Western Texts and New Worlds: Politics of Identity in a Philippine Fan Community

Abstract

Media scholar John Fiske asserts that fandom is “associated with the
cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly
with those disempowered by any combination of gender, age,
class and race.” American cultural theorists have sought to rescue
marginalized fans from stereotypes as passive consumers, deviants,
and social misfits by representing them as active appropriators
and transformers of texts. In the Philippines, however, some fan
communities need no rescuing as they are associated not with
subordination and social ineptitude but with high cultural and
economic capital. This paper uses a cultural studies approach to
read the cultural practices of the New Worlds Alliance (NWA), a
Philippine science fiction and fantasy fan community whose objects
of veneration include such print and media texts as the Harry Potter
series, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Star Trek. I argue that the
NWA’s member composition, its (Western) objects of fandom,
its activities and fan products, and its self-representation (i.e., the
celebratory construction of the Philippine “geek”) highlight the
disparities between center and periphery, rich and poor, and local
and global in the Philippines. Given the community’s privileged
class position in the Philippine context, the politics of its identity-construction cannot be adequately explained by fan theories that
have been applied to American audiences. Thus, I seek to examine
the NWAs discourses of empowerment and cultural superiority in
order to critique American models of “geekdom” as exemplifying
weapons of the weak or of fandom as liberatory cultural practice.

Keywords: cultural theory, popular literature/culture, fan studies, Philippine
culture, postcolonial theory