Cancel Culture and Other Myths: Anti-fandom as heartbreak

Abstract

Cancel Culture and Other MythsAnti-fandom as heartbreak Kathryn Lofton (bio) A friend is about to give a guest lecture. She is paralyzingly nervous: "I don't want to get canceled." A colleague who is about to have an editorial published asks me to make sure there is nothing cancelable in it. When their work occurs without incident, I return to the terror that preceded their success. "You see, you weren't canceled!" "Thank god," they both reply, an oddly unifying utterance for two professed nontheists. The stakes of canceling are such that disbelievers reach for higher powers when spared. I begin to ask everyone I meet what they think of when they think of cancel culture. A student tells me her grandparents [End Page 161] complain, "It's Salem all over again." A friend tells me of a colleague who got fired for something they said on Slack. "Can you believe it?" she snaps. "Cancel culture ruins lives." I gather these instances and wonder whether cancel culture is an encroaching menace against which everyone must defend or a moral panic that inflates the problem. In a 2023 paper published in Political Studies, Pippa Norris poses the question this way: "Do claims about a growing 'cancel culture' curtailing free speech on college campuses reflect a pervasive myth, fueled by angry partisan rhetoric, or do these arguments reflect social reality?"1 Norris finds that contemporary academics may be less willing to speak up due to a fear of cancel culture. Cancel culture is not a myth, Norris decides, because, in silencing people, it does something real. There is no question that cancel culture is real. It is also a myth. Taking myths as real requires resistance to conventional usage. Seven myths about COVID-19 vaccines, yells one headline. Ten mega myths about sex, beckons another. Myth used this way refers to an idea people believe that is not true. This is a relatively recent connotation of myth. In the history of religion, myths are stories people tell about forces more powerful than them described as superhuman. A superhuman force could be a god; it could be meteorology; it could be a corporation or a foreign state. Myths occur when human beings want to explain how mysterious things come to pass. Their explanation is: "Something more powerful than us did something to make this happen." Cancel culture produces a collection of myths within a particular tradition or a mythology. Depending on your political inclinations, the cast of gods and heroes alters considerably. The question is what mystery cancel culture's mythology explains. Thinking about this requires thinking a little about religion, and a lot about what hurts people most. The history of religions is a history of organizing power relations. If this premise isn't especially sexy to you, I commend the many Netflix films about religion where you can watch charismatic figures lull followers with promises of new dawns and off-the-grid [End Page 162] togetherness. A lot of people who Netflix and chill do not identify religiously, but everybody knows a heartbreak authored by a devastating player. "Something in the way you move / Makes me feel like I can't live without you," sings Rihanna in "Stay," her 2012 blockbuster duet with Mikky Ekko. This is just one of hundreds of lovelorn tracks from the Top 40 that would serve well as a soundtrack for religion's depiction in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022), Unorthodox (2020), and Wild Wild Country (2018). Religion has a fair number of sexual mountebanks, but for a new religious movement to become an established religion, it needs to evolve from one-hit wonder to Beyoncé. New religious movements, sometimes derogatively called cults, offer ritual resolve for persons seeking solutions to their most profound questions and pain. Religions evolve from small cultic movements when, after the initial romance fades, individuals keep repeating things that other individuals repeat, and those communal repetitions come to constitute a form of belonging. If I say the Lord's Prayer, the Jewish blessing over bread, or the Muslim salat, I am speaking individually, but I am speaking in a way many other people speak, and when we hear...