Fans and Affect: Supernatural, Seinfeld and the Mad Scientist

When I was 9 years old, I had just started at a new school, in a new city and with new people. At that age, they still have show and tell in school. I could think of nothing else but to share my collection of the babysitter club books. I remember setting them down on the table at the front of the room and not much else.


I'm at the point of reconsidering one of my reoccurring narratives. I believe that I am not the type of person who can be considered a fan. I'm not fan because I don't throw myself wholeheartedly and unabashedly into anything - I'm not a fanatic. It's not in my character to be non-skeptical about anything. In everything I do, there is a moment of doubt, which I always associated with distance.

I'm beginning to realize that my image of fans have been very much associated with the negative representation of them in the media and also the rather hypocritical stance in academia that dictates fandom as unprofessional.

The negative representation of fans is pervasive and remarkably gendered. It harkens back to an old association of good ole Freud between women and hysteria. The fan is hysterical to the point of losing control of one's body and actions. One of the first representations of fans came alongside the Beatles' wave of popularity. The image of a Beatles' fan is overwhelming female and hysterical. Footage of the Beatles arriving a new place or venue is often accompanied by the image of a mass of female fans, crying and screaming. I was always fascinated by these images but could never identify with them. My public face is far too stoic to engage in mass emotion.

A more recent representation of the fan comes from the TV show, Supernatural. Supernatural has a complex relationship to its incredibly active fan base - a relationship that sometimes ends up appearing in the show, and even formed one of the threads for a season's narrative. I've only watched up to the 7th season, so I can't speak to later appearances of fans. The fans that appear in Supernatural are presented as defective in some manner. They are often losers, who have in some way a social deficit that they replace with Supernatural. Becky is a clear example of the female, hysterical fan, who uses the show as a replacement for her inadequate reality. She eventually tricks the character, Dean, into marrying her. Her neediness and love for the show are depicted as abnormal and even monstrous. While she redeems herself in the end by behaving correctly, it involves denying herself the life that she wants.

This is not to say that there are no examples of male fans. Another episode in Supernatural features two male fans at a fictional Supernatural fan conference. Yet, the two male fans are depicted as less attractive and less competent than the two main characters from the show.


Similarly, in an episode of Seinfeld called "The Facepainter" being too much of a fan is looked upon with derision. Although all characters of the show are often shown as being sports' fans, their involvement consists mainly of wearing merchandise or watching their team play. When Elaine's boyfriend paints his face and expresses excessive emotion at a game, this is considered to be abnormal behaviour and requires a correction on the part of the girlfriend. The joke on her is that he responds incompletely to her correction by channeling this emotion into another form.

Where are all the positive depictions of fans? Is this why I hesitate to identify as a fan, because I don't want to be stereotyped as one of those hysterical, female fans or as abnormal? Or is it just that I don't want to be considered unprofessional.



Most academics could probably be considered closet fans. I can't speak for other areas, but in the humanities, our research focus is shaped in some way by our personal interests. Identity and research are often bedfellows (but not always). Otherwise, I believe, it would be difficult to find the motivation to spend all that time thinking about it. Sometimes, it occurs the other way around. You'll have to spend time with a topic or author and then you become a fan of it.



I wonder sometimes that if the ant-intellectualism in the broader publics is in part fueled by what is considered an abnormal, obsessional quest for knowledge. Is not the mad scientist, the fan gone academic? He (and they are mostly hes) are the monstrous reflection of the academic who is driven by an obsessive quest for knowledge. The one difference between the fan and the mad scientist is that often the mad scientist is denied emotion to the point of being emotionally cold and inhuman. At other times, the emotional register is also extreme, cue the maniacal laughter...

To that little girl, who liked her books enough to share with the world. It's okay to be a fan.  It's also okay to dare for more than just checking off the "like it" box. To really love it, excessively.

Ford and Schadenfreude: I am not the essence of good.

Sometimes, I would call myself evil. Yes. Evil. Today, the monstrous me reared its head with ram's horns and mehyed. My evil self is also a goat who likes to eat ice cream every day and drink copious amounts of alcoholic cider.

I wasn't sad when they announced today that Rob Ford had a tumour. In fact, there was more than a glimmer of Schadenfreude. My first thought wasn't well wishes. I thought, "maybe, just maybe, this will keep him from campaigning and we won't have another 4 years of Ford." After announcing to my husband that Ford had a tumour, I also told him that I am evil. Unsurprised he answered, "that's not good."

I may have been evil in other situations. Or perhaps a better word for it would be antisocial. I so badly want to be that nice girl, when really I tend to more of an acerbic wit (and people wonder why I am so quiet - I just don't want to alienate everyone by saying what I really think).



There was a particular uncomfortable situation just two weekends ago when we went to pick up Oliver from his grandparents house. I have rather strong beliefs about food and I often disagree strongly about how they feed both Oliver and his cousin. Not to get into details, I bit my tongue until it turned blue and started to affect the colour of my face. I may have appeared hostile (while trying to seem nice), but at least I didn't confirm their suspicions of my evil nature. Or my conflicted nature - words cannot express my gratitude at having a week of being child-free (but that's for another post).



I suspect my mask of niceness is somehow linked with my obsession with what people think of me. It is starting to fade a bit as I get older, but it's still there. I want people to like me - I generally like them. That's why I don't outright tell people that they're bad parents, bad artists, or just generally off their rocker. Unfortunately I have a face like glass and they probably can tell anyways. Ooops.



It's also why I didn't approach Ford when I saw him on the street at the Cabbage town fest last weekend. I was afraid what would come out of my mouth and also afraid he would brush off the criticism with his own blind delusions of grandeur (not to be confused with the French word for large). Besides, he had a little group of admirers circling around his own orbit and reinforcing his deluded sense of self. It's no wonder.

Hidden Hate: A Supposed Non-Conformist Confirms Traditional Gender Roles

I'm appalled and I feel betrayed. I continually attempt to think the best of the many Russian men I know and often disappointed by their beliefs regarding gender roles. This weekend I was confronted with a particularly heinous example. 

I married a Russian man with my eyes wide open and have been often impressed with his progressive views on femininity and masculinity. He sees nothing wrong with expressing affection for his son and performs various household chores. In essence, he is logical to the extreme and has a flexible mind, resulting in openness to otherness. Knowing him, I hope that other Russian men are capable of his strength and beauty.

I am often wrong. Sitting around the campfire this weekend, I expressed pride in the role he plays as an excellent and supporting husband and father. A Russian man responded, "so you're under her heel," in Russian so I wouldn't understand. At some other point, he also implied that my husband's loving behaviour toward his son is unmanly. On the drive home, my husband told me all of this as we were discussing the trip.

It's now clear to me why that Russian man repeatedly expresses wonder at the fact that a Canadian woman has married a Russian. Why would we want to be with a man, who thinks that his wife should do all the housework and take care of the kids while being the principle breadwinner. What is his contribution to the relationship and to the home. And more importantly, how can he declare that he's a non-conformist, when he clearly conforms to century old misconceptions on the abilities and roles of women.

You may wonder why I have couched this in terms of Russian versus Canadian. I am not fond of generalizing, but gender and the cultural differences between Canadians and Russians is a topic that often comes up saddled with a rather ugly form of misogyny. Behind that surprise at a Canadian woman married to a Russian man is often the question of why would a Russian man be with a Canadian woman. Within an integrated Canadian society, Russian men have little of the same unjust rights and expectations that they would have in a segregated Russian community. 

Is that why so many Russian men living in Canada choose to be with Russian women? Do other cultures that have similar repressive views of women also mostly choose women who have been cultured to conform to their expectations?

In 2011, I watched the Russian film, Elena, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev that encapsulates the dominating perception of women in Russia. A business tycoon marries his nurse whose rights as a wife remain essentially the same as a housekeeper. When learning that she won't be provided for after he dies, she takes drastic measures out of desperation. Jim Hoberman opens his review of the film as a "vivid evocation [...] of Moscow’s contemporary society." 

While he focuses on the class divisions, there is also a limited image of gender identity. The two main female roles, the nurse-wife and the tycoon's daughter, represent two main stereotypes of women in Russian society. One sees women as subservient to men and expected to take care of all the household duties. The other sees women as extremely attractive playgirls, whose purpose in life is to spend their husband/father's money. Another smaller voice whose power is equivalent to her class is evoked in the wife of the nurse's son. Her unplanned pregnancy and dependence on her mother-in-law's handouts reflects the lack of power she has over her body and her finances.



The encounter I had this weekend with one man's derogatory view of equality in praxis confirms for me that feminism is far from being a dead issue. I feel I have no choice but to become an ironic man-hater. As Jess Zimmerman, the editor of the magazine Medium explains, "It's inhabiting the most exaggerated, implausible distortion of your position, in order to show that it's ridiculous."  Maybe the only way to fight misogyny is with irony.

Disturbing Categories: Plants in Peru.

Even more than two months after my dissertation defense, there is one question from a reader that still niggles at me and has to do with our fundamental relationship to plants. The question asked me to reimagine the way I speak about plants - to break apart the framework that we use to understand our relationship to plant, and possibly revolutionize culture studies or to be specific film and lit studies. I was looking for that answer when I visited Peru this past June, and am still far away from answering it.

Two words cropped up in the defense. One, "tool," was mistakenly used by me as I searched for a better one. The second, "medium," was mentioned by a professor in German studies to describe one of the ways nature was integrated in poetry by the Romantics. As a "tool," the plants in stories become objects, instrumentalized and existing only for our purpose. I couldn't have stated it in a way I believe in less. As a "medium," the plant becomes a conduit for a message, an expression of another, but still less of an agent. And after writing so long about plants, I want to see and speak about plants as beings rather than tools or media. 

Yet, what is this other way of thinking?

True to my nature, the one museum I was excited about visiting concerned plants. The Plants of Cusco Museum (Museo de Plantas Sagradas, Mágicas, y Medicinales) uses the appeal of hallucinogenic and narcotic plants to draw in visitors.

The room on Ayahuasca brew (Banisteriopsis caapi vine and either leaves from Psychotria genus or Justicia pectoralis) did attempt to replicate the effects of the drug through an overlay of a jungle photograph with an image illustrating the hallucinations. According to the exhibit, the effect of the plant with the guidance of a shaman is to effectively reveal a second nature hidden to our sober senses.

With or without the help of a shaman, this experience is now available to Westerners and it becomes another item to be checked off the psychedelic bucket list.

The room on the role of the coca plant in Peruvian culture was far more educational as it traced a far more integral role of coca leaves than what is portrayed in popular media representations. Used in trading by indigenous peoples, the plant actually contributed to the health and well being of rural farmers by allowing them to obtain food otherwise inaccessible. The coca plant also had a social role as a ritualized greeting. The emphasis on cocaine trafficking rather than the medicinal properties and the cultural meaning of this plant has vastly reduced its significance for those of us who really only come to know the plant through its cultural distillations. Just as the coca plant is reduced to one alkaloid to produce cocaine, our North American understanding is limited to one perspective.

The tour guide at the Lima ruins was quite right to be proud of the plant and its availability in Peru. It's common to find coca tea, coca candy and coca chocolates in gift shops. Yet, this tourist version of the plant has once again limited it to a product.

The museum was about far more than just Ayahuasca and Coca. On one little table tucked away at the back, there were two heavy books on plants and their common usage. Many of the plants listed there were in the process of being studied and some of their traditional uses had been proved or disproved.

These books represented to me a relationship to the environment that can't be measured even as they spoke in quantitative language. The knowledge had been gathered over many generations and over many encounters and cannot be fully distilled into a book. The categorical breakdown of the plants according to measurable criteria was once again just one view of plant but once I reflected on the books, I saw a glimpse into an experiential relationship with plants between the categories.

It is best encapsulated by the differing relationship to plants between my mother-in-law and me. She can walk along the street and see who the plants are through her experience with them that is best described as familiarity. I count the points on the leaves and struggle to later identify them in a book.

To understand a plant, I wonder if the first step is not to experience it as living.