Nomadic Textual Poaching & Beyoncé Stan Meme-ing

By Connor Buzza 

With my creative project, I wanted to center the interpretive and creative practices of “stans”: the intensely supportive fans of celebrities that often congregate in online communities like Twitter and engage in discussion with other “standoms” (Bermudez et al., 2020, 1-2; Malik & Haider, 2021). Like other fan communities, stans are also active producers of fan content, such as fan art or compilation videos. Yet, one of the most distinct forms of fan content within standom is the practice of “meme-ing”, or the creation and sharing of visual content that is “actively circulated and adapted by users” (Palmer & Warren, 129). As I will demonstrate through my creative project, the meme-ing practices of stans is emblematic of “nomadic poaching”, in that stans appropriate celebrity texts and make intertextual connections to create their own new meanings.

In positing that stans are nomadic poachers, I am extending Jenkins’ (1992) argument that fans engage in both “textual poaching” and “nomadic reading” practices. To begin with the former, “textual poaching” refers to how readers may appropriate a text to make their own interpretations and fan creations. Rather than reading to understand the authorial meaning, textual poachers read and rework texts “according to their own blueprints” (26). Through their appropriation of a text, fans can fulfill their own interpretations and create new meanings according to their fannish desires. Furthermore, Jenkins also describes fans as “nomadic readers” to demonstrate how their fan interpretations and creations can wander across multiple texts. Fans are not bound to one text or fandom but are rather “constantly advancing upon another text, appropriating new materials, [and] making new meanings” (36). In fact, nomadic reading provides another avenue for fans to create new meanings via the juxtapositions and connections they make between and across texts: “It is the relationship between these two [or more] deliberately selected texts… that creates meaning” (Freund, 2018, 209). Thus, “nomadic poaching” refers to the ways that fans might engage in both “textual poaching” and “nomadic reading”. Fans appropriate multiple texts and make intertextual connections in their fan creations to produce new meanings.

Through my creative project, I attempt to capture and emphasize the nomadic poaching that is performed by stan meme-ing culture. My project in particular uses a popular stan meme-ing format that compiles stan Twitter memes and sets them to an artist’s music—my video specifically uses Beyoncé’s song “Heated”. While stan meme-ing may seem frivolous or nonsensical, I argue that it is indicative of their complex nomadic poaching practices.

Most evidently, this video shows how stan communities are highly nomadic, intertextual readers by drawing on a vast array of stan memes. Stan meme-ing is not bound to one standom or celebrity, but instead, relies on a vast array of stan references to make memes. This is most evident with the use of reaction memes and GIFs within standom spaces, such as in the comment section of a popular tweet about Beyoncé (PopCrave, 2023). Here, an array of memes from multiple standoms might be employed by a single standom to interpret and rework celebrity texts. Similarly, my project looks at “Heated” through intertextual references that span multiple standoms—including Nicki Minaj, Britney Spears, and Rihanna—as opposed to only referring to Beyoncé-centered texts. For each line of the song, I selected different stan memes that would compliment the lyric or support my stannish interpretation. In this way, my video “knits together” (Jenkins, 40) an intertextual network of stan memes to make interpretations about “Heated”. This illustrates how stan users frequently engage in nomadic poaching, as they rely on a rich, intertextual network of memes to make interpretations about celebrity texts.

Additionally, stans employ textual poaching techniques by appropriating celebrity texts and connecting them with stan memes to create new meanings. An example of this in standom would be the viral performance where Beyoncé supposedly points to a fan and sings “She ain’t no diva”; Beyoncé stans then used this meme to claim other celebrities are “no diva” (ShowTimeJoker1, 2023; WildxGlow, 2023). Here, Beyoncé stans appropriate this celebrity moment and use meme-ing to make their own interpretations and meanings about standom.

Likewise, my creative project uses stan memes to interpret the lyrics of “Heated”, consequently creating new meanings for the song. For instance, the specific memes I used create an interpretation of “Heated” as a fun dance song, but also one that does not need to be taken too seriously. An example of this would during the lyric “Give me face, face, face, face, yah”, where I used the popular stan meme of actress Emma Roberts—this stan meme, among several others in the video, supports my interpretation of the song as unserious and campy. While Beyoncé’s intent for “Heated” might have been to create a “fierce” anthem or message of self-love, my video appropriates this text and interprets it via stan memes to fulfill my own stannish desires. In this way, my project shows how stans might “poach” celebrity texts and give it new meanings through its connection to stan memes. This is also evident during the repeated lyric, “That cheap spandex she looks a mess”, which plays during the memes of Sam Smith and Taylor Swift. The use of these memes here interprets the lyric as a reference to these celebrities—they “look a mess”—even though the lyric is not explicitly directed towards anyone. The juxtapositions between the lyrics and memes reworks both to serve my stannish interpretations. Thereby, the connections that stans make between celebrity texts and memes creates new meanings through their intertextual interactions.

Conclusion

Bearing all of this in mind, I suggest that stan meme-ing is characteristic of Jenkins’ nomadic poaching argument. Stan meme-ing practices appropriate celebrity texts and make intertextual connections to create new meaning. My video in particular transforms Beyoncé’s song “Heated” by making connections to and interactions with a range of stan memes. In doing so, I illustrate how stans rely on similar methods of interpretation and creation as other fan communities, even if their meme-ing practices may seem insignificant in comparison.