Fangirl

Characterised as immature, hysterical, and obsessive, fangirls are routinely dismissed in mainstream media coverage (Click 2010; Nash and Lahti 1999) and by fans themselves (Bury 2005; Healey 2009). This paper forms a case study of an iCarly LiveJournal community, exploring the various ways in which young female fans discordantly negotiate, defend, and legitimise their fangirl culture and performance in light of negative cultural constructions of the fangirl.

Initially, fangirling was expressly welcomed, predicated on an assumed, communal understanding to what claiming the term for themselves, and labeling their performance as such, indicated within this space. Fangirling then became a potential source of fan shame, or at least a riskier pleasure, when Schneider, the tween sitcom’s creator/producer, later joined the community. While inter-fandom usually refers to disparate fan groups (Busse 2013; Hills 2012; Williams 2013), here I consider an inter-fandom dynamic in terms of fans of the same fan object but in different fan spaces. In the context of Schneider’s arrival, I explore the ways in which fans aligned themselves with, invoked, and repurposed fangirl stereotypes as a defence strategy to protect themselves from outside judgement and, as a bid for status, to elevate or distinguish their iCarly community from those outside LiveJournal. With a surge of new members following the producer’s entrance, this position was then reversed; new internal hierarchies were formed and intra-fandom (Stanfill 2013) distinctions made by existing members seeking to distance themselves from “entitled”, unsocialised fangirls, whose performances were left unmarked and were thus at risk of disparagement.

I argue that when claimed for the self, “fangirl” functioned to demonstrate one’s belonging and value or status in the community, yet when applied to Others, and invoked in its most derogatory sense, worked as a means to discredit and exclude.

Gothic became a self-parodying genre very quickly: Jane Austen wrote the self-reflexive 'Northanger Abbey' in 1798, though it did not see publication for nearly twenty years after that. Two hundred years later, the Gothic has expanded and adapted, and a mocking inter-textual awareness is a key quality for the popularity of the genre. The audience for this fiction has long been perceived as skewing feminine, as is recognized and critiqued in Austen’s work. The modern southern gothic of True Blood (2007-2014), and American gothic Supernatural (2005-ongoing), also recognize a majority female fanbase. Despite the very different eras of their generation, these fictions have much in common in their engagement with their audience and with their historical antecedents as Gothic genre fictions. Though the genre has always been self-reflexive and its heroes and heroines highly self-aware, the analytic capacity of the female audience is still denied and denigrated.