"We Shouldn't Have to Trend to Make You Listen": Queer Fan Hashtag Campaigns as Production Interventions

Abstract

©2018 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois if media is often approached through one or more of the lenses of production, text, and audience, then queerness can be pres­ ent at any of these points. This examination of queer fan hashtag campaigns is at the intersection of all three: how production is a site of contestation by queer audiences advo­ cating for queer texts. The campaigns we have studied for this article—#LexaDeservedBetter, #LGBTFansDeserveBetter, #PousseyDeserved­ Better, #BlackLGBTDeserveToBe, and LGBTQ FANS DESERVE RESPECT—seek to intervene in production processes through both advocacy and fans’ command of the very platforms that industry uses to measure audience engage­ ment. In what follows, we first situate queer fan hashtag campaigns in the context of contem­ porary media production and as an evolution from older forms of fan campaigning. We follow this context with a description of our method, analytics­qualified qualitative analysis, which allows examining large data sets—in this case from Twitter—qualitatively. We then describe three key features of queer fan hashtag cam­ paigns: how they harness affordances and industrial values, what they contend is wrong in industrial practice, and what they articulate as a better way. We end with a consideration of the limitations of such campaigns—in particu­ lar, the investment in whiteness that troubles their calls for queer solidarity. Ultimately, we show that queer fan hashtag campaigns are strategic interventions meant to alter both rep­ resentational and structural television produc­ tion processes by leveraging the importance of audience feedback in a connected viewing environment.