Henry Jenkins's Blog

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

books 1 and 2 in the frames of fandom series

Through both books the examples of fandom used are a mix of primarily North American fan cultures along with mentions of non-Anglophone ones, such as k-pop. While this mix certainly accomplishes the goal of showing the diversity of fandom spaces/objects/practices, how does the series also accommodate adequate consideration of the differences between them and the role of conflict in contemporary fandom communities? (Specifically, Book 2's overview of kinds of fans and their relationship to both each other and media texts/industries mentions the idea of fandom being where fans of marginalized identities can “appropriate” texts and refashion them to their own ends. There is also a side-bar that discusses the different ideas of appropriation and their complications, which is well taken. How does this discussion of audiences and their motivations interface with work on fandom spaces that has highlighted the roles racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc continue to play in fandom communities and their reworkings of media texts?) 

Henry: These are questions we’ve struggled with as we have been writing these books. The past decade has seen thorough and evolving critiques of fandom studies on the basis of race in particular, and we want to do the best we can to acknowledge those critiques and factor them into our considerations. We do so with an awareness that there is going to be a tension between the importance of representing a broad range of perspectives on these topics and also recognizing that as two white Anglo-American authors, this is not necessarily “our story to tell.”

All I can say is that we are trying to find our balance within this shifting terrain, and one way we do so is by highlighting the work of fandom scholars of color across all of these volumes and representing these debates through the insights they provide us. Fandom as Audience includes discussions of racebending Harry Potter, for example, that include the interpretive and expressive work of Black fans doing fan art and fan fiction to illustrate Stuart Hall’s notion of negotiated readings. Our book on Fandom as Subcultureforegrounds the example of a Black Disney bounder, considers the case of hijab cosplay, discusses the ways Black fans work around their marginalization in the mass media texts that inspire much of cosplay practice, and much more.  Fandom as a Public situates the recent discussions about “toxic fandom” or racism in fandom in the larger context of Nancy Frazier’s critique of Habermas’s claims about the “equal access to all” offered by the public sphere that emerge from his idealized understanding of the early modern European coffee houses. We show that contradictions about inclusion and exclusion surround the notion of the public from the start, and that we should not be shocked, though it is critical to understand, that fandom often falls short of its utopian ideals about creating a safe space for all who share passion for the same object.

One of the challenges, then, with trying to represent the broadest range of different perspectives and experiences through the books is that we can only represent the work that is already out there, and thus we are doomed to reproduce some of the blind spots in the existing literature. Our hope is that in mapping the field, we make the strengths and limitations of this work visible to emerging scholars, so they can focus their energies in ways that allow them to make original contributions.

Something similar can be said about the shift of fandom studies to encompass diversity on a transnational or transcultural, if not yet global, scale. My own current interests include supporting and amplifying work on fandoms in East Asia, particularly China.  I have started a research network that is bringing together a mix of researchers based in the United States, China, Korea, Japan, and beyond to do collaborative and comparative work together. This research group has two special issues of journals under development, one for the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and one for the Shanghai-based journal Emerging Media.We include such perspectives in every book in the series, but we also focus on it more explicitly in the Fandom as a Force of Globalization and Fan Locations books.

There and elsewhere, we pay attention to the tensions between pop cosmopolitanism/transcultural fandom (forms that connect across national borders) and fan nationalism (conflicts that seek to align fandom to national interests and to police borders between cultures). This is one of the key conflicts within fandom today, and to understand it, we may need to try to keep multiple and seemingly contradictory insights in mind at the same time. We signal the potential mobilization of fandom and fan-like structures by global strongmen in Defining Fandom, and we explore other forms of “toxic” or conflictual forms of fandom throughout all of the books. Our forthcoming book on Fandom as Public discusses some of the research on QAnon that has emerged within fandom studies, but we also look at ASMR fandom as a space where a more healing or therapeutic function emerged during the pandemic lockdown. We talk about the ways that the Chinese state encourages an entanglement between fandom and the national interests that restricts what can be said but also requires the performance of nationalism. But we also discuss how the free speech and participatory ethos of the Archive of Our Own struggles to deal with the structural and systemic racism that make it a sometimes uncomfortable space for fans of color.

We certainly have our own biases as researchers and mine includes a framing of the opportunities for cultural and political participation that fandom affords that is more optimistic than that of scholars drawn from critical theory and political economy. We also want to provide an overview of the field as a whole and that includes citing critiques of fandom and fandom studies. 

I appreciate your acknowledgement of the ways we discuss appropriation. From the start, fandom studies has centered on the ways diverse audiences appropriate and rework resources from mass culture as the basis of participatory culture. This has included the ways that groups marginalized in the source text speak back to media producers and re-story the media. Yet, we also have to acknowledge that there are ongoing critiques of cultural appropriation which have rendered that term problematic. How do we reconcile the two? Writers like Mikhal Bakhtin tell us that all cultural expression involves appropriation – the language we use does not come pristine from a dictionary but from other people’s mouths. Rather than a simple dismissal of appropriation, which would be inconsistent with other aspects of the field, we should ask harder questions and offer more nuanced accounts of the ethics of appropriation. When is it appropriate to appropriate?

I am not sure we have the answers to this question yet and perhaps not even the best framework for asking it, but at least we are acknowledging the problem here and considering some ways people are trying to address it. In Defining Fandom, there is a similar section where we consider the metaphor of consumer tribes and tribalism as it has been developed in consumer culture research and critique it from perspectives drawn from indigenous studies.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

BOOK 2: FANDOM AS AUDIENCE

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

what is a ‘fan’?

I'm curious about the conceptualization of what a “fan” is. Does that definition change between books? 

Rob: We took special care to define what we mean by “fan,” “fanship,” and “fandom” early in the series, and we did this not because we thought the terms were unfamiliar, but because we found that they were being used inconsistently, even by experts. Sometimes “fandom” referred to an individual’s enthusiasm, for instance, but at other times it described a collective entity. We needed to have that conceptual clarity to move forward with the other work we wanted to do in the series. So, although the definition does not change from book to book, it does develop, and we add nuance to its various elements. We build on them, return to the definition, even challenge it from different angles—but, fortunately, the foundation holds.

Our distinction is rather simple, yet essential. Fanship is a personal, passionate relationship between an individual and a fan object. It’s an orientation, an emotional and cognitive investment in a piece of culture: a team, a singer, a show, a brand, a game. Fandom, by contrast, is what happens when that fanship becomes social. When fans affiliate with others, when they participate in shared rituals, critique, creativity, or community, they enter into fandom. Fandom is thus always a collective formation of some kind. It includes norms, histories, values, and practices that are produced, shared, and sometimes contested by its members.

We think this distinction is powerful because it travels. It works across domains—music, sports, fashion, theme parks, politics, celebrity, brands. It respects solitary fans who have never set foot in a forum or a fan con, while also giving us language to talk about the intense collective energies that swirl around franchises like BTS, Formula One, Taylor Swift, and the UFC. It helps us map different kinds of involvement without being forced into ranking them. It also allows us to develop and accommodate the many digital advances that have altered the terrain, trajectory, and capacities of fans and fandoms, most notably those involving social media.

We also emphasize that fandom is not a static identity. It moves, changing through our lives and across our different activities. Fans shift in and out of fandoms over time. Their levels of involvement change. Our framework accommodates that fluidity, offering something more than a typology, and less than a rigid model. It’s a way to think about how people organize meaning through the passionate cultural engagements they form both alone and together.

So no, the definition doesn’t change. But it does get tested, elaborated, and put to work. That was the point. We didn’t want to assume we already knew what fandom was. We wanted to build a foundation strong enough to support fifteen books and flexible enough to grow with them. 

Henry: Each frame allows us to see things we would not see otherwise. Star Trek surfaces in almost all of the books because it was the starting point for both of us and because it has been so foundational for both media fandom and fandom studies. Other fandoms, such as those around Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, K-pop and Harry Potter, appear often across the books. Each time they surface, though, we add some new depth as we look at them from another vantage point. We may discuss how Black fans of Harry Potter explore the possibilities of a mixed-race Hermoine in Fandom as Audience and fan responses to J. K. Rowlings’ transphobic comments in Fandom as Activism.  Other examples are more local – we consider how Netflix has built Wednesday to address multiple audiences in Fandom as Audience or how a public sphere about gender and sexuality issues surfaces around the comic books Sex Criminal and Bitch Planet in Fandom as Public or how Good Omens inspired an online exploration of spirituality issues in Fandom as Devotion.

In terms of the purpose of these books, at one point you mention that you hope the series will help practitioners – marketers, brand managers – to interact with fan communities on the principle of “do no harm.” How does this work within contemporary fandom spaces which are increasingly polarized and where “harm” can be conceptualized very differently by different fan groups? Is there a consideration of ethical issues facing fandom researchers and practitioners? Is there a space for discussion of toxicity in fandom? 

Henry: We do not have a separate book on fan ethics – perhaps we should. But I’d like to think that ethical issues – for researchers, for practitioners, and for fans – surface across every book in the series. The goal of creating a conversation between fandom studies and consumer culture research is not to teach industry how to better “exploit” fans but to help them to understand the richness and complexity of fandom as a site of cultural experience within the context of a consumer economy. To serve those ends, we often include passages that show points of friction between fans and industry – for example, book 2 includes a discussion of the concept of fans as surplus audiences, how Alfred Martin has taken up the concept of “surplus Blackness” as a means of critiquing the racial assumptions guiding contemporary franchises, and the ways that “queer baiting” has been critiqued within fandom studies. In Fandom as Co-Creation, we dig deep into the literature on fan labor and explain why many existing industry practices that claim to “honor” fans actually exploit them. We link this work to the debates around the Paramount guidelines on Star Trek fan cinema and a larger consideration of intellectual property law, transformative works, and fair use.  

We definitely will be taking up sites of conflict between different groups of fans, including reactionary backlash by white male fans against women and fans of color, and we definitely deal with the growing literature on so-called “toxic” fan cultures, especially in Fandom as Public. I am sure we will face criticism on the balance of different perspectives here. Even with the large canvas this book series provides us, we will not be able to discuss everyone and everything, and our own blindness and privilege will be on display. But in creating this framework, we will create something that other scholars can push against and call attention to what is still missing in a field of research that for too long was shaped by presumptions of whiteness and Anglo-Americanness.

Rob: Yes, “do no harm” is a principle we offer to practitioners, but we don’t mean it naively. We’re fully aware that harm, like toxicity, is a contested category. What one fan sees as righteous defense of their values, another sees as overreaction or harassment. What a marginalized fan calls a reasonable and direct critique, a showrunner might experience as outlandish abuse. And from the point of view of an authoritarian government, even playful remix culture or satire can read as dangerous thought crime. So when we talk about harm in fandom spaces, we’re talking about something that always has to be contextualized socially, culturally, and politically. 

Fandom gives people a channel for strong feelings. Love, anger, grief, obsession, loyalty, and betrayal: fan communities are pulsing with these emotions. In an age when formal institutions often fail to reflect people’s values or listen to their concerns, fandom has become one of the few arenas where people feel like they can speak together about and maybe even back to power, or act to reshape culture in their own image or into forms that suit them better. That’s why governments monitor fan spaces. That’s why platforms struggle to manage fan conflicts. That’s why brands court fans and fear them at the same time.

We’re not trying to sanitize that energy, though. We respect it, and we are doing our utmost to try to understand it. Across the series, we return to the idea that fandom is a passionate form of cultural participation, not a passive state of appreciation. It’s not neat, and it’s not always polite. Sometimes it’s defiant. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s cruel. But it is always meaningful to those within it. And when that passion becomes collective—when it organizes, critiques, remixes, or revolts—it forces industry and institutions to listen. That’s not toxicity. That’s power and culture being built and rebuilt.

Of course, there are behaviors that cross lines. There are moments when fandom mirrors or reproduces structural harms—racism, misogyny, queerphobia, nationalism. We don’t make excuses for those things, of course, but we also don’t believe you can understand or engage with fandom by labeling entire communities as “toxic” from the outside. Those elements, like racism and misogyny, are not particular to fandoms or fans–they are all around us, and some fans express them, as one would expect. There is a bigger picture, however, in the study of how norms are negotiated within fan cultures, how boundaries are drawn, how accountability functions—or fails to. Those are interesting and important discussions to have, beyond simply labeling this or that phenomenon or behavior as “toxic” or “inclusive.” We think this sort of intellectual elaboration happens alongside viewing fandoms not only as expressive publics, but as moral economies, with their own forms of justice, solidarity, and exclusion.

Ethics, in that sense, is not a separate topic in the series. It runs through every volume, because we are always asking what these relationships—between fans and brands, fans and each other, fans and society—require and demand. We don’t claim to have the final word. But we hope the series opens space for that ongoing conversation and models the kind of respect and critical generosity that we believe fandom itself, at its best, embodies.

 More to come in Part Three.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

henry jenkins and a furry fan

The books (esp. book 1) straddle autobiography and autoethnography. In your minds, is there a separation between the two (and does there need to be?) and how does your own personal background affect the books?

Henry: It would be hard to exclude the autoethnographic/autobiographical voice from a book on the field of fandom studies. As we discuss in Fandom as Subculture (not yet published), the aca-fan stance has been a founding and defining trait of fandom studies. We pay tribute there to the work of Angela McRobbie, whose influence I have come to see as absolutely foundational to my own work in Textual Poachers. In her “Settling Accounts” essay, she calls out the male researchers at Birmingham who were writing about various British subcultures without acknowledging their own involvement with them. She advocated a feminist standpoint epistemology as the intellectually honest way to approach such terrain. I would say the passages in the books where we write about our experiences as fans are a fulfillment of those principles.

I have often been reluctant to go full autoethnography in the past when writing about, say, female fan fiction writers in Textual Poachers, for fear that as a male scholar I would be taking up too much space or redirecting attention away from the feminist/feminine project of fan fiction. But, here, I can tap my own participation in, say, the monster culture of the 1960s as we examine the ways it deployed a range of domestic technologies and practices – from monster models to my mother’s eyeshadow, which I appropriated for monster make-up, to a super-8 camera or a Disney record of haunted house sounds or the photocopier from my dad’s company – to encourage and enable new forms of participatory culture.

Our use of the first-person is also a challenge to the anonymous voice with which most textbooks are written and the reason why such “nonhuman” prose becomes deadly to read. We often use first person to call attention to the forms of association between people that shape our scholarship, seeing scholarship as emerging through conversations, debates, and even confrontations between human beings. This is something I never got from a textbook: understanding here who our mentors were, who our students were, who our collaborators are, to help readers grasp the collaborative nature of scholarship. We don’t like the mind/body split implied when we focus exclusively on ideas without acknowledging the people behind them. 

Rob: There is a distinction between autobiography and autoethnography, and it’s a meaningful one, although perhaps it is not always a hard and fast boundary. We certainly do straddle it in Defining Fandom and across the series, and we do that very intentionally. Autobiography, traditionally, is about self-expression and narrative coherence, where the telling of a life, or a slice of it, foregrounds the personal and the idiosyncratic because it is interesting and entertaining in itself. Autoethnography, on the other hand, takes that personal slice and uses it for a purpose–it refracts it through conceptual lenses and asks, “What does this story help us understand about culture, media, society, technology or something else? What frameworks does it offer to us, which does it challenge, which does it expand upon?” 

Our series, and especially the first book, mobilizes autobiography in the service of autoethnography. So we are not just telling stories about our youthful engagements with Batman, Gilligan’s Island, or Pogo comics because we think they might be charming tales or nostalgic trips down memory lane (which, sometimes, they might be). We're using them to get at some of the finer conceptual points of fandom, to calibrate, through the lens of our own experiences, its meaning across personal, cultural, commercial, sacred, and other territories. 

This requires a kind of careful attunement. We are aware that who we are—our backgrounds, identities, affiliations, fascinations, values, emotional repertoires, and much more—shapes how we understand fandom, and even what aspects of fandom we consider meaningful. But rather than bracketing that influence, we try to make it central. Positionality in qualitative research doesn’t eliminate subjectivity (that is inevitable in all research) but it does seek to make it visible so that we can make it count in our interpretations. It acknowledges that who we are shapes what we see, how we interpret, what we choose to write down and leave out. Like I tell my students when I teach qualitative research methods, positionality isn’t a bug: it’s a feature of cultural inquiry. By placing our subjectivities in full view, we treat them not as something which distorts or “biases” our perspectives but as instruments that can be adjusted for, cross-checked, and interpreted in light of their specific strengths and limitations–something we are doing constantly behind the scenes as we write this book series and try to adjust for our mutual blind spots. 

That said, although we have some key similarities, we don't speak from a single unified voice. Instead, we use our two voices to emphasize the divergences between us—our different relationships to religion, for example, or to particular genres (like sports, videogames, and music), or even to what counts as “serious” academic work. These differences aren’t obstacles to understanding; they actually are our understanding. We are modeling through our voices and their perspectives what it looks like to build theory in dialogue, across perspectives, with attention to friction and resonance.

That’s also why our approach embraces a diversity of fan practices, motivations, and intensities, just as we show our own attachments as uneven, sometimes ambivalent, and always transforming. The personal becomes meaningful when it is not only deeply felt but also when it is analytically situated as a formation we can use to ask better questions about how people form attachments, how meaning circulates, and how cultural structures shape affective life.

In this way, the autobiographical and the autoethnographic come together for us as complementary modalities. One provides raw material we enjoy writing and feel passionate about, while the other encourages us to be judicious and consider its processing into a more conceptual form of understanding. One brings the reader closeness and the specificity of particular examples; the other offers some degree of distance and a space for abstract reflection and considerations. Our books use both, not to collapse the personal into the scholarly, but mainly to explore how one can clarify and deepen the other. 

Can you discuss what impact you want the books to have? Why these topics for the fifteen books – how did you come up with those, why not others? They are semi-academic, semi-personal; they are short, but still longer than (say) the Fandom Primer series; they are built around the two of you, but tell stories of fandom across a spectrum of ideas. How should readers “place” the books in their categorization of books about fandom?

Rob: The impact we hope for is both intellectual and practical. We want these books to help reframe how fandom is understood and approached across multiple fields. That means deepening the conversations already happening in cultural and fan studies while also extending them into marketing, consumer research, and communication studies. We want the work we’ve each done separately to meet here, in dialogue. Not fused into some hybrid middle but sharpened through contrast and coordination. These books aim to do that work out in public, so to speak.

The initial goal was modest. We needed a textbook for our Fan(dom) Relations course at Annenberg. But very quickly, the project expanded. It became an intellectual voyage, one that it seems we could only take together. The idea of “frames” gave the whole notion structure as well as depth. Each book would examine a different paradigm for understanding fandom: Fandom as Audience. Fandom as Subculture. Fandom as Activism. The frames overlap, they build on one another, and sometimes they even conflict with one another. That’s okay; we actually wanted that level of complexity and depth. This wasn’t a master theory of fandom we were putting together. It was always meant to be a way for us to think about and across fandom’s many multiplicities.

Fandom today is multifarious—it is strong, great, and numerous. We think that, for better and worse, has moved from the margins to the center of culture, economics, identity, and politics. We wanted to write books that reflected that shift. These books had to find a balance between being focused, teachable, grounded in prior thinking, up-to-date, future forward, and conceptually rich. The books are short but not light. They are accessible but not simplistic. And yes, they’re personal. We appear in them because we believe that theory is better when it’s situated, when it has a voice, a history, and a perspective. 

The fifteen topics we chose reflect a kind of mapping exercise. They trace out the dominant ways scholars and practitioners have tried to understand fandom. Some frames, like Fandom as Participatory Culture or Fandom as Co-Creation, reflect well-established paradigms. Others, like Fandom as Desire, Fandom as Devotion, Fandom as Technoculture, or Fandom Relations, push into less charted territory that we think is important or will be. But every book tries to say something new. We are trying to use these books to develop a novel perspective, not just report on or overview existing ones. 

We’re aware that this series doesn’t fit easily into existing categories. It’s not quite academic publishing, but it’s also not a fan primer or how-to. These are conceptual books written by researchers, who are also fans, and by fans, who are also researchers. We’re building on decades of work that has argued—we think correctly—that fandom is not a deviation from everyday life, but a powerful and productive mode of engaging with culture. That argument has been made and what we do here is trace in a variety of new ways its implications for scholars, students, managers, and certainly for fans themselves. 

Where should these books be placed? Maybe in the space that doesn’t yet exist: a shelf for works that take fandom seriously as a global social form. That speak across disciplines. That engage theory without detaching from lived experience. That are willing to argue, to speculate, to build, and to risk being wrong. This, as I see it, is the Frames of Fandom series. 

Henry: Our initial discussions on the project centered on the high costs of textbooks and especially student frustration when only small portions of books are used. Most students have not yet learned to think of books as long-term investments not restricted to the benefits to be gained within the context of a particular class. But what if we could deconstruct the textbook, allowing people to, in effect, buy chapters a la carte, paying for only the portions they need? This question is what started us down the path towards self-publishing.

As we got into it, our idea of selling a book chapter by chapter evolved into the concept of short-ish books focused around a single frame but looking at that frame from a number of different angles, thus incorporating a broad array of different literatures.

Revision of Hall’s ENCODING/DECODING MODEL

So, the book on fandom as an audience largely foregrounds how the approach grew out of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, but it also considers some other parallel developments from consumer culture research, reader-response theory, or formalist film theory, each of which taught us things we needed to know to understand fandom. We hit the big names, but we also are reintroducing writers who have often dropped out of the conversation about fandom within fandom studies, considering for example Dorothy Hobson’s advocacy on behalf of the audiences for soaps or Martin Barker’s potential contributions as a critic of fandom studies methodology.  

When John Fiske asked me to write a book about fans in the early 1990s, he wanted a grand theory of fandom, which was not something I could write given the state of research on fans then. Textual Poachers became a study of a relatively discrete set of fans – the women who wrote and read fan fiction – though there are mixed signals throughout as it tends to universalize these fans or incorporate material from research on other kinds of media audiences. Many of the criticisms writers like Matt Hills directed against the book locate contradictions, uncertainties, inconsistencies, and hesitations that emerged from those competing ideas about the book’s project.  

Now, we are at a place where there is a massive body of scholarship on fans, and so we can begin to map this as a field while, at the same time, constantly pushing for a more inclusive understanding of what fandom studies might learn from other adjacent bodies of literature. Simply bringing consumer culture research and fandom studies together, which is at the heart of our initial vision, is a large contribution. Trying to keep up with the writings about fandom beyond the Anglo-American world, say, requires active searching and careful contextualization of the similarities and differences that emerge. Debates within fandom require us to go back to intellectual roots, to consider roads not taken, works not read or discussed, that might allow us to expand our research in productive new directions.  

Often as we are writing these books, we have in mind a reader being introduced to the field for the first time, someone in graduate school who is searching for where they might make their ‘original contribution.’ We are leaving many, many breadcrumbs here. But also, as a scholar in my, erm, late 60s, I am trying to trace my own journey through this space, consolidate ideas developed in scattered publications, weigh ideas to see how I might modify them if I were writing these works today, acknowledge old debates and heal old wounds. I have made many different contributions to fandom studies at different phases of my career, as has Robert, and these books function as introductions to our body of scholarship as well as maps of the field more broadly.

One challenge, though, is that these books are coming out on a rolling basis. The core of each book is drafted, so we can point to what topics will surface in what book, but we are also adding and reflecting as we prepare them for publication. About a third of the content or more comes at that stage. We are writing as if the whole project had been completed, including pointers to what’s in the books not yet published. We hope people will be patient since all of this apparatus will be helpful once the project is completed. I also worry that people will get upset because we did not include a person or topic in book 2 that was always planned to be discussed in book 10. So, bear with us…

More to come in Part Two.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.

Guns and gun violence has become one of the great polarizing issues in American politics. I grew up in a household where gun possession was the norm. My father housed his rifle cabinet – locked – in my childhood bedroom. I have chosen not to own guns, but I was trained how to use them safely because I was around them for most of my youth. I passed a gun safety course organized by the National Rifle Association (NRA) – in its more rational era – through my local scout troop. My brother, I am pretty sure, still owns guns. One of my nephews has worked for Dick’s Sporting Goods as one of their experts on guns. I know that I do not have much to fear from people who know how to use guns safely and recreationally. Even my mother was a crack shot though mostly firing at tin cans rather than any living being. As such, my own positions about guns are more complicated than many of my more progressive friends who lack this intimate exposure.  

During the years I was focused on the issue of whether representations of violence in video games could contribute to real world violence, following on from various school shootings, I tried to resist the temptation of pitting the first amendment against the fourth. I do believe the deregulation of certain classes of weapons – particularly semi-automatic guns which were once restricted under the Brady Bill – have contributed to the increase of large-scale public shootings because they allow the gunmen to get off so many shots before they need to stop and reload. But advocating for the reinstatement of those restrictions, for example, is not the same thing as wanting to “take people’s guns away” – not that any progressive I know advocates that on the wholescale basis that gun advocates fear. What worries me about the current NRA is not that they support the right to bear arms but that they are urging people to carry weapons, often concealed weapons, into situations (churches or schools for example) where they make no sense. Marching around waving guns just to show that you can is a degree of militancy that my father or the NRA members that came to my scout troop would not have supported, because their focus was on gun safety, not guns everywhere all the time. 

All these experiences came to mind as I recently read a graphic novel, Should We Buy a Gun? (2025), sent to me recently by its author, Dave Cowen, who uses the comic medium to explore a variety of perspectives on the issues raised by the book’s title. It centers on a progressive couple who starts to have doubts about any opposition to gun ownership when they become victims of a random street crime, which shakes their fundamental sense of security. Through engagement with a broad range of perspectives from friends, family, and coworkers, the characters learn that the question is far more complex than any simple position – right or left, pro or anti – can account for.

 The book doesn’t give us any answers; it is simply skiing questions, but my bet is that you will leave it less certain of your own stance than you were before reading it. This is why I find myself rehearsing and litigating my own trajectory through the debates. 

page from Should we buy a gun?

Cowen counts himself as a progressive; he has chosen to work with an artist Gabriel Wexler, who considers himself more conservative. And this partnership also reflects their desire to produce a tool designed to cut through political polarization and model how we might find common ground around this topic. Cowen has been going out, literally, into the town square to promote his book and engage with passersby to get a sense of where they stand on these issues. Given my own commitments to working past political divides, I salute these efforts and want to use this blog to call attention to the important work he is doing.  

What follows is an interview, conducted via email, with Cowen (and Wexler inserting himself at one point to make a comment).

Henry Jenkins: During the campaign, Kamala Harris sparked controversy when she, as a progressive Black woman, owned agun. Why has gun ownership become such a dividing line between right and left in America?

Dave Cowen: I think the Kamala Harris moment in 2024 was revealing because it showed that the dividing line is more negotiable than we tend to believe. After she said that on Oprah, a journalist from The Wall Street Journal, Cameron McWhirter, reached out to me after reading a draft of this book, for a story he was doing about liberals buying guns. I referred him to Tom Nguyen and The LA Progressive Shooters where I did some training. There’s a growing conversation on the left about guns, not just for personal safety, but also as a response to the perceived rise of authoritarianism on the right. Historically people on the left believe the consequences of right-wing gun ownership policies is the potential for traumatic harm. For instance, Deirdre Suguichi, who also read the book (and we’re slated to be doing something like this together), she wrote in an essay for Literary Hub: “That the number of mass killings – in airports, military facilities, houses of worship, workplaces, music venues, and schools – has skyrocketed since 2005, when the Republican-led Congress, under George W. Bush, lifted the national ban on assault weapons.” So I thinkliberals view it as a dividing line because they can’t see how conservatives would rather live in a society that is much more dangerous to innocents. Whereas I think conservatives can’t see how liberals would rather live in a society that is not much more protected against enemies. Harris was celebrated by Kris Brown of The Brady Campaign for her nuanced stance to both re-ban assault rifles but also promote responsible gun ownership. Meanwhile, gun rights advocate C.D. Michel called her a hypocrite, saying, “She sees the social utility of firearms for her. But she doesn’t want anyone else to have access to the most effective tools to defend themselves or their families.” To me, the dividing line is more of an inherent paradox for Americans to negotiate, which is something like: how do we balance unlimited danger to innocents vs unlimited protection against enemies?

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HJ: What factors have pushed both conservatives and progressives to more extreme and entrenched positions on these issues?

DC: I’m not a sociologist like Dr. Jennifer Carlson or an anthropologist like Ieva Jusionyte (who blurbed the book), but from my layman’s perspective I think geographic and algorithmic sorting pushes both conservatives and progressives to extremes. A staunch conservative can easily move to a red county of Florida and spend their time on X. A purist liberal can easily remove themself to BlueSky and never leave Portland. So your ideology and sense for what is normal or right is affected by these silos. As someone who was once pushed extremely and into demonizingthe other side, I ironically found you can also very easily expose yourself via curious movement both in the real and digital world to other perspectives. These very same mechanisms that pushed us apart can also be what can help bring us back together. That’s been my personal experience at least.

HJ: What does each side misunderstand about the other and their perspective?

DC: I think the main thing each side misunderstands about the other is how much they misunderstand the other. I thinkespecially with the digital world’s flattening of identity, where – and I’m guilty of this – making assumptions about someone based on their social media bio or posts. People can very often prejudge someone’s perspective. And this goes the same for bias against someone’s surface physical appearances or identity markers. But truly meeting a person who is different from you – which is everyone in some way – I find that it’s quite easy to find commonalities and understandmost everyone’s perspective. If you look at the etymology of that word understand it comes from “to stand” and yes “under” but that meant “between or among.” So, I think right there you see that you might not understand someonefrom your mind’s projections, it takes real presence, with someone, physically or not, to not misunderstand.

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HJ: Can you talk a bit about the character design in the book? What steps did you take to avoid reducing these characters to stereotypes and those characterizing their positions?

DC: That’s a great question. And I’m not sure I succeeded! I think some character design things I tried to do was make exceptions to the stereotypes part of the rule of the character design. For instance, an elder Indian-American mentor editor at NPR is probably unlikely to own a gun as a stereotype, but, here she is. Or a queer interracial couple isn’tusually thought of as having strong Christian values, but, here they are. Which, if you live in Los Angeles like we do, you often find that there is tremendous diversity within diversity, so any of those examples aren’t that rare. I think the toughest character design was the teenage student, David. He was originally named John White and was a White person, because potential school shooters are statistically more likely to be young White men. However, later in the drafting process, I decided to change his race to a mix of Latino and White. His father was already absent in the narrative, but his mother stayed White. I also changed his name from John to David. Which is my given name. His last name changed to something Latino, in this case, Gomez. Why the change? Well, not to ruin the story, but thischaracter has a redemption arc. So I didn’t want people to think that only a young White male could be redeemed in this way. I really wanted – and I think this change came after the shooting in Uvalde (which was by someone with Latino background) – people to identify this redemption arc with any young man. And the given name change to David promoted semi-autobiographical identification, which essentially says: reader, you or me or someone we love could become wayward.

Another difficult choice was, do I rewrite his dialogue, his characterization, his plot based on this change to hisheritage? I talked to a friend who is of Latino background, and he advised that he thought it would be even better to not change any of it, besides the literal color of the character, because changing him to fit some stereotype of what I thought might be different would be paradoxically stereotypical itself. So I think this is a long way of saying that every character design choice was extremely thought through, but I’m aware that probably anyone could take issue with any of them, but that’s ok!

HJ: I often felt as if the writer and readers were growing along with the characters as they worked throughsome of the contradictions in their position. What was your thinking about the journey these characters are taking?

DC: Thanks for noticing that! I would say that was definitely true of the writer, and I hope with the readers. The way the book was made over 11 years – 7 as a screenplay and 4 as a graphic novel – was extremely evolutionary. It can’t be overstated how much it evolved as a written script and then again as a graphic novel. The story went from a silly action comedy to a very pacifist progressive polemic, and that was before it was even re-imagined as an open graphic novel.Within the making of the graphic novel, there was a whole illustrated draft that no one will see – and Gabriel can attest (sometimes to his frustration, LOL) – that the graphic novel kept changing based on how I continued to work through the contradictions in my own position, up until it was finally published January 20, 2025. At a certain point it became clear the goal wasn’t for me to find a position, but to provide a way for readers to work through the contradictions in their position – or even to be open again to not having a position, which is kind of a hard sell to make. But I think there is tremendous utility in a book that guides you to not know how you think about something again, before perhaps you can know anew.

HJ: How did you come to write a comic book addressing this divide? What do you hope will happen as readers of diverse ideological backgrounds engage with this book?

DC: This book is personal in that the couple was inspired by a relationship in my life that ended due to irreconcilable differences. Those differences were bigger than this issue, but my hope is anyone who’s in a relationship with differences can find something helpful here. I’ve been out selling the book on the street and meeting others to engagewith it. Several people have confided to me they are in relationships that could benefit from this book. As we reach a potential breaking point in society, I’m happy (and privileged) to be in a niche role of promoting not Right reformation or Left resistance but personal reconnection and societal reconciliation.

HJ: Tell us about the partnership which produced this book. The writer is liberal, the artist conservative. How did this impact the finished work?

DC: We met via my godson being pre-school friends with his son and I liked him and his work. I didn’t know his politics. Our partnership is also interesting because Gabriel is work-for-hire. It’s somewhat hierarchical in the sense that I’m the publisher and writer (and financier). He’s the illustrator who is executing, paid per page. It’s not a partnership where he might say I wouldn’t draw that because that’s not what I think it should be. But then again, I don’t think Gabriel is like that as a person at this point in his life. And I was also at a point in my life where I wasn’t likethat in my maturity. So, the impact is somewhat intangible and it was in the many phone conversations around the work at hand. It was the casual texts of a link to a podcast from him. Or the gift of a book from me to him. Honestly, it’s hard to even use right/left labels sometimes. I know he’s illustrated for a very conservative publication. But he might also say the left itself has moved since he once considered himself. I think the beauty of the partnership and the book is that it dissolves labels. Yes, it might start with that as a sales pitch, and the characterizations, but the goal is to transcend the polarizations. I think we were able to do that for ourselves and hopefully others.

Gabriel Wexler: This is the only question I feel qualified to weigh in on. The simple answer to this is that I was working for Dave, and I don’t think it’s the artist’s job to shape the narrative or let his opinions affect the work. If I had deep ideological differences with the book, I wouldn’t have said yes to illustrating it. Dave entered this with morequestions than answers, which is a humble and honest way to make art. Really, it’s the only way. Of course, you can write a lecture but it won’t make for very fun reading.

HJ: Do you have a sense of how people have used your book to help spark discussions around these issues?

DC: I think we are in the very early stages of that, which is why I feel very fortunate to connect with an authority like yourself. No pressure (LOL) but I would love to be invited to my alma mater USC where you teach to use the book to spark discussions. Maybe we can figure out a next step, Henry ;) But more than anything specific like that, I hope, generally (and to use your kind of terminology), that this book becomes part of our civic imagination, not just about guns, but about how the collective can more civilly relate to each other, so we have a better world.

Dave Cowen has written for The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Points In Case, among many, and his work has been featured in The New York Times and on NPR. His graphic novel debut SHOULD WE BUY A GUN? unites a provocative, heartfelt story with simple, enchanting art. Written by a politically left author and illustrated by a politically right artist, it aims to help heal our polarized divide. Cowen has also published six comedy Haggadahs, parodies on Trump, Seinfeld, Biden-Harris, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Kanye West, and Mel Brooks. His other books include an experimental stream-of-consciousness memoir THIS BOOK IS THE LONGEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN AND THEN PUBLISHED. The satire FAKE HISTORY! And a remix of memes SPIRITUAL INSTAGRAM. He also has a Substack, Shuffle Synchronicities, which teaches how something greater communicates with us through the music we love. A second Substack, SerioComics, are enthusiasms for graphic literature that is serious and comic as he debuts his.

Gabriel Wexler has made storyboards for film and TV, drawn for newspapers and magazines, taught art at schools, and illustrated a book for young adults.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

The following passage is a continued excerpted from Henry Jenkins’ new book, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (New York: New York University Press). If you like what you read and want to read the rest of the book,

Use code NYUAU30 for 30% off when you order the book on nyupress.org . 

Here's the link: https://nyupress.org/9781479831890/where-the-wild-things-were/

These transitions in ideas about childcare can be traced back to the origins of the Child Study movement in the early twentieth century. Here, I consider one particular outgrowth of the Progressive Era—the ways that the permissive imagination was founded on certain assumptions surrounding whiteness that imperfectly fit the realities of Black America. The initial focus of Child Study was on reforming the conditions that impacted the lives of low-income, immigrant, and minority children, especially those living in urban environments. Increasingly, the focus shifted toward the raising of “normal” children, in other words, white, middle-class children. Normality was also defined through the norms of child development shaped by observational work. Since the early 1930s, Yale University’s Arnold Gesell had been a leading voice promoting scientifically grounded child management; he was to childhood what Masters and Johnson were to human sexuality. Returning to a tradition of surveys begun by his teacher, G. Stanley Hall, Gesell interviewed thousands of American parents, recording each stage of their children’s development and publishing encyclopedic works mapping children’s biological and cognitive development. Working with Francis Ilg, Gesell made this data more readily available to postwar parents, hoping to lower stress by helping them to understand their child’s individualized development in comparison with others in their cohort. Martha Weinman Lear, a critic of permissive parenting, wryly notes that many parents used such norms as competitive benchmarks. Black children were underrepresented in this research, which tended to fore- ground white, middle-class practices and perspectives. We might see this conflation of “normal” with whiteness as perhaps the original sin of the Child Study movement.

Advice writers had little to say directly about Black childhoods, sometimes expressing discomfort about knowing how to speak to the realities of Black lives. But they did sometimes address concerns about whether white children were being taught to hate people of different races and ethnicities. A book responding to parents’ questions about family life in wartime confronted this query:

Until recent events forced us into a horrible dilemma, my husband and I believed and taught our children that hate and war were the most destructive forces on earth. We taught them also to respect and believe in the reasonableness of human beings of all races and nationalities. Now there is an orgy of hate let loose. I believe my older children can keep their balance, but I dread the effect on the little ones. Must even the babies hate?

While some animosity toward the enemy was a consequence of the war, the Child Study Association of America advised: “The best thing we can do is to help our children to be fair to others of enemy alien descent with whom they come in contact and who are certainly not responsible for this war. If they really love justice they will not tolerate ostracizing the classmate whose parents come from Germany, or ridiculing Japanese children in their community, or stealing fruit from the corner grocer whose name and accent are Italian.”  As the war ended, the focus expanded to include not simply people of other nations but also people of diverse races living in the United States. The novelist Pearl S. Buck (1952) explained: “It is the duty of every parent and teacher to see that in our own community the children are made aware of the problem of race and to pass on, not prejudices, but freedom of choice for the new generation to deal with what in their time may be a choice that will result either in world harmony or the greatest and most horrible war the human race has yet seen.”

These wartime writers saw helping their own children to deal fairly with people of other races as part of their patriotic duty. As Buck reminds her readers, “Do not forget that Nazism had as twin doctrines the false ideas that one race is superior to another and that the male is superior to the female. Both of these notions are at the root of tyranny in society.” And both, Buck felt, need to be resolved to prevent future race wars.

In Glass House of Prejudice (1946), Dorothy W. Baruch challenged readers to confront their own prejudices to better prepare their children to live in a more diverse society. Baruch was the founder and director of the Gramercy Cooperative Nursery School. In the late 1920s, she directed the parent-education department at the National Council of Jewish Women. For much of her career, Baruch ran a private practice treating children with psychological issues. Between 1939 and 1953, she published eight books on child psychology, education, and family life. Baruch translated the wartime struggle against fascism into a model of democratic parenting.

In Glass House of Prejudice, Baruch notes that fascists encouraged American isolationism through tapping racial prejudices, dividing the population against itself and diminishing concerns for the plight of European Jews: “Why, as the hate messages flew across America, were they lifted in such eager hands? Unless they were in some fashion welcome, would they have been so closely embraced?” She asks: “Did we expect to rescue the people of other countries from intolerance and persecution and to disregard what is happening to millions in our own country? Why have we allowed the break between Americans of different races to widen so that whole masses of people have come to feel that they are unwanted and they do not essentially belong?”

Such attitudes, she concluded, had been taught, and so a concerted effort might ensure that the new generation were taught to embrace the richness of American culture. Racism took root as children worked through their anger and frustrations over ways they had been unfairly treated, directing rage outward against those different from themselves, rather than inward, toward family members who often sparked those feelings. As the 1949 musical South Pacific recounted:

“It’s not born in you.
It happens after you are born.
You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear. . . . You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people
whose eyes are oddly made
and people whose skin is a different shade.”

Consider how the song sees racism as a set of “learned” cultural prejudices mapped onto biological differences. Following this same logic, Baruch concludes, “If children could grow up learning to handle their hostile emotions and having guidance in doing so all along the way, the vicious circle of hatred could be diminished even in one generation.”

Baruch shares the story of a classroom of ten-year-olds that “suddenly went wild” when the teacher left the room, chanting that one little boy, Jerry, was a “dirty jew.” Confronting the class, the teacher suggests that the children seemed to be feeling “very, very mean” and needed to find a way to share those feelings:

They decided they wanted to draw about it. Before they started, the teacher assured them that they could make their pictures show mean feelings coming out in any way they liked. Some drew pictures of cannons shooting men to pieces. Others drew pictures of people setting fire to houses. One boy drew a man and a woman and a baby with nooses around their necks. . . . When they were through with the drawings, the children crowded into small groups, looking at the different pictures. The teacher smiled to herself when she noticed two of the boys who had been among Jerry’s worst persecutors. Their arms were now around his shoulders. They were intimately pursuing the friendship that they had denied before.

Baruch’s account expresses the support, at least among progressive educators, for the project of promoting “racial harmony,” a phrase blurring racial and ethnic distinctions in its application.

Children’s book writers in the immediate postwar era similarly sought a more accepting society. Consider, for example, In Henry’s Backyard. Columbia University anthropologists Ruth Benedict (Mead’s mentor) and Gene Weltfish had written a pamphlet, The Races of Mankind (1943), to help debunk myths that had been spread by fascists overseas and racists at home. In 1945, United Productions of America (UPA) produced an animated short based on the pamphlet, and in 1948 a children’s book based on the original text and illustrated with pictures from the film was released. Henry, the story’s protagonist, dreams that “the whole world became so small that it fit nicely into his own backyard and all sorts of odd people had become his neighbors.” Henry needs to overcome his fears as he confronts such cultural and racial differences: “Then suddenly he felt...an ugly sort of tug...that stopped him. It was his Green Devil, who lived inside him. It had slithered . . . out . . . of him. And it whispered, ‘don’t speak to these people, Henry! You won’t like them. They’re DIFFERENT!’” The book helps Henry—and the reader— overcome their prejudices: “We’re not born haters. . . . We’ve only got one world and we’re all in it.”

Such direct representations of racism, or for that matter, racial difference would become less and less common the deeper we move into the 1950s. Postwar storytellers generally avoided the negative racial stereotypes found all too commonly in the 1930s and 1940s. But they frequently responded by constructing an all-white world or by moving into the realm of allegory. In a nuanced, multilayered analysis, Philip Nel argues that children’s book authors had minds like sponges, which absorbed, sometimes unconsciously, influences from all directions. He argues that The Cat in the Hat, for example, might be described as “mixed race” because its origins lay in both white and Black culture (including Black-faced minstrelsy), that as a consequence it may be hard to see some of the stereotypical representations upon which it was built, and it may generate contradictory or ambivalent feelings about race as we contemplate the presence of this trickster character in a white household.

It was easier to avoid representing minoritized children than to construct alternative framings. Consider, for example, the case of P. D. Eastman, one of the animators who worked on The Races of Man. Eastman had served in the US Signal Corps during the war, working on the Private Snafu training films under Theodor Geisel, better known today as Dr. Seuss. Eastman also collaborated with Geisel as a scriptwriter and storyboard artist on Gerald McBoing-Boing. And in the early 1960s, Geisel invited Eastman to contribute to his Beginner Books series. East- man is today best known for his picture books, Go Dog Go (1961) and Are You My Mother? (1960).

At the risk of overreading a simple fable, Are You My Mother? depicts a baby bird’s first encounter with difference, not the racial difference In Henry’s Backyard depicted, but rather the differences between species. As the baby bird is about to hatch, its mother departs in search of food, leaving the infant to confront the world on his own. The newborn asks each new creature he encounters whether they are its mother. Across the book, the baby bird again and again discovers places where he does not belong: “The kitten was not his mother. The hen was not his mother. The dog was not his mother. . . .” In the end, a giant steam shovel—the SNORT!—returns him to the loving care of his own mother. The book is a reassuring story suggesting that everyone has a loving mother and that children do not necessarily notice the differences that matter to adults. But it is also a story where birds of a feather flock together. I do not mean to suggest that Are You My Mother? is a racist work. If anything, it tries to be “color-blind” by removing the story from the human realm altogether, but in the context of a society struggling with segregation, it stresses hominess, comfort, and familiarity. In shifting from cultural categories such as race to biological categories such as those distinguishing animal species, Eastman made such distinctions seem more natural and logical.

For most of the period, children’s fictions were segregated just as decisively as children’s lives were, the majority of the child-rearing advice books assumed a white middle-class reader, and the majority of children’s films and programs had an all-white cast. Fewer Black parents were raising their children according to Dr. Spock. They could not afford the risks—misbehaving Black boys might have lethal encounters with cops. Permissiveness constituted a form of white privilege, no matter how much these authors might have wished otherwise. Their normalization of whiteness, their silence about racism, made children’s fictions complicit in America’s inequalities.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

The following is excerpted from Henry Jenkins’ new book, Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America (New York: New York University Press).

If you like what you read and want to read the rest of the book, Use code NYUAU30 for 30% off when you order the book on nyupress.org. 

Here's the link: https://nyupress.org/9781479831890/where-the-wild-things-were/

Extract – Where the Wild Things Were: Boyhood and Permissive Parenting in Post-War America

“No parent wakes up in the morning planning to make his child’s life miserable.” Thus begins Haim G. Ginott’s 1965 guide Between Parent and Child. Born in Tel Aviv in 1927, Ginott’s varied career included elementary school teacher, resident psychologist for NBC’s Today Show, and professor of child psychology at New York University. His book spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list, reflecting an expanding market for advice literature addressing parents, given the success of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (first published in 1946 and growing in popularity across the 1950s and early 1960s). Ginott’s book adopts an explicitly “permissive” approach, understanding what an earlier generation might have seen as misbehavior as reflecting a failure to communicate: “No one deliberately tries to make his child fearful, shy, inconsiderate, or obnoxious. . . . We want children to be polite and they are rude; we want them to be neat and they are messy; we want them to be confident and they are insecure; we want them to be happy and they are not.”

To overcome these challenges, parents should express their expectations and address children’s needs: “He wants us to understand him. He wants us to understand what’s going on inside himself at that particular moment. Furthermore, he wants to be understood without having to disclose fully what he is experiencing. It is a game in which he reveals only a little of what he feels, needing to have us guess the rest.” Ginott instructs parents how to play this guessing game, moving between broad principles and practical applications. “How do we know what he feels? We look at him and listen to him, and we also draw on our emotional experience.” Let’s label these practices as empathetic introspection. Such understanding must shape parents’ everyday approach: “Our inner motto is: let me understand. Let me show that I understand. Let me show in words that do not automatically criticize or condemn.”

The Fabulous Fifties, a 1960 CBS television special, featured shifts in child-rearing practices among the trends that defined the previous decade. A comedy segment parodied the efforts of the modern parent—in this case, the father—to apply permissive practices in disciplining a boy who has separately asked both parents for money to purchase the same school supplies. The father (Shelley Berman) is thrown off guard by the unpredictable and sometimes irrational choices his son (“Flip” Mark) is making: the boy uses his father’s democratic impulses—such as telling the boy to sit where he wants—to defer the disciplining— as he shifts from chair to chair throughout the conversation. The boy’s dialogue includes non sequiturs the father does not know how to interpret, and the boy does not know how to explain. And the boy rationalizes his choices by deploying familiar permissive concepts, such as talking about the expressive potential of the modeling clay he purchased with the excess money. In the end, the father seeks to punish him by demanding that he stay in his room but is defeated even here, storming off after the boy negotiates exceptions to this rule. Here, the comedy stems from the widely recognized gap between permissive ideals and their application.

Broad ideas about child psychology, empathy, and democracy are essential to permissiveness: a discursive formation, a cluster of interlocking ideas and practices, a structure of feeling that took shape across the twentieth century and reached its greatest influence in the 1950s and 1960s. Here is how Ginott describes his approach: “Permissiveness is an attitude of accepting the childishness of children. It means accepting that ‘boys will be boys,’ that a clean shirt on a normal child will not stay clean for long, that running rather than walking is the child’s normal means of locomotion, that a tree is for climbing and a mirror is for making faces.” Reading this passage, one might be tempted to say that permissiveness is a theory of childhood that explains children’s emotional and social development, seeing certain “wild and untamed” attributes as part of children’s nature. For Ginott, “childishness” would have referred to acting like a child, which for writers of this period would have included images of rambunctiousness and messiness but also curiosity, fairness, and imagination.

The “new” permissive approach was signaled in the first few decades of the twentieth century by the shift from feeding on schedule (a practice disciplining the child’s body, reining in their emotions, and restraining their actions within an adult-centered world) toward feeding on demand (where the parents were expected to interpret the child’s various cries, feeding them when hungry, comforting them when hurt, and providing them company when lonely). From there, parents turned toward child psychology, investigating youngsters’ emotional and fantasy lives. Permissiveness is defined in terms of what it permits. Ginott explains, “Strong feelings do not vanish by being banished; they do diminish in intensity and lose their sharp edges when the listener accepts them with sympathy and understanding.”

If permissiveness freed children from constraints, it imposed new expectations on parents regarding how they should behave in response to children’s outbursts. Advocates of more permissive approaches offered parents insights on how they should interpret and enable children’s emotional expression, even as they prepared their children for a world that was unlikely to tolerate behaviors it saw as brattish: “A parent who listens with attentiveness conveys to the child that his ideas are valued and that he is respected. Such respect gives the child a sense of self-worth. The feeling of personal worth enables the child to deal more effectively with the world.” Ginott justifies this approach as a recognition of children’s rights: “The essence of permissiveness is the acceptance of children as persons who have a constitutional right to have all kinds of feelings and wishes. The freedom to wish is absolute and unrestricted; all feelings and fantasies, all thoughts and wishes, all dreams and desires, regardless of content, are accepted, respected, and permitted expression through appropriate symbolic means.” Ginott’s phrase “the freedom to wish” captures the ways children were connected to a larger vision of a more democratic culture.

For critics, the term “permissiveness” conjured images of a world without limits, a world where parents are at the mercy of tyrannical tykes. But Ginott and the other childcare experts saw setting “limits” without intensifying conflicts as essential: “Destructive behavior is not permitted; when it occurs, the parents must intervene and redirect it into verbal outlets and other symbolic channels. . . . In short, permissiveness is the acceptance of imaginary and symbolic behavior. Over-permissiveness is the allowing of undesirable acts. Permissiveness brings confidence and an increasing capacity to express feelings and thoughts. Over-permissiveness brings anxiety and increasing demands for privileges that cannot be granted.”

Having abandoned the more discipline-centered approaches of their own upbringing, parents struggled with doubts about how far they should let their children go:

Civilization has cast parents in the role of “killjoys” who must say no to many of the small children’s greatest pleasures, no sucking of the thumb, no touching of the penis, no picking of the nose, no playing with feces and no making of noise. . . . Some restrictions are inevitable if the child is to become a social being. However, parents should not overplay their role of policemen for civilization, lest they invite avoidance, resentment, and hostility.

Here, adult impulses—such as a repulsion at certain bodily functions— need to be suppressed for children to grow without inhibition, repression, or trauma. Permissiveness situates children’s natural response to the world within a nexus of adult power, where what one adult might tolerate another seeks to shut down. And ironically, no matter how it might seek to dislodge parental authority over children’s bodies, the concept assumes that adults are the ones who might grant permission.

Where the Wild Things Were focuses on the discursive effort required to adjust to this new model of parent–child relations. Such efforts were conducted through advice literature for parents and through children’s fictions, stories across all media that represented and were addressed to the world of the American child.

We—the postwar generation—were the “wild things” in the permissive imagination; our subjective experiences of the world were the focus of adult speculation. Critics accused us of acting like “wild animals” because no effort had been made to “tame” our impulses, while advocates spoke of our “unbridled” energy. By the late 1960s, when many of the initial baby-boom children were college-age, they were said to be “wild in the streets.” In Wild Things, Jack Halberstam writes about Max, the protagonist of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, as embodying “the wild not simply as a space beyond the home but also as a challenge to an assumed order of things.” I want to second Halberstam’s conception of wildness as “a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the unpredictable,” for the child in the permissive imagination is all these things. The child embodied a natural freedom (in the Rousseauian sense) to operate on the outer limits of the civilized order, a potential to escape adult limitations, and a new world order that the writers who used such metaphors wanted to achieve. In both advice literature and children’s fictions, the child is often depicted as a “wild animal” or a “wild Indian,” suggesting a space outside the civilized domain. As Robin Bernstein argues, the presumption of childhood innocence that justified such wildness in white children was rarely if ever accorded Black children or for that matter, Native children, making permissiveness a form of white privilege.

Keep in mind that adults were willing accomplices to our wildness, making efforts to accommodate our messes and noise. Consider, for example, a 1964 commercial announcing the launch of Transogram’s Trik- Trak, a racing-car toy that allowed children to set up the track as the battery-powered car was in motion. As the announcer explains, the toy allows your car to “go anywhere, room to room, all over the house.” And if the point was not clear enough, there is a diagram showing the car traveling across all the rooms including the parents’ den and bedroom. A boy shouts “Trik-Trak,” and his father puts aside his paper and lifts his legs so the car can run under his feet, smiling and saying “Terrific.” It’s hard to imagine any working father being so cheerful about the car disrupting his evening paper in this way, but the fantasy was potent, not just for the child but also for the adult.

Figure I.1: Henry’s suburban boyhood was informed by an infrastructure of permissive ideas, embodied by the Parents magazine on the coffee table.

As I enter my sixties, I reflect on this period with nostalgia: the works discussed here shaped the kind of man I would become. In some cases, I returned to the same copies, kept in storage all these years. Some passages of this book are explicitly autobiographical, most are implicitly so. But this book is more than a trip down memory lane. By reengaging with my parents’ generation, I have discovered things I had missed about these texts before. Consider this image (figure I.1) taken from one of my parents’ slides: I always focused on myself, sitting across the room, wearing a striped shirt. I was surprised, then, to notice the pile of Parents magazines on the coffee table in the foreground. The choices my parents made were guided by the best practices in child development and in the service of a larger civic responsibility. Though invisible to the children whose lives it helped to shape, this advice literature was omnipresent.

Many advice-book writers saw themselves as promoting a more scientifically grounded approach to parenting. Some of what they saw as science has been thoroughly debunked—for example, the theory that the child recapitulates the history of the “human race’” or their involvement in eugenics. Other aspects—such as Freudian psychology or Mead’s early fieldwork—have been disputed by more recent accounts. But the importance of these writers’ moral philosophy concerning the relations between children and adults does not rest on claims of scientific validity alone, and these debates do not undercut permissiveness’s historical importance in shaping the American family (and through it, the American society) during a period running roughly from 1946 (the publication of Spock’s book) to 1968 (the beginnings of a strong conservative backlash).

When advice-literature writers referred to the American child as “he,” they were adopting normative practice of the period: “he” stands in for both masculine and feminine cases. Benjamin Spock was early to note the gendered politics around pronouns, writing in his 1957 edition: “I want to apologize to the mothers and fathers who have a girl and who are frustrated by having the child called ‘him’ all through this book. It’s clumsy to say him or her every time, and I need her to refer to the mother.” In the Victorian era, the ideal child was often a girl; Alice, Dorothy, Wendy, Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms, and many more come to mind, who frequently broke free from constraining norms, spoke their mind, ventured beyond the domestic sphere, and engaged in “unladylike” behavior. Another wave of stories in the 1930s and 1940s, but increasingly fringe by the 1950s, depicted young girls—whether outspoken orphans (such as Annie or the characters played by Shirley Temple) or spunky pranksters (such as Little Lulu, Little Audrey, or the Harvey girls).

The ideal child of the permissive era was a boy—almost always white, suburban, straight, middle-class, Christian (mostly Protestant), and above all, American. These were all-American boys, often depicted in red-and-white-striped shirts, blue jeans, and Keds, with disheveled hair, smudged cheeks, and dreamy eyes. Even Charlie Brown had a stripe on his shirt, albeit a jagged, anxious one. These boys turned their parents’ bedrooms upside down or talked back to kings in the pages of Dr. Seuss’s best-selling books. They were rescued by Lassie or led astray by Flipper. These boys are curious, adventuresome, messy, noisy, rough- and-tumble, muddy even. They explore the world, questioning everyone and everything. They sometimes disobeyed and often escaped adult supervision; they were natural leaders and embraced a democratic style of living. This focus on boys assumed that while girls would and often did read books about boys, boys tended to actively avoid books about girls, and it was boys, the perception went, who most needed help in learning to read.

Beyond that, the traits associated with boyhood aligned with the ways America viewed itself as a nation coming out of the Second World War—bold, fearless, outgoing, wild, open for action, eager to explore the world, and curious about the future. Yet, they were also the traits that led the country into colonialist and military excursions; the “Boys will be boys” ethos has been used ever since to justify the worst excesses of toxic patriarchy.

There are certainly adventurous girls in the children’s literature of the period—from Harriet the Spy to Pippi Longstocking or even Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird—but they were far fewer, less central to the conversation, and in the case of Pippi, foreign in origin. For this reason, among others, my book focuses on boy-centered narratives and thus reads the advice literature for what it tells us about masculinity. These are also the children’s fictions most important for me as a boy raised by gender- normative parents. Throughout, I will be asking what it means that the child in the permissive imagination is so often male just as I ask why it matters that these boys are overwhelmingly white. Throughout, I use “child” when referring to the advice literature’s constructions and “boy” when referring to children’s fictions, but do not forget that much of what is written about “the child” assumes that the child is male.

This is necessarily a partial account of the permissive imagination— far from exhaustive even regarding the subject matter it does consider. Many, perhaps most, readers of a certain age will find one or another favorite missing. More than once, I have been asked about the relative absence of Leave It to Beaver. I can offer several possible explanations for why I lean toward Dennis Mitchell and away from Beaver Cleaver, who follows many of the same genre formulas. Part of what interests me about Dennis is that he appears across media—comic strips, comic books, and television—while Beaver appears almost exclusively on television (and a short-lived comic book). Hank Ketcham has a definite authorial voice and strong views, especially about gender and race, which allow us to examine a more conservative yet still permissive stance. Jay North as an actor also appears in Maya, which I also wanted to discuss. But ultimately, it is a matter of personal preference. Dennis lives in my personal mythology. I watched Beaver—everyone my age did—but never fully embraced him.

How did this cluster of ideas and practices I am labeling the “permissive imagination” take shape? Rather than a rigid periodization, I am drawing on a more dynamic model of cultural change developed by Raymond Williams. Williams stresses “the dynamic interrelations, at every point in the process of historically varied and variable elements.” New ideas do not erase old ones but build upon them. Aspects of cultural traditions are always being pushed aside to make room for the new or carried forward to temper its impact. Williams proposed that dominant (the most widely adopted meanings and practices), emergent (“new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships”), residual (“formed in the past but . . . still active in the cultural process”), and even archaic (“wholly recognized as an element of the past”) may coexist, mutually informing the “structure of feeling” common to a particular period. Thinking of permissiveness as a structure of feeling suggests its aesthetic, social, and emotional dimensions as it is embodied in everyday practices (such as the way adults might kneel on the floor to speak eye-to-eye to children), elements of style (Fred Rogers’s direct address and slow pace, the whimsy of Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, the ways photographers such as Ruth Orkin and Helen Leavitt center children’s expressive practices), and so much more.

“Permissiveness,” always a relative term, was often defined against John Watson the behaviorist, a dominant voice of the prewar period. But the behaviorist model did not go unchallenged in its own time. The roots of permissiveness as an emergent perspective go back to the Progressive Era (1890–1920), when Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped to popularize a version of the Montessori method through her fiction (The Home-Maker) and her advice writing. Fisher was well ahead of her time, but she was not alone. Fisher collaborated with Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg in rallying a group of complementary thinkers who articulated a method of Child Study and translated these insights into advice for parents. Josette Frank and Anna W. M. Wolf are representatives of the expansion of the Child Study discourse in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dorothy Baruch, an educator and child advocate, was the primary voice for a more democratic approach to family life. Baruch, like Fisher, presented her insights in child-rearing guides but also helped to shape fictional representations—in her case, the Sally, Dick, and Jane books that introduced my generation to reading. Having embraced feeding on demand, writers extended this approach to factor in children’s other bodily—even erotic—desires as things that needed to be accepted and accommodated. With this came a larger reassessment of “discipline,” seeking to understand and address the root causes of children’s behavior. Under this paradigm, children had core rights that needed to be respected. The hope was that the next generation would be more comfortable with their bodies and their identities, more democratic in their impulses, more exploratory in their learning, and more connected with the world around them than the previous generation saw itself to be. Dorothy Baruch describes the ideal outcome:

We hope they will become adults who are able to get along without fights and wars, who will want to settle disputes by more civilized means, but who will stand up for themselves and for what they believe to be right. . . . The ideal is the personality which will maintain itself against opposition as it feels the necessity and which will not perpetually be yielding, giving in submissively to any and every influence that comes near.

With the publication of Spock’s Baby and Child Care, permissiveness became the dominant paradigm for parenting and remained so until the late 1960s, when it faced increased challenge from feminists because of its normalization of gender roles and from conservative critics because of the suspicion that tolerance of disruptive behaviors had paved the way for the counterculture. This approach was also informed by a multitude of women—themselves mothers, often women’s rights advocates—whose contributions have been largely neglected. Ginott’s Between Parent and Child concludes with a short list of “books you may find enjoyable and useful,” which includes works by Baruch, Wolf, and Selma Fraiberg.

In The Permissive Society, Alan Petigny argues that America during the Truman and Eisenhower years was less conservative, complacent, and contained than popular memory might suggest: “During the latter half of the 1940s, and continuing throughout the 1950s, the popular ingestion of modern psychology, coupled with changes in child-rearing and religious practices, constituted an unprecedented challenge to traditional moral constraints.” Many of the experts and creatives discussed here held progressive (and sometimes radical) beliefs and saw themselves as helping to reshape American society for a postwar era by reimagining the American family (which they saw as more fluid and more open to experimentation) and reshaping the American child (whom they saw as coming into the world free of the fears and prejudices that had led to the failure of their own generation to overcome racism or embrace global citizenship).

By the late 1960s, conservative backlash toward Spock and his contemporaries would lead to the formation of a “Dare to discipline” approach that saw itself as putting adults back in control over children’s lives. This model remains a potent reactionary force today, while permissiveness has retained a residual status.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

If you need to develop projects involving education, literacy, engagement strategies and interaction with technology and digital platforms, you will invariably find our interviewee in search engines. If you are in the academic world, you will certainly find countless citations of his work in scholarship from around the world, the result of 40 years of a consistent and innovative career in studies of communication, transmedia, media ecology, interaction design and digital platforms.

Carlos A. Scolari has a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics and Communication Languages (Catholic University of Milan, Italy) and a Degree in Social Communication (University of Rosario, Argentina). He is Full Professor at the Department of Communication of the University Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona, where he coordinated the PhD Program of Communication between 2018-23. He's lectured about digital interfaces, media ecology /evolution and interactive communication in more than 30 European, Asian and American countries. He's been the Principal Investigator of H2020 TRANSLITERACY (2015-18) and the Spanish projects TRANSALFABETISMOS (2015-18), PLATCOM (2020-23) and LITERAC_IA (2024-27).

His most important publications are: Hacer Clic (2004), Hipermediaciones (2008), El fin de los medios masivos (with M. Carlón, 2009/2019), Crossmedia Innovations (with I. Ibrus, 2012), Narrativas Transmedia (2013), Transmedia Archaeology (with P. Bertetti and M. Freeman), Ecología de los medios (2015), Las leyes de la interfaz (2018), Media Evolution (with F. Rapa, 2019), Cultura Snack (2020), La guerra de las plataformas (2022) and On the Evolution of Media (2023).

In this interview with Dr. Carlos A. Scolari, we reviewed his thinking on current challenges in communication and technology, referring to some of the world's leading experts on engagement studies, fandom, and communication systems, such as Dr. Henry Jenkins. This is a unique opportunity to discuss the present and future of transmedia, new paradigms in storytelling strategies, new contexts for interactions and communication literacy with artificial intelligence, as well as some case studies of projects he has developed.

In Imagining Transmedia (2024), a book recently published by MIT Press that was the subject of some publications on Pop Junctions, Henry Jenkins asks: “How could we have a stable or even coherent definition of ´transmedia´, given the fact that we are discussing emerging and evolving practices within a media landscape that is itself always being reconfigured?”. He states: “All media produced today follows a transmedia logic, loosely speaking, but I used ´transmedia´ to narrowly refer to an intentional, coordinated strategy for spreading story elements across multiple media platforms”.

I agree with the observation that nearly all contemporary communication strategies — be they commercial, political, or cultural — are executed across multiple media and platforms and actively invite audience participation. In essence, these are transmedia strategies. However, I suspect that the term ‘transmedia’ is losing its prominence, particularly within professional circles, due to the ubiquity of transmedia practices. When transmedia becomes the norm, the term ceases to serve as a distinguishing characteristic for businesses or professionals. In this sense, the descriptor ‘transmedia’ no longer carries differentiating power.

As I stated in an article titled “Transmedia Is Dead. Long Live Transmedia! (Or Life, Passion and the Decline of a Concept)”, a parallel can be drawn with the trajectory of the term ‘multimedia’ in the 1990s. Reflecting on my own experience, I was then living in Italy and working at Ars Media, a company specializing in ‘multimedia’ communication. Early in the decade, the term ‘multimedia’ was reserved for a niche group of companies producing digital works, such as CD-ROMs or laser discs, and thus functioned as a marker of differentiation. By the decade’s end, however, the proliferation of multimedia content across the web and digital supports rendered the term obsolete as a competitive advantage. ‘Transmedia,’ I believe, is undergoing a similar lifecycle.

Regarding its definition, ‘transmedia’ appears to have achieved a relatively stable understanding within academic circles. However, as with any concept, it remains subject to tensions and reinterpretations, particularly in light of the rapid evolution of the media ecosystem.

If the concept of ‘transmedia’ follows the same path as ‘multimedia’ years ago, media companies (from the big corporations to the individual production units) will look for new concepts to differentiate what they offer and gain visibility in the market. New concepts like ‘immersive narrative’ or ‘narrative experience’ – in the line of ‘user experience’ or ‘UX’ – could be possible substitutes in the highly competitive media production market.

Exactly. In recent years, there’s been a lot of buzz around ‘immersive narratives,’ a concept I find fascinating because it shifts how we think about storytelling. Instead of the traditional linear approach—like the structures proposed by Aristotle, Propp, or Campbell—it encourages us to think in terms of ‘worlds.’ These are spaces filled with characters, relationships, and plots—a dynamic place where things happen. Researchers like Marie-Laure Ryan, Susana Pajares Tosca, and Lisbeth Klastrup have explored this territorial aspect of narrative in depth.

When I talk about ‘immersive narratives,’ I’m not just referring to the metaverse or VR headsets. It’s about a cohesive set of media where users step in, interact, and essentially live alongside the characters. This shift from the linearity of traditional storytelling to the three-dimensionality of world-building is a game-changer. For one, it provides richer perspectives for analyzing these experiences. And for another, it opens up new possibilities for creativity and production. Writing a script for a linear story is entirely different from creating a narrative world—it’s a whole new level of complexity and opportunity.

The concept of ‘narrative experience’ draws a direct connection to the design of ‘user experience,’ creating a fascinating and valuable crossover, particularly for professionals. Thinking of the creation of ‘transmedia’ or ‘immersive’ narrative worlds as a form of design opens up exciting possibilities. Just as architects design museums and urban planners create parks, why shouldn't we have designers dedicated to crafting narrative worlds?

In some universities, especially within communication programs, transmedia workshops are already part of the final-year curriculum. These workshops integrate and apply the various languages and media that students have learned throughout their studies. Adding a layer of design culture—or even incorporating design thinking—into these workshops could enrich the learning process and prepare students to approach narrative world-building with a more structured and innovative mindset.

You wrote that in academic and scientific circuits the situation is different: the life cycle of concepts is longer than in professional markets. Although in social sciences there are fashionable concepts, such as ‘sign’ or ‘structure’ in the 1960s, ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ in the 1980s, etc.), the concept of ‘transmedia,’ like ‘hypertext,’ or ‘multimedia’ should last longer than in professional circuits.

The academic world, like any other cultural sphere, follows trends and shifting research agendas. Just take a look at Google Ngram, and you’ll see how research topics and key concepts change over time. That said, I think terms like ‘transmedia’ or even ‘multimedia’ still hold their analytical value in academic discussions, regardless of trends. Despite the waning of professional hype, these terms provide a framework for understanding specific logics of communication. It would not be surprising to see doctoral dissertations on ‘transmedia storytelling’ being written decades from now, much as concepts like ‘hypertext’—not entirely new—continue to serve as viable analytical categories. Just last week, an excellent doctoral thesis on ‘transmedia tourism’ was defended in our department, showcasing the enduring relevance and adaptability of these frameworks.

Henry Jenkins and you have recently dedicated time to developing projects related to transmedia or civic media/civic imagination due to the strength of using storytelling for social causes, activism, and educational actions. For you, are there still theoretical and project horizons for transmedia? If so, what are the paths or trends? I personally believe so, including in a corporate and institutional environment, beyond the civic, or activist, or related to social causes. Technology does not determine cultures and societies, at least for now, I hope that AI does not change that.

A decade ago, we began exploring the concept of ‘transmedia literacy,’ aiming to adapt the logic of transmedia narratives—stories told across multiple media with audience collaboration, now involving prosumers—to the educational context. Our focus was on understanding how young people learn outside traditional school environments, in informal settings like social networks or video games. At the same time, we sought ways to bring this learning into the classroom, integrating it into the school curriculum. The H2020 TRANSLITERACY project (2014–2018) gave us the opportunity to work in eight countries, advancing our understanding of these dynamics.

Can you talk about this project and main outputs? Could you describe what types of transmedia storytelling strategies are most effective for educators?

The H2020 TRANSLITERACY project was a cutting-edge initiative designed to bridge gaps in digital and transmedia education, particularly for younger generations immersed in complex media ecosystems. Aimed at shifting from traditional media literacy to the broader concept of transmedia literacy, the project emphasized understanding and engaging with the multiple platforms teens navigate daily. In this project, we did not approach young people as victims of the media, as traditional media literacy often did. Instead, we see them as active agents who are learning—however and wherever they can—to navigate a complex and hyper-technological environment. I completely agree with the way dana boyd summed up this landscape: “It’s complicated.” And any oversimplification of complexity is dangerous. For example, believing that banning a smartphone or a single app will magically solve the challenges of adolescence.

Another cornerstone of TRANSLITERACY was its bottom-up methodology. By analyzing the everyday practices of teens—from writing fan fiction to modding video games—the project uncovered informal learning processes often overlooked by traditional education systems. Beyond its scientific contributions—such as creating one of the most comprehensive maps of the skills teens develop outside of school—the project also produced a practical framework and a series of activities to help educators integrate these transmedia skills into formal education. This approach not only bridges the gap between informal and formal learning but also empowers educators to connect with students on their own digital and creative terms.

TRANSLITERACY PROJECT 

The concept of ‘transmedia literacy’ is also present in some of your other projects.

Building on the same methodological and epistemological foundations of TRANSLITERACY, we later examined informal learning processes in the context of platform workers through the PLATCOM project, which concluded earlier this year. In this case, we did not work with adolescents but with platform workers over the age of 18. However, we also explored the competencies they develop and the informal learning processes involved. More recently, with María del Mar Guerrero-Pico we launched a new project called LITERAC_IA, which revisits the concept of ‘transmedia literacy.’ This time, our research focuses on how teenagers are engaging with Generative Artificial Intelligences and the ways they are learning to use these tools.

PLATCOM PROJECT

As shown, the concept of 'transmedia'—in this case, 'transmedia literacy'—continues to provide a valuable framework for various research projects that share common elements. Our focus is on informal, ‘wild’ learning that occurs outside traditional educational institutions, often within highly technological and interactive environments like digital platforms. We are particularly interested in how these practices can be identified, adapted, and incorporated into formal education settings.

As I already said, when working with adolescents, we make it a point to reject the notion of them as passive victims of the media—a perspective that has dominated traditional media literacy for years. This marks a key distinction between our approach and more conventional views. While we strongly advocate for the critical and ethical use of digital technologies, we firmly oppose the narrative that positions every teen or adult person as inherently vulnerable and defenseless to media influence.

Back to the use of ‘transmedia’ in other fields, just as our team continues to work under the umbrella of ‘transmedia literacy,’ other researchers can pursue their studies within similar frameworks. Long live transmedia!

There are digital platforms whose information literacy is not dominated by the public, others that will soon exist following consumption and behavior trends, this has always existed. But what I really believe is that there is still a lack of strategic, innovative, and intelligent vision in storytelling projects that incorporate much of what prosumers produce. What do you think about it?

The media industry is always eager to encourage audience or user participation, yet it often struggles to meaningfully integrate that content into its ecosystem. It's no surprise that most fanfiction or user-generated content ends up on platforms like Wattpad, social media, or wiki pages. The media industry's DNA still reflects its broadcasting roots, when audiences were treated as mere numbers rather than collaborators.

The most compelling examples of participation, however, often emerge in non-fiction transmedia projects. Documentaries or civic engagement initiatives, for instance, genuinely incorporate audience contributions, allowing their productions to deeply shape and inform the narrative. A transmedia project like QUIPU from Perú or MUJERES EN VENTA from Argentina would be unimaginable without the participation of Peruvian or Argentinian women sharing their stories. In contrast, the Marvel universe could easily continue thriving without integrating the fanfiction that has grown around it. It probably wouldn't be the same, but it would still exist. This highlights a key difference in how participation can be valued and utilized depending on the context.

Very soon quantum computing will reach domestic use, a new communication paradigm for transmitting, emitting, and receiving information in millions of data points at the speed of light. Human data capture and processing capacity is not enough. And from it, with AI, platforms will certainly emerge that will influence relationships between people. Based on this, what are the challenges for storytelling in this scenario that is increasingly approaching? What, in your opinion, would be a storytelling strategy for the new generations that represents them and makes sense?

If we consider narrative models, I doubt we’ll see any major changes—just as there haven’t been over the past millennia. Certain narrative structures have endured for thousands of years, and it’s hard to imagine radical transformative shifts. What is changing, however, are the ways these narratives are expressed and the social practices that activate, disseminate, and amplify them. The integration of generative AI offers intriguing opportunities for exploring the creation of new narrative worlds. Early experiments, beyond deepfake videos, are venturing into dreamlike and surreal territories, shaped by AI's inherent hallucinations and errors. On the video game front, procedural generation is another key trend. While not entirely new—it was applied in games from Tetris (1985) to No Man’s Sky (2016) —it transformed gaming by cutting costs and unlocking new creative possibilities for virtual environments. Yet, much remains to be explored, and it’s too early to propose detailed scenarios for the future. Reality, as always, will surprise us—for better or worse.

Other topics, such as the capture and processing of human data or the use of platforms for surveillance, clearly lie outside the realm of narrative. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from studying the evolution of the media ecosystem—and socio-technological networks in general—it’s that long-term predictions are nearly impossible. At best, we can aim to envision scenarios, which are often highly diverse, within the short term. But, as I mentioned earlier, reality always manages to surprise us in the end.

Still on the challenges of digital platforms mentioned in the questions above, there are others that are already imposed in our increasingly algorithmic society in which data storage and exchange does not occur in a transparent and secure way. In Algorithms of Resistance, Bonini & Treré (2024) state that “platform power is thus inseparable from the ability of individuals to exert some sort of agency and resistance over it”. During 2020 and 2024, your research group developed the PLATCOM project. Could you talk about the main contributions of this project? Do you believe that those involved are aware of how much the algorithm influences their work and lives?

For four years, we conducted research on platform labor in Spain. Our focus was not on content creation but rather on the most vulnerable workers in this ecosystem—those engaged in ‘last mile’ tasks such as elder or pet care, delivery services, or driving. This is an incredibly complex landscape, one that cannot be reduced solely to the dynamics of oppression and resistance (although these dynamics undeniably exist). In the Spanish context, a significant portion of these workers avoid union organizations or collective resistance actions. Perhaps the high number of undocumented immigrants working in the sector or the perception of it as a transient and temporary activity reinforces this attitude.

Our fieldwork uncovered some fascinating insights. For instance, we encountered workers who, during the same interview, praised the ‘freedom’ that the platform system afforded them—for example, the ability to work without a boss and to manage their schedules autonomously—while simultaneously criticizing the platforms for employing ‘slave-like’ exploitative practices. In this context, we developed a concept: slaverty (esclavertad), encapsulating this paradox. This term reflects just one of the many contradictory and conflict-laden aspects that emerged from our study.

One thing became clear to us: platforms cannot be analyzed solely through the lens of algorithms or the ruthless use of personal data. If we limit our analysis to that dimension, we miss much of the picture. To illustrate, let me draw a historical comparison. Television was a hegemonic medium for several generations, and its business model was built on a quantitative system—ratings—that determined the cost per second of advertising spots. That model shaped the content being produced and intensified the competition among different media. The question is: Can we reduce television to that quantitative dimension alone, to the temporal exploitation of attention for monetization through advertising? Clearly not. Beyond its business model, television transformed how millions of people perceived themselves and their understanding of the world; it exported the American Way of Life but also helped rural-to-urban migrants in Latin America understand urban living. Just as we cannot impoverish the analysis of television by reducing it to ratings, we must not impoverish the analysis of platforms by reducing them to algorithms. A significant portion of our social lives is constructed and unfolds on platforms. Things happen on platforms—many things—beyond the inevitable and problematic algorithmic dimension.

According to your recent book (On the Evolution of Media, 2023), “Media Evolution is a proto-discipline that studies media change from a long-term, holistic, intermedia, reticular, and complex point of view. The goal of this proto-discipline is not to predict the future of the media ecosystem but rather to understand its past and contemporary transformations.” Could you elaborate on how you perceive the main contributions of this perspective?

Media Evolution examines how mediated communication evolves over time, focusing on the dynamic interplay between media and their reciprocal processes across different historical and cultural contexts. Drawing on biological concepts like ‘emergence,’ ‘adaptation,’ ‘survival,’ or ‘extinction,’ it provides a framework for understanding how media grow, compete, and integrate within a dynamic ecosystem. Central to this perspective are ideas such as ‘coevolution’ and‘intermediality,’ which highlight the mutual influences between emerging and traditional media. This approach moves beyond linear historical narratives, presenting media landscapes as interconnected, evolving networks.

But why the need for a new theory or research field? Is Media History or Archaeology insufficient? Unlike Media History, which focuses on chronological developments, Media Evolution emphasizes intermediality by uncovering systemic patterns and identifying adaptive strategies within media ecosystems. Let me explain. History of communication books often tell us that clay tablets came first, followed by papyrus scrolls, then manuscript books on parchment, and finally, in the 15th century, the printed book. However, what they rarely discuss is what happened to papyrus after parchment became widespread, or how manuscript books managed to survive after the invention of Gutenberg’s press. The same gaps appear when discussing the 20th century: How did cinema change with the emergence of television or video games? How did radio adapt after the rise of television? This is what Media Evolution seeks to address. Media Archaeology, for its part, delves into specific devices and practices, often avoiding broad theoretical frameworks. Together, these approaches are complementary: Media History outlines general timelines, Media Archaeology uncovers forgotten devices and practices, and Media Evolution provides a broad framework for understanding the long-term dynamics of media change.

Links

PLATCOM Project: https://platcom.upf.edu/

Transmedia Literacy: https://transmedialiteracy.org/

Teacher’s Kit: https://transmedialiteracy.upf.edu/es/transmedia-skills-map

Bonini, T., & Treré, E. (2024). Algorithms of resistance: the everyday fight against platform power. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Jenkins, H. (2024). “Foreword: What We Mean by “Transmedia”. In: Finn, E. Imagining transmedia. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Scolari, C.A. (2018). Transmedia literacy in the new media ecology. White Paper of the H2020 TRANSLITERACY project. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Scolari, C.A. (2019). Transmedia Is Dead. Long Live Transmedia! (Or Life, Passion and the Decline of a Concept). Letra. Imagen. Sonido: Ciudad Mediatizada, ISSN 1851-8931, Nº. 20, 2019, Pags. 69-92. 

Scolari, C.A. (2023). On the Evolution of Media. London: Routledge (Spanish edition: Sobre la evolución de los medios,Ampersand, 2024).

Scolari, C.A., Piña, M. and Guerrero-Pico, M. (2024). Communication platforms, workforce and informal learning. White Paper of the PLATCOM project. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Renata Frade is a tech feminism PhD candidate at the Universidade de Aveiro (DigiMedia/DeCa). Cátedra Oscar Sala/ Instituto de Estudos Avançados/Universidade de São Paulo Artificial Intelligence researcher. Journalist (B.A. in Social Communication from PUC-Rio University) and M.A. in Literature from UERJ. Henry Jenkins´ transmedia alumni and attendee at M.I.T., Rede Globo TV and Nave school events/courses. Speaker, activist, community manager, professor and content producer on women in tech, diversity, inclusion and transmedia since 2010 (such as Gartner international symposium, Girls in Tech Brazil, Mídia Ninja, Digitalks, MobileTime etc). Published in 13 academic and fiction books (poetry and short stories). Renata Frade is interested in Literature, Activism, Feminism, Civic Imagination, Technology, Digital Humanities, Ciberculture, HCI.

In this in-conversation piece, Do Own (Donna) Kim, Utsav Gandhi, and Gabrielle Roitman exchange critical, intercultural, and personal readings of The Substance (2024). In Part One, Donna opens the conversation with the “love yourself :(“ South Korean (henceforth Korean) Internet meme. In Part Two, Gabrielle and Utsav expand on her reading by exploring other connections, from American pop culture to immigrant experiences and queer bodies. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger. More beautiful. More perfect….The one and only thing not to forget: you are one. You can’t escape from yourself.” (excerpt from “The Substance” product introduction video) Is “love yourself” the solution? Can we? How? We welcome you to join our conversation.

Donna:

What do you think? Is “love yourself” the solution? (Can we? How?) I’m curious about what came to your mind while watching The Substance. 

Gabrielle:

Generations of Americans have come into contact with the “This is your brain on drugs” PSA. The Substance’s opening and continual return to a similar shot of an egg invokes this cultural staple. The 2024 film suggests, ‘this is your brain on internalized misogyny’ in the form of the literal drug that Demi Moore’s Elisabeth takes, known in the movie as The Substance.

“This is your brain on drugs” (Up: NYTimes; Down: @trythesubstance Instagram). The Substance’s egg imagery invokes the cultural staple.

The Substance is now a Best Picture Academy Award-nominated, campy, patriarchy-addressing film, like Barbie before it in 2023. Notably, both films take place in different but highly satirized Hollywoods and employ strong visual references and practical effects that celebrate the medium of film. Importantly, though, American audiences have generally interpreted both movies as if they are meant to encapsulate womanhood.

By this standard, these movies, which address issues related to feminist ideas, will inevitably fail. Womanhood is vast and varied and obviously cannot be summarized in a tight 2 hours. However, the team behind Barbie never set out to define womanhood. That movie, in an interesting turn of phrase, is self-aware. The Substance is, too.

With reproductive rights on the line in a way they have not been since 1973 and politicians overly interested in policing the boundaries of womanhood, it can feel like media (more broadly) have a job to perform, to provide guidance for living in patriarchy. I wonder, though, if it’s fair to expect a simple how-to guide from cultural products that have taken years of work and luck to get to the point where we can consume them on our variously sized screens.

The Substance can be boiled down to its commentary on beauty standards and how they harm our selves. Critiques of the movie often put forward that it did not do enough. Enough of what? Enough for advancing feminism in the mid-2020s? And in our current political moment, I understand the urge to want more, but a movie is not a leader. It cannot change anything about our political wellbeing in and of itself.

“And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault” (America Ferrera’s monologue in Barbie), gif from Tumblr

I return again to Barbie – a doll, like a movie, is an inanimate object; it can take on feminist and misogynistic projections, but it can never take action. Because it is not a living participant in our society. But people are.

In the pivotal bathroom mirror makeup scene, when it becomes clear Elisabeth will spiral inwards toward her demise, she becomes paralyzed by the threat of perfection. The clever visual cue of the devil on her shoulder in the form of Sue’s billboard looms large as a reminder that there will always be something better. Elisabeth covers up more and more each time she goes outside and continues to keep herself stuck in her apartment. She gives up her willingness to interact with the world because she believes she is no longer perfect and consumable.

When a movie centers on a female experience, is it nothing but a vessel to spoonfeed The Audience a lesson? The Substance provides metaphors depicting “your brain on internalized misogyny,” but is it perfect? Does it need to be?

Elisabeth Sparkle’s Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (official Instagram).

Utsav:

I’m generally interested in why audiences place this burden of expectations and interpretations on what is ultimately just a two-hour trip to the movies. There may be some complex structural factors at play here of where we see and identify role models in society. Or perhaps it is the long-standing chokehold that the film industry has on audiences as an audio-visual medium with broad exposure and inroads into society (especially with the rise of streaming platforms and the ubiquity of short-form movie clips on YouTube and social media).  

“This Barbie has a Nobel Prize in physics” (official website).

However, there is also a thread here about how movies are marketed. The case of Barbie is more understandable – a first-time major motion picture based on what is well-ingrained intellectual property, popular movie stars/director combo, a blitzkrieg marketing campaign promoting a variety of “unique” Barbies (such as physicist Barbie), and of course the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon that ultimately helped both films. I wonder if there was anything similar in the marketing for The Substance that may have set up these expectations and interpretations from the public. What do you think, Gabrielle?

Gabrielle:

Like you said, there are definitely societal factors at play with the reverence we give movies and how we think about their impact to change culture. With fear stemming from failures in political leadership, many people are also looking for someone/thing to show the way forward or to scapegoat what’s gone wrong so we can wise up and avoid these pitfalls in our continued fight. The marketing side also surely plays a role in how much time we think about these films. When we’re continually exposed to hyperbole either from marketing campaigns or from social media posts that gain traction, it can build expectations about how life-changing a movie will really be.

Interestingly, some of the critiques I’ve read of The Substance bemoan its lack of tackling social media’s role in our struggles with self-loathing and beauty standards. I did not have this issue. Elisabeth’s purchasing of The Substance from a faceless entity and the packaging it arrived in felt eerily similar to TikTok Shop ads promising products that will change your life. Additionally, the movie hones in on the specificity of self-loathing as it exists in our own heads and bodies. When we buy products that will supposedly smooth our skin or cut bloating, we’re dreaming of a better, upgraded self, with our flaws fixed. 

A movie cannot address all of our thoughts and feelings about body image, patriarchy, what it is to be a woman. I think it’s reductive to think that all of that could be addressed in one movie. What it can do is capture a snapshot of a cultural phenomenon. The reaction to these so-called “flashy feminist” movies in a way demonstrates an argument they try to make. The Substance as a drug does not effect a change that “fixes” anything for Elisabeth, but it reflects the culture in which she exists.

Utsav:

Yes, super insightful thoughts! I agree that I also did not have an issue about the lack of social media’s role. I attributed that to the movie not having a timestamp for when it is based–it is pretty timeless in that sense. The New Year's Eve production at the end actually makes it seem like it could be the 1970s! On that final note, the production also reminded me of another subtly feminist movie I watched recently, also set in the showbiz of 1970s Los Angeles, Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour (on Netflix). No reverse aging or bold pink feminism in that one, but gritty, real-life psychological horror about patriarchal violence – except that it flips the usual narrative by focusing on the women, not on the perpetrator.  

“It changed my life” ( official Instagram ).

Donna:

Living through our bodies is a shared yet differently experienced pan-human phenomenon (see Kim (2025) on gay bodily experiences in Seoul, Korea). What can be some other ways to read Elisabeth and Sue’s relationship? 

Utsav:

“She left. I’m the new tenant.”

Think of an immigrant’s journey over time. We leave a place behind and enter a new one, slowly attempting to redefine home and understand our position in our new environment. Even if some immigrants might materially leave everything behind, much colloquial (sometimes literal) “baggage” gets moved across. However, possessions aren’t the only items in flux as this journey continues. So are various aspects of identity. In the 1950s, linguist Einar Haugen coined the term “code-switch” to describe people’s propensity to transition between languages, accents, and self-presentation in the face of changing societal norms and expectations. These expectations can vary across contexts, but as an immigrant I have felt them more strongly while navigating everyday conversations or attempting to make acquaintances in my new country. I, too, have engaged in a fair bit of code-switching over my fifteen years of being an immigrant, such as “rolling my R’s” or “enunciating my V’s and my W’s” whilst speaking to Americans. However, I have always seen my code-switching as an exercise in assimilation – not in replacement or substitution. I think it bears repeating, especially in today’s politically fraught times and populist uprising against immigrants, that I have never heard an immigrant talk about “replacing” someone by taking over their spot at a place of work or residence, even if they attempt to blend in. On the contrary, in The Substance, Sue is brazen about being “the new tenant” after replacing Elisabeth.

Sue announces that Elisabeth has left ( TikTok ).

There are other allegories between the immigrant experience and Elisabeth/Sue’s story in the movie. When Elisabeth tries to control and wrestle back access she has left to The Substance as a function of how much extra is being consumed by Sue, Elisabeth gets told on the phone, “What has been used on one side is lost on the other. There is no going back.” There is a clear parallel here to immigrants losing time due to leaving their community or loved ones behind for a new home. What is also “lost” are the immigrant’s talents, successes, growth, and individual development, which are in limited supply and can’t be used to service their previous community (or the idea popularly known as “brain drain.”) Time is relentless, and choices and decisions can seem irreversible – in economic terms, I also conceptualize them as “sunk cost.”

“There is no "she" and "you." You both are one,” both Sue and Elisabeth get told at different times as they try to extricate themselves from their alter-egos. Again, this feels like a parallel with an immigrant's changing sense of self and identity. Immigrants contain multitudes, but they are also, in many ways, blends of their old and new selves. As the movie’s tagline says: “You can’t escape from yourself.” 

Elisabeth becomes Sue for the first time ( Official Instagram ).

Apart from the feminist, neoliberal, and immigrant lenses discussed above, the movie has also been described in detail as an allegory for queer and transgender experience – writer Emily Cameron in Gay Times points out that “an injectable that brings to life a gorgeous version of you that you are happier with is extremely familiar for trans people.”

Gabrielle:

Could you speak more about the ideas surrounding time as a finite resource when moving between places? It is interesting that many people will only know the “you” where you are from and others the “you” where you are now. Internally, though, you have to contend with both “yous.” Do you think this will always exist as some form of loss? Or is there an inner peace regarding this double existence for immigrants that Elisabeth/Sue was never able to exemplify?   

Utsav:

Yes, of course. That is actually a deeply moving and poignant question; thank you. The inner peace feels more like a decision, not a “given.” You must move beyond the “grass is greener on the other side” mentality and be at peace with where you are, the product of choices within and outside your control. You’re right: Elisabeth/Sue couldn’t exemplify that what they were going through was directly a product of their own decisions. They even seemed to have lost track of their larger goal (to maintain fame and adulation with their audience and fanbase). Instead, they got swept into a vicious circle of immediate gameswomanship – or trying to rescue themselves from their alter egos. They never seemed to simultaneously contend with their “yous,” perhaps because they were two entirely different physical bodies.  

Do Own (Donna) Kim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago's Department of Communication. Donna studies everyday, playful digital cultures and mediated social interactions. She is particularly interested in norms, hybridity, and what being human/artificial means in emerging technological contexts. She has written about topics like video games, virtual influencers, mobile technologies, and Korean digital feminism. Her work can be found in journals such as New Media &Society, Communication Monographs, International Journal of Communication, Lateral, and Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. Donna received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. You can find her on doowndonnakim.com or @doowndonnakim.bsky.social.

Gabrielle Roitman is a second year master’s student in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she studies social media, culture, and identity. She is interested in the intersection of the emerging influencer industry with more established creative industries such as film and the performing arts. You can follow her at @gtroitman.bsky.social

Utsav Gandhi is a first-year Ph.D. student in Communications and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he is broadly interested in business models and regulation of social media, news media, and generative AI. Originally from Mumbai, India, Gandhi was previously a pre-doctoral Research Professional at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center. You can follow him on the Fediverse at @utsavpgandhi.bsky.social or on Letterboxd at utsavpg (for his amateur movie reviews and activity).

The Substance posters (IMDB). Left: white capital letters against a black background. “Have you ever dreamt a better version of yourself?”

The Substance posters (IMDB). Right: a woman with back stitches is lying down on her side in a white bathroom. In capital letters, “Absolutely f***ing insane”.

In this in-conversation piece, Do Own (Donna) Kim, Utsav Gandhi, and Gabrielle Roitman exchange critical, intercultural, and personal readings of The Substance (2024). After briefly introducing the film, Donna opens the conversation with the “love yourself :(“ South Korean (henceforth Korean) Internet meme. Then, Gabrielle and Utsav expand on her reading by exploring other connections, from American pop culture to immigrant experiences and queer bodies. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger. More beautiful. More perfect….The one and only thing not to forget: you are one. You can’t escape from yourself.” (excerpt from “The Substance” product introduction video) Is “love yourself” the solution? Can we? How? We welcome you to join our conversation.

Donna:

The Substance (2024), written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, centers on a 50-year-old fading star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) and her “better version” Sue (Margaret Qualley)—her “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” self unlocked by the black market drug, “The Substance” (but “not to forget: [Elisabeth/Sue] are one [and she] can’t escape from [her]self”). Despite being an R-rated, less mainstream “body horror” genre film, The Substance has been a global critical and commercial success. Accolades include wins and nominations for various prestigious awards, such as Cannes Film Festival (Best Screenplay), Golden Globes (Best Performance – Musical or Comedy; Moore’s first major acting award in her 45-year career), and the upcoming Oscars (5 nominations). In Korea, it has been touted as one of the most successful foreign indie·art films in the past year. According to the Korean Film Council, it is approaching 500,000 audiences (February 19, 2025). This ranks it within the top 30 most popular foreign indie·art films in the country’s history, which is an impressive feat as the list also includes major films like Avatar (2009) and Titanic (1997).

VIDEO: The Substance official trailer (YouTube).

When thinking about The Substance and its reception, my mind keeps returning to the “love yourself :(“ meme. It can look something like this: “OMG embrace your natural beauty😭 Love yourself❤️🙏”. This is a comment-based meme you can easily find on the Korean Internet, often coupled with sarcastic statements about plastic surgery, skin tone, or body shape written in an intentionally English-to-Korean translation-like tone. It parodies the common “love yourself” type of foreigner reactions to Korea’s beauty cultures, particularly toward Korean women. Globally, Korea is known as one of the plastic surgery capitals in the world, if not the capital (cf., National Evidence-based Healthcare Collaborating Agency (2014); International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (2023)). Korean skincare and makeup, characterized by their naturalistically youthful, “dewy” aesthetics, have even gained their own name: K-beauty. A rising local and tourist attraction is “personal color analysis” image consulting, where you can get expert evaluation of the colors that best boost your appearance and some matching style recommendations. Perhaps it is to no one’s surprise that a country with such a thriving beauty industry suffers from lookist cultural norms, particularly harsher toward women (or heaven forbid, older(-looking) women (!)). As a Korean woman myself, I can unfortunately speak from experience. I recall being twelve or so when I shamefully dropped my head to look down at my no-kids-size-fit-me-anymore chubby belly and legs upon a friend’s perhaps innocuous “Why are you wearing ajumma pants?” Ajumma in Korean translates to middle-aged or married women, and I was literally wearing my mom’s pants—a perfectly fine light bluish-grey pair, normally worn by the coolest person I know on the earth. Yet, I was deeply ashamed. Ajumma did not simply mean a middle-aged married woman, which my mom technically was. What I heard was that I looked uncool, outdated, unappealing, unfeminine, uncouth, and all other things associated with the “unattractive older women” stereotype.

A little twist here is that while this exchange was in Korean, it did not happen in Korea. This was in Canada, and my friend was a Korean Canadian gyopo who spoke English more fluently than Korean, if I remember correctly. Despite the country’s infamy, Koreans in Korea are not the only people who suffer from such gendered, ageist norms: the above-linked report by the “International” Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery indeed reported internationally, and K-beauty is a term that helps make certain goods, services, and content appealing to the overseas consumers, to whom an image consulting Korean tour package may also seem alluring. The intersection of age and gender has been studied in various global media and communication contexts. Maria Edström’s 2018 study of the Swedish media buzz across three decades (1994, 2004, 2014) found that older women are still particularly invisible. Even in the “executive” category where older people were relatively more represented, women still appeared younger than men (not to mention that the category itself generally followed hegemonic masculinity aesthetics). In the “beauty” category, 90% of the persons were women and none were over 60, and youth was depicted as an essential quality. Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s study (Smith et al., 2024) of a total of 1,700 top-grossing films in North America from 2007 to 2023 also found a persisting comparative lack of adult (over 40) women to men on screen (1 to 3). The study specified the limited role-wise opportunities for older women. Films with female-identified leads and co-leads over 45 years old amounted to a mere 4.8%, and 1.2% when only counting women of color over 45 (cf., girls & women: 31.2%; girls & women of color: 7.2%). Moreover, women tended to appear more in a caregiving role than men (46.7% versus 38.6%). Behind-the-scene composition is part of this picture: women made up only 6.5% out of 1,900 directors, 13% out of 4,930 writers, and 22.1% out of 17,446 producers. These studies not only show the global pervasiveness of the gendered, ageist pressure but also help us understand the interconnection between what we see, what we come to expect, and how opportunities and imaginations get confined.

Elisabeth and Sue (IMDB). Up: Elisabeth is blowing a kiss in her show “Sparkle Your Life”. Down: Sue is making the same pose in her replacement show “Pump it Up”.

My mind returns to the “love yourself :(“ meme because The Substance, including its success, shares the collective sarcastic exasperation expressed by the meme. Its satire suggests that the tropey urges to simply love oneself are patronizing, unhelpful, and even harmful on several levels, which can be boiled down to “you just don’t know how it is.” On one hand, it points out how accompanying exotifying misdescriptions (e.g., “I heard everyone must get work done there”) and prejudiced misunderstandings (e.g., “they just don’t want to look Korean”) hijack the phenomenon from Koreans’ everyday experiences. The suggested antidote—i.e., love yourself—additionally simplifies the complex cultural processes into a simple single-issue matter of looks that can be resolved with an individual-level positive outlook. On the other, the intercultural “mirrorings” of other countries’ beauty standards (e.g., curves, tan) call attention to the ironic transnational presence and deep-rootedness of similarly operating norms. That is, the urges to “love yourself” in the absence of a concerted critical societal interrogation of “can” and “how” may only serve as exacerbating dismissals. The situation is infuriating because it’s not just about looks (but it kind of is too), and it’s not just about the individual and what they can do about themself (but it kind of seems to be). It is maddening because what stands between the person and loving themself is not just knowing, but being able to survive existing as their loving self. ‘What in the world (and where) are we supposed to do?!’

Similarly, The Substance lets out a comically deep sigh. The horrendous story of Elisabeth Sparkle’s self-abuse and fall revolves around her body(ies). Thus, as the “love yourself :(“ trope goes, it may seem that much of it could have been prevented with some good old realization and self-acceptance, especially as the film takes progressively absurdist, “absolutely f***ing insane” (poster caption) turns. However, like how the mesmerizing glittery snowglobe reminds Elisabeth, The Substance’s transfixing spectacles constantly prod us with the not-so-simple question: what made Elisabeth sparkle—or perhaps what made “Elisabeth Sparkle”? According to Fred, a high school acquaintance she ran into, Elisabeth has “not changed a bit” and is “still the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world.” We don’t get to know what this means. We only get to know Elisabeth Sparkle as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We learn about Elisabeth’s talents and hard work: her beauty, her fitness, her charisma, her wit, her knowledge, her drive, and her life-long regimen.

Sue’s immediate rise only further proves that Elisabeth’s stardom was from who she has been. She is a seasoned accomplice. She expertly wields Sue’s drop-dead gorgeousness, including through her “innocent” and lovely big smiles despite her disgust toward White Men in Power™, personified through the evidently disgusting television executive “Harvey” and his various extensions (e.g., younger male casting directors) and iterations (e.g., fellow Old White Men in Suit caricatures) (further readings: Andreasen (2022); Durham (2021)). As Sue, she makes perfect-for-late-night-show saucy remarks to distance herself from “old” Elisabeth’s irrelevance, associating Elisabeth with Sue’s mom’s—older women’s—generation. We learn about the “love” that has surrounded Elisabeth. She currently lives alone in a big, expensive penthouse, and seemingly has no close personal relationships. Other than the hired cleaner who remains obscured in the background, we do not see anyone in pre-Substance Elisabeth’s apartment. After getting fired on her 50th birthday, she drinks angrily at an exquisite bar, elegantly dressed but alone. We subsequently see her throwing up and struggling from a hangover by herself at her home. The only posts Elizabeth seems to have received since her forced retirement are a generic rose bouquet with a generic note from her former job (the exact kind she receives later as Sue before Sue’s big break/Elisabeth’s true grand retirement), bills, and food delivery fliers (sushi of course). As Sue, she gets visitors: invited lovers (the first leaves a cute sticky note message in her apartment) and an uninvited admirer who covet and seek her, whose tenderness quickly switches to disregard, hostility, and even fear at non-Sue-bodied Elisabeth. The contrasting treatment she experiences at her job similarly depicts the love that had surrounded her in her professional life, culminating in the “tunnel vision” scene toward the end. Now monstrously merged, all “Elisasue” sees through the single eyehole of her mask are the flashes of an adoring crowd cheering her as she walks down the long hallway toward her final stage: “There she is, so beautiful!” “We love you!”

Elisabeth is more than her looks, but it had been presumably what enabled Elisabeth to sparkle/be Sparkle in her daily and professional life. If we can guess from watching the movie, she knows this even better from living and building her life as Elisabeth. ‘What in the world (and where) is she supposed to do now?!’ We must witness all the absurdity, discomfort, and pain. We are also to witness the youthful glow of Sue. Both the gore and beauty shots are prolonged and descriptive. They resist cleaner, faster outcome-oriented retelling of Elizabeth’s achievements and abuse and ground her story in the texture and rhythm of her everyday life—the details that cumulated to experiences and then to life, the moments that she had to (re)live in their time. This invites the audiences to fill in the jumps, gaps, and inclarities in the movie with the details and moments they have lived, and fill in those in their own narratives with Elizabeth’s life. A powerful example would be the scene where Elizabeth does and re-does her styling while preparing for her date with Fred, who probably would have been struck by her in any look. I remember being physically frozen for a moment at her first bathroom mirror reflection. I found her and her styling to be so breathtakingly beautiful. I loved the satisfied little smile that she had. She is just about to leave but sees the giant billboard sign of Sue across her window. She hurries back to the bathroom. She applies more makeup and fixes her hair. She is now running out of time but is unable to leave, haunted by Sue. Each time she returns, she covers herself with more products and items, and each time, she sparkles less. I got sad because I caught myself thinking “she looks older now,” a thought that I have hurled at myself in front of mirrors before. She ends up smearing her red makeup all over her face as she cries and angrily tries to erase her face. She messes up her hair. She stays at home.

Elisabeth’s date preparation scene (YouTube). Elisabeth looks unhappily at her mirror reflection.

The Substance’s increasing absurdity reflects the baffling complexity of our collective exasperation. As the film reminds us, we “are one” and we “can’t escape from [our]self”. Elisabeth becomes a witch, an attempted self-murder, and a monster. According to Cohen’s (1996) seven monster theses, monsters ask us why we have created them. ‘What in the world are we supposed to do to survive existing as our loving selves?’ The bloody metal concert-esque ending scene to Anna von Hausswolff’s “Ugly and Vengeful” felt like a good cathartic scream. All, not just Elisabeth, are now smeared and drenched in red. The audiences—both the characters and us (see “mirroring-effect” in art-horror (Carroll, 1990))—cannot just selectively gaze on their own accord, but must now witness every detail and moment of the disfigured, entwined, and regenerating “beautiful creation” “that had been shaped for success” (Harvey’s quote). The Substance does not answer the question for Elisabeth. Once her New Year’s Eve show is over, she gets further deformed as she grunts and staggers to her star on the Walk of Fame, eventually drying up without a speck of dust left behind. Truly, “how-to” is a complex societal challenge. Consider my anecdote: What does loving yourself look like for an otherwise happy and confident twelve-year-old who, according to the limiting common retail sizes, only has a single pair of apparently “ajumma” pants that she can fit into? How should she navigate her loving relationship with herself and her mom (the actual owner of the pants who technically is a middle-aged married woman) from this incredible social threat, especially now with her already ajumma-associated socio-physical self?

What is comically exasperating is that somehow the key may be in loving yourself. In Korean female comedian Kang Yumi’s (who has been fan-nicknamed “cultural anthropologist” for her sharp social commentaries) The Substance-inspired absurdist parody of Korea’s gendered ageism Yumistance, just-turned-42—43 in Korean age—“ajumma” Yumi repeats returning to even younger versions of herself only to discover that she has forever been mandated to “jagi gwanli” (manage the self) to stay competitive as an already “too old” aging woman. She abuses the substance (here a high-end beef gogi gift set for New Year’s that sponsored her YouTube video, so she simply grills and eats the sponsored meat over and over again) until she becomes unborn: she finally escapes, but by disappearing from the world! Yumi wakes up from the nightmare and learns that the gogi gift set left at her doorstep is from her mom to make sure her daughter is eating well. Yumi narrates as she grills the gogi: “Whatever the matter, mindset is the most important thing. It is natural for people to age. If one cannot accept it, whatever the age, happiness remains practically the same [gogiseo gogi, a wordplay on geogiseo geogi (literal: “from there to there”; idiomatic: “it’s about the same”) that literally translates to “from meat to meat”]. Please let me age healthily.” Loving yourself is possible and powerful. But we cannot do so whichever “meat suit” we embody if it gets subsumed under the myriad means to competitively jagi gwanli. We must be let age and live healthily. Monstrous concerts can help the inner screams become unignorable chants.

Yumistance (YouTube). Yumi unhappily stares at her bedroom mirror reflection.

Stay tuned for Part Two.

Do Own (Donna) Kim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago's Department of Communication. Donna studies everyday, playful digital cultures and mediated social interactions. She is particularly interested in norms, hybridity, and what being human/artificial means in emerging technological contexts. She has written about topics like video games, virtual influencers, mobile technologies, and Korean digital feminism. Her work can be found in journals such as New Media &Society, Communication Monographs, International Journal of Communication, Lateral, and Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. Donna received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. You can find her on doowndonnakim.com or @doowndonnakim.bsky.social.

Gabrielle Roitman is a second year master’s student in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she studies social media, culture, and identity. She is interested in the intersection of the emerging influencer industry with more established creative industries such as film and the performing arts. You can follow her at @gtroitman.bsky.social

Utsav Gandhi is a first-year Ph.D. student in Communications and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he is broadly interested in business models and regulation of social media, news media, and generative AI. Originally from Mumbai, India, Gandhi was previously a pre-doctoral Research Professional at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center. You can follow him on the Fediverse at @utsavpgandhi.bsky.social or on Letterboxd at utsavpg (for his amateur movie reviews and activity).

With this video essay, Green and Red perform a poetic analysis of both the style and content of Best Picture nominee Anora, evoking Kogonada's use of the dotted line and the driving poetic force of Catherine Grant's "Carnal Locomotive."

The following video contains some nudity and references mature content.

For creating a world for a face. For pushing the idea of creating a film for an actor to its limits. For seizing control of the world amidst the uncontrollable guerilla filmmaking. For seeing light in the darkest places, rising from the east. In Farsi, Pomegranate is Anaar انار)), Light is Noor نور)), and this is Anora (آنورا).

Green and Red: Kasra Karbasi and Amin Komijani.

Audiovisual essayists, writers, cinephiles. Based in Iran.