By Sara Mortensen
Within walking distance of The White House, a crowd of hundreds had gathered and were participating in a call and response with the women on stage.
“What are we going to do?!” “VOTE!” “What are we going to do?!” “VOTE!”
The women in question were Karen Huger, of Real Housewives of Potomac fame, and Drag Queen VinChelle, who had just finished a Real Housewives-themed performance highlighting Karen’s iconic moments from the show. If you ask people what a voter registration event looks like, this is not what most would imagine.
However, this event – part of the Real Housewives of Politics project at the Working Families Party – is the latest in a long history of fan organizing and it exemplifies how we’re at a particularly exciting moment for fandom and politics being intertwined.
The maelstrom of events that led to President Biden dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris this summer coincided with Charli XCX’s new album release. Seemingly, these two events are unrelated… until a tweet from Charli XCX declaring that “Kamala IS brat” set in motion a “rebrand” of Kamala’s campaign to embrace the “brat” aesthetic. This summer also saw Taylor Swift fans – “Swifties” – organizing to volunteer, fundraise, and generally support the Harris campaign.
Even though fandom organizing is currently experiencing a ton of momentum thanks to celebrity endorsements and the power of meme culture, the practice has a long history. Media scholar Henry Jenkins has defined fan activism as “forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans… and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture.” In other words, when fans love something, they love it hard – and these self-organized communities, who often have a shared language and values, are primed to channel that love and creative energy into civic imagination and action.
As someone who has been a fan activist and organizer for the past ten years, I’ve seen first-hand how the movement has gone from niche to mainstream.
Fan-led political activism is often said to originate in the 1960s with the Star Trek fandom with campaigns to increase the representation of LGBTQ+ characters on the show. Early fan activism efforts were also focused on “save our show” campaigns, resisting censorship, and defending participatory practices (i.e. fan fiction, fan art, etc.).
Much of the modern movement of fan activism evolved out of the Harry Potter fandom in the late 2000s. In those days, Harry Potter fans banded together for charity efforts, such as the time they raised $123,000 in two weeks for Partners in Health to support Haiti after a devastating earthquake in 2010. In 2014, fan organizers secured a huge – and at the time unprecedented – win when, after four years of grassroots organizing, they were notified that Warner Bros. would make all Harry Potter-branded chocolate Fair Trade or Utz certified.
Much of this organizing happened in person at Harry Potter or other nerdy fan conventions – that’s where I learned that there were people out there using their love of a book series to do something good in the world. Nowadays – for me at least – Harry Potter is intrinsically tainted by J.K. Rowling’s baffling desire to make her legacy one of transphobia and hate, but there was undeniably something special about the Harry Potter fandom and fan organizing in the early 2010s. At these conventions, telling people about the work we were doing felt like telling someone the secret ingredient to a family recipe – people were intrigued, inspired, and surprised that there were fans out there channeling their energy into something political.
Now, though, fan organizing is much more recognizable to the everyday person. Everyone is a fan of something, and thanks to the rise of the social internet and the mainstreaming of fandom, it’s not as surprising to people when they hear that fans are banding together to make change.
There are so many examples over the last few years showing how fan organizing has spanned different fandoms, different social and political issues, and different mediums.
In 2018, fans of Marvel’s Black Panther used the immense hype around the movie release to register thousands of people to vote. In 2019, Overwatch fans used the character Mei as a symbol in protests for a free Hong Kong. In 2020, K-pop fans engaged in a slew of political action, the most famous of which was a coordinated effort to “sell out” a Trump 2020 campaign rally by reserving tickets they never intended to use.
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Grand Theft Auto players found a way to – in the game – host a memorial for George Floyd and raise money for the Gianna Floyd Fund. In 2022, using the hashtag #TolkienBlackFolks, Black Nerds Create cultivated a femme and nonbinary-led diverse, outspoken community of Lord of the Rings fans in response to white supremacist-led attempts to claim the community and symbology of Tolkein’s work as their own.
The list goes on and on.
As grassroots fan organizing is becoming more mainstream, the people and institutions in power are also getting involved in the movement. Fans are demanding that celebrities take a political stance, and when they do it can result in hundreds of thousands of people checking their voter registration status. And political organizations like the Working Families Party, a political party focused on organizing working people of all backgrounds to step into their political power, are investing in the kinetic potential of fans by hiring fandom organizers. And it makes a ton of sense that fandoms are a training ground for political organizers. The most diehard fans are natural organizers.
There is, of course, a negative side to this, where the intensity of fandom—especially when used for cruel or mean-spirited purposes— can be overpowering and lead to bullying. Arguably, however, the potency and power of fandoms provide all the more reason for why candidates, campaigns, and causes should take fans seriously.
But more often than not, the thing that fan organizing offers above all – something that is sorely needed in activist spaces – is joy. The kind of joy that fandom is the best at: unabashed, unironic, and infectious.
At the Real Housewives of Politics Drag Brunch mentioned previously, attendees yelled in delight, danced with joy, and snapped in satisfaction. At the same time, because Working Families Party organizers required attendees to check their voter registration to gain entrance to the brunch, a few dozen people were able to discover that they had been kicked off their state’s voter rolls with enough time to register again before the presidential election. When local elections can literally be decided by hundreds of votes, every registration truly matters.
Second after joy, fan activism offers hope, and the fact that organizers can make a voter registration event a joyous and meaningful occasion for fans gives me immense hope.
Just as we reimagine our favorite media through fan art, fiction, and cosplay, fandom organizing demands that we do the same for our country: What does a better world look like? What does it take to get there? How can we get there together?
Sara Mortensen is an activist, organizer, and writer who serves as theFandom Organizing Coordinator at the Working Families Party.