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IF MEDIA IS OFTEN APPROACHED THROUGH one or more of the lenses of production, text, and audience, then queerness can be present 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 advocating for queer texts. The campaigns we have studied for this article—#LexaDeservedBetter, #LGBTFansDeserveBetter, #PousseyDeservedBetter, #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 engagement. In what follows, we first situate queer fan hashtag campaigns in the context of contemporary media production and as an evolution from older forms of fan campaigning. We follow this context with a description of our method, analytics-qualified qualitative analysis, which allows examining large data sets—in this case from Twitter—qualitatively. We then describe three key features of queer fan hashtag campaigns: 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 particular, 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 representational and structural television production processes by leveraging the importance of audience feedback in a connected viewing environment.
"Dang, Back at It Again": Precedents and Background for Contemporary Fan Campaigns
Though large-scale fan campaigns to put pressure on industry date back at least to the letterwriting effort that secured Star Trek's second season in 1967–68, what we are calling queer fan hashtag campaigns are new. They are, in fact, new for each of their constituent parts—new because the cultural position of LGBTQ+ people has changed, new because fandom social norms have changed, new because technology has changed, and new because industry itself has changed.
Queer fan hashtag campaigns respond to shifts in industrial practice that have increased the value of fans, social media, and fans on social media. Fans are increasingly seen as integral to industry strategy (Ballinger; Busse; Russo). Audience social media activity is both directly measured by Nielsen's Social Content Ratings and collected and analyzed as feedback...