Join The Daily Vox journalists SHAAZIA EBRAHIM and FATIMA MOOSA every week as they chat all things fun and serious around fan culture, fandoms and what it means to be a stan. They’ll be destroying tropes around the supposedly traditional hardcore male football fan and the manic pop culture fangirl; covering everything from football, Young Adult fiction to Beyoncé and K-pop. Living in the fanworld as women of colour who are avid consumers of all things fan-related means that it is impossible to ignore the politics of these things. And that’s what the Critical Stans are all about.
Will women ever get escape the awful portrayals in popular culture? We speak about how Serena Williams was cast into an “Angry Black Woman”, how Nicki Minaj and Cardi B are always deliberately pitted against each other (without denying their agency to beef if they want to, of course) and how the “Yoko Effect” still lives as Ariana Grande was blamed for her ex Mac Miller’s death. Spoiler alert: we get angry.
Produced by Sipho Hlongwane
Episode 9: Cause-Sumption and the Commodification Of Activism
Episode 8: Pleasures and Perils of YouTube
Episode 6: On the Obsession with Reality TV
Episode 5: The Most Wonderful World of K-pop
Episode 4: The Science Behind The Boy Bands
Episode 3: Worshipping At The Altar of Celebrity
Episode 1: World Cup and Misogyny
