Having just finished reading Jason Tocci’s 400+ page thesis from 2009, this is the question that still lingers with Andreas Ottemo. In this post he outlines and critiques Tocci’s attempt to elaborate the shape of geekdom in the early 2000s and wonders whether any core holds together the disparate strands of geek identity.
Tocci does an excellent job in mapping the different corners of geek culture. He does so through a multi-sited ethnographic investigation where he traces geek culture through visiting self-declared geek conventions, maker-spaces and geek tv-show casting meets. He also engages with geek culture online, through geek forums, blog posts and by maintaining his own blog.
He conducts his investigation against the background of understanding geek identity an “identity in its own right, which implies membership in an entire geek culture”. Through such a manoeuvre, Tocci avoids defining “the geek” in his own terms, and in a way defers the question of geek identity to the no less challenging task of delineating geek culture. And as cultural theorist Raymond Williams has argued, culture is one of the most complex words in the English dictionary.
Tocci acknowledges this, and borrows Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities to discuss geek culture. This allows him to capture both the local and highly contextual aspects of engaging in geek culture as insular spaces, while simultaneously underscoring how these spaces are tightly linked to a broader geek community. This gives us a hint as to why it seems so hard to answer the question of what defines a geek. Anderson uses the concept of imagined communities to discuss the commonality we experience within a nation. Maybe it is only natural, then, that geek identity seems just as hard to pinpoint as Swedishness, Britishness or other nationalities?
Four versions of the geek
At the same time, Tocci does delineate geek identity in some ways. Perhaps he is not so interested in establishing a core of geek identity, but in choosing to focus on four different versions of the geek, he does offer something of a map. These versions are “the geek as misfit”, “the geek as genius”, “the geek as fan” and last “the geek as chic”. These are explored in one findings chapter each.
In the first, Tocci maps the aspects of geek identity that correlate most strongly to an idea of the geek as a social outcast, epitomised by TV shows like Beauty and The Geek. This is a form of geekdom that seems animated by a “locker room atmosphere” and it is largely a masculine identity formation with a strained relation to women and to sexual and ethnic minorities.
The geek as genius, in its turn largely defines its “geek identity through technical mastery”, particularly in relation to “information technology, programming and engineering”.
The geek as fan largely revolves around media consumption and fan culture, particularly as it relates to the science fiction genre but also more broadly.
The geek as chic captures the notion that the geek has become popular, even mainstream, and correlates to our previous posts about superhero movies dominating the cinema for the last decade. In this chapter, Tocci also discusses geek aesthetics and style as well as nerdcore hip hop and similar cultural forms of expression.
But no one logic to rule them all
As can be seen, Tocci traces geek identity through a number of distinct domains and he does discuss similarities and overlaps. However, he largely prioritises being empirically close to the data and justifying the settings he explores in their own terms rather than speculating or theorising geek identity in more abstract terms. This is most certainly a helpful quality of the thesis but it also builds up high hope that in the concluding chapter, one will see all the different threads that are laid out through the findings chapters tied together. It is therefore with some frustration I find that Tocci dodges this and instead chooses to conclude the thesis through offering “an anecdote that might help to encapsulate much of what I see as characteristic of geek cultures”.
The anecdote is interesting enough, but ultimately it offers simply a last glimpse into geek culture before closing the thesis, rather than actually concluding the arguments. This is unfortunate in the way that it makes the knowledge contribution of the thesis less clear, but most of all, it does not help me answer the question that started this blog post: is there a core to geek identity?
It is not so much that I want to pinpoint an essence of geek identity nor that I think any identity necessarily even has a defining core. But I cannot shake the feeling, however, that there are indeed forms of family resemblances between the different forms of geekiness that Tocci describes. And maybe then even some underlying logics and characteristics that animate all formations of geekiness. This is something that we’re exploring through this project and we’d be interested to hear what do you think?