Abstract
Fandom is wide-ranging and multiform, involving commitment to a huge range of media and mediated activity, engagement with different levels of knowledge and enthusiasm being brought to its objects of interest and fulfilment that itself is as diverse as it is rich. The negative stereotypes which were once the stock-in-trade of tabloid journalists are far less frequently heard than 30 or 40 years ago, in part because the variety of fandom is now commonly accepted, with pathological obsession occupying only one extreme end of the spectrum, and in part because of the rise of fan studies over the past quarter century, with academics (often fans themselves) cultivating, disseminating and promoting a positive conception of fan audiences and fan activities. Fandom is bred of active choice and feeds integrally into identities, ideas of belonging, forms of distinction, credentials of authority and sources of self-esteem. If fans were once regarded as media pariahs, they are now celebrated, coaxed and courted by media producers who play a considerable part in fostering fan interest. The passionate engagement and participation which fandom represents is both a marketing tool and maker of profit. From being a subversion of consumerism, fandom becomes a failsafe form of income generation in the pervasive arena of popular culture.
The Ashgate companion to fan cultures is designed to showcase the current state of fan studies. It is divided into three sections based around the questions of fan definition, fan/producer relationships and fan sites and locations. Definition is definitely a contested issue, so where audiences end and the realms of fandom begin is complex, uncertain and always liable to shift. Chapters in the first section explore the difficulties this raises by looking at processes of becoming a fan, changes in fandom over the life-course, exchanges of antipathy in anti-fandom, media fandom and mechanisms of survival and differential scales of fandom in everyday life. The second part involves us in fan/celebrity interaction, online media technologies and fan-oriented texts, fan funding, taste makers and opinion leaders, the neglect of celebrity in fan studies and online fandom of gay television representation. Finally, the book turns to manifestations of fandom across the distinctions of online/offline, physical/digital, real/mediated. Chapters deal with transnational fandom, conflicts in online fan interactions, change and continuity in online fan communities, space and place, offline fan conventions, spectatorship and fan identities and (in relation to football hooliganism) the marginalization and derogation of fans. This concluding chapter reminds us that ‘participatory culture’ as a normative centre of fandom does not cover everything.
Vexed questions arise as one reads through this rich array of essays. How resistant is fandom, and is fan resistance being reincorporated into consumerism? What are the differentiating points between being active and being in control? Is fandom more about passionate enthusiasm for the ‘fan object’ or more about the cultural capital that accrues around fan involvement? What is the nature of community in online fan communities? Where does fandom fit in the cultural public sphere? What are the causes of fandom dissipation? If fandom is at least partly about desire – as in film or popular music fandom – can this ever overcome the contradiction between ardent encouragement of that desire and the impossibility of its tangible achievement except, as John Ellis (1992: 98) once put it, through the satisfactions of looking? Fantasy is perhaps the only additional way to do this, to translate being possessed into being the possessor, to shift the perspective from being the one looking to being the one looked at, as, for example, in the way the columnist Sally Weale (1996) has talked about her adolescent crushes on Paul Weller and Morissey: All unattainable, all the object of hours of girlish contemplation. They became the centre of elaborate daydreams which had little or nothing to do with reality. I was sure, for example, that Paul looked at me during that final rendition of Going Underground at Bingley Hall in Stafford. There were thousands of girls like me there, but he looked right into my eyes – really, he did. There was a connection.
It is a measure of the energy and quality of this edited collection that such questions are thrown up and remain unresolved, with easy formulas and facile responses eschewed. The book shows why fan commitments and fan labour give a sense of worth, purpose and achievement, while fans themselves continue to abide as a powerless elite. It presents some fascinating empirical work, displays a good deal of expertise and brings established and emergent scholars together between two covers. The only major disappointment is the highly truncated introduction, which does little more than summarize fan studies and offer short chapter outlines. For a volume of this scope, stretching to 300 pages, this is a puzzling editorial shortcoming.