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

Wicked Divas and Internet Girl Fans • 45
number and describe their dreams of performing on Broadway.
Girls’ distinctly homosocial fandom extends well beyond spectatorship
as they create their own performances — songs, poems, stories,
and artwork on fan Web sites, at Wicked singing contests, and
even in Wicked yoga classes. These fan practices coalesce around
the icon of the diva.
I want to suggest that girls’ attraction to Wicked has everything
to do with the musical’s representation of divas — both the
characters and the actors — and that these divas are fundamentally
non-normative and nonheterosexual; they are, that is, queer. My
project here is to explore girls’ attention to Wicked as articulated on
fan Web sites to examine what girl audiences do with the musical
and, more specifically, what they do with the musical’s divas. By
taking girls seriously as participants in culture, I aim to revalue
their fandom. In addition, I hope to demonstrate the pleasurable
productiveness of queer divas on the Broadway musical stage.
A word about method: fan cultures of the twenty-first century,
perhaps especially youth fan cultures, are easily accessible on
Web sites, fan sites, home pages, and Web-based discussion boards.
While Matt Hills cautions those of us who study reception to not
take such easily accessible and plentiful (read overwhelming) material
at face value, he admits that the plethora of sites for fans’ selfexpressions
are valuable sources indeed. 19 Although exploring fan
Web sites cannot unlock the complex mystery of musical theater
reception, it can reveal some clear patterns of use, engagement,
and utterances of feeling. As Valerie Hey writes, “Despite their
individual mode (in the form of feelings, subjectivities, emotions,
memories),” everyday knowledges are “intimately related to dominant
and systematic features of social life.” 20 Girls who post on fan
sites are performing their spectatorship and their fandom. Rather
than make general or pseudo-scientific claims about Wicked’s
fans, I would like to read each example as I would a newspaper
review: as at once idiosyncratic and yet typical and revealing of its
moment. Also, my readings focus only on selected topics of Web
discussion that deal with identification and affiliation with the
musical, which only comprise a tiny fraction of girls’ conversations
about Wicked on the Web.