Mel Stanfill
Biographic Data
| ID | 238445 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mel Stanfill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mel |
| FAMILY NAME | Stanfill |
| SIGNATURE | STANFILL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Central Florida |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8227-1570 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
From Governance Grievance to White Nationalism: A Study of Anti-Moderation Subreddits
Reddit communities like r/DeclineIntoCensorship and r/WatchRedditDie have emerged out of rejection of the platform’s moderation policies. We find that these groups frequently exhibit white nationalist ideologies, often independent of critiques of Reddit governance. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis of highly-engaged posts and comments, our research investigates why governance venues are prominent sites of racism. We find that, firs…
Waving the cancelling wand: Harry Potter fans and the cancellation of J.K. Rowling
The “cancelling” of celebrities is typically understood as a stark, immediate withdrawal of support. However, what happens when cancellation intersects with fandom, known to endure long after artists disappear from the mainstream? This study examines how Harry Potter fans navigated anti-transgender statements made by author J.K. Rowling. Drawing on a 2022 survey posted on Tumblr, qualitative analysis of free-text responses reveals four thematic c…
Don’t catch the woke mind virus: Social justice terminology as meme in the right-wing Twitter ecosystem
Seeking to understand how racist content circulates on Twitter, we identified several repeated phrases, or memes – ‘diversity is a code’, ‘diversity means chasing down’, ‘antiwhites deny white genocide’, ‘genocide in South Africa’, ‘woke go broke’, and ‘woke mind virus’ – that use social justice terminology and span from general conservatism to white nationalism. Despite apparently disparate rhetoric in the memes, they had shared users and topics…
The plausible deniability playbook: How white victimhood narratives evade moderation
Quantifying fandom: Identity, romance, and platform preferences on archive of our own
Fan scholars typically study single fandoms and gain rich insight into their identities and practices, but without systematic study, it has proven difficult to draw broader conclusions about patterns across fandoms. In this study, we attempt to provide a broad systemic analysis of fandom, using a survey of 4874 fans who use the fan fiction posting site, Archive of Our Own. Through our analysis, we examine the interplay of fan identity with their …
Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture
Highlights the importance of considering contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies 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 co…
Making fandom great again: Silencing discussions of racism in reactionary and transformative fandoms
This article examines comments about race, racism, and fandom from the far-right comics fan subreddit r/WerthamInAction and on stories tagged "Don't Like, Don't Read" on progressive fanfiction sharing site, Archive of Our Own. We find significant convergences between the two groups despite their ostensible difference in ideology. In particular, both groups deployed racist stereotypes and resisted re-casting characters portrayed as white in media …
The politics of credit in remix of Japanese popular culture: Between “an 80's Japanese disco floor” and “this remix is worthy of the actual game”
In this article, we examine songs that reuse decades-old Japanese media, in which the Japaneseness is both important and attenuated. While there is clear desire for and pleasure in the Japaneseness of source materials in vaporwave (electronic music featuring manipulated sounds and images from the 1980s and 1990s) and future funk (which commonly samples 1980s Japanese music and speeds it up), actual sources matter primarily as a signifier of Japan…
Mapping Tumblr Through Fannish Homophilies
Using survey data from a 2022 survey of fans that was distributed on Tumblr between February 22 and March 21, 2022, this paper speculatively maps the network of Tumblr. Tumblr is home to fandoms of all kinds, acting as a space where fans can gather, discuss theories, produce fan texts and media, and interact with fanworks, making them one of the key distinctive communities that use the site and a suitable community to investigate the shape of the…
Rock This Way: Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy
Introduction: Rock This Way, or the Shape of Musical NormsThis book is better because of the advice, feedback, conversations, suggestions, and friendship of several people.The Race + IP conference, where I first took some of the ideas in this book for a test drive in 2017 and 2019, was tremendously welcoming of me-even when I couldn't remember off the top of my head that "thou shalt not steal" was used against Biz Markie (I can now, I swear).In p…
“YouTube’s predator problem”: Platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance
YouTube experienced large-scale criticism in early 2019 for predatory behavior toward children on the platform. To address concerns about children’s safety, YouTube acted quickly by demonetizing and deactivating comments on videos featuring minors. In this paper, we analyze both the company’s response to this scandal and how users received that response. We argue that YouTube’s reaction was governance-washing, which presents the appearance of vig…
Debating with Wertham's ghost: Comic books, culture wars, and populist moral panics
Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, contended that comic books could harm youth; it is popularly understood as the impetus for the creation of the Comics Code Authority that limited what could appear in comics. Wertham subsequently became a ‘bogey man’ within the comics community, leveraged to do various kinds of political work. In this paper, we examine social media posts from reactionary fan movement Comicsgate to explore how Wertham…
“Miss Rona Is Really Clapping the White Supremacists”: Black Twitter's Political Humor in Covid-19 Times
As has been widely reported, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately sickened and killed Black Americans. At the same time, however, there is a significant body of conversation on Black Twitter that jokes about the pandemic. This includes tweets that nickname the pandemic as "Miss Rona,” as in “god i need a drink so bad, miss rona i promise i will be good.” Through an analysis of tweets using the “Miss Rona” nickname, we examine how Black Tw…
Not Your Robin Hood: Gamestop and Platform Economics at Play
In January 2021, GameStop and AMC, stocks with no discernable reason for an increase in value, rose abruptly in price. This was soon understood as the result of manipulation by members of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. While individualized stock trading is often framed as equalizing the playing field, everyday people remain second-class participants in the stock market, which quickly became clear as trading was suspended on stocks the Redditors …
An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure
In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of …
Communities of making: Exploring parallels between fandom and open source
Studies of social media frequently focus on the most popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) and fail to consider more unconventional platforms and communities that nevertheless fit the criteria of social media. A comparison of fan communities emphasizing different content structures (Archive of Our Own, DeviantArt, and Fanfiction.net) to open source community platform GitHub can provide insight into the practices of communities of…
Can't nobody tell me nothin: Old Town Road', resisting musical norms, and queer remix reproduction
Old Town Road', a genre-defying song fuelled by proliferating remixes, is a key site to unravel the position of remixes in contemporary popular music and culture. In this article, I examine mainstream press discourse about 'Old Town Road', finding that Lil Nas X's use of remixes to boost the song's popularity was generally seen as smart, while the racial politics of genre were contested but still powerful. Ultimately, the popular conversation aro…
A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises
The past decade or so of media promotion has seen a recurring trope of Fanboy to the Rescue—have no fear, it says, this revered franchise is being taken over by a writer, director, or producer who is a “fanboy.” In this trope—which, following Suzanne Scott, the book discusses in terms of the “fanboy auteur”—the fan credentials of writers, directors, and producers are presented as a guarantee of quality media-making. This is a strategy of marketin…
When, Where, and How Is Digital Sound
This panel’s first author, in discussing podcast archiving, notes that internet archives like the Wayback Machine have had much more focus on preserving visual and text content than sound. Internet Research has similarly traditionally had less engagement with sound than with other forms of digital content. This panel seeks to contribute to ongoing work to bring Sound Studies and Internet Studies into better conversation with each other, taking di…
Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans
My NSFW video has partial occlusion: Deepfakes and the technological production of non-consensual pornography
Although open source software (OSS) lowers barriers to participation, it is also a site of toxic geek masculinity, which can be seen in the emergence of non-consensual fake pornography, or deepfakes. Drawing from studies of non-consensual pornography and past research on gender on GitHub, a popular social coding platform for OSS, we assert that the toxic geek masculinity observed in the deepfakes community is driven by meritocratic ideals and and…
Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary
This special issue explores the intersection of reactionary politics and fandom. Fandom has traditionally been thought of as progressive, but this has been limited and limiting. Moreover, considerations of the relationship between politics and fandom have especially focused on democratization and new media–enabled participation. However, it is important to expand our understanding to other aspects of politicization. This introduction situates the…
Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans
As more and more fans rush online to share their thoughts on their favorite shows or video games, they might feel like the process of providing feedback is empowering. However, as fan studies scholar Mel Stanfill argues, these industry invitations for fan participation indicate not greater fan power but rather greater fan usefulness. Stanfill’s argument, controversial to some in the field, compares the “domestication of fandom” to the domesticati…
Fans of color in femslash
This roundtable discussion brings together a group of fans of color to discuss their experiences specifically in femslash fandom
The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies
Fan studies, as a field, currently does not have a robust engagement with race. Recent years have seen the emergence of some awareness of fan studies’ gaps with regard to race and attempts to fill them. Here, it is argued that it is the whiteness of both fandom and fan studies that encourages this inattention to race. The whiteness of fandom leads to fans refusing to address race as well as actively foregrounding whiteness. Whiteness is also vita…
The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design
This article elaborates a theoretical case for considering new media as productive power, viewing web interfaces as both reflecting and reinforcing social logics. It then details an analytic method for websites – discursive interface analysis – which examines functionalities, menu options, and page layouts for the structures at work within them. The piece concludes with a short, illustrative examination of several official media company websites,…
Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary
This special issue explores the intersection of reactionary politics and fandom. Fandom has traditionally been thought of as progressive, but this has been limited and limiting. Moreover, considerations of the relationship between politics and fandom have especially focused on democratization and new media–enabled participation. However, it is important to expand our understanding to other aspects of politicization. This introduction situates the…
Fandom and/as labor
Editorial providing an overview of the topic of fan studies and labor; and outlining the special issue's contents
My NSFW video has partial occlusion: Deepfakes and the technological production of non-consensual pornography
Although open source software (OSS) lowers barriers to participation, it is also a site of toxic geek masculinity, which can be seen in the emergence of non-consensual fake pornography, or deepfakes. Drawing from studies of non-consensual pornography and past research on gender on GitHub, a popular social coding platform for OSS, we assert that the toxic geek masculinity observed in the deepfakes community is driven by meritocratic ideals and and…
Mods as Lightning Rods: A Typology of Video Game Mods, Intellectual Property, and Social Benefit/Harm
Video game modification, or ‘modding’ – nonprofessionals altering or adding to games – is, in some interpretations of US law, copyright infringement or a violation of end-user license agreements. However, though mods are roughly all equally (il)legal, the industry only sometimes uses its legal power to stop them. In this article, we explore the economic and social factors that impact how video game corporations employ the law in relation to moddi…
(Dis)locating nations in the World Cup: Football Fandom and the Global Geopolitics of Affect
The World Cup, as a tournament that pits national teams against one another, initially seems to be a site where support for sports is tied to nations. However, situating this sporting event at the intersection of discourses of globalization, transnational circulation of capital and populations, and theories of fandom, our examination of diasporic populations found that the choice is not a simple one between ‘origin nation’ and ‘residence nation.’…
Finding Birds of a Feather: Multiple Memberships and Diversity Without Divisiveness in Communication Research
Journal Article Finding Birds of a Feather: Multiple Memberships and Diversity Without Divisiveness in Communication Research Get access Mel Stanfill Mel Stanfill 1Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Communication Theory, Volume 22, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01395.x…
Quantifying fandom: Identity, romance, and platform preferences on archive of our own
Fan scholars typically study single fandoms and gain rich insight into their identities and practices, but without systematic study, it has proven difficult to draw broader conclusions about patterns across fandoms. In this study, we attempt to provide a broad systemic analysis of fandom, using a survey of 4874 fans who use the fan fiction posting site, Archive of Our Own. Through our analysis, we examine the interplay of fan identity with their …
Making fandom great again: Silencing discussions of racism in reactionary and transformative fandoms
This article examines comments about race, racism, and fandom from the far-right comics fan subreddit r/WerthamInAction and on stories tagged "Don't Like, Don't Read" on progressive fanfiction sharing site, Archive of Our Own. We find significant convergences between the two groups despite their ostensible difference in ideology. In particular, both groups deployed racist stereotypes and resisted re-casting characters portrayed as white in media …
Finding Birds of a Feather: Multiple Memberships and Diversity Without Divisiveness in Communication Research
Journal Article Finding Birds of a Feather: Multiple Memberships and Diversity Without Divisiveness in Communication Research Get access Mel Stanfill Mel Stanfill 1Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Communication Theory, Volume 22, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01395.x…
The interface as discourse: The production of norms through web design
This article elaborates a theoretical case for considering new media as productive power, viewing web interfaces as both reflecting and reinforcing social logics. It then details an analytic method for websites – discursive interface analysis – which examines functionalities, menu options, and page layouts for the structures at work within them. The piece concludes with a short, illustrative examination of several official media company websites,…
Fandom and/as labor
Editorial providing an overview of the topic of fan studies and labor; and outlining the special issue's contents
The fan fiction gold rush, generational turnover, and the battle for fandom’s soul
The fan fiction gold rush has met with mixed reactions—embraced by some, decried by others. This demonstrates tensions between older, more communitarian models of fandom and contemporary, individualistic, market-based ones, raising the possibility that generational shifts may result in the crowding out of previous traditions. Fans have often explicitly distanced their use value from exchange value, rejecting mainstream principles through popular …
Where the femslashers are: Media on the lesbian continuum
Some texts are femslashier than others. Drawing on Alexander Doty's argument that television shows with primary relationships between women are "lesbian sitcoms," I argue that media driven by relationships between women are "structurally lesbian media" that generate femslash fandoms
(Dis)locating nations in the World Cup: Football Fandom and the Global Geopolitics of Affect
The World Cup, as a tournament that pits national teams against one another, initially seems to be a site where support for sports is tied to nations. However, situating this sporting event at the intersection of discourses of globalization, transnational circulation of capital and populations, and theories of fandom, our examination of diasporic populations found that the choice is not a simple one between ‘origin nation’ and ‘residence nation.’…
The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies
Fan studies, as a field, currently does not have a robust engagement with race. Recent years have seen the emergence of some awareness of fan studies’ gaps with regard to race and attempts to fill them. Here, it is argued that it is the whiteness of both fandom and fan studies that encourages this inattention to race. The whiteness of fandom leads to fans refusing to address race as well as actively foregrounding whiteness. Whiteness is also vita…
Mods as Lightning Rods: A Typology of Video Game Mods, Intellectual Property, and Social Benefit/Harm
Video game modification, or ‘modding’ – nonprofessionals altering or adding to games – is, in some interpretations of US law, copyright infringement or a violation of end-user license agreements. However, though mods are roughly all equally (il)legal, the industry only sometimes uses its legal power to stop them. In this article, we explore the economic and social factors that impact how video game corporations employ the law in relation to moddi…
Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans
My NSFW video has partial occlusion: Deepfakes and the technological production of non-consensual pornography
Although open source software (OSS) lowers barriers to participation, it is also a site of toxic geek masculinity, which can be seen in the emergence of non-consensual fake pornography, or deepfakes. Drawing from studies of non-consensual pornography and past research on gender on GitHub, a popular social coding platform for OSS, we assert that the toxic geek masculinity observed in the deepfakes community is driven by meritocratic ideals and and…
Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary
This special issue explores the intersection of reactionary politics and fandom. Fandom has traditionally been thought of as progressive, but this has been limited and limiting. Moreover, considerations of the relationship between politics and fandom have especially focused on democratization and new media–enabled participation. However, it is important to expand our understanding to other aspects of politicization. This introduction situates the…
Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans
As more and more fans rush online to share their thoughts on their favorite shows or video games, they might feel like the process of providing feedback is empowering. However, as fan studies scholar Mel Stanfill argues, these industry invitations for fan participation indicate not greater fan power but rather greater fan usefulness. Stanfill’s argument, controversial to some in the field, compares the “domestication of fandom” to the domesticati…
Fans of color in femslash
This roundtable discussion brings together a group of fans of color to discuss their experiences specifically in femslash fandom
A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises
The past decade or so of media promotion has seen a recurring trope of Fanboy to the Rescue—have no fear, it says, this revered franchise is being taken over by a writer, director, or producer who is a “fanboy.” In this trope—which, following Suzanne Scott, the book discusses in terms of the “fanboy auteur”—the fan credentials of writers, directors, and producers are presented as a guarantee of quality media-making. This is a strategy of marketin…
When, Where, and How Is Digital Sound
This panel’s first author, in discussing podcast archiving, notes that internet archives like the Wayback Machine have had much more focus on preserving visual and text content than sound. Internet Research has similarly traditionally had less engagement with sound than with other forms of digital content. This panel seeks to contribute to ongoing work to bring Sound Studies and Internet Studies into better conversation with each other, taking di…
“Miss Rona Is Really Clapping the White Supremacists”: Black Twitter's Political Humor in Covid-19 Times
As has been widely reported, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately sickened and killed Black Americans. At the same time, however, there is a significant body of conversation on Black Twitter that jokes about the pandemic. This includes tweets that nickname the pandemic as "Miss Rona,” as in “god i need a drink so bad, miss rona i promise i will be good.” Through an analysis of tweets using the “Miss Rona” nickname, we examine how Black Tw…
Not Your Robin Hood: Gamestop and Platform Economics at Play
In January 2021, GameStop and AMC, stocks with no discernable reason for an increase in value, rose abruptly in price. This was soon understood as the result of manipulation by members of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. While individualized stock trading is often framed as equalizing the playing field, everyday people remain second-class participants in the stock market, which quickly became clear as trading was suspended on stocks the Redditors …
An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure
In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of …
Communities of making: Exploring parallels between fandom and open source
Studies of social media frequently focus on the most popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) and fail to consider more unconventional platforms and communities that nevertheless fit the criteria of social media. A comparison of fan communities emphasizing different content structures (Archive of Our Own, DeviantArt, and Fanfiction.net) to open source community platform GitHub can provide insight into the practices of communities of…
Can't nobody tell me nothin: Old Town Road', resisting musical norms, and queer remix reproduction
Old Town Road', a genre-defying song fuelled by proliferating remixes, is a key site to unravel the position of remixes in contemporary popular music and culture. In this article, I examine mainstream press discourse about 'Old Town Road', finding that Lil Nas X's use of remixes to boost the song's popularity was generally seen as smart, while the racial politics of genre were contested but still powerful. Ultimately, the popular conversation aro…
“YouTube’s predator problem”: Platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance
YouTube experienced large-scale criticism in early 2019 for predatory behavior toward children on the platform. To address concerns about children’s safety, YouTube acted quickly by demonetizing and deactivating comments on videos featuring minors. In this paper, we analyze both the company’s response to this scandal and how users received that response. We argue that YouTube’s reaction was governance-washing, which presents the appearance of vig…
Debating with Wertham's ghost: Comic books, culture wars, and populist moral panics
Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, contended that comic books could harm youth; it is popularly understood as the impetus for the creation of the Comics Code Authority that limited what could appear in comics. Wertham subsequently became a ‘bogey man’ within the comics community, leveraged to do various kinds of political work. In this paper, we examine social media posts from reactionary fan movement Comicsgate to explore how Wertham…
Mapping Tumblr Through Fannish Homophilies
Using survey data from a 2022 survey of fans that was distributed on Tumblr between February 22 and March 21, 2022, this paper speculatively maps the network of Tumblr. Tumblr is home to fandoms of all kinds, acting as a space where fans can gather, discuss theories, produce fan texts and media, and interact with fanworks, making them one of the key distinctive communities that use the site and a suitable community to investigate the shape of the…
Rock This Way: Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy
Introduction: Rock This Way, or the Shape of Musical NormsThis book is better because of the advice, feedback, conversations, suggestions, and friendship of several people.The Race + IP conference, where I first took some of the ideas in this book for a test drive in 2017 and 2019, was tremendously welcoming of me-even when I couldn't remember off the top of my head that "thou shalt not steal" was used against Biz Markie (I can now, I swear).In p…
Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture
Highlights the importance of considering contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies 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 co…
Sociology (24 works) · Media studies (18 works) · Fandom (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Art (13 works) · Digital Games and Media (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (11 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works)