Abstract
This essay examines fan interactions on "The All-New Ms. Marvel Backstage Pass," a Tumblr site initiated by Marvel Comics to promote the Ms. Marvel (2014–) comic book. I conceive of this site as a space in which racial, ethnic, and gendered identity dimensions can be uniquely articulated in accordance with identity markers of the Ms. Marvel character, a female teenage Pakistani American Muslim. These articulations are possible due to Tumblr's unique affordances as a mediator of fandom formation—affordances that are both technological and social. For Ms. Marvel fans, Tumblr affords opportunities for intertexual and paratextual productivity, orienting emerging fans into broader rites and practices of fandom participation and specific forms of identity expression undertaken in accordance with identity vectors of Ms. Marvel, its creators, and its fans. For Marvel Comics, fan activities on "The All-New Ms. Marvel Backstage Pass" are a source of promotional labor inflected with the veneer of authenticity, providing the company with a centralized means of instigating fannish promotion and emboldening an emergent audience that corresponds to institutional desires for audience diversification. This Tumblr therefore brokers the economic and institutional drives of Marvel Comics and the cultural drives of an emergent diversified fandom.
Highlights
[1.1] In late 2013, Marvel Comics launched the Tumblr site "The All-New Ms Marvel Backstage Pass" in anticipation of the company's impending Ms Marvel comic book series
I conceive of this site as a space in which racial, ethnic, and gendered identity dimensions can be uniquely articulated in accordance with identity markers of the Ms Marvel character, a female teenage Pakistani American Muslim
For Marvel Comics, fan activities on "The All-New Ms Marvel Backstage Pass" are a source of promotional labor inflected with the veneer of authenticity, providing the company with a centralized means of instigating fannish promotion and emboldening an emergent audience that corresponds to institutional desires for audience diversification
Summary
[1.1] In late 2013, Marvel Comics launched the Tumblr site "The All-New Ms Marvel Backstage Pass" (https://allnewmsmarvel.tumblr.com/) ( referred to as "Backstage Pass") in anticipation of the company's impending Ms Marvel comic book series. Rather than merely promoting Ms.Marvel to fans, Amanat engaged with fans through Backstage Pass, fostering a sense of community by emboldening fans to align fandom and identity expression through social media campaigns and practices. Instead, circulating and dispersing texts on Tumblr fosters the creation of "intimate publics," as Tumblr engenders a "sense of commonality and likeness" (Kanai 2017, 5) through the circulation of texts, but through reblogging and liking texts In this sense, reblogging and liking are technological modes of dispersion and interaction; they are social modalities that create a pathway for users to "gain credibility according to intense systems of distinction" (Fink and Miller 2014, 615), and solidify cultural bearings around issues of taste, identity, and collectivized inclinations. This dynamic further helps to illuminate the intersection of two paradigms occurring through Backstage Pass: intertextual and paratextual encounters
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