The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures

Linda Duits, Koos Zwaan, Stijn Reijnders, Linda Duits, Koos Zwaan, Stijn Reijnders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317043478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Fans constitute a very special kind of audience. They have been marginalized, ridiculed and stigmatized, yet at the same time they seem to represent the vanguard of new relationships with and within the media. 'Participatory culture' has become the new normative standard. Concepts derived from early fan studies, such as transmedial storytelling and co-creation, are now the standard fare of journalism and marketing text books alike. Indeed, usage of the word fan has become ubiquitous. The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures problematizes this exaltation of fans and offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of the field. Bringing together the latest international research, it explores the conceptualization of 'the fan' and the significance of relationships between fans and producers, with particular attention to the intersection between online spaces and offline places. The twenty-two chapters of this volume elucidate the key themes of the fan studies vernacular. As the contributing authors draw from recent empirical work around the globe, the book provides fresh insights and innovative angles on the latest developments within fan cultures, both online and offline. Because the volume is specifically set up as companion for researchers, the chapters include recommendations for the further study of fan cultures. As such, it represents an essential reference volume for researchers and scholars in the fields of cultural and media studies, communication, cultural geography and the sociology of culture.

Part I
Re-defining the Fan

1
Returning to ‘Becoming-a-Fan’ Stories: Theorising Transformational Objects and the Emergence/Extension of Fandom

Matt Hills

Introduction

Fan studies has had much to say about fan cultures and communities, but rather less to say about how people become fans in the first place. Indeed, in his textbook Understanding Fandom (2013: 124), Mark Duffett goes so far as to describe this issue as an ‘elephant in the room’. In a sense, it is understandable that fandom has typically been theorised as communal, cultural and social: this means that it can be studied as a pre-existent, lived identity. However, by focusing on specific fan communities, the phenomenology of fandom has been somewhat downplayed and marginalised in much scholarship, as have accounts of how people become fans in the first place. Likewise, trajectories of fandom have been displaced by reified, fixed models of what it means to be a fan:

too often theorizations … have been based on restrictive typologies, rather than considering the process, development and … fluidity of being a contemporary … fan. … These also tend to present static models, which fail to recognise the … temporality of individuals’ locations within these communities. (Crawford 2004: 38)

Rather than media fandom being thought of as inherently intertextual, moving across the artefacts of popular culture and drawing them together into historicised, biographical networks of affect and meaning, fandom has instead typically been defined singularly. That is to say, fans are approached and defined as singular fans of ‘X’; Doctor Who fans, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, Twilight fans, and so on:

Very few studies address the origins of an individual’s fandom; for many scholars ‘fan’ is a kind of consumer category into which someone simply falls or does not fall … In such studies, there is no ‘becoming a fan’; rather ‘being a fan’ simply appears as a mode of audience participation. (Cavicchi 1998: 41)

The difficulty is that by ‘fixing’ fans into rigid communities and object-based categories, academia frequently loses the capacity to consider how people can be fans of multiple texts at the same time, as well as how people might move through and between different fandoms over time. Contained by concepts of community and culture, fandom partially loses its lived connection with a ‘narrative of the self’ (Giddens 1991: 76).

‘Becoming-a-fan’ stories, by contrast, potentially enable scholarship to consider how the process of first experiencing fandom, and initially embracing a fan identity, can be lived as self-narrative, and how it might be discursively framed. In this chapter I therefore want to return to becoming-a-fan stories with two specific aims in mind. Firstly, I will theorise ‘transformative’ moments of becoming-a-fan, using the work of object-relations psychoanalyst and theorist Christopher Bollas (1987, 1989 and 1992; Minsky 1998; Hills 2005). As with my own prior work drawing on D.W. Winnicott’s theories of play (Hills 2002), this cannot involve a wholesale application of Bollas’ work as there are difficulties carried by reducing fandom to psychoanalytic accounts. Chiefly, there is the danger of rendering fandom interchangeable with other cultural experiences and artefacts, something that ultimately precludes thinking about the specificity of media fandom(s). Secondly, I want to consider how becoming-a-fan stories may not, in fact, always be presented by audiences as transformative, but may instead form a continuation of previous commitments to popular culture and ‘narratives of self’ already in play. In such cases, the knowledges, practices and discourses of fandom can be extended intertextually towards new fan objects. Where Cornel Sandvoss has written of fandom as an ‘extension’ of self (2005: 100), we may also encounter the ‘extension of fandom’ into new texts and brands when a prior self-narrative of fandom is transferred and transposed into new consumer/audience experiences. It is therefore important not to assume that becoming-a-fan necessarily means a life-changing, pivotal moment of self-transformation: empirically, it may just as well form part of a routinised, habituated way of interacting with pop culture. In the next section, then, I’ll focus on fandom-as-transformative, before moving on to address the alternative modality of fandom-as-transference.

Transformational Objects: Conversion, Induction, Socialisation

Where fan studies have focused on becoming-a-fan stories, the concept of conversion has been important. Daniel Cavicchi’s outstanding study of Bruce Springsteen fans offers one example:

a closer look at fans’ accounts of their experiences shows that … conversion serves as more than simply a metaphorical description of fans’ degree of feeling; it actually describes in detail the process of becoming a fan. In particular, the descriptions of transformations found in narratives of becoming a fan are remarkably similar to those found in the conversion narratives of evangelical Christians in the modern United States. (1998: 43)

Daniel Cavicchi argues that people who become Springsteen fans initially experience this as a ‘conversion’ whereby their priorities in life, and their emotional connections, are reconfigured by the process of entering fandom: ‘becoming a fan is, for most fans, a milestone in their lives in which “everything changed”; they tend to think of themselves in terms of being a fan and not being a fan’ (1998: 153). Following Cavicchi’s work, C. Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby define ‘becoming-a-fan narratives’ precisely as ‘fans’ accounts of encountering media texts that resonate so powerfully that they transform one’s identity, daily activities, and life trajectories’ (2010: online).

Classic, ‘first-wave’ studies of fandom (for example Jenkins 1992 and Bacon-Smith 1992) do not, in fact, approach fandom merely as a consumer category. Henry Jenkins considers the socialisation of fans: ‘an individual’s socialization into fandom often requires learning “the right way” to read as a fan, learning how to employ and comprehend the community’s particular interpretive conventions’ (1992: 89), while Camille Bacon-Smith devotes a chapter to the topic of ‘Training New Members’ (1992: 81–114). But these accounts of emergent fandom, approaching it sociologically and culturally as a learned set of protocols and reading conventions, fail to adequately consider the affectively powerful moment of ‘conversion’ alluded to by Cavicchi:

Becoming a Springsteen fan … entails a radical, enduring change in orientation. It is … the development of a complex relationship with Bruce Springsteen through his work, a dramatic opening of oneself to another’s experience. [Fans] dramatically portray the process of becoming a fan as … a lasting and profound transition from an ‘old’ viewpoint … to a ‘new’ one, filled with energy and insight. (Cavicchi 1998: 59)

Other theorists have also considered the importance of conversion in relation to becoming a fan. Steve Bailey’s analysis of Kiss fans covers similar ground: ‘15 year old “Jon” … claims that following his first [Kiss] concert, “ever since then I’ve been a different person”’ (2005: 121). Bailey addresses a genre of fan testimony, the ‘Kisstory’, in which fans recount how they first discovered the group:

fans provide a … description of the struggles that sometimes follow an initial conversion to Kiss fandom … fans often describe resistance not only from family, but also from peers … being a Kiss fan was perceived as requiring the ability to ‘stand up’ for yourself, ‘even when it’s not the popular thing to do’ and ‘everyone thinks you’re nuts’. Other ‘Kisstories’ offer … tales of adolescent persecution and tests of courage related to their status as a Kiss fan. (Bailey 2005: 122)

Bailey suggests that this struggle is partly linked to the low cultural status of Kiss, given that they are a rock group with a highly artificial image, rather than participating in dominant (sub)cultural norms of ‘rock ideology’ and authenticity (2005: 110). But he also reads fans’ defensiveness as linked to the age at which they typically discovered Kiss:

Most of the fans I interviewed, as well as those … offering their ‘Kisstories’ in various publications, gave ages between five and eleven for the onset of their love for the group, and even younger ages occasionally appear. Thus, the maintenance of Kiss fandom involves retaining what is often a pre-adolescent passion, a particularly unusual characteristic for music fans, a wider culture that tends to hold music beloved by children in extremely low regard. (Bailey 2005: 109–10)

Thus, this fandom is not merely ‘enduring’ (Kuhn 2002; Stevenson 2006), it is also adolescent, or even pre-adolescent, yet held onto through adulthood. The assumption might therefore be that this is somehow a regressive or ‘childish’ object choice; and this is a taint that Kiss fans evidently work to ward off via their identity management and self-presentation. But elsewhere – in a detailed case study of one Manic Street Preachers fan, Julia, rather than a fan community–Tania Zittoun has suggested that what looks like (religious) ‘conversion’ may in fact be psychoanalytically readable as ‘generative’; that is, enabling the healthy expansion of self-experience, knowledge and use of symbolic resources. Zittoun poses the question, ‘do the processes described … not strongly resemble those of a conversion process?’ (2006: 140), but her answer is that supposed fan ‘conversion’ is in fact a productive self-transformation rather than some kind of ideological capture: ‘it is precisely the very generativity of Julia’s use of symbolic resources that is to be highlighted: each step of that transformation has enabled her to open new options’ for self-development and growth (Zittoun 2006: 140–41). Similarly, the Kiss and Springsteen fans display developmental transitions via their becoming-a-fan stories, whether it is dramatising a newfound sense of autonomy (Kiss), or an openness to another’s experience and artistic vision (Springsteen).

Becoming-a-fan as a part of developmental, maturational processes within pervasive media culture is not, of course, restricted to popular music fandom. Heather Meggers has recently considered how reading and writing fan fiction is understood via self-narratives of transformative personal development. In a survey of 485 online fans covering 140 different ‘primary fandoms’ (2012: 59), Meggers found that 55 per cent ‘believed that participation in online fandom had played a role in changing their own attitudes about sexuality’, with increased openness, tolerance and acceptance of others being one theme, along with increased acceptance of one’s own sexuality, and increased knowledge more generally (2012: 60). Meggers argues that this ‘media fandom helped many women discover their authentic sexual selves’ via the provision of ‘a perceived safe space for self-discovery’ (2012: 66). However, as with Bailey’s Kiss fans and Zittoun’s Manic Street Preachers fan, these transformative fan experiences coincide with adolescence:

Fandom involvement might have influenced … changes [in the self] … or it might have been a simple covariate during important formative years in many fans’ sexual and emotional maturation. Either way, it is important to acknowledge the perceptual association that exists. (Meggers 2012: 76)

Reading fandom as psychologically epiphenomenal is highly problematic, though, since this posits an essentialist notion of the ‘authentic’ self. It is an issue which persists in object-relations psychoanalysis such as Christopher Bollas’ work, marked as it is by concepts of the individual’s ‘idiom of the true self’ (1989: 42). For Bollas, the affective choice of objects that we make throughout life (not only in fandoms, presumably, but also in tastes, enthusiasms, passions and relationships) amounts to the generation of our ‘personal effects’:

In the course of a day, a week, a year, or a lifetime we are engaged in successive selections of objects, each of which suits us at the moment, ‘provides’ us with a certain kind of experience … Sometimes we are conscious of why we choose what we do. More often than not, however, we choose our objects because we seek the experience potential of the choice … And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object, meeting up at just the right time. (Bollas 1989: 48–9, my emphasis)

Bollas uses the term personal effects, borrowed from the ‘ceremonial phrase’ of one’s possessions left behind after death, to think about the field of objects which act as a ‘signature’ of our idiom, hence becoming a sort of ‘private culture’ (1989: 49). Personal effects–the conscious and unconscious object-choices accumulated across a life-course–are ‘[i]n health’ a way in which the self ‘continuously establishes its idiom’ (ibid.). But note that only some of these ‘personal effects’ are significantly transformative, where the ‘true self’ encounters an object that can be ‘wedded’ to it, ‘meeting up at just the right time’. There is a dimension of chance to this; what is lived and experienced as powerfully transformative is often also experienced as surprising:

Objects … often arrive by chance, and these aleatory objects evoke psychic textures which do not reflect the valorisations of desire. We have not, as it were, selected the aleatory object to express an idiom of self. Instead, we are played upon by the inspiring arrival of the unselected, which often yields a very special type of pleasure–that of surprise. It opens us up, liberating an area like a key fitting a lock. In such moments we can say that objects use us. (Bollas 1992: 37)

Bollas’ work does not directly theorise media fandom–an absence perhaps partly driven by the analyst’s own forms of cultural capital – yet it seems especially evocative of fans’ conversion narratives. The object that suddenly becomes so vital to the emergent fan, seeming to unexpectedly interlock with self-experience, indicates a ‘duality of object arrival – by desire or by chance’ (Bollas 1992: 27). And though fan objects might common-sensically be expected to arrive ‘by desire’, it appears that those which are markedly self-transformative and unconsciously generative are not, in fact, reducible to desiring selves.

Moving away from discussions of personal ‘idiom’ and the ‘true self’ – both of which import an unhelpful degree of mysticism into what would otherwise proceed as rationalist media/cultural studies – Bollas offers up a rather more useful concept: the ‘transformational object’ (1987: 28). Less clearly tied to a ‘destiny drive’ or ‘true self’ (Bollas 1989), the transformational object is any which re-evokes existential echoes of early, pre-verbal childhood experience. At this archaic phase of self-formation, it is the mother who has the capacity to transform the subject: ‘in our analysis of certain fe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I RE-DEFINING THE FAN
• PART II FANS AND PRODUCERS
• PART III LOCALITIES OF FANDOM
• Index