ABSTRACT
The challenges of writing and research across media industries can be overcome by looking not at the sum of these industry relationships, but instead the intersections from which they emerge. By adopting a set of interrelated research and writing strategies, media scholars can transform lists of media franchises into more critical assessments of the franchising processes through which agency and constraint unfold within and across entertainment industries. Scholars like Suzanne Scott thus provide useful models in their critical interrogation of the power dynamics whereby media industry convergences empower some producers and consumers while marginalizing others. Her investigation of the “fake geek girl” shows us how industries that imagine media franchising as a way to capture privileged male consumers participate in the boundary-policing that constructs female fandom as inauthentic, marginal, and unwelcome.
