“That moment meant a lot to my daughter”: affect, fandom, and Avengers: Endgame

Abstract

This paper analyzes a viral Twitter thread from October 2020 in which Marvel fans debated the quality and political significance of a scene from Avengers: Endgame that highlights a number of Marvel’s female superheroes. Comments formed a complex reception matrix that used gender and affective reactions to the scene to construct political statements about the role of identity politics in popular culture. Many users framed supposedly rational, critical interpretations of the scene as inherently superior to emotional or affective responses, and posited that those fans who enjoyed the scene (often young people and women) were naïve and unintelligent. Some fans co-opted feminist language to criticize those fans who enjoyed the scene, which in effect framed fans of hegemonic identities (i.e., cishet white males) as the most proper and intelligent audience members. This paper uses theories of affect, gender, and feminist critique to analyze a sample of fan comments. This discussion shows how social media shapes both political discourses and fan identities.