Fan Studies

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Trans at the Table: Queer Oral Histories of Actual Play Podcast Fandom

Fan Studies

In studying queer and trans fans, I’m continuing in a broad tradition of fan studies work that looks at gender and sexuality. However, existing scholarship on queer fans often assumes a specific kind of media fandom: corporate control, mass-market appeal, perhaps with (sanitized) queer characters. If fans are writing slash fic or drawing trans characters, it’s likely not canonical to the source text. However, Friends at the Table is certainly not controlled by a corporation, and definitely doesn’t queerbait. What would it look like to investigate a heavily queer fandom of a podcast made by a majority-queer cast with attention to queer characters, relationships, and worldbuilding?

While existing scholarship provides excellent starting points, it is not without its faults, especially the subsumption of transgender people under normalizing discourses of sexuality and the refusal of queer fan studies to deal with queerness and race together. Even studies that highlight the uninterrogated whiteness of queer fandom fall back onto narratives of LGBTQ mainstream acceptance and progress without questioning which LGBTQ people have reaped the benefits of visibility and widespread social acceptance. Much as white women are often particularly invested in claiming a marginalization derived from gender while negating the privilege of race, white queer and trans people are also often invested in emphasizing their experiences of gender and sexuality while eliding their race. Such blind spots exist in fan culture and fan studies unless actively contested.

One strategy for contesting the negation of race, class, and marginalizations beyond (often cisgender) queerness in fan studies is expanding the canon of the discipline. I take special inspiration from Rebecca Wanzo, who argues for the expansion of the academic tradition of fan studies to include African American cultural criticism as a way to destabilize the “romanticization of fan exceptionalism” (1). Wanzo identifies how race is typically neglected in fan studies because it troubles the idea that fandom is a chosen opposition to the norms of cultural consumption, something inherently radical. These arguments, Wanzo notes, assume that white fans experience the oppression of capitalism, patriarchy, and cissexism in the same way that Black fans and other fans of color do—and white fans do not. While queer fans, even white cis ones, certainly experience oppression and alterity, Wanzo’s specific critique is of the uninterrogated whiteness of such fans, who sometimes seek to claim an unquestionable alterity despite their privilege.

A study of queer fans is not always a queer study of fandom, especially when such studies do not engage with the structuring logics of race, class, queerness, and media. Though more recent studies have questioned the construction of fandom as an inherently oppositional and marginalized stance, many studies do not trouble the constructions of fandom as a binary category, with clear lines between fan and average consumer and between fan and media producer. Increasingly, media corporations have sought to harness the buying power of a sanitized, normalized fan—to be a fan is to be a reliable consumer, eager to buy T-shirts and movie tickets. Rebecca Wanzo writes that “if fandom is oppositional, it is not just about being in opposition to normative modes of consumption but also about being in opposition to normative fans” (2), and queer fans are not automatically exempt from such calls to capitalist consumption on the basis of non-normative gender and sexuality. Instead, queer fans can become a market to whom corporations increasingly appeal. A queer study of fandom should pay attention to such constructions of fans and fandom, not take for granted the categories of queer or fan, interrogating oppositionality with attention to the specific conditions of a media text’s production.

Fan studies encompasses a wide variety of approaches and objects of study, yet it has tended to focus on TV and TV-based understanding of broadcasting, reception, and reworking/transformation (3). However, actual play podcasts cannot be understood solely on these terms, especially because of their use of roleplaying games to structure narrative. On a fundamental level, actual play podcasts are recordings of gameplay. In fact, the term derives from forum posts on websites like RPGnet that reported not just the play but the experience of play, contextualizing conversation and criticism in play reports. While some were conversations or critiques driven by abstract theories of games, culture, and politics, others were updates for people following along. This history of actual play as not simply a record of gameplay but a contextualized, criticized, and/or theorized record of gameplay aligns the medium well with critical game studies. To think about actual play podcasts and Friends at the Table, fan studies alone will not suffice.

1. Rebecca Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies,” Transformative Works and Cultures 20 (September 15, 2015): para. 2.2, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0699.

2. Wanzo, para. 2.2.

3. Fan studies also focuses on various serial properties in films and comics; however, these serial properties (for example, Harry Potter, the Marvel Universe, and the Star Wars universe) are televisual in their seriality and their association with large corporations—and the effects both seriality and corporate control have on their medium and message.

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