Screaming, Crying, Writing Up: Literary Music Journalism Books as a Legitimization of Contemporary Fangirl Practices

ABSTRACT

In light of the increased commercial awareness of fangirl culture in the last decade, this article critically analyses three books written by prominent woman music and culture journalists: Fangirls by Hannah Ewens (2019), Larger Than Life by Maria Sherman (2020), and Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany (2022). Examining book content as well as promotional author interviews in the music press, I explore themes of legitimacy, emotionality, and academic capital, and consider how authors re-position both fangirls and themselves as “knowledgeable” within participatory music culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Fangirls
• fandom
• music journalism
• feminism
• cultural capital
• literary non-fiction

Introduction

In April 2017, Harry Styles gave an interview to Rolling Stone, his first solo press engagement since his band—British pop juggernaut One Direction—had announced their hiatus. Interviewed by film director and journalist Cameron Crowe, the singer described his excitement to release a solo album, his famous flings, and his views on his sizable female audience, the young women who had propelled him and his bandmates to record-breaking popularity:

Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music—short for popular, right?—have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy?…Young girls…They’re our future…They don’t act ‘too cool.’ They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick (qtd. in Crowe).

Harry Styles has done several notable interviews since, but it is this quotation which has become eulogized in contemporary fan canon, mirroring the sentiment of a similarly beloved tweet by music critic Jessica Hopper, “Suggestion: replace the word ‘fangirl’ with ‘expert’ and see what happens.” In the age of social media and self-conscious online self-representation (Thumim), fangirls are attempting notable reclamation of the term, fighting back against misconceptions of their superficial engagement with popular culture. Though women are amongst the earliest adopters of the internet for fannish purposes (Bury), their pioneering activities of organized appreciation, fan fiction, or creative activism have broadly been dismissed as hysterical or reductive (Hannell), not in line with the “serious” musical appreciation—or journalistic criticism—that boys and men have been positioned to provide.

Women’s engagements in music more broadly have also been historically blockaded, with female performers sexualized, siloed, or otherwise dissuaded from fully participating in “boys’ spaces.” With boys’ spaces seemingly covering everything from music forums and concert spaces right through to university production courses and newsrooms (Born and Devine; Geertsema-Sligh and Vos), women and girls’ participation in popular music has been regarded as immature or idealistic, leaving them “having to work twice as hard” to be taken seriously (Bayton 3).

Bolstered by the advent of digital-era feminism, however, a slow sea change in the reputation of both fangirls and women working within the industry has generated broader discussion. Online fan communities, for example, have become increasingly politicized, reflecting their awareness of how fans drive both artist output and performance of social conscience (Dean; Coscarelli). Encouraged by the events of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, music magazines have sought to diversify their staff, taking greater advantage of specialized freelancer expertise (Dolber et al.). Alongside enduring appetites for nostalgic retrospectives (Fischer) and the rise of TikTok’s “BookTok” communities (James), the stories of female music practitioners have thrived within this environment, leading to what feels like a “current glut of music books” (Hann).

But fangirls don’t just want to read about women rock stars: they also want to hear about how they helped to make them. To illustrate the way in which the identity and political power of the fangirl has been reclaimed in the digital age, I focus on the contents, positionality, and media reception of three “fangirl” books by three prominent female music journalists: Hannah Ewens, Maria Sherman, and Kaitlyn Tiffany. Recognizing that these women at times self-identify as fangirls themselves, I consider the way in which they respond to (and champion) the idea of the fangirl as an under-appreciated arbiter of expert knowledge. By extension, I explore how they themselves are “written into” being experts as professional women, creating space for greater recognition of “feminized” forms of journalistic writing. I position these texts as encouraging signs of an appetite for women’s previously untold stories in music and reiterate—like Paula Hearsum before me—the great potential that is afforded when “expert” fans, scholars, and journalists meet.

The Public Rise and Reputation of the Fangirl

The study of fangirl culture is visible across many strands of media scholarship. Early feminist media scholars often found ways to engage with fan studies as a means of exploring “decades of cultural disparagement” (Hannell 4) toward young women’s leisure pursuits (Ang; McRobbie). In the field of musicology, there has been significant work on female fandom through the phenomenon of “Beatlemania” (Ehrenreich et al.; Feldman-Barrett), “teenyboppers” (Wald and Gottlieb) or artist-specific appreciation (Trier-Bieniek). However, given that fangirls are often read as “immature and undiscerning” (Andrews and Whorlow 255), little space has been afforded to what happens when fangirls grow older (Vroomen), or professionalize their interests, finding ways to not only continue their fandoms, but to use their increasing platform to unapologetically champion the idea of fandom itself. These digital-era “journo-fans,” as I call them, hold significant similarity to the well-established aca-fan (Hills), explored later in this paper.

In its traditional context, Sandvoss describes fandom as an act of repeated consumption, often resulting in quite strong feelings of personal investment that manifest through acts of collection or community participation. The fangirl, then, may be thought of as merely a gendered specificity. However, my reading of fangirls also recognizes that girls are often deeply aware of the way in which their fandoms have historically been labeled as less serious than boys’ interests are, deciding to “acknowledge the devaluation of the feminine but embrace it anyway” (Cann 167).

This devaluation of the feminine is a vital distinction. Given that the label of “fangirl” is often associated with a certain degree of guilty pleasure, Gerrard notes that the fangirl (and to some extent, the corresponding fanboy) overlaps significantly with the “groupie” and the “shipper,” rooted in stereotypes of sexuality and constructed romance which assume that the fangirl is more interested in the idol than the art. As such, the fangirl has historically been ridiculed for her “uncontrolled, socially unacceptable desire” (Stanfill 118), portrayed as lesser than a “real” (i.e. male) fan who connects with an artist on the grounds of more straightforward musical appreciation. Cynicism regarding the participation and motivations of female fans, or fangirls, is especially common in genres of music typically coded as male-dominant, such as heavy metal, where it is assumed that “women are incapable of understanding the music as an art form” (Hill 1). But as the Harry Styles quotation which began this article alludes, the opinions and plain-stated purchasing power of fangirls have started to become too visible for even the most hardened of musical misogynists to ignore. While it should not be forgotten than feminized fan activity and collectivism existed long before the internet, fannish language and praxis have become symbiotic with the way that social media and internet culture is experienced, offering up “the ability to generate, dissect, and recirculate various celebrity and popular culture paratexts” (McCann and Southerton 59). This digital focus looms large in fangirl discussion, positioned as both its greatest attribute and its deepest form of cultural agitation.

Although media reports on modern fandom tend to focus on the activities of particularly invested “stans”–scorned for their vicious infighting, defensive doxing, and unobjective parasocial relationships with idols (Monroe)—self-defined fangirl culture often emphasizes more positive forms of (self-)expression and cultural exchange (Baker; Williams; Harrington). Fangirls, writes Lammers (368), can become valuable teachers, engaging in highly useful forms of digital literacy, while Zhuang, Huang, and Chen provide compelling evidence for how fangirls—“originally a non-politicized group”–used their networks of fannish hashtags and emoji-coded language to mobilize significant anti-authoritarian protest in China, “a departure from previous male-led cyber-nationalist movements” (53). This blend of devotion, knowledge, and creative problem-solving, argues Vice journalist Lauren O’Neill, is exactly why fangirls should garner more respect:

Certainly, it’s armies of mostly female fans who do so much to keep artists afloat, buying tickets and merchandise, and leading campaigns to get songs to the tops of charts. … More than that, however, doubters forget that when you devote so much of yourself to something, you’re going to end up knowing an awful lot about it. (O’Neill)

Female Music Journalists

Though feminist music and media scholars openly recognize that “efforts to map women’s participation in the music industries have been hampered by a lack of data” (Leonard 1), McLeod notes that “women rock critics have increasingly written about, and taken seriously, subjects that many male critics have repeatedly written off” (51). Throughout the 20th and 21st century, there have been various women writers who have established careers of notable character and access: Disc magazine’s Penny Valentine, the New Yorker’s Ellen Willis, and the NME’s Julie Burchill among them. But despite these leading figures, aspiring female music journalists have still had to contend with an industry that is “generally masculinist in tone, geared towards the idealized male reader” (McLeod). Historically, this has generated a self-fulfilling prophecy: a lack of female writers means a lack of role models, and a tendency for women to “increasingly [choose] the professions that are deemed appropriate for their gender” (Fröhlich 73).

The assumption made by Post that “men have more leisure time” to engage with music also links to barriers attributed to motherhood (38). According to Lindberg et al. “women tend to stop writing in their mid-thirties, either to raise families or because music becomes irrelevant to them” (265). This stereotype has influenced recruiting editors, who argued that it was a “waste of time” to train women who would one day quit to take care of their families (Steiner 44). Similar assumptions can be found in the derogatory way that female musicians tend to be “written off” in the music press as they grow older (Gardner). Women are thus dismissed both as young fans, and as older professionals.

While other scholars consider the innumerable evidence which demonstrates how sexist writing on female musicians can be (McLeod; Whipple and Coleman), I note that “the discourses employed in music journalism exclude women from serious discussion both as musicians and as fans” (Davies 301). First-person reports from women journalists suggest that they are frequently sent out to interview women artists with the belief that this is the only beat in which they can offer value (Rogers), only to be accused of bias if the written results prove to be “too positive” (McDonnell). Similarly, if a female writer does appear to show good rapport with a male artist, it is assumed that there must be an element of sexual attraction, connecting back to earlier discussions of “fangirl” as a pejorative term. As Lecaro writes, “getting mistaken for a groupie is pretty much a rite of passage for most women who write about music. … women in particular must make extra efforts to hide the giddy fan inside in order to be taken seriously.”

Some hope arrived with the turn of the millennium. By 2013, feminist think pieces which discussed the poor representation of women were being commissioned more readily, not least in response to the release of Robin Thicke’s hit song “Blurred Lines,” and the resulting debate about rape culture and musical misogyny across popular culture (Horeck). Similarly, the rise of blogging (and micro-blogging) culture (Jetto; Mengede) created new opportunities for writers to challenge the traditional structure of writer hierarchy. Where previously a career in music journalism relied heavily on being friendly with the right “old boys’ network” (McLeod), web 2.0 allowed people to not only consume more music than ever before, but to self-publish their opinions without editorial constraint. This is an area of particular use to women: the platform of X (formerly known as Twitter), while far from a feminist utopia (Rego), may be thought of as a space where women (and in particular women of color and/or lower social mobility), have been able to demonstrate their writerly voice to a mass audience, serving as a credible journalistic CV.

Poptimism has also helped women writers, directly challenging the idea that pop music is not worthy of serious critical attention. As Longhurst wrote in 1995, “pop music has often been seen as ‘immature’ or superficial because of its implied audience among young women” (107). Where “glossy pop” publications such as Smash Hits leant into the lightheartedness of their readership by having fun with the “cartoon-like” characteristics of popular idols (Forde 27), “serious” music titles tended to avoid covering artists who adhered to pop sensibilities or, in some cases, actively begrudged them, using them as punchlines, and as lowbrow or “sell-out” comparisons. Such industry sentiment can now be thought of as “rockism,” summarized in Sanneh’s often-cited New York Times piece: “Rock bands record classic albums, while pop stars create ‘guilty pleasure’ singles. … If this sounds like you…you might be a rockist.”

A blurring of genre in the 2000s (and the increasing “cultural omnivorousness” of audiences [Barna]) meant that critics and consumers alike were forced to admit that there must be value outside of “a narrow group of primarily white, male guitar players performing primarily for white, male, middle-class fans” (Kramer 591). Under increasing commercial pressures in the digital age, even publications that have broadly prescribed to rockist attitudes have had to show greater willingness to covering whatever sells well, which means paying more attention to the fanbase of the likes of Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, and BTS. The pivot at publications such as Pitchfork and NME toward increased coverage of pop music (and its non-western forms, such as K-Pop or Latin Pop) offered significant opportunities for women to come in as experts, staking their claim in previously under-explored spaces. Whether writing strictly about pop music or not, the spirit of poptimism is essential to the rise in stature of women music journalists, afforded greater space to write about both themselves and female fan audiences.

Positioning the Aca-Fan

As far back as 1997, book anthologies like Liz Evans’s Girls Will Be Boys have attempted to challenge themes of gendered erasure, stating that “female journalists are more than capable of getting their hands dirty,” serving on the “frontlines” of critical moments such as Britpop, riot grrrl, and now internet-era fangirl culture. But in recognizing how women have contributed to participatory cultures, a further tension emerges between music academics and journalists. Hearsum notes that the two professions have a long history of “regarding one another with suspicion,” doubting the respective accessibility or rigor of each other’s work (107). Nonetheless, it stands to reason that both music scholars and music journalists will have come to their profession through personal enjoyment, a desire to make a living from their music interests. In 2002, Matt Hills coined the term “aca-fan,” recognizing the rising amount of scholarship which drew, at least in part, on the researcher’s personal fan attachment to the subject that they were studying. Whilst the difficulties of balancing social closeness and intellectual distance can risk potential bias or confused power dynamic in aca-fan methodologies, scholars argue that such an invested approach carries strengths of inherent insight and sensitivity, “representing an operative link between a large part of the consumer population and decision makers” (Cristofari and Guitton 715).

At present, the idea of a corresponding “journo-fan” faces a greater barrier of intellectual recognition. Nunes argues that “music journalism is relatively devalued within both the fields of journalism and culture” (132), considered a lesser intellectual form than literary or theater criticism which relies upon the “historical knowledge (a sign of education) required to understand the very texts they were critiquing” (Jacke et al.). Whilst perceptions of women writers’ sycophancy may have somewhat improved, there is still a notion that music journalists are ultimately untalented, pivoting to criticism because they are not creative—or formally educated—enough to produce music themselves (Reilly). Writers may engage with some of these classed notions themselves as a matter of self-deprecation (Klein 7), but also feel the brunt of them in modern debates about music criticism’s supposedly depleting value.

While the perceptive decline of acerbic, intellectual “personality” music journalism is lamented in the age of uncertain markets (Forde), the scrutiny borne upon writers who dare to critique popular musicians has become exacerbated in the digital age, where the rise of “stan” culture has emboldened fans to mobilize online and bully critics in the name of defending their idol (Jackson). Women journalists are particularly vulnerable to online harassment, with trolls not only casting aspersions on their credibility but, in some cases, actively threatening their lives (Ferrier and Garud-Patkar).

As Klein notes, popular music critics may only overcome these skepticisms “by consistently displaying their qualifications—proficiency as a writer, breadth of knowledge, and studied judgment regardless of personal preferences” (1). The pressure to perform subject authority is exacerbated not only when writers are female, but also when they are writing about fan culture, already weighed down by accusations of superficiality. As such, the act of producing fangirl literature in book form might be understood as a way of delivering writerly legitimacy. But with significant pressure from fans themselves to deliver the subject fairly and accurately, the female journo-fan takes on a great deal of emotional and technical responsibility, well in line with the intellectual considerations of the aca-fan.

Method and Case Studies

In order to illustrate recent re-appraisals of both the fangirl and the female music journalist position, I point to three books, written by women music journalists who demonstrate significant expertise and investment in the idea of telling young fans’ stories. Fangirls by Hannah Ewens (2019), Larger Than Life by Maria Sherman (2020) and Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany (2022) all take the form of trade/consumer publications, drawing on some academic resources but overall taking a more fluid, journalistic approach. In my discussion, I use a critical approach informed by sentiment analysis, audience studies, and feminist theory, exploring how each writer positions the power of female fandoms, and how they themselves achieve cultural capital by embodying concepts of gendered expertise, a stylistic form of emotional, experiential music writing which can be considered separate to traditional academic fan studies.

Raised on the Isle of Wight, U.K., Hannah Ewens is an ex-senior editor at Vice magazine and Rolling Stone U.K., with music and culture bylines across The Guardian, Dazed, Empire, Kerrang!, and Sunday Times Style. Ewens has also hosted documentaries, podcasts, and panels, while her website lists credentials that cross over with academia: a conference paper on My Chemical Romance and emo fandom at the 2020 Museum of Pop Culture Conference, as well as an MA in Journalism and an MFA in Creative Writing.

Her first book, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture, was listed among both The Financial Times and Pitchfork books of 2019/20. Across ten essay-style chapters that are loosely themed around specific artists (Ariana Grande, One Direction/Harry Styles, Courtney Love), Ewens adopts an investigative approach, meeting with fans in subject-specific environments: concert queues, after meet and greets, anxiously awaiting their idol at airports. She digs into the psyche of their affection, considering the emotionally redeeming qualities of unapologetic girlhood. “From Beatlemania in the early 1960s to the Directioners and Beyhive of today, female music fans have long driven the objects of their affection,” reads its official blurb. “But marginalized fan groups are never given appropriate credit. … Ewens is on a mission to give these individuals their rightful due” (Waterstones).

Based in Brooklyn, Kaitlyn Tiffany is a Canadian staff writer at The Atlantic. Rather than holding a traditional music beat, she also covers stories relating to technology and internet culture. Prior to this, she held staff writing positions at Vox.com, The Verge, and The Cornell Daily Sun, earning a BSc in Communication and Development Sociology from Cornell University.

As a historical recollection of technological change, Tiffany’s book Everything I Need I Get From You is also an argument of How Fangirls Created the Internet As We Know It, told through “an underworld of inside jokes and shared memories” (Macmillan). Drawing specifically on Tiffany’s lived experience as a fan of One Direction, the book uses the band as a vessel for mediations on fan culture, which Tiffany argues has a significant knock-on effect for more widespread political communication, conspiracy theory, and digital innovation.

The final author, Maria Sherman, is based in Los Angeles, where she works as a global music writer for Associated Press. Having studied musical and cultural criticism at New York University, she has previously worked at Netflix, Jezebel, BuzzFeed Music, and various others. Her official biography describes a lifelong love of music, mirroring Tiffany’s affection for One Direction: “If I were in a boy band, I’d be the bad boy. Yes, Harry Styles ruined my life.”

Sherman’s first book, Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, was published in 2020. Sherman’s book is distinct from Tiffany’s and Ewens’s books in that its titular focus is not strictly on fangirls, but rather the boy bands they idolize, tracking an impassioned history of notable groups. Nonetheless, fangirl culture is implicit in Sherman’s conversational style, the frequent nods she makes to the fangirl reader, and the magazine-styled structure of the book, broken into short, visual chapters which draw on personal anecdotes of fangirling practices and demystifying the kind of fangirl lingo that readers may have seen in online community discussion. Sherman positions herself as a fangirl historian in much the same way as her fellow authors, but the book is presented as an “accompanying guide” to boy band fandom rather than a literary meditation on it.

These women are not musicians or professors, nor are they clear-cut memoirists. Instead, their stylistic approaches serve to highlight the positive affordances of longform literary nonfiction within music journalism, and the ways in which this discipline can bridge the gap between traditional academic approaches and fannish appetites for humorous, accessible and culturally reflective texts. By meeting fangirls at their level, journo-fans are uniquely positioned to produce work that engages the reader in a non-hierarchical way, fitting neatly inside the increasing canon of works that engage with pop-culture and women’s interest.

Screaming, Crying, Throwing Up: De-Pathologizing the Fangirl’s Exuberant Expertise

Though they take different approaches, all three authors share a core purpose: to acknowledge fangirl practices and take those cultural contributions seriously. To do this, they legitimize the kind of emotions that female fans may exhibit, challenging the idea that fangirls need always be negatively pathologized as crazy or unwell.

In their early chapters, two of the three authors (Ewens and Tiffany) demonstrate visceral embodiments of fandom by including a well-known anecdote of a One Direction fan who screamed so loudly at their concert that her lung collapsed; a music-related injury only twice before seen in medical record. They also mention Crazy About One Direction, a 2013 Channel 4 documentary which focused on a small sample of intense young fans who viciously trolled the bands’ girlfriends and wrote explicit sexual fanfiction, sparking enormous online pushback from the wider fanbase who felt that they had been unfairly represented. A misogynistic, hysterical portrayal of fandom, Ewens in particular implies that this approach was willfully manipulative on Channel 4’s part: “call[ing] girls crazy and then feign[ing] surprise when they are emotional about it” (41).

Beginning with these examples allows these fangirl authors to offer their own fandom as a form of empathy (see further discussion of author positionality below) and to situate themes of misrepresentation and tone policing, arguing against the suppression of feminine fannish emotion. Like Ewens, Sherman also positions the physical release of fangirling as affirming one’s own sense of identity: when girls or queer fans come together and allow themselves to scream at concerts, she argues that they might “escape from the hegemonic masculinity and other baloney that pervades popular music” (154).

Meanwhile, Tiffany goes one step further in the analysis of bodily function, interviewing both “puke shrine girl”—a fan of Harry Styles who erected signage on a particular stretch of American freeway where the singer had once vomited—and the “Harry Fairy,” a Utah woman who left tiny photoshopped images of Styles as a pregnant person across several of the state’s college campuses. Maintaining her anonymity, the latter fan insists to Tiffany that there was no “profound explanation for the photos,” other than her own amusement at the idea of people finding them (171).

Treated in the music press as an example of deranged feminine behavior, these pastimes are not argued by Tiffany as especially “normal” practice. But she does attempt to see the side of fannish expertise which links to Dare Edwards’s reading of fangirling as “playful, lightly self-deprecating behavior…cognizant of their devalued status” (20). Tiffany argues that female fans often knowingly perform to their heightened stereotype, acting erratically to amuse one another just as much as they are actively trying to get the attention of their favored artists. We might, therefore, consider this as a form of humorously artistic, avant-garde, or even “queered” performance on the fangirls’ own terms (McCann and Southerton), directly challenging conventions of unobjective, passive consumption.

Youthful dramatics and creative whimsy are intertwined with cultural savvy. As Tiffany notes, fandom has become increasingly blurred with commerce in the online age: “consumer brands consider anybody who pays money for the thing they produce a fan” (129). When fans write disturbingly detailed fanfic, celebrate mundane details, or tweet “One Direction ruined my life,” she argues that they may in fact be “wiggling away” from how fandom has been “thoroughly commodified. … Like, ‘let me see you sell back to me my fan fiction about Liam Payne cutting my collarbone out of my body. … good luck with that’” (Parker et al.). Surrealism becomes a way for fangirls to perform parodies of their own excitement, testing boundaries of taste by mocking themselves, each other and any music industry executives who attempt to capitalize upon a fandom without fully understanding (or respecting) its idiosyncrasies.

Despite the media focus on fangirls’ heady emotions and obsessive behaviors, all three authors are quick to note that fangirling links to various forms of pioneering expertise, often breaking news or deciphering new theories much faster than the traditional media can (Ewens 135). In relation to the media, Ewens positions female knowing as an act of resistance, giving the example of emo-rock group My Chemical Romance, and the fans who protested outside the offices of The Daily Mail when the paper portrayed them as a “suicide cult band” in 2008. Interviewing several of the girls who attended, Ewens was captured by the level of organization and compassion: “The day showed that emo fans weren’t all holed up in their rooms, self-harming and being anti-social. … They sang songs that captured happy thoughts; they picked up girls who came alone or in twos and banded together” (96). Where newspapers had heavily implied that this band were preying on their dangerously impressionable female audience, girls demonstrably pushed back against what Ewens describes as a “perfect storm” for sexist, ageist moral panic: “young female fans, dramatic music and mental health” (105).

In exploring expertise, community, and willful self-amusement, all three authors serve to challenge the notion of fangirling as an inherently dangerous or pathological practice. They do also acknowledge the potential pitfalls of fangirl culture—Tiffany, in particular, offers several examples of where some One Direction fans went so far with “conspiracy theory” readings of queer subtext between members that they altered the natural dynamic of the band, creating significant tension within the fanbase. Overly invasive fan behaviors like this are not justified, but the predominant message of all three books is to reassure readers that, in most cases, their emotional exuberance and investment isn’t excessive, or particularly harmful. In fact, fandom can be the very thing that makes life joyful, offering both meaning and welcome distraction. “When I’m doom-scrolling through a timeline full of terrible news and inane bickering, it’s a treat to come across all-caps excitement or an ultra-niche joke,” writes Tiffany (88). “It is the type of thing that can buoy a person.”

The Author as a Fangirl: Emotion, Authority, and Gendered Expression

The use of “I” in Tiffany’s quotation is no accident. When fans can interact with their favorite bands on social media rather than waiting for a journalist to act as an intermediary, they come to expect more from the music press than simple explanations of what the music sounds like. They want more gossip, more insight, and more human stories. In short, they crave what could be described as a feminized form of music journalism. This change of expectation encourages more creative forms of writing and work on areas of fandom that may have once been overlooked.

The use of personal anecdote and emotional disclosure helps these writers to maintain a clear link of affability with their audience. We may note, for example, that at time of writing, Tiffany has 16,000 Twitter/X followers, Sherman 16,600, and Ewens 24,400. All three writers come with extensive bylines and hard-won public standing that not only demonstrates their skill, but also generates their own fanbases, readers who are interested in both their personal and professional lives.

Evidence of a pre-determined audience is important to publishers who aim to sell commercially viable books but, given how readily female authors are accused of lacking the rigor of their male colleagues, author links to fandom must be navigated carefully to convince the reader of their subject authority. Though her desire to write about fans began from a more general interest in internet cultures, Tiffany uses her fandom of One Direction as her central case study. Describing her writing process on the Fansplaining podcast, Tiffany notes a tension between memoir and self-indulgence, not wanting her own experiences to overshadow the integrity of her research process: “It’s really fun to be young and blogging about yourself. … But I have been trying to pull back a little bit more and think a little bit more critically” (Klink and Minkel).

Tiffany’s reflections can be understood in the context of sociological readings of gendered expression. Coates argues that from earliest childhood, girls tend to use language to “interpret accurately the speech of other girls,” creating relations and establishing nuance (160). Women’s natural keenness to interpret others, therefore, lends itself well to elements of music journalism that are “associated with a personal engagement and empathy” (Djerf-Pierre and Lofgren-Nilsson, 79)—features, interviews, and think pieces. This point might be demonstrated even further by Brackstone, literary agent at Faber Books, who have become notable forerunners in work of women’s music literature since publishing Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Boys, Music and, more recently, journalist Jude Rogers’ memoir, The Sound of Being Human. “The male way of writing about music has been quite trainspotter-y, clubby and exclusive,” Brackstone says. “A writer like Jude [Rogers] is the antithesis of that” (qtd. in Garavelli).

Although women writers may have at times felt pressured to adopt a more detached, “macho” tone similar to that of male colleagues (Leonard; Davies; Rogers), the fangirl authors I discuss here often draw on their own experiences of fandom to illustrate their arguments. Complementing Tiffany’s and Sherman’s open affection for One Direction, Hannah Ewens’s book culminates in a full chapter on her fannish relationship with Courtney Love, documenting her experiences of traveling to the U.S. to meet up with other fans from a Facebook fan group, and attempting to get close to a warehouse where Love is rehearsing. Ewens is nervous, but also exhilarated by the thrill of possible proximity: “I could get into huge problems with the team that have allowed me access the following night. But being something of a professional fan means you frequently miss out on the bizarre situations you can get into with other fans” (367).

As professional fans, or “journo-fans,” all three writers are aware of their objective reportage responsibilities. But both within the texts and in promotional interviews, all three authors state that their motivation came from personal interest, a sense of wanting to capture something that they didn’t feel had been probed deeply or emotively enough before. Sherman was also keen to challenge the popular notion that all fangirling begins in pre-teen youth, having herself discovered One Direction in her early twenties: “Finding 1D was exuberant, a feeling I assumed was inaccessible outside of adolescence…I wanted to write something that did justice to the modern boy band because, frankly, it’s absurd that a book like the one you’re holding didn’t already exist” (10–11).

Though Sherman mostly situates her love of One Direction through relatively universal themes of joy and empowerment, both Tiffany and Ewens write in a more detailed way about the individual and emotionally aspects of their fandom. In writing on the moral panic against My Chemical Romance, Ewens considers the way that their music helped her through her own bouts of poor mental health, while Tiffany writes of listening to Harry Styles’ song “Kiwi” whilst processing an abortion, drawing comfort from the pro-choice allusions in its chorus (“I’m having your baby/It’s none of your business”). Attending a Styles concert with her sister, Tiffany finds comfort in noting that even as she has grown older, her fandom remains the same: “I was a virgin at my first One Direction concert…and now I was at a Harry Styles concert as an adult woman who’d just had [what was] … statistically likely to be a common experience. … I felt almost entirely normal and almost exactly like myself” (109–11).

Being so upfront about personal, vulnerable connections to an artist can have methodological benefits. As Walkerdine et al. explain, offering something of yourself to an interview subject can help to encourage them to open up about their own challenging emotions and experiences. In Hannah Ewens’s book, Fangirls, there is a chapter which explores the fandom of pop singer Ariana Grande and, more specifically, how fans rebuilt themselves and their community after a terrorist concert bombing on 22 May 2017, in Manchester, England, took the lives of 22 fans and injured several hundred more.

Describing the bombing as “an attack on girls and young women” (298), Ewens points to the gendered coverage of the event, noting that it was “mostly online opinion pieces by adult women, often with an earnest pro-fangirl slant” who pointed out the misogynistic nature of the attack, rather than the mainstream, male-dominated media. One such tabloid publication, she writes, went as far as to call Grande’s performance into question, indulging in victim-blaming rhetoric: “This was not a space for [young girls], a concert of a ‘woman singing about sex and little else’” (303).

Ewens antidote to this demeaning coverage was to speak directly with the young women who were at the Ariana Grande concert, focusing on the ways in which fandom had given them the courage to continue engaging with popular music. Having sought ongoing permission from these fans’ parents, she spent time getting to know survivors and their families and, in viewing the subject through a feminist lens, was able to reflect on these young people’s enduring fandom as not only bravery, but also as active defiance. “Being involved in the attack galvanized these girls in a community sense…their fandom and their ‘political’ way of existing in the world couldn’t be so easily separated” (318). As she puts it, “revenge exists in every pop concert the girls returned to, every second spent listening to Ariana” (321). By sending the girls pre-published copies (and refusing to have the chapter re-published by “gross” right-wing newspapers who sought to scandalize the subject [Treadgold), Ewens provided a compelling story of emotional maturity, establishing a sense of protective connectivity between writer and subject that was based on empathetic solidarity and knowing.

Refusing to see their emotional and temporal closeness to the subject as a flaw (in the way that feminized forms of writing were once perceived), all three writers claim that they are the right people to write these books not just because they have done the research, but because they have a first-hand sense of the care and protection that fangirls deserve. “I didn’t want a man or a much older woman, for example, to write this book,” said Ewens. “I wanted to write it while all of it was a not-so-distant memory” (qtd. in Cai). Rather than waiting for the fangirl to be canonized after the fact, these writers use their books as living testament to the idea that new musical knowledges are being forged by young women all the time, even from within deeply harrowing circumstances.

Putting the Fun in Fandom: Journo-Fan’s Commercial Capital

Building on Brennan’s claim that “a lot of [music-based] academia tries to evacuate emotion” (111), these authors are unapologetic in the way that they situate themselves emotionally within the text. By offering up so much of the authors, all three books were praised upon publication: Tiffany’s for smartly “contextuali[zing] fandom as a culturewide coping mechanism and creative outlet” (Hess), and Ewens for “approach[ing] her subjects with empathy, validating the importance of these self-made communities” (“Our 15”). Sherman, meanwhile, drew approval not just for her efforts to engage with the under-represented history of nonwhite boy bands, but her dexterous turn of phrase, “strik[ing] a perfect tone between cultural critic and super-fan, simultaneously applying gender theory and jokes that’d land at a comedy club” (Edelstone). Seemingly surprised by her own success, Sherman explained in interviews that though she had always wanted to write a book about boy bands, she hadn’t undergone the normal pitching process: “My editor cold emailed me…which is a bit unusual, I think. I didn’t think I was in a position…I’m still fairly young…but I knew I had to do it. And I’m so thrilled I took the leap” (“Parnassus Books”).

Sherman’s transparency about how the book happened (and self-deprecation about her assumed lack of credentials) offers rare insight into the process, establishing a thematic difference in the way that academic and journalistic nonfiction may be produced. Interestingly, Ewens’s book, Fangirls, initially published in the U.K. in 2019, was re-published by the University of Texas Press in the U.S., suggesting some collapsing boundaries between longform music journalism and popular music studies. But although all three texts make use of key source materials by music, internet, and fan studies scholars, all three fangirl authors are clear in their desire to not be mistaken as academics. In the words of Tiffany, “there hadn’t really been, I felt, a satisfying, non-academic popular press explanation of how fandom and internet culture were intertwined” (Hickey). This gap reinforced her desire to “touch on personal experiences” in order to make her work feel “less speculative or academic” (“Fangirls”). The implication is that academic texts lack the accessibility of the consumer press and are less likely to appeal to fangirl readers.

Sherman is further still from an academic approach, as evident in both her interviews about Larger Than Life, and in its visual format. All three book covers visually engage with the youthful palettes of internet-era fandom, but the heavily-illustrated format of Sherman’s book, with breakout columns and boxed-out anecdotal asides, unlocks a history of boy bands that feels more interactive—maybe even more gleefully girlish—than a traditional academic press might allow, empowering her to use the empathetic close-reading and conversational tone which defines the female journo-fan.

In several instances in the book, Sherman directly points out her position, playfully reflecting on a perceptive tension between academic and journalistic fangirl intellectualism. Before lapsing into some quite complex theory on boy bands and nascent sexuality, she boxes out an “ATTENTION” in blue: “I’m interrupting the regularly scheduled programming to bring you an academic message. … Maybe one day when you’re on a blind date and your match says something stupid like ‘I don’t get why 5 Seconds of Summer are a big deal’, you can school them in a few succinct paragraphs” (24).

Talking directly to the reader, she eyerolls in a conspiratorial, sisterly fashion at the idea that such “schooling” rigor might be necessary for a fangirl to be taken seriously (Robinson 3), but nonetheless navigates several academic texts with effective simplicity. Sherman jokes of being a boy band “professor” (200), though she frequently reminds her audience that she is not the only expert, and that she would love to see other fangirls bring their knowledge to the table. “Some biases are prevalent and unavoidable, and surprisingly, they don’t all rhyme with Scharry Schyles,” she writes. “If that’s not good enough for you, well I don’t know, pal. Write your own book! Then send it to me, because that sounds rad as hell” (15).

Like aca-fans, journo-fans may not wish to self-label as such, feeling that only highlights an unhelpful intellectual hierarchy (Brooker et al.). Instead, writers like Sherman work hard to package their expertise in a friendly writing style, deconstructing academic fan studies back into lay(wo)man’s terms. Knowing what it is to have their interests—or intellect—derided, journo-fan authors do not seek to become gatekeepers themselves and, as in Sherman’s case, reassure the reader that their own fangirl knowledge is just as worthy as that of the “expert” writer.

Such an approach has been very successful. At the time of writing, Sherman’s book is in the production stages of being adapted into a visual documentary, directed by Gia Coppola (Grobar). Though a release date has not yet been confirmed, Superfans: Screaming Crying Throwing Up illustrates her ongoing emphasis on the fangirl-to-professional pipeline, offering living proof of what she writes about in her book: that being a fangirl comes with an impressive amount of cultural power and self-recognition. “We’ve always had the power to write the narrative. And isn’t that magical?” (313).

All Fangirls Welcome? Reflections, Conclusions, and Literary Potential

Once thought of as a pejorative, the label of the fangirl has been reclaimed as an emblem of positivity, a reminder to be unabashed about the popular culture that brings you joy. In highlighting female contributions to musical knowledge, I argue that all three texts have shrewdly utilized three key approaches: subject area (de-pathologizing emotions associated with fandom); personal memoir (offering their own anecdotes of lifelong fandom and feminized journo-fan interest); and journalistic writing style (authoritative, but arguably more fun and personable than academic work). Ewens, Sherman, and Tiffany display significant expertise of fangirls, and of themselves as journo-fangirls, asserting that there is value in their unique positionality and lived expertise.

That millennial women music journalists can claim subject authority in this area is endemic of healthy shifts in the music industry press. It is no longer seen as wrong or immature for a writer to insert themselves in their copy in emotionally resonant ways. Certainly, as McLeod states, “a writer’s sex organs do not predetermine a particularly gendered style of writing” (57). An essentialist view of writerly approaches not only serves a problematically binary understanding of gender, but also does nothing to acknowledge the nuances of personal style that a music journalist of any gender may choose to prioritize. However, as these books demonstrate, women are often especially inclined to adopt feminist methodologies in their journalism, to create lines of questioning that “throw into doubt the hierarchies of taste and of experience that order pop’s history” (Powers 462). As McDonnell puts it, “the more you’re marginalized, the more you think about feminism” (6). Without women’s voices (and without poor representations of female fandom to push back against), these analyses would not contain the same passion and care, attributes long dismissed in more superficial, stereotypical writings on fangirl practice.

The work of inclusion continues, however. No single book or author can engage fully with every aspect or intersectional demographic of fandom. Certainly, all three authors reckon with the potential marginalization of queer audiences, and Sherman also interrogates the narrow lens of whiteness through which boy bands and their fandoms are typically represented, noting the pioneering activities of black and brown groups in detail. In Tiffany’s and Ewens’s books, however, race is more siloed in the discussion. Though Ewens’s chapter on Japanese fans of Harry Styles is amongst her most insightful, she openly notes that interviews with black and international fans for her Beyonce chapter were conducted on Skype, limiting the ethnographic depth and access that she was able to achieve when writing about British or white-centric fandoms in other sections(Cai).

A growing number of books by black female authors, writing about black female artists and fandoms, further widens contributions to fangirl knowledge, drawing on diverse, experiential connections between authors and fandoms. Stephanie Phillips’s book Why Solange Matters blends reportage and memoir, contending with the artist, her black-diasporic fandom, and the racial-political content of her work from a position of inherent understanding. Encouragingly, Phillips is set to write another book about the experiences of both herself and other black people in alternative rock music, detailing “‘the depth and power of the contributions’ from those who have been overlooked or downplayed” (Nathan).

In terms of genre, too, the books I’ve considered in this chapter are mainly focused on pop, though Ewens does incorporate analyses of female rock and pop-punk fandom. Literary non-fiction accounts of music beyond pop and poptimistic fandom would further extend the reach and power of a journo-fan approach, challenging the notion of fangirling as an inherently “silly” pop praxis (Hamer 282). Books that consider fangirling from the positionality of heavy metal, or hip-hop, for example, would help to draw in more diverse voices and to challenge assumptive links between fannish behaviors and genre. The success of the three books analyzed in this article opens the door for more women’s stories, and the potential to represent the rich spectrum of fangirl expertise.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenessa Williams

Jenessa Williams is a graduate of the Media and Communication PhD programme at The University of Leeds, UK. Her doctoral research explored the implications of the #MeToo on Music Fandom, and how Indie-Alternative and Hip-Hop fan communities respond differently to allegations of celebrity sexual abuse. Her wider research interests explore race, gender, activism and feminist representation in music, music journalism and the online culture wars. Jenessa also works as a freelance music journalist, with work appearing in the Guardian, NME, the Forty-Five, Pitchfork, Alternative Press and Music Week.