminine preservationism, creativity, and nurturance,” (Geraghty 60) but then mentions how a male fan may take his Star Wars collectible to “Death Valley to recreate scenes from the film” (Geraghty 60). This would be considered a “creative” form of fan engagement, which is gendered towards females, but it was done by a male. It is almost impossible to correctly categorize a large group of people with simple binary distinctions since there will inevitably be an overlap. For example, cosplay is a common fan practice that is done by both males and females, both in which could be considered an affirmational or a transformative mode of engagement, depending on how it was carried out.
In the article, Geraghty concludes his statements by saying that nostalgia is one of the largest driving factors when it comes to collecting and how nostalgia is a “genderless emotion” (Geraghty 70). If this is the case then it would be hypocritical to say that cult collecting is a gendered practice.
Geraghty, Lincoln. Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom, and Collecting Popular Culture. New York: Routledge Books, 2014. 60, 61.