Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture 9780773552951

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Preface

G ET T I NG A L I F E

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GETTING A LIFE

The Social Worlds of Geek Culture

B E N J A M I N

W O O

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 isbn 978-0-7735-5284-5 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5295-1 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-5296-8 (epub) Legal deposit first quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Woo, Benjamin, author Getting a life : the social worlds of Geek culture / Benjamin Woo. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5284-5 (cloth). – isbn 978-0-7735-5295-1 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-5296-8 (epub) 1. Subculture. 2. Fans (Persons). 3. Individuality. 4. Mass media and culture. 5. Popular culture. I. Title. hm646.w66 2018

306'.1

c2017-906099-6 c2017-906100-3

This book was set by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: “What Is a Nerd?”

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1 Talk Nerdy to Me: The Meaning of Geek Culture 29 2 Taking Geek Culture Seriously: A Practice-Theoretic Account 49 3 Values and Virtues: What Is Best in Life?

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4 Careers: Boldly Going On 89 5 Making Communities from Mass Culture

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6 Institutions: Building Worlds between Production and Consumption 131 7 The Limits of Participation

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8 The Geek, the Bad, and the Ugly 172 Conclusion

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Appendix: Participant Profiles Notes

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References Index

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Acknowledgments

I’ve been living with this book, in various forms, for quite some time now, and it has left a trail of people who need to be thanked criss-crossing the country. I once again offer my greatest and sincerest thanks to the many people who agreed to speak with me, at length, about their lives. This book could not possibly exist without your generosity, and it wouldn’t be what it is without your warmth, wit, and insight. Having smart, articulate interviewees makes it look easy. Thank you. At Simon Fraser University, I am grateful to the faculty who enabled and supervised the original research on which the book is based, notably Gary McCarron, Shane Gunster, and Stuart R. Poyntz; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding the project through the doctoral fellowships program; and to the friends and colleagues who kept me on track – and helped me find it again whenever I went astray. I want to extend particular thanks to Danielle Deveau, Sara Grimes, Dylan Mulvin, Siobhàn Quinn, Jamie Rennie, and Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa. My first attempts at revising the manuscript into publishable form were undertaken while I was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary, and I owe an inestimable debt to Bart Beaty for making that opportunity possible, as well as to Rebecca Sullivan, Christian Bök, my fellow postdoc Paul Huebener, and the graduate student community in the Department of English for welcoming me with such hospitality. The final push came during my first years on faculty in the Communication and Media Studies program at Carleton University, and I was given the opportunity to return to some of the ideas in this book in the context of a graduate seminar I taught there in the winter of 2015.

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I feel very lucky to have landed in this department and am privileged to have truly outstanding, supportive colleagues. I offer my thanks to the writing group that applauded the feathers in my cap and commiserated with my black eyes during the last rounds of revisions: Aubrey Anable, Laura Banducci, Rena Bivens, Amrita Hari, Christian Holz, Laura Horak, Irena Knezevic, Tracey Lauriault, Merlyna Lim, and Megan Rivers-Moore. Responsibility for any errors remain, of course, mine alone. My editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Jonathan Crago, has been a steadfast supporter of this book. I am deeply appreciative of his work guiding me through the publication process. I want to further express my thanks to the rest of the team at MQUP who helped make it a reality. The book is much stronger for the application of copyeditor Kathryn Simpson’s proverbial red pen. Some of this research has been previously published in somewhat different forms: a précis of the book’s argument was published under the title “Nerds, Geeks, Gamers, and Fans: Doing Subculture on the Edge of the Mainstream” in the edited collection The Borders of Subculture: Resistance and the Mainstream (Woo 2015); an earlier version of chapter 6 appeared as “Alpha Nerds: Cultural Intermediaries in a Subcultural Scene” in The European Journal of Cultural Studies (Woo 2012a); and sections of chapters 3 and 7 were adapted into “Understanding Understandings of Comics: Reading and Collecting as Media-Oriented Practices” in Participations (Woo 2012b) and “A Pragmatics of Things: Materiality and Constraint in Fan Practices” for Transformative Works and Cultures (Woo 2014), respectively. Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, Daniel W.K. Woo and Ruth Woo, for raising this nerdy kid, and – above all others – Laurena Nash for putting up with the bad puns, opaque references, and the comics and action figures for all these years.