(Kristin Chenoweth) and Elphaba - Camera Obscura: Feminism ...

Wicked Divas and Internet Girl Fans • 63
fans include Georganne Scheiner, Signifying Female Adolescence:
Film Representations and Fans, 1920 – 1950 (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2000); Jennifer Fisher, “Experiences and Relationships,” in
“Nutcracker” Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas
Tradition in the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2003), 132 – 70. More queerly, Judith Halberstam suggests
that “we rethink the adult/youth binary in relation to an
‘epistemology of youth’ that disrupts conventional accounts of
youth culture, adulthood, and maturity” (In a Queer Time and
Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives [New York: New York
University Press, 2005], 2). My essay is in conversation with these
scholars’ work.
13. Clearly, “girls,” as they appear in this essay, are extremely
privileged. If they have seen Wicked, someone paid upward of
$50 (and more likely, $100) for a ticket for them. If they have
traveled to see the show, then even more dollars were spent.
Girls who participate on the fan sites that I cite have access to
computers and the knowledge to participate on Internet forums.
The concerns of adolescent girls about which I generalize in
this essay thus are, of course, overdetermined by class and, to a
certain degree, race.
14. There is another pseudo – fan site that is linked to the musical’s
own Web site, www.wickedthemusical.com. At first it seems
to demonstrate the producers’ savvy in reaching potential
audience members where they live and in capitalizing on
spectators’ practices by providing a space to express fandom and
simultaneously prominently featuring easy links to purchasing
tickets, T-shirts, and other souvenirs. At closer examination,
however, it turns out not to be a true fan site. There are fan
letters and accolades posted, but a spectator has to send an
e-mail to the producers, who in turn decide which letters to post
(or who may have created these letters themselves).
15. On girls and the Web, see, for example, Sharon Mazzarella, ed.,
Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity (New
York: Peter Lang, 2005); Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of Their Own:
Female Fandoms Online (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
16. On fandom as an active practice, see, for example, Cheryl Harris
and Alison Alexander, eds., Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture
and Identity (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1998); Lewis, The Adoring
Audience.