Fans Post

These readings discussed the idea of social media and fandom. Jenkins discusses how fandom has transformed into social media likes and followers and how fandom feeds into gender and race power structures. Fans tend to be more female worshipping males, etc. This reminds me of the love that Crazy Eyes in Orange of the New Black. Crazy Eyes, a black woman named Suzanne is referred to as Crazy Eyes, who almost immediately falls in love with Piper Chapman, the white woman who starts off as the main character. Crazy Eyes discusses how she is so much better than every other woman at the prison, and how she simply has to have her as a girlfriend. She becomes almost creepily obsessed with Piper, but taking a step back from this is the idea of a black woman pursuing a white woman. A black woman hoping to win a white woman’s affection, when she really has no show. I swapped the audio for a voiceover of Uzo Aduba and Jenji Kohan, discussing first how her character goes about being passionate about something, and then how people loved Aduba’s chocolate and vanilla swirl, fangirling all about the song she created, tweeting at her and retweeting all over social media. That being said, OITNB is starting to change the conversation surrounding fangirling narratives, portraying a black woman’s fandom over a white woman, and then additionally how fans were fangirling over a black woman. 

I used a quote from Jenkins discussing the racially segregated nature of fandom, and put it over a clip of OITNB where Crazy Eyes is fawning all over Piper, using iMovie. I then put the quotes in small chunks and had the full quote overlaid in the beginning.