This guest post by Tanya Erzen is part of a blog tour to promote the release of her newest book, Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It, which you can purchase at the Beacon Press website. Other blogs participating in the tour include Women and Hollywood, Feminism and Religion, Fangtastic Books, and Everyday Sociology.
Even though Breaking Dawn Part 2, the long-awaited final film of the Twilight series, premieres on November 16 in Los Angeles, devoted fans will begin camping out for days and weeks ahead of time. They’ll sleep in tents and shuffle through interminable lines in a grimy parking lot, all for the fleeting glimpse of a Twilight celebrity on the black carpet. After all, this is the age of mundane celebrity: everyone wants to be one and be close to one. Fan sites like the Twilight Lexicon and HisGoldenEyes will roam the premiere, hoping to obtain the coveted interview with stars like Robert Pattinson or Kellan Lutz. In the fan firmament, these sites reign near the top of the hierarchy, where they have access to insider gossip, corporate giveaways, and visits to film sets.
The massive fan demand to be at the film premiere as the Twilight juggernaut reaches its crescendo has prompted Summit Entertainment to almost double the numbers they will accommodate at “fan camp.” Mothers and daughters, groups of girls and contingents of TwilightMoms, traveling from afar to the tent city will feel the elation of being among other captivated fans. After days together, they’ll be bonded to legions of others with the same aspirations, embarking upon a kind of public happiness absent from their daily lives. There have certainly been fan crazes before, but what differentiates the Twilight phenomenon is that its fan base consists almost entirely of women and girls.
Denigrating these female fans as rabid, obsessed and hysterical is a favorite pastime for many media outlets. The specter of hundreds of stargazing women, clamoring for a glimpse of actors, evokes snarky bewilderment among pundits. Descriptions of fans typically include comments about unbridled fanaticism and the ear-piercing shrieks of thousands of girls.
At one Comic-Con, the longstanding convention that is a lure for, mainly, male fans of comics, science fiction, and fantasy, Twilight fans camped out on sidewalks for days to attend the actors’ panel. The invasion of female fans into the Comic-Con stronghold sparked a backlash. A few disgruntled male attendees sported signs that read, “Twilight Ruined Comic-Con,” and one baffled online commentator at Rotten Tomatoes wrote, “Fan boy culture’s hold on the Con was hijacked by a vampire romance, of all things.”
Applying adjectives like “screeching” and “stalking” to female fans, commentators imply that Twilight fans should just get a life. Older women, especially, are a favorite target. They’re “stalker moms,” pitiable addicts, and negligent parents. Details magazine mocked them for reverting back to adolescent folly: “It’s not uncommon to hear them break into unprompted gasps, giggles, and squeals.” The implication is that these women just need to get a life instead of spending all their time obsessing about a frivolous interspecies romance.
It is unsurprising that critics deride a phenomenon that attracts mainly women, to all extents labeling it as an instance of mass hysteria. The misogyny lurking here is obvious. One has to wonder why, for example, equally zealous fantasy-football players or sci-fi geeks, many of whom happen to be male, do not endure the same disdain.
The refrains go something like this: the books are poorly written and riddled with cliches, the people who like them must be dupes of the patriarchy or simply burdened with bad taste. These screeds overlook what makes the series compelling for millions of women and girls. In my time with Twilight fans around the world—from the occasional forum participant and those who watched the films fifty times to the person who corralled her entire office into choosing Team Edward or Team Jacob—I have found they also spoke of how the fanpire transformed their everyday lives, not as mere escapism but as a vehicle for connecting with others and forging new identities beyond that of Mormon mother or ordinary teen. At conventions and premieres, thousands of girls and women discard their cares about boys and men to bond in aerobics and self-defense classes and dance together at elaborate Twilight-themed vampire balls. Married women in the group TwilightMoms temporarily abandon domestic responsibilities for convivial sleepovers where they simultaneously bemoan the absence of spicy sex and intimacy in their marriages and reassure themselves that heterosexual marriage is the only way to envision their lives. Three generations of families bond with each other over their enchantment with the books, attending book releases, conventions and tours of Forks. None of these fans care if Comic-Con is no longer teeming solely with men wearing alien and superhero costumes, nor do they need or want rescuing from the scorn they receive for their fanaticism.
At the same time the fanpire encompasses authentic ways to belong and connect to others, the ceaseless commercialization of Twilight means that for many fans, ravenous consumption of all things Twilight is the main way to retain their feelings of enchantment. When they begin to feel Post-Saga Depression (PSD), what fans call the blue feeling that descends after finishing the books and realizing there is no actual Edward, there are Edward and Bella Barbie dolls, calendars, video games, graphic novels, and fangs readily available in the vast, bazaar-like atmosphere online or at some conventions. Everything on display at official conventions is based on spinoff marketing, celebrity endorsement, and steering fans to other movies that feature the Twilight actors.
Even while critics continue to disparage the fans, they remain a key concern of Summit and other brands eager to exploit their earnings potential. Tent city is now a Summit-sponsored event, designed to harness fan’s buying power. A fan once described the fanpire as an army storming bookstores, conventions, and movie theaters. Twilight-lovers want the ineffable high to last as long as possible, and the corporate sponsors of these events are certainly delighted to oblige. Creation Entertainment knows that the danger for fans arises when, without another book to read, life begins to feel barren. The swoon-inducing possibility of celebrity proximity and the desire for the next Twilight product sustain fans in the months of drought between a new film or significant fanpire gossip.
Critics scoff at Twilight fans, and then they wonder why Fifty Shades of Grey, originally a smut Twilight fan fiction story, is a national bestseller. It’s time that they began taking the complicated practices and pleasures of female fans seriously. The corporate marketers certainly are.
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Tanya Erzen is an associate professor of comparative religious studies at Ohio State University. Her work has appeared in the Nation, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post. She is the author of Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement, which won the Gustave O. Arlt Award and the Ruth Benedict Prize. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a visiting scholar at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle.