The genre fandom shaped: new media, emo and gender.

This book explores how online fandom has shaped the definition of emo, with significant implications both for millennial constructs of gender and contemporary fan studies. ‘Emo’, an abbreviation of emotional hardcore, refers to both a music genre and a youth scene notable for its androgynous style and queer performativity. Utilizing the theoretical tools of Foucault and Butler, I will demonstrate fandom’s key role in defining ‘emo’ as a concept and genre after 2001, especially its implications for gender constructions through popular music. In the early 2000s, it was still common for young people to dismiss bands and styles for being ‘gay’, as an insult roughly equivalent to ‘feminine’. By 2017, the spaces in which emo is defined are almost universally queer-positive. Simultaneously, whilst music journalist Andy Greenwald could claim in 2003 that ‘no-one knows what [emo] is’ (Greenwald [2003] 2012, 1-2), a well-developed fandom would indicate otherwise, certainly by the later 2010s. Investigation is required as to how and by what processes this has happened. I reflect particularly on the changing relationship of fan practices with the music industry and trade press: without overstating fandom’s influence or falling into technological determinism, we can chart a trajectory in the invention of modern emo that moves gradually from sites and practices that are more like a broadcast model, towards sites and practices that are more like ‘bottom up’ UGC. This is why I claim that fandom ‘shaped’ the genre rather than ‘made’ it. Discourse is always in flux – signifiers are never closed totally – but it is nonetheless reasonable to posit that the early website MySpace and associated blogs helped establish the terms and boundaries which initiated this discursive struggle, even if many of its users would not have described themselves or their bands as ‘emo’. The book is thus structured around sites with a loosely temporal progression, demonstrating the spread of emo fandom from MySpace origins to LiveJournal, YouTube and Tumblr. I am particularly concerned with three phenomena: ● The expanding possibilities of masculinity and the ways in which these articulations both uphold and compromise White male privilege ● The creative uses fans make of media material as technologies of the self in the new media environment. ● The possibilities web 2.0 affords for the citation and spread of discourse, crossing and redefining the lines of (sub?)cultures that would once have been relatively This book answers Marchart's (2004) call for the reconnection of micro-level and macro- level aspects of socio-political practice in the field of subcultural studies. Further, it contributes to the feminist project instigated by Angela McRobbie (1980), demonstrating the creative uses of male-dominated media by girls and women. Adapting the methodological tools I developed in Fanfiction and the Author (Fathallah 2017), I am concerned to show how fans' creative responses to media resonate in broader culture. In this book, I will argue that at least in certain cases, we need to abandon the idea that the media produce texts and ideologies which fans reshape and adapt - this is ultimately still a reception studies argument. In this research, I have found that rather than taking up and altering discourse of popular media, there is no coherent object called emo before fandom defines it, and that fandom’s definitional work has to some extent been re-uptaken and legitimized by the music industry and trade press. This study will then have significant implications for the changing relationship between fandoms and industry, not only with regard to genre and categorization but definitional and boundary construction in general.