Rights statement: © Fathallah, 2021. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in The Journal of Fandom Studies, 9, (3), 253-273, 2021, 10.1386/jfs_00044_1
Accepted author manuscript, 337 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Sex, Race and Romanticism
T2 - The Meta-Vampire in Emo Fandom
AU - Fathallah, Judith
N1 - © Fathallah, 2021. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in The Journal of Fandom Studies, 9, (3), 253-273, 2021, 10.1386/jfs_00044_1
PY - 2021/9/1
Y1 - 2021/9/1
N2 - The genealogy stretching from Romanticism to the tortured poets of the emotional hardcore music scene is by now well-established. Emotional hardcore, or emo, is invested in the construction of the usually-White male artist, a sensitive and creative being subject to a great deal of suffering - both as a result of his artistic nature, and of the external forces aligned against him. The European Romantics invented the concept of artist as cultural icon - Lord Byron is often considered Britain’s first celebrity. He was also, not coincidentally, Britain’s first literary vampire. This article utilizes a discursive analysis based in open coding to consider emo fandom’s obsession with the figure of the vampire, especially what emo fans - who are mostly girls - have done with it in fanfic. Considering the gendered genealogy of the vampire, and the problematic gender politics of the emo scene, I explore how the constraints and opportunities of these discursive structures influence the ways emo fans imagine vampires, who appear so often in their writing. Picking out key themes of sex, race, and the ethics of the vampire inherited from both emo fandom and vampire literature generally, I argue that the selected sample demonstrates a transformative impulse towards race and sex which is ultimately still contained by the overarching discursive structures within which artists operate.
AB - The genealogy stretching from Romanticism to the tortured poets of the emotional hardcore music scene is by now well-established. Emotional hardcore, or emo, is invested in the construction of the usually-White male artist, a sensitive and creative being subject to a great deal of suffering - both as a result of his artistic nature, and of the external forces aligned against him. The European Romantics invented the concept of artist as cultural icon - Lord Byron is often considered Britain’s first celebrity. He was also, not coincidentally, Britain’s first literary vampire. This article utilizes a discursive analysis based in open coding to consider emo fandom’s obsession with the figure of the vampire, especially what emo fans - who are mostly girls - have done with it in fanfic. Considering the gendered genealogy of the vampire, and the problematic gender politics of the emo scene, I explore how the constraints and opportunities of these discursive structures influence the ways emo fans imagine vampires, who appear so often in their writing. Picking out key themes of sex, race, and the ethics of the vampire inherited from both emo fandom and vampire literature generally, I argue that the selected sample demonstrates a transformative impulse towards race and sex which is ultimately still contained by the overarching discursive structures within which artists operate.
KW - fanfiction
KW - emo
KW - race
KW - gender
KW - Romanticism
KW - new literacies
KW - digital literacies
KW - fan studies
KW - vampires
U2 - 10.1386/jfs_00044_1
DO - 10.1386/jfs_00044_1
M3 - Journal article
VL - 9
SP - 253
EP - 273
JO - The Journal of Fandom Studies
JF - The Journal of Fandom Studies
SN - 2046-6692
IS - 3
ER -