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Paper short abstract

This paper foregrounds the keyword "fandom" and explores the methodological implications of multimodal anthropology in working with women-oriented fan culture communities concerned with popular online feminism in China by highlighting their complicity and disruption of the dominant structures.

Paper long abstract

How can multimodal anthropology engage with media fandom in ways that creatively address bad habitus in both the fields and their tools? In contemporary China, popular media and media fan cultures are key sites of cultural production. Emergent “fandom publics” (Zhang, 2016) are one of the few sites for public expression under severe censorship. They are also sites of expansive and intensive consumption, blurring distinctions between what Jenkins (1992) calls “interpretive audiences” and what Sugihartati (2020) calls cultural “prosumers (producer-consumers)”.

This paper proposes “fandom” as a keyword for critical anthropology of multimodal worlds in which tools and platforms enable subversive gender relations as well as complicity in dominant valuations of ethnicity, sexuality, class, and rurality. It looks at the case of women-oriented mobile game fandoms in China, centering around gender politics and negotiations of queerness in these fan communities. It asks how these fans connect to popular feminist movements in China that are censored online and prohibited in physical spaces. What kind of “feminist” politics are produced when fans seek empowerment through consumerism and gender equality through prosumption? And finally, what forms of ethnographic participation, observation or collaborations can emerge in working with fandoms?