Fans have become important to work in media sociology and cultural studies for a variety of reasons: they can be taken to represent a dedicated, active audience; they are consumers who are often also (unofficial, but sometimes official) media producers (Jenkins 1992; McKee 2002); and they can be analyzed as a significant part of contemporary consumer culture. Fandom – the state of being a fan – is usually linked to popular culture rather than high culture. People who appreciate high culture, often being as passionately partisan as pop culture’s ‘‘fans,’’ are described as ‘‘connoisseurs’’ or ‘‘aficionados’’ rather than as fans (Jensen 1992). Whilst connoisseurship is typically deemed culturally legitimate, fandom has been analyzed as rather more problematic: the stereotype of ‘‘the fan’’ has been one of geeky, excessive, and unhealthy obsession with (supposedly) culturally trivial objects such as TV shows. Henry Jenkins has highlighted and opposed this negative fan stereotype, arguing that such portrayals of fandom should be critiqued, and that fans should instead be viewed more positively as building their own culture out of media pro ducts, and as selectively ‘‘poaching’’ meanings and interpretations from favored media texts. Jenkins, whose seminal work Textual Poachers (1992) helped to make fandom a viable object of academic study, suggests that the creativity of fans is downplayed in cultural common sense in favor of viewing fans as ‘‘cultural dupes’’ who are perfect consumers, always accepting what the culture industry produces for them. Against this narrative, depicted as belonging to the Frankfurt School of Marxist theorists such as Theodor Adorno as much as to forms of cultural common sense, Jenkins argues that fans discriminate keenly between and within their objects of fandom, developing an aesthetic sense of what counts as a ‘‘good’’ episode of television series such as Star Trek or Doctor Who (see Tulloch & Jenkins 1995). Fans develop extensive knowledge and expertise about their shows or sports teams, also characteristically feeling a sense of owner ship over ‘‘their’’ object of fandom. They also ‘‘tend to seek intimacy with the object of their attention – a personality, a program, a genre, a team’’ (Kelly 2004: 9). This ‘‘intimacy’’ could involve meeting a celebrity, getting a sports woman’s autograph, seeing an actor give a talk onstage at a convention, chatting with him or her in the bar afterwards, or even visiting real locations used in the filming of a TV series (see Hills 2002). Fans thus seek to break down barriers between themselves as subjects and their objects of fandom, their fan identity becoming a meaningful aspect of cultural and self identity. Indeed, Tulloch and Jenkins (1995: 23) distinguish between ‘‘fans,’’ who claim a cultural identity on the basis of their fandom, and ‘‘followers,’’ who despite following pop cultural texts, pop groups, TV series, and so on more than casually, do not make such an identity claim. As can be seen from this, fandom is generally discussed in relation to media consumption and media texts, sometimes being referred to specifically as ‘‘media fandom’’ (Jenkins … Continue reading Fan Culture