Matching energy: The end of caring about reception studies’ racial ambivalence

This essay proposes matching energy as a methodology and a citational politic. It calls for marking white audience/fan studies as so particular to whiteness to be useless to the study of race. Matching energy is a process by which one models the behavior of those with whom they are interacting. Matching energy in work on race and audiences/fans entails willfully ignoring exnominated white studies of audiences and fans in the same way those studies ignore studies of racialized audiences and fans. That is, it is not that we ignore this work because we are unaware of it; rather, we ignore it because we are matching energy. Matching energy is methodological in its particular curation of the center from which it draws its knowledge base. That is, it builds a racialized center and calls into question the universality of whiteness and studies of white audiences/fans. It uses citational politics to ignore this work. It does not ‘fight’ with the work and offer it a citation. Rather, it pretends it does not exist, like white audience/fan studies pretends racialized work on audiences and fans does not exist. This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.