Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

Abstract

Fake Geek Girls offers a timely survey of the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as tastemakers and promotional partners over the past decade as fan culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Through an exploration of the subtle and interconnected ways in which media industries, journalists, and other fans have cultivated an androcentric vision of fan identity and participation, Fake Geek Girls surveys the politics of participation within contemporary fan cultures and reasserts the importance of feminism to fan studies. Fake Geek Girls additionally contends that there are meaningful connections to be made between the recent influx of gendered boundary-policing practices within fan and geek culture and broader cultural pushback against “political correctness” and “social justice warriors” within the growing alt-right and “Men’s Rights” movements.