About the Author

Suzanne Scott is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Radio-Television-Film Department at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018).

Reviews

"Scott has created a terrific and timely account of the exclusionary logics that inform fan culture and mirror contemporary American politics. It helps contextualize the recent sexist, racist, and homophobic backlashes against Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Ghostbusters, and The Little Mermaid (for casting a black actress as Ariel) as symptomatic of the culture at large. Fake Geek Girls is a must read for anyone interested in learning how gender, power, and privilege shape media production and fandom."
*Women's Review of Books*

"Fake Geek Girls ties together a dizzying array of fan studies theories, feminist media theories, and industrial critiques to build a convincing argument about the convergence culture industry and its gendered practices… Fake Geek Girls provides an interesting and timely intervention into questions of gender, fan studies, and popular culture."
*Convergence*

"Essential reading for anyone interested in fandom, media industries, and the larger political struggles in which we all live. In this compelling book, Scott investigates the boundary-policing in media fandom that constructs female fans as inauthentic, marginal, and unwelcome. Fake Geek Girls situates these gendered struggles as part of a larger war on women, helping us to understand the way that privilege and power operate within contemporary convergence culture and beyond."
*Derek Johnson, author of Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries*

"Fake Geek Girls is a must read for anyone interested in the gender politics of the media industry and media fandom. Scott connects the dots between GamerGate, Trump's election, and the mainstreaming of fandom, revealing the systemic gender policing underpinning all three. An incisive and thoughtful critique, this book lays bare the gendered logics at work in the industrys hailing of fans while recognizing the complexity of their response."
*Louisa Stein, author of Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age*

"Scott’s book acts as resistance to the persistent vilification of fangirls, seeks to reestablish fan-girls’ influence on both culture and cultural studies, and examines the persistently aggressive gendering of American fandom today."
*Media Industries*

"Without doubt an important text for media scholarship and fandom studies. It’s meticulously researched, politically relevant, and it significantly revisits and reimagines early convergence culture theory."
*Science Fiction Research Association Review*

"A clearly argued and insightful work that I would recommend to everyone interested in contemporary media culture, feminism, and identity politics. [...] We need studies like Fake Geek Girls that make us see the gendered power structures in today’s digital culture we might otherwise choose to ignore."
*Fafnir Journal*