Routledge 1992
"Historical propensity to treat media audiences as passive & controlled, its tendency to privilege aesthetic superiority in programming, its reluctance to support consumerism, its belief in media industry manipulation. The popular press, as well, has stigmatised fandom by emphasising danger, abnormality and silliness. And the public deny their own fandom, carry on secret lives as fans rick the stigma that comes from being a fan."
"Perhaps only a fan can appreciate the depth feeling, the gratifications, the importance for coping with everyday life that fandom represents."
PART I: Defining fandom
Fandom as Pathology: The consequences of characterisation by Jolie Jensen
- There are two types of fans: obsessed loner and the hysterical crowd
- Obsessed loner = intense fantasy relationship with celebrity figures -> stalking, threatening, killing
- Hysterical crowd = drugs, violence, alcohol, sexual and racial imagery associated (young hysterical fans)
- The fan is defined as a response to the star system. This means that passivity is ascribed to the fan he or she is seen as being enthralled /brought into existence by the modern celebrity system via mass media.
- "Erotomania" or the "Othello Syndrom" is an increasingly narcissistic society or maybe the fantasy life we see on television
- Caughey = media addicted age, celebrities function as role models for fan who engage in 'artificial social relation'
- Schickel = compares deranged fans and serial killers to 'us' ("normal" fans)
- Fandom as psychological compensation - psychological version of the mass
- Society critique = Fandom, especially 'excessive' fandom, is defined as a form of psychological compensation, an attempt to make up for all that modern life lacks.
- Para-social interaction = surrogate relationship - inadequately imitates normal relationships
The Cultural Economy of the Fandom by John Fiske
- Fandom is typically associated with cultural forms that dominate value system denigrates: music, novels, comics, celebrities
- Fans fiercely discriminate against what makes a (true) fan and what falls in that fandom
- D'Acci (1988): 'Cagney and Lacey' Fans -> Use show = higher self esteem, confidence to stand up for self, adult woman took inspiration to risk starting own business
- This popular discrimination involves the selection of texts that offer fans opportunities to make meanings of their social identities an social experiences that are self interested and functional
- Cultural tastes as practices are produced by social rather than individual differences, and so textual discrimination and social discrimination are part of the same cultural process within and between fans just as much as between fans and other popular audiences
- Fans make their culture out of the commercial commodities of cultural industries
- Fandom is a heightened form of popular culture in industrial societies that the fan is an 'excessive reader' who differs from the 'ordinary' one in degree that than kind
PART II: Fandom & Gender
Something More than Love: Fan stories on film by Lisa A. Lewis
This is a list of films that portray the extremes of fandom and fans:
- Hollywood or bust
- The Fan
- Comeback to the Five and Dime Jimmie Dean, Jimmie Dean
- I Wanna Hold Your Hand
- King of Comedy
- Heartbreak Hotel
PART III: Fans and industry
Fans as Tastemakers: Viewers of Quality Television by Sue Brower
Fans dictating the course and popularity of a show and how it relates.
- Role for a play incirculating social and aesthetic opinions in our culture
- Television series develops a following among people who both discover and create in Dick Hebdige's terms, a 'symbolic fit' between certain expressive materials and their lives (199, 11).
- By their activity in relation to the cultural form, they refine and enhance its social image while, as fans, claiming it as symbolic of their identity
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