Fandom
Fans & Kingdoms of fans
• A fandom can grow up centered around any area
of human interest or activity.
• The subject of fan interest can be narrowly
defined
– focused on something like an individual celebrity
– more widely defined, encompassing entire hobbies,
genres or fashions.
• groups of people fascinated with any subject
• Fandom as a term can also be used in a broad
sense to refer to an interconnected social
network of individual fandoms, many of which
overlap.
Definitions
• fandom can be defined or explained as the state of
being a fan or all that encompasses fan culture and
fan behavior in general, or the study of fans and fan
behavior.
• the definition of an audience is: an assembly of
listeners or spectators.
• the definition of fanatic is: marked or moved by
excessive enthusiasm and intense uncritical devotion.
• the definition of a fan is:
1) an enthusiastic follower of a sport or
entertainment or
2) an enthusiastic admirer (as of a celebrity).
Fan Activities
• Members of a fandom associate with one another
• fan conventions and publishing and exchanging fanzines and
newsletters
• communications and interaction for the purpose of archiving detailed
information pertinent to their given fanbase.
• Some fans write fan fiction, stories based around the universe and
characters of their chosen fandom.
• Some also dress in costumes ("cosplay") or recite lines of dialogue
either out-of-context or as part of a group reenactment.
• Others create fan vids, or analytical music videos focusing on the source
fandom, and yet others create fan art.
• Such activities are sometimes known as "fan labor" or "fanac," an
abbreviated form of the phrase "fan activity."
• The advent of the internet has significantly facilitated fan association
and activities.
• Fandom is sometimes caricatured as religious faith
Two images of the fan
• Obsessed individual & Hysterical crowd
• Critique of modern life
• Characterization of fandom as pathology
– Elitist and disrespectful beliefs about common life
Fandom as pathology
• Literature on fandom – images
of deviance
• Fanatic
• Fan – social & psychological
pathologies
• Fandom is excessive
Fan as Creative Consumer
• Technology & consumption
• Fan as passive receiver
• Fan as creative consumer
– Recontextualization of existent cultural products
– Purchases of a commodity (cultural product) is
only the first step
– Means of declaring your exaggerations
• Elevation of consumer as creator does not
deny the role of the producer
Creative Fans
• semiotic productivity is when fans use their
object of fandom to create social meaning in
their own lives (ex. a fan who gains confidence
watching his or her favorite character on TV).
• enunciative productivity is when fans express
their fandom to the outside world through
speech or appearance (ex. fans wearing their
favorite team's jerseys)
• textual productivity is when fans create texts
based on their object of fandom
Theories of fandom
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romantic attachment
Identification
fantasy
Fans as Tastemakers
Collective support and/or admiration for…
A collective celebration of mutual
taste/preference in –
• A ritual gathering (physical or virtual)
Relationships between fans
• Instead of monetary reward, one of the major rewards of
fan labor is the formation of relationships between fan
creators and other fans.
• relationships created through fan exchanges are often as
important, if not more so, than the products exchanged.
• The focus on relationships separates fandom economic
practices from the capitalistic practices of everyday life.
• From an economic anthropology viewpoint, the products
of fan labor are a form of cultural wealth
• valuable also for their ability to interrelate the fan works,
the fan-creators, and the original media property itself
through conversation and fan work exchanges.
• Fans, in other words, are “affines” of media property and
of other fans.
Legal issues
• Most fan labor products are derivative works
• they are creative additions or modifications to an
existing copyrighted work
• or they are original creations which are inspired by a
specific copyrighted work
• Some or all of these works may fall into the legal
category of transformative works (such as a parody
of the original), which is protected as fair use under
U.S. copyright law.
• corporations continue to ask fans to stop engaging
with their products in creative ways.
Fandom
• a site of collective memory
• affective community as the center of an
emotional life
• issues of gender, ethnicity, class, national
identity, diasporic identity, transnational
identity and power through global consumer
culture
• Interpretive communities