Understanding Fandom

Mark Duffett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623560867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Fans used to be seen as an overly obsessed fraction of the audience. In the last few decades, shifts in media technology and production have instead made fandom a central mode of consumption. A range of ideas has emerged to explore different facets of this growing phenomenon. With a foreword by Matt Hills, Understanding Fandom introduces the whole field of fan research by looking at the history of debate, key paradigms and methodological issues. The book discusses insights from scholars working with fans of different texts, genres and media forms, including television and popular music. Mark Duffett shows that fan research is an emergent interdisciplinary field with its own key thinkers: a tradition that is distinct from both textual analysis and reception studies. Drawing on a range of debates from media studies, cultural studies and psychology, Duffett argues that fandom is a particular kind of engagement with the power relations of media culture.

1

Introduction

The first performer on stage was Sting. He walked out on stage with a group of black backing singers, who began to sing one of his hits, beginning as an acapella chorus of voices . . . By the end of the first line, the 70,000 or more voices present were all singing as one, sending a message to millions watching the television signals that were being broadcast around the world by satellite. My body reacted instinctively, and I can still remember the moment vividly. My body was filled with excitement, the hairs on my arms stood up, and the ones on the back of my neck prickled. I was washed with a wave of euphoria, my whole body tingled, filled with energy, with excitement, with the moment of Kairos, of time that stood still, that had quantity rather than pace. I experienced joy, elation, exhilaration, as well as passion, political motivation and conviction.

RUPERT TILL 2010, X

It seems as good a place as any to begin a book on media fandom with music researcher Rupert Till’s account of the 1988 Free Nelson Mandela concert in London. Till’s report seems to capture something about an overwhelming sense of emotional conviction that accompanies fandom. His identification with the music is unexpected, bodily and heartfelt and seemingly lacking input from his own conscious will. It is not approached in a calculating way or as an achievement. Closer inspection reveals greater complexity. Rupert Till’s pleasure seems to spring unbidden from his experience of a live performance and yet it likely represents the culmination of an extended engagement with Sting’s recorded and broadcast music. Till is in a leisure environment surrounded by a vast group of like-minded people, at an event that could well have resonated with his value system. It is unclear whether his connection is just about the music, what it said in the context of Mandela’s incarceration or with Sting himself for making a statement. Moreover Till’s recollection comes from an event that has, over two decades, become important as part of a generational memory. He can now speak about his experience using words like ‘kairos’ which act as reminders that he has, in the meantime, acquired the knowledge and vocabulary of an experienced academic.¹ These things are worth mentioning, not because Till’s entry into fandom sounds in any way suspicious, but rather to highlight that fandom itself is a more complicated phenomenon than we might think.

Most of us can identify with Till’s experience in some way. It supplies an example of the surprisingly commonplace moment where, as individuals, we discover something significant about our passion and identity. Many people attend concerts, collect recordings, enjoy the cinema and watch television. Almost everyone loves a particular star or TV show. Whether the fascination is with Sting or Spiderman, Marilyn or Twilight, almost everyone self-identifies as a fan in some sense. An estimated 90 per cent of American males have repeatedly played video games (Jenkins 2006, 201). CBS polls consistently find that over 40 per cent of all Americans consider themselves to be Elvis fans (Victor 2008, 152). One study of young adults found that over 75 per cent of the sample professed a strong attraction to a celebrity at some point in their lives, and over half claimed that a famous person had influenced their personal attitudes or beliefs (see Boon & Lomore 2001).

Media fandom is the recognition of a positive, personal, relatively deep, emotional connection with a mediated element of popular culture. I began researching the topic for a PhD in 1995 and still remain interested by the questions that it can raise. Fandom has intrigued a generation of scholars who are interested in the expression of social and personal identity in the context of media culture. One useful distinction to make here is between wider research fields and fan studies. Fandom research is a very broad, long-standing, multi-disciplinary body of scholarship that takes fandom as its primary focus. Interested scholars are either interdisciplinary in orientation or have come from academic traditions such as sociology, anthropology and psychology. Fan studies is a much narrower area which has emerged from cultural studies in the last two decades. Its practitioners aim to represent fandom in a positive light and tend to study fan communities and practices. A wide range of fan research still takes place, although fan studies currently attracts the most attention. Fandom remains a complex and challenging area of analysis worth studying for many reasons. As Western society shifts further into a digital, tertiary, service economy, its analysis can help to explain why individuals are increasingly constructing their personal identities around the media products that they enjoy. Given the continual mystery and ubiquity of the phenomenon, studying it can help us improve individual self-awareness. A focus on fandom uncovers social attitudes to class, gender and other shared dimensions of identity. In business, the analysis of fandom enables product development. Crucially, its study can expose the operation of power in the cultural field.

Understanding Fandom is based on the debated premise that its subject matter has enough coherence to warrant detailed analysis. Sports fandom remains the most accepted model for fandom in our society. Although a minority of researchers have studied both topics, in many ways sports fandom and media fandom are very different objects of study.² Sports fandom is ultimately tribal and based on a controlled, competitive mentality. It raises passionate instincts that are significantly different in both meaning and intensity to those associated with enjoying television, music or cinema. One example should suffice: in May 2008 when public video screen coverage of the UEFA cup final malfunctioned in Manchester’s Piccadilly Square, a riot took place that involved 1,500 police officers trying to contain thousands of disappointed Glasgow Rangers fans. Some of the officers wore emergency riot gear as they were expecting trouble. Fifteen police officers were injured and 42 fans arrested. In contrast, although concerts, conventions, raves, festivals, film premiers and celebrity book signings can attract large numbers of people, they are not generally associated with the atmosphere of drunken bravado and mass violence that can spoil sporting fixtures. Media fandom is socially enacted through different sets of gender relationships, different styles of behaviour and types of feeling. Because sport has gradually been extended as mass spectacle and its elite players have increasingly taken up the associated trappings of stardom, the difference between sports fandom and media fandom has perhaps diminished. David Beckham, for example, arguably has fans who are media fans rather than sports enthusiasts (see Cashmore 2004) and of course many people follow both pursuits at once. That does not mean there is no difference between them. Discussion in the present volume will not address sports fandom.

Perhaps a more pressing question is whether media fandom is itself a coherent object. Concluding an important book-length study of television fandom, Henry Jenkins wondered:

I am not sure that the types of fans I have discussed here, fans of a particular configuration of popular narratives, are necessarily identical with other varieties of fans, fans of specific media personalities, rock performers, sports teams or soap operas. These groups will have some common experiences as well as display differences that arise from their specific placement within the cultural hierarchy and their interests in different forms of entertainment. (1992, 286)

Jenkins is right: different fandoms involve a range of experiences and occupy different places in the public imagination. Telefantasy is a broad genre of television programming that includes sci-fi and fantasy narratives. Jenkins’ book was based on research with fans of several different telefantasy series. Two points are interesting here. He identified what we might loosely call ‘celebrity followers’ as unserved by his analysis. As a strain of media fandom, popular music is perhaps the most representative of this contingent. Studying the difference between different media, P. David Marshall (1997) argued that film, television and popular music performers are differently exposed in their respective mass media. Marshall suggested that the aura of film stars emerges from the distanced nature of their screen image; we, as an audience, only witness a tiny fraction of their actual personalities on-screen. Television constructs media celebrity in quite the opposite way: by an intimate, immediate over-abundance of imagery that habituates viewers on a daily basis to their familiar presence. Meanwhile, for Marshall, popular music performers are particularly associated with the image of the live crowd, the energetic group of admirers who have assembled in one place to see them. Synergy is the cross promotion of commercial products to different outlets. Marshall’s differentiation argument may be breaking down in an era of multimedia synergy where film stars work on television and in theatre, and tweet messages directly to their fans online. Nevertheless, it remains useful for addressing Jenkins’ concerns. The process of following mass mediated celebrities, which, taking Marshall’s lead we might recognize as symbolized by pop fandom, is not so very different in kind from other types of media fandom. Instead it represents one pole in a process that can also include reading narratives (whether biographic or fictional) and creating new reference points such as fan fiction. Jenkins (1992) looks at fans who made music (‘filk songs’), but rarely does he – for both political and intellectual reasons – directly address the ‘cult of personality’ that undergirds some prominent types of media fandom. If fan studies has mostly been a repository for writing about telefantasy fandom for rather too long, it has much to learn from an interchange with the much smaller body of research about the popular music audience. Media fandom holds together narrative and personality, criticism and emotion. Its different forms – represented at their extremes, perhaps, by sci-fi and popular music fandom – are associated with different theoretical perspectives, yet they are not completely distinct. Rather than claiming to be a comprehensive survey of fandom research, this book has a more modest aim of introducing some of the key writers from the field and drawing together commonalities between fandoms for a range of media.

A brief history of fandom

Fandom is a sociocultural phenomenon largely associated with modern capitalist societies, electronic media, mass culture and public performance. In most research there is a tendency to talk about the phenomenon as if it has always existed, fully formed, in society. Some scholars have called for more research that historicizes fandom. As that issue is increasingly being addressed, writers have begun to unearth a complex history which demonstrates Henry Jenkins’ claim that ‘Nobody functions entirely within fan culture, nor does fan culture maintain any claims to self-sufficiency. There is nothing timeless and unchanging about this culture; fandom originates as a response to specific historical conditions’ (1992, 3). Those conditions stem from shifts in the media and their tendency to reconfigure everyday experience.

The term ‘fan’ first appeared in late seventeenth-century England, where it was a common abbreviation for ‘fanatic’ (a religious zealot). It became significant in the United States a century later, where it was used by journalists to describe the passion of baseball spectators (Abercrombie & Longhurst 1998, 122). This later usage was adopted to describe dedicated audiences for film and recorded music. It is easy to make swift generalizations and say that prototypical forms of fandom therefore never existed in earlier times. That would, however, mistake the invention of the label for the beginning of the phenomenon. As Leo Braudy (1987) has shown, fame is an ancient mechanism, a point that seems obvious when one thinks about institutions like royal, religious or political office and the circulation of human faces on coinage. Portrait painting was a longstanding way to keep a record of personal likeness. Shakespeare, who was a highly successful playwright in his own lifetime (1564–1616), became the centre of one of the most enduring cultural phenomena after his death. His birthplace in Stratford upon Avon – which still attracts around 400,000 visitors per year – has been open to the public since the mid-eighteenth century. By the Victorian era it had became fashionable for visitors – some of whom, such as Charles Dickens, were famous in their own right – to scratch their names on the window panes or scrawl them on the inner walls of the cottage. The Victorian visitors’ engravings are not so different to the graffiti that is currently written by fans on the stone wall outside Graceland.³

In the early part of the nineteenth century romantic poets like Lord Byron established a new benchmark in literary popularity. Written reports and newspapers helped to spread the reputations of well known people. By this time there were multiple genres of stage performance. Long before the advent of cinema or recorded sound, performers like the singer Jenny Lind (1820–87) and actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) made international tours, complete with merchandise, on the basis of their reputations (see Waksman 2011 and Cavicchi 2011, 14–18). Newspaper reviews prepared prospective audiences for their arrival. In effect, some kind of publicity had always allowed performers’ reputations to precede them. It now seems strange that audiences who had never actually seen or heard a star could be sent into paroxysms of glee primed only by press reports. Nevertheless, celebrity was mediated by such means.

A significant shift happened in the middle of the nineteenth century. The term ‘celebrity’, which had previously referred to the general condition of being famous, extended its meaning to encompass famous individuals. The development of photography catalysed and consolidated this meaning. Portrait photographers like Napoleon Sarony, who ran a studio in New York from 1867, took pictures of singers and actors. Publicity shots formed the basis of a merchandising industry of photos, cards and postcards that circulated the carefully-posed visual image of theatre performers in an era where followers could easily acquire visual referents. When the American showman Buffalo Bill (William Cody) came to London to display his travelling show in 1887, his apartment was, according to a local journalist, ‘embarrassed by an overwhelming mass of flowers which come hourly from hosts of female admirers’ (see Warren 2002). In the later part of the nineteenth century, audience appreciation was conferred not only on writers, heroes, singing stars, raconteurs and theatre actors. It extended to other public figures, including a coterie of dandies who combined an aristocratic sense of privilege with dapper styles of dress and a carefree approach to their personal finances.

Later in the nineteenth century, the invention of sound recording (Edison’s phonograph in 1878), cinema (perforated celluloid in 1889) and airwave broadcasting (perhaps as early as 1906) laid the foundations for electronic media industries that would support the vast audiences and fan phenomena that dominated much of the twentieth century. As sociologists Ferris and Harris (2011, 13) explain, ‘there would be no fame if there were no fans, and there would be no fans if there were no media, whether print or electronic’. By 1904 the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso had acquired contracts with the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Victor Talking Machine Company that consolidated his immensely popular career, though he died in 1921, four years before electrical recording enabled high-fidelity sound. Meanwhile, once film fans started writing to Hollywood, the studios began to use stars as in-house vehicles for audience engagement. Movie studios were deluged from 1908 onwards with letters for early film performers such as Florence Lawrence.⁴ When Carl Laemmle Snr, the head of Independent Moving Picture Company, publicized the names of his actors due to public demand in 1910, the star system was born. Motion Picture Story Magazine, the first national film fan magazine in America, began that same year. Within five years it was joined by Photoplay, Motion Picture and Shadowland. Mainstream publications like the New York Times also began covering Hollywood stories. Some of the first fan clubs emerged around this time. By 1912, all the major film companies except for DW Griffith’s Biograph revealed the names of leading studio actors.

Between the 1920s and 1950s, fan demands helped to shape Hollywood to some extent. The dominant studios initially aimed to reach a female audience and to provide young working women with figures of identification. Features such as George Melford’s The Sheik and Rex Ingram’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (both 1921) established Rudoph Valentino an early Hollywood heartthrob. When Valentino died of a perforated ulcer in 1926, a crowd of around 75,000 onlookers marched on his funeral home, creating a crush that shattered the glass windows and required a police charge. Reports of the event scandalized Hollywood ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Fan stereotypes and representations
• 3 Beyond the text
• 4 The pathological tradition
• 5 How do people become fans?
• 6 Fan practices
• 7 Fandom, gender and sexual orientation
• 8 Myths, cults and places
• 9 The fan community: online and offline
• 10 Researching fandom
• 11 Conclusion: The frontiers of fan research
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index