fandom, art, & politics for propaganda prosumerism John Carter McKnight fan studies network Conference September 2014

“beauty saves the world” is a case study of the “Natalia Poklonskaya” meme from early 2014 in which a Crimean prosecutor became an object of fandom and propaganda

it’s a case study of fan practices as a transformational element in political imagery – fan art and memes enabling “propaganda prosumerism” -

this case raises questions for our understanding of the borderlands between fan studies & political communication -

and challenges notions that use of the tools of pop culture = depoliticization suggesting rather that politics, pop culture, and fannish practices are complementary and sometimes inseparable

let’s start with memes -

created with awareness of each other a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, or stance created with awareness of each other circulated, imitated, or transformed via internet by many users (“socially constructed public discourses”) Shifman, L. (2014) Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press

“a new vernacular that permeates many spheres of digital and non-digital expression”

“whereas the viral comprises a single cultural unit…that propagates in many copies, an internet meme is always a collection of texts.”

or, a conversation across content, form, and stance

one of the messages of the meme is the value of participatory culture itself – this has major (under-examined) implications for the study of conservative memes.

some memes are readily understandable, while others require extensive literacy in a range of cultural vernaculars.

Natalia Poklonksaya - a story goes viral

March 11, 2014 press conference

first tweet in Japanese three days later: “Crimea’s new attorney general, oh oh oh”

by March 16, manga-inspired fan art begins to spread across the Japanese art site, Pixiv (similar to Western DeviantArt)

first article in western pop-culture media, March 19

Major Western media coverage by March 20. Note, the. story Major Western media coverage by March 20. Note, the *story* is viral, but the *art* is a meme. From here we’re going to look at the evolution, interpretation, and remix of the meme in a specifically ideological context.

- and then memetic

We begin with Japanese uptake of it, exclusively via manga-style art creation,

then classic Western memefication of the Japanese manga-style art,

cosplay,

or memefied commentary on cosplay.

but after displaying the depoliticization expected of memetic imagery - but I want to focus on what happened to the meme *after* its expected translation from a local vernacular into a global meme

- the meme is repurposed and re-politicized in the Russia-Ukraine conflict a story that, if not unique, isn’t well-known in social media scholarship, and may have ramifications on a much wider scale.

13 million hits for an anime video portraying Poklonskaya as a paladin, using both manga-inspired imagery from the Japanese origin of the meme and a (re-) politicized context.

“compare and contrast” becomes a theme in pro-Russian usage

for internal use only – a Russian memetic vocabulary drawing from Soviet and Imperial iconograpahy

media scholarship sees “depoliticization” as a natural outcome of memes’ reliance on a pop-culture vocabulary -

yet the Poklonskaya story suggests that depoliticization led to a virality that in turn enabled greater weight and spread to propaganda uses

In the new “Polite Alphabet” introduced in Siberian schools: “Bravery”

meanwhile, Poklonskaya continues as a political actor – and a meta-commenter on her own memefication

and is thus simultaneously depoliticized celebrity, raw material for memes, and controversial political actor

“internet memes assume a new role in deliberative processes, providing a polyvocal ‘meeting space’ between opposing camps” Shifman, L. (2014) Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press

if so, that raises questions about the borderlands between fan studies and political communications -

can fan studies help in analyzing political uses of social media? (how) are fannish practices used in political discourse? can nationalisms/ideologies be read as fandoms? how are political figures like objects of (anti-) fandom?

coming soon #indyref: participatory democracy and the values of meme culture “Not Your Waifu, Huilo: Contested Masculinity in Social Media Imagery of Vladimir Putin as (Anti-) Celebrity” Otherness & Transgression In Celebrity & Fan Cultures – Aarhus University, November 2014

thank you! j.mcknight@lancaster.ac.uk @john_carter johncartermcknight.com lancaster.academia.edu/JohnCarterMcKnight