“#Bughead Is Endgame”: Civic Meaning-Making in Riverdale Anti-Fandom and Shipping Practices on Tumblr
Abstract
In this paper, we seek to understand how shipping and anti-fan practices intersect to create meaningful audience engagement and civic discourse about contemporary social and political issues in the “politics of viewing” CW’s adaptation of Riverdale. By examining tagged posts from January 3, 2017 to June 26, 2019, we elicit how fan-rhetoric operates in a digitally networked environment and interrogate the intra-fan rivalries between shippers, anti-shippers, and anti-fans that underpin the Riverdale fandom on Tumblr. In doing so, we begin to sketch out a taxonomy of shipping-specific anti-fan practices, extending Gray’s work into different types and modes of anti-fandom to consider the role shipping plays within consumption practices, fandom stratification, and the production of civic discourse online.
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Biographies
Emily Burkhardt is a recent graduate from Monash University. She completed a year-long honours research project within the School of Media, Film and Journalism. Her research theorises anti-fandom and the significance of intra-fandom relations to the continued understanding of fandom practices in the digital age. She is also interested in the exploration of fandom beyond conventional media texts, including the importance of fanfiction and real person fandom. She is also interested in writing recreationally, with multiple contributions to Monash University’s online newspaper Mojo (2016–2017) and ‘print/hard-copy Esperanto Magazine (2016–2019), and won the 2019 Most Valuable Contributor award from Esperanto’s editors.
Dr. Verity Trott is Lecturer in Digital Media Research at Monash University. Her research examines digital and online communities often with a focus on the structural and network dynamics with gender and intersectional lenses. She received her PhD from the University of Melbourne where she researched the organisational practices within digital feminist activism. Her work has been published in New Media & Society (2019), Information, Communication & Society (2020) and Feminist Media Studies (2020). She is a member of the Automated Society Working Group at Monash University in which she examines cultures of automation and digital technology.
Dr. Whitney Monaghan teaches in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. Her background is in screen, media and cultural studies and her research has a focus on queer theory, the representation of gender and sexuality on screen and in new forms of digital screen media. She is the author of Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media: Not “Just a Phase” (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). She is co-author of Queer Theory Now: From foundations of Queer Futures with Dr Hannah McCann, and co-editor of Screening Scarlett Johansson: Genre, Genre Stardom (Palgrave MacMillan 2020) with Dr Janice Loreck and Dr Kirsten Stevens.
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Article first published online: June 3, 2021
Issue published: September 2022
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