It is time for your "Young Adult Literature to popular culture" connection! Angela Insenga is steeped in all kinds of connections between popular culture--music, television, film, documentary, and so many social media sharing formats. Every time I read something Angela writes I am amazed by her ability to make all of these connections. Her assignments are amazing and I often wonder if I could pull off some of them in my class--but it doesn't stop me from trying every once in awhile.
Angela has been a frequent and productive contributor to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday. To find a few more of her posts just browse through the Contributor's Page. Thanks Angela.
Angela has been a frequent and productive contributor to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday. To find a few more of her posts just browse through the Contributor's Page. Thanks Angela.
“Stalking Boybands was Serious Business”: YAL, TikTok, and the “Girlfan”
by Angela Insenga
In the era of “Devious Licks,” it may well be anathema to think about bringing anything related to TikTok into the classroom. And, with study of social media informing us of its addictive and purported degenerative powers, using it could raise hackles. However, I’m pairing Goldy Moldavsky’s novel Kill the Boyband with the documentary This is Us, which tells the "rags to riches" Algerian tale of the British-Irish sensation One Direction and is slickly directed by Morgan Spurlock. And then, instead of asking my students to turn in one more end-of-unit essay, I am asking my students to study TikTok creations within the real 1D fandom, gather data on how the one-minute chunks of film are put together and by whom, and come to conclusions about the (mostly) girlfans they encounter.
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In Goldy Moldavsky’s darkly humorous and satirical Kill the Boyband, the members of The Ruperts, each named Rupert, originally auditioned alone on So You Think the British Don’t Have Talent?, each imagining a solo career in the music business. But all the boys were eliminated from competition. However, the boyband is born when the host looks out into the audience, sees myriad signs featuring the name “Rupert,” and quips, “Seems like the Ruperts are getting a lot of love tonight!” At this moment, “a million lightbulbs went on over the heads of music execs,” and the boys were rockets into space, destined for stardom and inevitable commodification, their personalities narrowly and heteronormatively defined for millions of those who had only seen their tryout videos. Where there are boy band members, fangirls follow.
The unnamed narrator of the novel defines and self-identifies as a new breed of fangirl, noting:
It wasn’t enough anymore to send them fan mail and kiss the posters above our
beds….you weren’t a true fan until you engaged in Twitter death threats and endless
stan wars [where fangirls]. . . .[wielded] Sharpies like weapons [and passed] the time by
discussing ambush tactics. . . [with another] Ruperts fangirl [whose] friendship [with
other fans also] lived and breathed primarily in Twitter DMs and text messages.
In short, we learn from the ensemble of female protagonists, “just how important the internet was in all of [their] lives.” A virtue of the internet is that it can connect groups of likeminded individuals who spur each other onward, enrich each other’s lives, and share common obsessions. This virtue is also social’s vice, with which we contend daily. But why focus only on the decline when there are also positive results?
It wasn’t enough anymore to send them fan mail and kiss the posters above our
beds….you weren’t a true fan until you engaged in Twitter death threats and endless
stan wars [where fangirls]. . . .[wielded] Sharpies like weapons [and passed] the time by
discussing ambush tactics. . . [with another] Ruperts fangirl [whose] friendship [with
other fans also] lived and breathed primarily in Twitter DMs and text messages.
In short, we learn from the ensemble of female protagonists, “just how important the internet was in all of [their] lives.” A virtue of the internet is that it can connect groups of likeminded individuals who spur each other onward, enrich each other’s lives, and share common obsessions. This virtue is also social’s vice, with which we contend daily. But why focus only on the decline when there are also positive results?
The action in Kill the Boyband takes place on a single night at the “swankiest hotel in SoHo,” the Rondack. Superfans Erin, Isabel, Apple, and our unnamed narrator book a room here, right where The Ruperts are staying before performing their sold-out half-hour special, “Coming to America: The Ruperts Learn about Thanksgiving!” Instead of freezing outside at the barricades the city set up—though being a “barricade girl” is quite a feat, I have come to understand—the girls go inside, where the chances of running into a Rupert increase dramatically. In their quest, they end up accidentally kidnapping Rupert Pierpont, the least-adored “ginger” Rupert whose only redeeming quality is that he can juggle. What follows is part comedy of errors, part searing critique of the music industry, and an examination of a weirdly maligned group: girls who stan bands.
If any of the book’s details sound familiar, you may have lived through the 2010s, when British-Irish boyband One Direction ruled pop music. After Simon Cowell plucked each solo boy from the group that did not make the cut on the British talent show The X Factor, their popularity soared. And even though they came in third place as a band, within five years, by 2020, the band sold an astonishing 70 million records worldwide. In their five-year run, 1D won seven Brit Awards, seven American Music Awards, five Billboard Music Awards, five Billboard Touring Awards, and four MTV Video Music Awards. Most importantly, the band won a record of 28 Teen Choice Awards after being nominated 31 times. By 2015, it was hard to turn a page, stand in a grocery checkout lane, walk through a school supplies section, a mall, peruse toothbrushes or teach an adolescent without seeing one of—if not all—of the boys’ faces. And when I tell my students that 1D was bigger than The Beatles, they balk. But they traveled to and performed in more countries and cities, expanding their fanbase and its rate of consumption, and they had the power of social media: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Vine.
It is at the juncture of Moldavsky’s critique of the music industry and the fangirl figure, the culture that so harshly dismisses fangirls them as “crazy,” and One Direction’s enduring fanbase that now resides largely online where my students and I are now situated. We moved from the fiction of the novel to the heavily mediated image of One Direction in This is Us to “real” fans on TikTok who, even now, are churning out intricately crafted videos or putting up slapdash ones because they are upset, excited, or angry.
After studying Moldavsky’s fictional representation of The Ruperts stans—called the “Strepurs”—we move into the thriving niche of TikTok where Directioners dwell, making and remaking artistic chunks of film dedicated to One Direction or to one of the members. I ask my students to think about the critique of the music industry and fans in the novel as they begin to methodically examine TikToks organized under assigned hashtags (e.g., “#Nialler” for Niall Horan, “#Narry” for those who ship Harry and Niall, etc.). Using criteria I’ve suggested; in particular, I focus on the “rhetoric” of TikTok, on trends, and on ways in which recombinant TikToks critique or seek to answer others. Considering the purported fickle nature of teen girls, the 1D portion of TikTok bursts with energy and optimism, depression and exhilaration, and longing and having. All of this, even though the band went on hiatus over six years ago.
I chose this learning pathway for my students with hopes that they could further understand how social media in the hands of a dedicated fandom works and how foregrounding specific TikTok trends from girlfan creators leads us to complicate the rather prejudicial trope of the “crazy fangirl,” much like Moldavsky explodes the concept in her novel. TikTok, I hope to show them, is a (de)generative space, wherein a multitude of communities governed by hashtags exist. In these hyperreal groups, adolescents repeatedly demonstrate higher order thinking as they create videos using the platform’s mechanics—filters, voiceovers, snippets from films, and soundtracks. Each TikTok about 1D is added to an ever-widening web of texts that produce syncretic and longitudinal knowledge about the fandom and the object(s) of its affection. While TikTok allows for endless recombinant chunks of film, the trends also bear out that trends arise. For example, enduring beliefs that two members of the band dated, showcase the band’s time in the spotlight, (re)imagine a reunion, and artistically advertise every scintilla of news about the boys’ now flourishing solo careers. But there is more than recapitulation of adoration, the boys’ own contracted social media appearances, or concert footage.
In their TikToks, girlfans of 1D are often philanthropists, raising money through a 5k or donating to charities favored by the members of the band. They are increasingly comfortable living in ambiguities, adapting happily to others’ chosen pronouns, sexual identities, and gender expressions. They create pointed, critical messages to other public people like Candace Owen, who in 2020 attempted to blast Harry Styles for wearing a dress as the first man to appear on the cover of Vogue, pleading with him and America to “Bring back manly men.” Fans profess Harry Styles' “Treat People with Kindness” mantra and mean it, as comment threads and monies to charities on his birthday evince. They profess that the friendships they’ve made with other fans mean more than anything to them--even more than the band itself. They also, in teary posts, sometimes leave the Neverland they’ve half-lived, half-created. They go to college, get engaged, have children. And their social accounts, left as a kind of momento mori to their own girlhood, remain.
In my YA class, then, study and discussion of Moldavsky’s satire in Kill the Boyband has become a conduit for study of real girls in a real fandom. In absence of 1D concerts and in a plague year wherein all members of One Direction canceled solo gigs, TikTok is, more than ever, a bastion for expression in a world that does not sanction the exhibition of female desire or hysteria. A girl falling to her knees when Niall Horan surprises her at a candy shop in Disneyland or a “Louie” claiming that he is “the actual sun” in her life is seen as unbalanced, while boys losing their minds over football, screaming at umpires ‘calls in the sixth inning, or being loud, obnoxious, or angry is seen as typical, even expected. On TikTok, girls who are fans are seen. They are heard. And that, it turns out, is the point. 1D TikTokkers, just like the young women in Moldavsky’s texts are super fans. They scream. They snipe. They love. They obsess. And, in the mix, I am finding, is their creation for our study, for our understanding of how YAL and social media connect, how both can be a place for authentic expression.
Until next time.
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