Episode 309: Talking Toxic Fans with Dr. Erin Keating

What this episode covers

On this episode of Geek4 I’m joined by Dr. Erin Keating (she/her). Erin’s Graduate Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba (my alma mater). She is Associate Editor of the journal Restoration: Studies in Literature and Culture and has published on 17th-century celebrity, secret history, and coffeehouse culture, as well as the comic Watchmen. She is in the initial stages of a new research project on queer kinship in fantasy and its fandoms focusing on Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen and Muir’s Locked Tomb Series. Recently, she’s started a brilliant Youtube channel where she talks about some of her eceletic interests in an analytical, crtical way. One of her videos (Has Fandom Always Been Toxic? A 17th-Century Fan Novel and Capitalist Thought prompted me to reach out to her and see if she wanted to discuss toxic fans. We discuss her discovery of a 17th century secret history, The Player’s Tragedy, which she argues is a product of a toxic fan. We talk Chappel Roan and boy bands and Taylor Swift. We cover a lot of ground.

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