Fandoms serve as a rich site to examine intermedial play in modern culture, with fans engaging with and creating new, media-hybrid products that honour, subvert, and/or expand source material. While the body serves as both site and tool for this work, such productivity is only considered valuable and legitimate if conducted by a certain type of body – one detached from emotion and non-threatening to white, heteronormative, ableist, patriarchal society. The fangirl has long been condemned as a bad cultural producer with bad taste, too emotional to engage with or create worthwhile products. However, I argue that the fangirl’s productivity challenges the assumed hierarchical divide between logic and emotion that dominates Western theory. Using my own affected responses as a starting point and focusing on fan edits, choreography videos, and concert films in the BTS and Taylor Swift fandoms, I combine personal experiences of fandom with academic research to examine the impact intermedial play has on the fangirl as both consumer and creator. My approach applies recent intermedial theory to current fan studies research and feminist analysis in order to understand the 21st century viewer from a more encompassing, multimedia perspective. Additionally, this autoethnographic method demonstrates the value (and presence) of affect in academic work first-hand. This exploration ultimately concludes that the fangirl actively uses affect in fan productivity to articulate identity and build community and thus demonstrates the value of emotion and affect in rational thought as it is a fundamentally embodied process.

Authors:
Innes Seggie, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Ms Innes Seggie is an MSc graduate from the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines the changing relationships between media. Her current projects focus on the rising popularity of physical media and the affective power of media hybridity.

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