ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a viral Twitter thread from October 2020 in which Marvel fans debated the quality and political significance of a scene from Avengers: Endgame that highlights a number of Marvel’s female superheroes. Comments formed a complex reception matrix that used gender and affective reactions to the scene to construct political statements about the role of identity politics in popular culture. Many users framed supposedly rational, critical interpretations of the scene as inherently superior to emotional or affective responses, and posited that those fans who enjoyed the scene (often young people and women) were naïve and unintelligent. Some fans co-opted feminist language to criticize those fans who enjoyed the scene, which in effect framed fans of hegemonic identities (i.e., cishet white males) as the most proper and intelligent audience members. This paper uses theories of affect, gender, and feminist critique to analyze a sample of fan comments. This discussion shows how social media shapes both political discourses and fan identities.

摘要

本文分析了 2020 年 10 月的一条病毒推特帖子，漫威粉丝在该帖子中讨论了《复仇者联盟：终局之战》中一个场景的质量和政治意义这突出了漫威的一些女性超级英雄。评论形成了一个复杂的接收矩阵，使用性别和对场景的情感反应来构建关于身份政治在流行文化中的作用的政治陈述。许多用户认为对场景的理性、批判性解释本质上优于情感或情感反应，并认为那些喜欢场景的粉丝（通常是年轻人和女性）是天真和愚蠢的。一些粉丝用女权主义语言来批评那些喜欢现场的粉丝，这实际上将霸权身份的粉丝（即西施特白人男性）视为最合适和最聪明的观众。本文使用情感、性别和女权主义批评理论来分析粉丝评论样本。