Because scholars have paid insufficient attention to race in fan studies, a new genealogy of fan studies is needed, one that includes different kinds of primary and secondary texts that have explored responses of black fans. There is a rich history of black fan criticism and acafandom that has never been seen as such but that both complements and complicates current definitions and paradigms in fan studies. Discussions of fan otherness, antifandom, and fan ambivalence explore the difference that the inclusion of African American cultural criticism would make to both canonical scholarship and more recently published work in the field.
rebecca wanzo is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. She is currently completing a book manuscript about sentimental political storytelling in the United States forthcoming from suny Press.
Issa Rae's web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011–13), initially posted on YouTube, and Lena Dunham's Girls (HBO, 2012–) are examples of the precarious-girl comedy in the new millennium. These sitcoms depict women experiencing a prolonged girlhood produced not only by the greater economic insecurity that middle-class women have been facing post–Great Recession but also by a variety social factors that generate feelings of immobilization and isolation. Abjection is often a principal sign of these characters' precarity—they inhabit spaces where they often recoil from others and vice versa, and their constant association with that which is considered gross (like dirt, vomit, and feces) is habitually a sign of what emotional and economic insecurity has wrought. However, race makes a critical difference in the treatment of abjection in these two shows. While Girls is a study in the classic psychoanalytic account of abjection, often depicting its protagonist as a dehumanized object full of disappointed drives, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl humorously blends the historical weight of black abjection with other kinds of abjection, so that the abjection its protagonist uses to define herself is not one determined by the history of white supremacy. These programs hinge on immobility as a mode of being. Depicting female subjects who will never entirely escape abjection, these shows also highlight racial and class-based differences in the embrace of not only this twenty-first-century form of comedy but also in modes of self-fashioning in neoliberal times.
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