[Air-L] new book: Fandom Is Ugly out now

[Mel Stanfill]

 Hi all,

With chapters across multiple angry social media moments and combative
digital cultures, my new book Fandom is Ugly seems right up the AoIR alley.

It's available starting today from NYU Press:
https://nyupress.org/9781479824960/fandom-is-ugly/

You can save 30% with discount code NYUAU30.

Here's the official press blurb:

The Gamergate harassment campaign of women in video games, the “Unite the
Right” rally where hundreds of Confederate monument supporters cried out
racist and antisemitic slurs in Charlottesville, and the targeted racist
and sexist harassment of Star Wars’ Asian American actress Kelly Marie Tran
all have one thing in common: they demonstrate the collective power and
underlying ugliness of fandoms. These fans might feel victimized or
betrayed by the content they’ve intertwined with their own identities, or
they may simply feel that they’re speaking truth to power. Regardless, by
connecting via social media, they can unleash enormous amounts of hate,
which often results in severe real-world consequences.

Fandom Is Ugly argues that reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand
in hand, and to understand one, we need to understand the other. Mel
Stanfill pushes back on two mainstream assumptions: that media and the
pleasure of consumption are frivolous and unworthy of study, and that
fandoms are inherently progressive. Drawing on a corpus of angry social
media posts, Fandom Is Ugly finds that ugly moments happen when deep
emotional attachments collide with social structures and situations that
have been misunderstood. By holistically examining the forms of ugly fandom
in cases that touch upon race, gender, and sexuality, Fandom Is Ugly
produces a comprehensive theory of the negative sides of fan attachments.

(I really hate doing self-promo, but if the people at my press are going to
go all out on my behalf, the least I can do is grit my teeth and email some
listservs, and hopefully this is useful to some on here).

Best,

Mel Stanfill, PhD
Associate Professor
Texts & Technology / English
University of Central Florida
http://www.melstanfill.com