 which has existed since at least 2004 and possibly as early as 2001. So leaving aside all the various troubling kind of racist overtones of the macro, as well as the issue of whether it's funny or not, it's extremely popular. And you're going to get raped is now this like catchphrase that's used in competitive and argumentative context. It shows up in a lot of places. So whether you like it or not, this is like, this is the major reference for the Edward macro. So this macro, these loves tenderly macro, it functions just like that you're going to get raped macro, and it doesn't function without that reference, right? So you're going to get raped plays on viewers' perceptions of black and possibly homeless guys. The subject of it is widely assumed to be homeless when you see people talking about the macro. And then love tenderly puts these assumptions in conversation with perceptions of Edward Cullen and Robert Pattinson, right? So most members of Twilight, when they were asked about it, agreed that Edward is abusive, and Robert Pattinson is homeless looking or a bomb in their words, right? Because they'll go to like press calls looking sort of uncountable. And these are like common complaints. This is not just on Twilight, right? Everybody who just likes twilightist themes says these things about Edward and Robert Pattinson. But the normal narrative that's being put out in the press and that people assume that twilight fans are into is that Edward is the perfect boyfriend, and Robert Pattinson is the heartthrob. So the cognitive dissonance is what's funny. And what you need to remember with this is that twilight members are behaving in many ways like fans, right? They're following obsessively everything that happens. There, I used that term. They're following everything that happens in the twilight books. They're following the actor's lives, et cetera. They just have a very different perspective on what is going on with this stuff. So the dissonance between the way that Edward is being portrayed here and the way that he's being portrayed sort of in the media is what gives the macro kind of an analytic punch. So by aligning these two things, whoever is looking at this macro is forced to think about Edward's actions in a new light. He isn't a literal racist in the books, right? He's just sort of creepy. But by aligning the idea of rape with being loved tenderly, the macro actually does make an argument. It says, look, his seductions are creepy and scary, and every bit is frightening as that, you know, creepy guy that you're scared is going to rape you, not romantic and sexy like the normal narrative goes. The other thing about this is that the gaze functions really interestingly, right? So Edward is like looming and he's sort of like goofy and sort of menacing in this picture. But in the context of the macro, the viewer is given the power to say no, right? You're looking back at him, you're like, Edward, you douche. Right? So the experience of reading a macro isn't complete until the viewer reacts, ideally with humor, right? Drowning him in the mainstream understanding of twilight out with laughter. It may be a little bit of a stretch to bring the glasses and the douche into this, but I think that it's really valid because the point of this macro and many, many others like it is that they're challenging this expected gender role story of twilight with their laughter. So I'm going to really quickly sort of skim over the next part of my thesis in which I'm comparing these macros, which have totally been not dealt with in the literature in general, with sand bits which have been dealt with somewhat extensively. And this is actually a slide that is changing now. So sand bits and macros behave very similarly in some ways. They're both created in communities of interpretation and criticism. Communities develop methods of reading that are difficult for outsiders to comprehend, right? So if you see a sand bit and you've never seen a sand bit before, you don't know what it's doing. They can both serve as a way to mess with expectations about the male gaze. There's a lot of scholarship about that. The D in recontextualization of narrative are key components. There are some macros that take like an entire scene and recontextualize it with new captions. This last point actually has changed. Now I am working into my thesis that there are many there are many fanmids that are intended to be humorous, but they don't typically dealt with in the academic corpus. They haven't been talked about very much. And I think that there's a lot of reasons for that. I think there's a lot of reasons why things like macros, fanmids, or if we look more broadly, things like films, right? Songs that are like sort of parody but sort of just for fun that fans will sing that are based in the original the original story world. There's a lot of reasons why these things don't get talked about in the fan studies corpus very much. And I think that one of the reasons is the humor element, right? It's just plain difficult to talk about humor. As you guys probably noticed with me talking about the Edward macro, it's always either like too serious or too unserious for academic discourse. But there's another part of this which is that the fancultures that we usually study are female fancultures. And to quote Nancy Walker, humor is at odds with a conventional definition of ideal womanhood. Humor is aggressive, women are passive. The humorist occupies a position of superiority. Women are inferior. So now I want to illustrate this for you. I'm making this argument right that we're uncomfortable with the idea of finding women and this is part of why we ignore humorous productions by women. To illustrate this, the first American collection of women's humor was published in 1885. I bet that most of you didn't know that before 1885 there was a humorist that existed ever other than maybe Jane Austen. There were no collections of women's humor in English that I know of or that Nancy Walker knows of or that anybody I've read about knows of until 1976. And it was called Titters and Titters was subtitled the first collection of humor by women because the wit of women was so obscure. Furthermore, as late as the early 90s and possibly to this day, women did not appear in any major collections of significant American humor. Despite that, they're really prominent in humor scene. I mean like Dorothy Parker, you can list so many people from even just this century and yet they're not showing up in academic discussions of American humor. So I think that there's a good strong argument for the fact that they've fallen out of the academic discourse and so how do you start talking about funny female fans? Like where do you begin with that? But there's another reason that we might exclude humor from our discussion of fans. And that's because humor potentially complicates our understanding of what a fan is. So in fan cultures, Matt Hills, who's one of the major scholars who's writing about this right now, refuses to give a definition of fan but he privileges people who claim a fan identity and he assumes that the natural object of fan studies is self-identified fans. Cornell's San Vos, you can see quoted above, says that fandom is the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular text or narrative. And he describes the repeated consumption of any text as affection. An affection for the text. So Wallace seems to potentially include emotional investments that aren't totally positive. The rest of fans doesn't explore the possibility of frustrations and animosities towards a given text to write. He only looks at people who are like yeah, I love it. And humor you can see naturally kind of problematizes this because even the most good nature humor is poking fun at something. Even the most good nature humor is potentially, you know, saying, yeah, I'm not totally uncritical of this. How can you make a joke where there's no but of the joke? I guess it's possible but it's very hard. And this especially is problematized by things like the macros that Twilight is producing, which are also kind of biting commentary, or funny fanbids. Fanbids are traditionally understood as critique, but when they're funny it's like an extra level, like they're getting this joy and critique. And that's hard to deal with. How can you enjoy making fun of something so much and still be a fan? Is that even possible? And yet the people that I looked at in my astigraphic study of Twilight behave exactly like fans do. They look at everything that goes on in Twilight. They discuss the themes of it. They look at the actors. They follow everything they do. I found out more from them about what was happening in the world of Twilight than I did from the Twilight purely fan sites that I found. In my previous presentations about Jonathan Gray's ideas about fans which are representative of he claims that you have a nucleus which is the fan or the close reader and then you've got the non-fan which are like the electron that makes this nice little diagram of the atomic conception of fandom. And they're a step forward, right? You've now got a fan and you've got an anti-fan. Someone who hates something and they're in conversation with each other. But they're really too simplistic. And they're being taken up in wider conversation. A lot of people that I interviewed without any prompting identify themselves as oh, I'm a fan or oh, I'm an anti-fan. And this as I hope you can see, even if it is a step beyond like Hills or Sandvast saying that fans are self-identified fans who love the text, it'll buy opinions like Twilight still. It erases really complex effective engagement with texts and makes it hard for us to study critical practices like cracking serious jokes. I have considered suggesting a term that Twilight came up with which was LOL fan as in a fan who loves to make fun of something for the wills. But I think that would only mess this up even more, right? We're not going to get through this by creating more categories. Rather, I think we really need to rethink our concept of what we're studying when we're studying fans and people who are receiving a text. So my conclusions are that the term fan and the conception of my field as fan studies is deeply flawed for a variety of reasons. That Jonathan Gray's work to challenge this was a step in the right direction, but he doesn't go far enough in order to break down these artificial terms and instead be looking at the relationship of the reader to the text. That this is reflective of cultural biases against women's humor in particular and it also causes us to miss important cultural phenomena like macros and other fan's humor productions. Humor productions in general, really. It's not inherent to the way the field was constructed in its origins. Henry, for instance, talks about he talks about filks, he talks about fan humor. Ian Ahm initially did not even talk about fans in her son's work. She didn't use the term. Instead, she was focused on readers who had something to say about Dallas in her case. And it's easily runny. By commanding our gaze to all effectively engaged principle and interpretive communities that are based around popular texts and all their productions. So changing with focus from this idea of here is a thing called a fan to here is a relationship that some people have with the text. We want to study the relationship and not necessarily the person. I'm not saying. Of course, so the term fans studies is deeply flawed. What would you propose in this place? What's better? I don't know. This is a master's thesis. Let me do a sense of how that how we can circumvent kind of useful constraints. So I think the key for this I think the key for this is that fan studies is a term that's not actually like there's no program in fan studies that exists. But I know it's not cemented yet and I think what I'm really arguing against is cementing it as a field to say. I think that I'm arguing that it should be viewed I know that You criticized the analog for sort of talking about this as audience studies which I did not criticize the analog What was your comment about the analog was that she did a good thing by talking about it as audience studies. Okay, but is that the answer? I don't know if that's the answer because I feel like that's something that has I guess I I really don't know the answer to this. I think that audience studies is potentially good but I haven't I haven't I guess I just don't feel like I am in a position to say the key thing for me is that really the key point for me has been that fan studies is giving us blinders. I also wonder about audience studies because I feel like it suggests that we're looking at like the non-fans that Jonathan Gray is encouraging and I think that that's not the case I think the most people going to fan studies are interested in that aren't interested in the non-fans and that maybe audience studies suggest that there's a big broader I don't know. I'm not going I don't know the answer to that question. Okay. I want to follow up on that. I sympathize with the idea that if we focus too much on fan as a category of person that it can pull in a lot of directions and make it hard to see something and so I think the idea that to get through this or go to some next stage is very smart, very interesting and it's a question of sort of it seems to me so the answer to one of the ways to think about the answer to William's question is you know, is what are you trying to get to? Right. You're saying get through this and that's certainly true but what are we trying to get through and I hear a few things coming out and that thing's very provocative. One is a humor is very hard to deal with I'm not sure that no fans deal with humor I guess I was thinking of the football fans who put the bag over their head and I know it's different, I know it makes a lot of distinction and that's all fine but I guess it's still like it seems to me it's where you want to go with it and I do think it's interesting to say well it's about why it distracts us this term fan is that it makes it as if all fans somehow share the same kind of emotional attachment so then there's just category as a fan and you get in a certain kind of game and it seems to me you want to say that there's this more complicated relationship and I think this is always part of fans love and hate you know I do think that's part of being a fan in any situation maybe but that humor I think it's true humor is especially hard to talk about I mean I think there's something about academic discourse here that we gotta be so serious right we gotta wear all our clothes and you know these rules about what you can and cannot do during your talk I don't know if it's New Yorker question we'll get to that later so I guess that's my question that is so I'm going to totally agree with you so far but then the question is what would you want to do with it like where do you want to take this and say okay now this is I can't get to where I want to get to so I'm still having heard where you want to get to so one thing about this is that my thesis has seriously developed at first I was just doing a separate rapid study and there's even been like serious developments in my concept of the thesis like yesterday after it already made my thesis presentation so fortunately nothing that's going to work but but I think that for me the thing that I am really most deeply interested in that maybe I didn't fully express through this is it's a concern for the calcification of like which particular groups of fans that we are going to study so right there's this whole thing where we study people who write fan fiction you know we study people who are in this tradition of media fans and who are not quote fair old fans which is a term that some people will use for those who did not sort of come up through the star track to whatever you know and also you know for studying male fans we study certain behaviors of theirs and for studying female fans we study other behaviors that are theirs so when you bring up humor with football fans yeah there's a lot of stuff about men doing parody and most of that is not actually a conversation with people who would call themselves fan study scholars and there's I feel like there's all these calcifications that are existing and I would really like to or that are beginning to come to be and I would really like to sort of smash those down and I think that maybe the idea of audience study is where I want to go with this the idea that there are audiences that are here not in the way that Jonathan Gray is talking about them as inhabiting very set points but rather as as a more cited thing right as a more individual thing for each person a conversation away from the academic discussion because I know that your interest just knowing you are in both spheres and I'm wondering what the institutions of this work are for the people from using content as well as people in marketing yeah so I've been thinking about this a lot actually I know that you also know and one of the things is I think that people's perceptions of what a fan is who are in the sort of grid and entertainment world are very un-mixed right they're very much focused on the idea that fans are giving an adulation and completely love everything they do and I think that in recent years that's been challenged to some degree and people don't necessarily understand that even though they maybe are not purely loving everything we do that's not necessarily the end of the world right that you can look at reactions and be like okay here these reactions to my work some of them are good some of them are bad how can I slave to these to keep everybody interested I haven't gotten too far into that because I've been mostly focused on actually writing thesis but I'm looking forward to exploring that a little more and thinking harder about very controversial things like Twilight right where man all the people on Twilight went to see the Twilight movies and make fun of them in the theaters and man they were putting some more money in the pockets of the people who were putting on the Twilight movies so I think that it's an interesting way to go for marketing and for commercial applications but I'm sort of drawing my animal one and using humor I draw back to Mary Douglas to suggest that humor emerges when we have intensely contradictory ideas in our midst at the same moment and humor is the way we negotiate through those contradictions absolutely so it's not to think about the male fans for a moment historically there has been a discourse where the fandom has not written in academia about male fans using humor to negotiate knowledge based on the text and to signal their emotional distance from it as a way of negotiating what it means to be a fan and a male at the same time so the question traditionally that's opposed to the more immediately engaged female fans through romance or melodrama have been the dominant modes so I'm wondering how that gets complicated by this reading are the female fans simply adopting the male posture is it traditionally described or is there the intensity or ambivalence about closeness and distance or critical engagement and emotional investment that's very different from what's been characterized as male fans so I think that it depends on which specific group you're talking about I think that for the twilight group I would say yes it is the same impulse because because of the fact specific the text is so highly gendered and twilight fans are represented as so female and so incredibly irrational just every possible term that you can use for that I think that there really is something happening with the twilight fan group where they are both launched the text and absolutely have to somehow negotiate that I'm not a girl like that however the fans in any community which I'm also looking at I think is different in some ways the human standards are easily overlooked but many of them do speak to a closeness to the text that doesn't come up as much in twilight that is more mixed so I think that it's a really great insight and I think that both are true for different communities and I think that this just points back to why you can't say like and then here are wall fans right like why I can't just propose the category of wall fans who like to make fun of the text and like leave it there which would be very neat and let me tell you how much I would love to do that but I can't do that because different communities of fans are using humor as interacting with the text generally speaking I would say that the media has gotten nicer to fans in the time that I've been in fandom and I think that that is true so I guess I'm optimistic but then their coverage of twilight fans has been a throwback which is part of what interests me in it because it seems like fan communities were getting treated more and more reasonably even just from the time that I started becoming involved in Harry Potter fandoms now they're treated much more sympathetically but twilight fans are this real case where they're like back to all of the things that are you know back to describing all the scary things about fans back to the beetle maniacs back to you know all the stereotypes so I don't know what to say on that topic I think it probably is a little bit a little panic but I think it existed around the beetle maniac so that's good at least so I have a lot of evidence I have a question about corporeality corporeality so a lot of like you said beetle maniacs for example has a reference and a lot of this talk about how women relate to these media that they have an effect in relationship with is about yeah like this so like this is different and a lot of one of the ways this is different twilight is that these people are in a physical space screaming at an actual person I assume so what I'm curious about is if you have thoughts about the sort of interface between on the one hand this sort of intellectualized humor like you talked about all of the references that have to go to the macros in contrast to this kind of fan behavior which is not online and can it be done in a lull yes it can in fact twilight has done many things where they actually showed up to things that they knew it's a lot like right when anonymous comes and like you know live trolls somebody they'll do things like they'll organize like a twilight prom which is going to happen this is something that has actually legitimately happened Stephanie Meyer did throw a twilight prom that was for serious business so they'll show up to like a bookstore or whatever and have like their twilight prom in cosplay but in really ridiculous over the top ways and sometimes they'll do the thing where they somehow are embodying a macro or whatever so they'll show up in person and they actually do have a lot of physical meaning I was surprised when I started looking at the community I just didn't have time to talk about all this but a lot of them talk on the phone text message I actually interviewed some people in person who live in Boston and they were totally fooled with that it was a really interesting thing that people assumed that a community like this is going to be totally disembodied but in reality the twilighters were meeting up and were engaging face to face so I think that there is an important question about embodiment and like the way that people are talking about being embodied one other thing though is that I use this because it's nice to illustrate and it's hard to like just show a picture of a website and be like hey guys but these fans are probably also involved in online communities right so it shouldn't be you shouldn't even though the language of embodiment is used to talk about twilight and you shouldn't assume that that means that like the laughing fans are online and the serious fans are offline I guess I'm not thinking of them being like whether they're two different groups or not but thinking about like how and the expression even one of them would work differently because the online one seems very intellectual and referential and there's sort of you know the two kinds of humor this like belly left kind of humor and I expect that might map out whether they're in physical space or not it doesn't really seem to, I mean it seems like mostly they're translating the intellectual humor into some kind of a physical analog out of curiosity I mean I'm going to make a set of heuristic distinctions and I know they're all bound together but I'm curious about where your emphasis is within this so there's the community aspect it's embodied, it's corporal you're looking at it that's what you're doing research there's an identity issue where it's a highly effective mode you've got to really understand how people think and see themselves and there's maybe the issue of engagement, the activities the manifestations, the things that people do and they're all bound together but if you had to say like where your interest really is because this might a bit solve the problem of the reification of a social group as fans so this has really changed over the course of the thesis and I think that that's why there's some amount of confusion as to what my focus is because until very recently I was confused as to what my focus was but it really is about so in the thesis itself my focus is definitely on the productions of the community and doing close readings of a number of things like those macros and then I'm using the rest as as a scene setting as sort of showing like there's a lot more that we can do with this but here are the macros and the reason that I'm doing that is because that has been a traditional thing that people in fan sites have been doing right like they look at a fanfic and they're going to do some kind of a focus on this fanfic they're looking at a vid and they're doing a close reading of a vid I don't know if that actually answered your question but my brain's a little poor I guess this is kind of related to that question and maybe we can talk about this but the self-regulation of the group who seem to have focused mostly on and of course it's really interesting to sort of move the scale of the person and talk about the relationship between the person and the fact but thinking about are there any outliers or because you have to be in sort of whether an outlier data point but then also like maybe not because it's a self-regulation group but then of course there's a lot of deviance so how does it regulate everything it's like you stepped into girl world it really is so this is something that I had I really do not have time to talk about this in the thesis otherwise I would go way into this stuff right so there's all this really cool stuff that's actually happening with the relationships between people and so on but instead because I have only like 100 pages to write this in I've been focusing sort of on the things that they leave behind as they go through it but in my study man they will drum people out of the group and in fact there's like this whole language around what happens when somebody is starting to get too serious business or when somebody has gone too far and founded everybody right like there's these two ways that you can get drummed out of the spotlight group and they'll talk about how you can like you post that when is the term not flail flounce post so like when you've been drummed out of the group because everybody loathes you either because you're too serious business or because you're too making fun of things traditionally people will post a flounce post about like oh I really hate twatlight right and from their perspective they're like dude twatlight is full of horrible people who have just kicked me out by making my life miserable but everybody on twatlight finds this really funny and they'll make fun of the flounce posts how do you drive someone out basically being really mean to them and sending like by posting macros I mean you know by posting mean macros in context where they're going to be insulting and by posting animated gifs which I also didn't get a chance to talk about but there's like lots of animated gifs that they use to express emotions and hosting those like ones of people eye rolling on all your posts and so on so it really it's like stepping into middle school a little bit but it's very strongly regulated community internally would be an entire thesis talk about that so in the world are there any men on the community and what are their roles and how do they have to sort of negotiate that yeah so in my time on twatlight I encountered four men and two of them are boyfriends of people who are there and two of them are gay and the gay guys generally behaves like I hate making like general comments like this but when I interviewed them they were like yeah I totally have girls and the guys who were on there were just like I really like, I think they're funny they're hilarious, like these women are really funny and I like being here and my girlfriend's on here and she's really into it and so like it's fun for me to watch what's going on and it gives me an insight into the minds of women which I thought was sort of scary but so there were a very few but everybody in twatlight was very excited to have them there and was like you should go talk to the guy, he can give you his perspective you know but yeah internal polling was like you know 99% women and I have no reason to doubt that I mean I'm sure it's not a scientific example but I have no reason to doubt that the polls were not reflective of like the people who are boasting the most and so on because we should probably wrap up and she will be one