Love/Hate
Why Do We Watch Things We Hate?
In a new book, scholars unpack the idea of anti-fandom, from ‘Star Wars’ to Martha Stewart to Hillary Clinton
In case you didn’t notice, people seem pretty angry lately. There’s the vitriol you see printed on T-shirts and chanted at Trump rallies and the “Can you believe he said that?” tweets and “I know!” replies. There was the torrent of abuse poured on Leslie Jones and the cast of Ghostbusters when the female-led remake came out and the heated resentment aimed at the Star Wars team for featuring Kelly Marie Tran, an Asian-American actor, in The Last Jedi. There are the people meme-ing Tom Brady kissing his son on the lips and the people who are still burning effigies of Roger Goodell after Brady’s suspension over Deflategate. And don’t even get us started on whatever is going on in Cardi B’s Instagram comments.
In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, out January 8, Melissa Click, an assistant professor of communication studies at Gonzaga University, delivers a collection of 15 essays by scholars exploring the many ways there are to hate, and why we love to do it.
