Pierre Bourdieu

Famous and beloved sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher. How much do you reckon one would earn from being those three things? Off topic. Bad

Pierre Bourdieu is another referenced a lot by fan scholars. He has a lot of theories so it might be hard to get through them all and trying to adapt them to fan culture.

Main theories for consumption:

• Economic, social and cultural capital: 
  • Economic capital: command over economic resources (cash, assets).
  • Social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support. Bourdieu described social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition."
  • Cultural capital: forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society. Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system.
  
  
  • Cultural capital has three subtypes: embodied, objectified and institutionalised (Bourdieu, 1986:47). Bourdieu distinguishes between these three types of capital:
    • Embodied cultural capital consists of both the consciously acquired and the passively "inherited" properties of one's self (with "inherited" here used not in the genetic sense but in the sense of receipt over time, usually from the family through socialization, of culture and traditions; a meme). Cultural capital is not transmissible instantaneously like a gift or bequest; rather, it is acquired over time as it impresses itself upon one's habitus (character and way of thinking), which in turn becomes more attentive to or primed to receive similar influences.
      • Linguistic capital, defined as the mastery of and relation to language (Bourdieu, 1990:114), can be understood as a form of embodied cultural capital in that it represents a means of communication and self-presentation acquired from one's surrounding culture.
    • Objectified cultural capital consists of physical objects that are owned, such as scientific instruments or works of art. These cultural goods can be transmitted both for economic profit (as by buying and selling them with regard only to others' willingness to pay) and for the purpose of "symbolically" conveying the cultural capital whose acquisition they facilitate. However, while one can possess objectified cultural capital by owning a painting, one can "consume" the painting (understand its cultural meaning) only if one has the proper foundation of conceptually and/or historically prior cultural capital, whose transmission does not accompany the sale of the painting (except coincidentally and through independent causation, such as when a vendor or broker chooses to explain the painting's significance to the prospective buyer).
    • Institutionalized cultural capital consists of institutional recognition, most often in the form of academic credentials or qualifications, of the cultural capital held by an individual. This concept plays its most prominent role in the labor market, in which it allows a wide array of cultural capital to be expressed in a single qualitative and quantitative measurement (and compared against others' cultural capital similarly measured). The institutional recognition process thereby eases the conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by serving as a heuristic that sellers can use to describe their capital and buyers can use to describe their needs for that capital.
• Habitus: Habitus is the set of socially learned dispositions, skills and ways of acting that are often taken for granted, and which are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life.The particular contents of the habitus are the result of the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. The habitus can be seen as counterpoint to the notions of rationality that is prevalent within other disciplines of social science research.It is perhaps best understood in relation to the notion of the 'habitus' and 'field', which describes the relationship between individual agents and the contextual environment. 
• [Thank you Wiki]
• I've realised that I spelt 'Bourdieu' wrong in my labels.....

Michel de Certeau part 2: Summary Points

Ok this is the only short summary I could find that I understood to an extent:

http://recombinant.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/the-practice-of-everyday-life-michel-de-certeau-summary-points/

For more in depth but easy-to-understand explanation (not referenced in this post):

http://www.arasite.org/decwalk.htm

The Practice of Everyday Life – Michel De Certeau – Summary Points

General Introduction

- an investigation into how ‘users’ operate
- traditionally considered to be passive and guided by established rules

- last 300 years has focused on the idea that the individual is an elementary unit of society
- groups are form out of individuals and are always reducible to individuals
- purpose of the study is to make systems of operational combination explicit
- expose the actual everyday actions of consumers
- “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”

Consumer Production

- studies of popular culture and marginal groups
- did not locate cultural differences in groups associated with ‘counter-culture’

Usage, or Consumption

- many studies have looked at the representations of a society on one hand and how it behaves on the other
- analysis of tv broadcast images (representation) and time spent watching tv (behaviour) should be complemented by studies of what the cultural consumer ‘makes’ or ‘does’ with these images during this time

- production vs consumption – the latter is devious, silent and invisible

- example of Spanish colonizers forcing their culture upon indigenous Indians; they did not reject or alter them but rather subverted them by using them for ends and references that the Spanish could not relate to or understand
- comparison with consumer culture; the ‘common people’, like the Indians, have a foreign culture imposed upon them by the Elites, but often subvert this culture by using it in ways the producers did not intend

- the presence and circulation of representations tells us nothing about what they mean to people
- we must analyse the manipulation of cultural objects by ‘users’ other than its makers
- difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in its use

- performance vs competence; the act of speaking is not the same as having a knowledge of the language
- language is “an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers”
- users make countless transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules

The Procedures of Everyday Creativity

- Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault – instead of analyzing the ‘apparatus exercising power’, he focuses on ‘the mechanisms that have sapped the strength of these institutions’
- ‘grid of discipline’ becoming more widespread; how does society resist this? how do people manipulate the mechanisms of discipline or conform to it so they can evade it?

- micro-politics as everyday tactics of evasion from the imposed dominant cultural order
- consumers who are pushed to the limit and who resist social norms form a sort of network of ‘anti-discipline’

The Formal Structure of Practice

- assumption that everyday operations conform to certain rules
- what is an art or ‘way of making’?
- popular culture = arts of making
- an art of combination that is intertwined with an art of using

- two types of investigation, 1) descriptive analysis of readers’ practices, urban spaces, everyday rituals, resues of collective memory. 2) tracing the origins of the forms of these operations, e.g. the recomposition of a space by familial practices and the ‘art of cooking’

- sociologists, anthropologists and historians have examined mixtures of rituals and makeshifts (bricolages), manipulations of spaces, operators of networks (e.g. Goffman, Bourdieu, Mauss, DÈtienne, Boissevain, Laumann)
- linguistics: analysis of everyday interactions in relation to structures of expectation, negotiation, and improvisation of ordinary language. (e.g. Garfinkel, Labov, Sachs, Schegloff)

- formal logics, analytical philosophy: action, time and modalisation
- Noam Chomsky’s study of the oral uses of language

The Marginality of a Majority

- an exploration of the types of operations that characterize ‘consumption’
- to find the origin of the creativity via appropriation that this hypothesis says is inherent in the act of ‘consuming’ culture

- mass marginality: marginal groups have now become the silent majority

- the practice of re-use or adaptation of products is related to social situations and power relationships

- “The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, lends a political dimension to everyday practices”

The Tactics of Practice

- consumer vs producer dichotomy; the collected material, a limited number of practices (e.g. reading, talking, cooking), the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to seemingly unrelated scientific fields

Trajectories, Tactics, and Rhetorics

- consumers as ‘unrecognised producers’ and ‘poets of their own acts’
- comparison between consumers and autistic children in terms of what they produce

- limits of statistical analysis; captures material of consumer practices but not their form
- statistical analysis of this kind finds only the homogenous, missing out on the reality of the ‘artisan-like inventiveness’ of common consumers

- differentiation between ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’

- strategy: the overarching plans of large institutions or power structures
- tactics: belongs to the ‘other’; depends on time; always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized on the spur of the moment; kairos

- many everyday activities are tactical in nature, e.g. talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, as do ‘ways of operating’

- tactics: intelligence is inseparable from them; strategies: based on objective calculations from a collective power or institution; tactics do not seek to take over or win and does not engage in sabotage

- rhetoric: ‘ways of speaking’; manipulations are related to the ways of persuading the will of the audience

- connection between the Sophists and tactics
- Sophist position: make the weaker position seem the stronger
- claimed to have the power of turning the tables on the powerful by making use of the opportunities in any given situation

Reading, Talking, Dwelling, Cooking, etc.

- focus on reading as an example of an everyday practice that produces without capitalizing
- production vs consumption; writing vs reading; consumer as a voyeur in a ‘show-biz society’

- reading as an act of production that is not recorded; akin to a once-off silent performance

- the reader interprets the writer’s words subjectively, making them their own; thus, ‘the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news’

- the text is like a rented apartment where the occupier makes changes in the same way that a speaker changes a text by using their native tongue, accent or turns of phrase.

- reading is an art that is anything but passive, resembling the art whose theory was developed by medieval poets

- the art of conversation creates a collective communication that belongs to no one and everyone

- the possibility of establishing a reliability within the situations imposed on an individual
- making it possible to live in these situations by reintroducing into them an art of manipulating and enjoying

Extensions: Prospects and Politics

- analysis of tactics extended to two areas, 1) prospects / futurology, 2) the individual subject in political life

- futurology: falls short of adequately analysing ‘space’, focus on ‘simulation’
- relationship between rationality and imagination; the tactics of practical investigation vs the strategies offered to the public as the product of these practical operations

- the ‘split-structure’ of so many organisations requires a rethink of all the ‘tactics’ neglected by traditional scientific enquiry

- Freud’s civilization and its discontents; the microscopic connections between manipulation and enjoyment
- “the fleeting and massive reality of a social activity at play with the order that contains it”

- Quote from John Everyman: “When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras…. You’ve no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it’s incredible how one grows.”

Michel de Certeau part 1: the Wiki-Nutshell

Referenced by many many fan scholars. Michel de Certeau

The Practice of Everyday Life is a book by Michel de Certeau which examines the ways in which people individualise mass culture, altering things, from utilitarian objects to street plans to rituals, laws and language, in order to make them their own. It was originally published in French as L'invention du quotidien. Vol. 1, Arts de faire' (1980). The 1984 English translation is by Steven Rendall. The book is one of the key texts in the study of everyday life.

The Practice of Everyday Life re-examines related fragments and theories from Kant and Wittgenstein to Bourdieu, Foucault and Détienne, in the light of a proposed theoretical model. Some consider it as being enormously influential in pushing cultural studies away from producer/product to the consumer.

Wikipedia

To date, Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" acting in environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". In the influential chapter "Walking in the City", Certeau asserts that "the city" is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.

Wikipedia

***Yeah I know Wikipedia isn't a reliable source, apart from the fact that it can be, I'm just trying to get the general gist and understanding of his theories so that I can see why and how fan scholars have related it to fans and fandom community. ***

Fandom: Identities & Communities in a Mediated World

edited by Johnathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C.Lee Harrington
afterword by Henry Jenkins
New York University Press, 2007

"Most people are fans of something. If not, they are bound to now someone who is...fandom matters because it matters to those who are fans. However beyond this, the contributions fan studies have made varied in the course of what we, in retrospect, can summarise as three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades."

First wave: power, inequality, discrimination

• de Certeau's theory (1984)
• John Fiske - fans are "associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race"
• Bi-polar struggle between hegemonic culture industries and fans
• FANS IN MAINSTREAM
• Era of broadcasting changed to narrowcasting (niche marketing, target marketing; dissemination of information to narrow audience, no general public. Includes television and radio. Aiming media messages at specific segments of the public defined by the values, preferences o demographic attitudes)
• Deregulation of media markets and reflected rise of new technologies, the fan as a specialised yet dedicated consumer has become centrepiece of media industries' marketing strategies. Rather than ridicule, fan audiences are now wooed and championed by cultural industries. 
• Mainstream appreciation of being a fan
• Changing representation of fans in mass media
• Became more than mere act of being a fan of something, it was a collaborative strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities
• Fan studies: negative protrayal/imagery/stereotype of fans by authorities, media and other non-fans. Low on social/cultural hierarchy
• Tactics of fan audiences in their evasion of dominant ideologies
• Camille Bacon-Smith, Henry Jenkins, Roberta Pearson, Constance Penly, John Tulloch

Second wave:

• Leitmotif in the sociology of consumption by PIERRE BOURDEIU
• Replication of social, cultural hierarchies within fan - and subcultures, as the choice of fan objects and fan practices of fan consumption are structured through out habitus as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural and economic capital
• Interpretive communities of fandom (as well as individual acts of fan consumption) embedded in the existing economical, social and cultural status quo. 
• Gender, the taste hierarchies among fans themselves are described as the continuation of wider social inequalities. 
• Conceptual shift of fan studies to fans seen as not a counterforce to existing social hierarchies and structures but, in sharp contrast, as agents of maintaining social and cultural systems of classification and this existing hierarchies
• Bourdieuvian perspective to unmask false notion of popular culture as a realm of emancipation

• 1&2 wave = focus of particular audience groups: fan communities, subcultures, interaction between members of such group either as interpretive and support networks, on in terms of cultural hierarchization and discrimination through distinction. Focus primarily on only one, possible the smallest subset of fan groups on wide spectrum spanning regular, emotionally uninvolved audience member to petty producers. 

3rd wave:

• Increasingly diverse in conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms. 
• Fans = common mode of consumption
• Cyberfandom (online) is the shift/migration to the internet for fans and fandom. Specialised sites for specific fandoms, congregational sites for multiple fandoms in one (Television Without Pity; TWoP), accessible via Blackberries, iPods/iPhones, PUPs, laptops and cell phones
• Off the web: celebrity, television and film gossip magazines, entertainment programs on television for people who want latest news and updates (cable, radio, satellite channels)
• Chnging communication technologies and media texts contribute to and reflect increasing entrenchment of fan consumption in structure of our everyday life
• MICRO = fan, intrapersonal, pleasures & motivations, relationship between fans and fan objects
• MACRO = readings, tastes and practices are tied to wider social structures yet extends the conceptual focus beyond questioning of the hegemony and class to the dearching social, cultural and economic transformations of our time. (dialect between global and local; rise of spectacle and performance in fan consumption)
• Fan patterns, behaviour, types of consumption and interaction are becoming more integrated/integral in every day life in modern societies (global phenomenon)
• Sybiosis: cultural practice and perspective of being a fan + industrial modernity at large
• Fan studies = key mechanisms through which we interact with the mediated world at the heart of our social, political and cultural realities and identities. 

Before my computer overloads from too many things being open:

• http://fandebate.livejournal.com/
• http://books.google.com.au/books?id=-gcLB-7FkBQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Fans,+bloggers,+and+gamers+:+exploring+participatory+culture&hl=en&sa=X&ei=IlD8T7nfPMjZigeV25H8Bg&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Fans%2C%20bloggers%2C%20and%20gamers%20%3A%20exploring%20participatory%20culture&f=false
• http://karenhellekson.com/?page_id=42
• http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/researchgroups/studyareas/audienceandfanstudies/index.html
• http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc
• http://khellekson.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/fan-studies-101/
• http://fanlore.org/wiki/Aca-Fan
• http://books.google.com.au/books?id=K--bJVZ2QlIC&pg=PT11&lpg=PT11&dq=3+generations+fandom+studies+fan&source=bl&ots=lZJqoo3xvi&sig=fbzxp8xpExEkch32s6y46bOQy9g&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dd_8T6nUEdGviQeQ0oXhBg&ved=0CGEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=3%20generations%20fandom%20studies%20fan&f=false

Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (3 hours of skimming)

Part I

• Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness
• Within the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not proprietors, a recognition which must contextualise our celebration of strategies of popular resistance
• All resistant readings are not necessarily progressive readings.
• Fans do not simply consume preproduced stories; they manufacture their own fanzine stories and novels art prints, songs, videos, performances etc.
• Jean Lorrah (1984), fan writer: "The fandom...is friends and letters and crafts and fanzines and trivia and costumes and artwork and filksongs and buttons and film clips and conventions - something for everybody who has in common the inspiration of a television show, which grew far beyond its TV and film incarnation to become a living part of world culture"      Lorrah's description blurs the boundaries between producers and consumers, spectators and participants, the commercial and the homecrafted, to construct an image of fandom as a cultural and social network that spans the globe. Fandom here becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community. 

Part II

• Here I focus on the 3 central aspects of fans' characteristic mode of reception

1. Ways fans draw texts close to the realm of their lived experience
2. The role played by rereading within fan culture
3. Process by which program information gets inserted into ongoing social interactions

• Scopophilia: The love of watching or looking. (**Originally in a sexual or pornographic nature but was used in cinema psychoanalysis in the 1970s**)

Part III

• While common sense might suggest that fans become fans because of their fascination with particular texts or performers, the reverse is often true
• Barbara Fennison, fan writer, describes process: "While I enjoyed fandom, and writing fan stories about TV shows, it was a case of finding that I like fans and wanting to join in their activities; the TV viewing itself was more like homework...How many other fans enjoy the processes of fandom more than, or at least as much as, the supposedly central attraction of the shows and movies themselves? Probably more than myself alone."

Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (Introduction)

Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture
Henry Jenkins
Routledge, New York and London 1992

"Fans" have a much longer history, fitting more generally into longstanding debates about the popular consumption of fiction or audience response to popular entertainment....we are beginning to develop a more sophisticated understanding of ow these groups relate to the mass media and draw upon it as a resource in their everyday life. This subculture cuts across traditional geographic and generational boundaries and is defined through its particular styles of consumption and forms of cultural preference.

Media fandom = an amorphous but still identifiable grouping of enthusiasts of film and television

Textual Poachers identifies at least five distinct (thought interconnected) dimensions of this culture: its relationship to a particular mode of reception; its role in encouraging viewer activism; its function as an interpretive community; its particular traditions of cultural production; its status as an alternative social community.

Chapter 1: overview of the complex social and cultural status of the fan, challenging conventional stereotypes and outlining recent work in cultural studies which provides the theoretical background for this study.

Chapter 2: identifies characteristics of fandom's mode of reception, considering issues of textual proximity, rereading and the translation of program materials into resources for conversation and gossip.

Chapter 3: looks at the critical and interpretive practices of the fan community, including the processes of program selection, canon formation, evaluation, and interpretation as well as their relationship to gender specific reading styles

Chapter 4: traces the reception history of a particular program, Beauty and the Beast, suggesting the role played by generic expectations in shaping fan response and ways that fan interpretive conventions provide the basis for activism against the producer's actions

Chapter 5. 6, 7: examine two forms of cultural production within the fan community - specifically fan writing and video-making - describing the texts produced, their generic traditions, and the aesthetic criteria by which they are judged

Chapter 8: considers fandom's status as a new form of "community", one formed by relations of consumption and categories of taste, and discusses the role of folk music in creating a common identity for this geographically and socially dispersed group.

From the outset, an account of fan culture necessarily signals its problematic status, its inescapable relations to other forms of cultural production an bother social identities. Nobody functions entirely within the fan culture, nor does the fan culture maintain any claims to self-sufficiency. There is nothing timeless and unchanging about this culture; fandom originates in response to specific historical conditions (not only specific configurations of television programming, but also the development of feminism, the development of technologies, the atomisation and alienation of contemporary American culture etc.) and remains constantly in flux.

My task here is not to signal the fluidity of cultural communications but rather to make a case for fandom as having any degree of coherence and stability at all. Textual Poachers describes a social group struggling to define its own culture and to construct its own community within the context of what many observers have describes as a postmodern era; it documents a group insistent on making meaning from materials others have characterised as trivial and worthless.


**All content was directly quoted or paraphrased from Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers. Don't own any of these original and brilliant thoughts**

The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (an incomplete summarisation and analysis)

Edited by Lisa A. Lewis 
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

List of books to track down and borrow

State library most likely:

• Theorizing Fandom: Subculture and Identity by Cheryl Drake Harris
• Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins
• The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media by Lisa A. Lewis
• Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith

Lists of dissertations and theses

For the purpose of research and analysis of my first chapter: Defining and exploring the history and term of Fandom

• Close Encounters of a Different Kind: A study of science fiction fan culture and its interaction with multiple literacies by Gail A. Bondi
• Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys - Ethnography of Online Slash/Yaoi Fans by Sandra Youssef
• Academia Explores the Final Frontier: A look at fandom theses and dissertations by Karen Ann Yost

"Etymologically, the word fan derives from the word 'fanatic' and means an enthusiastic devotee...with personifying the word fan comes a certain mentality, a psychology." —Katie B. Davis

Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of Online Slash/Yaoi Fans

Red went on to tell me that all of the fans described in this piece did something “higher” with it. Gesticulating, she painted the picture of an ordinary American girl liking the TV-show Angel, and watching it every time it is on TV. This girl could be called a “fan.” But the fans, I was working with and writing about, including myself, had “made it part of identity” to such a degree that we thought about it outside of the times shown on TV, to the extent that “being a fan” pervaded other aspects of our lives.

....This text is, essentially, an ethnography of what it means to be an online fan. In order to underline what I wanted to translate, I would have had to offer a moment of ethnography alien enough, yet understandable enough, to introduce an unfamiliar audience to the topic. Yet, such a single ethnographic moment does not exist. All of the scenes depicted above are, after all, not simply moments of ritual or hobby, but moreover are infused with a certain mode of identity. Beyond serving an introductory function, they urge you to immerse yourself into a world that will seem alien at best.

Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of Online Slash/Yaoi Fans

Sandra Youssef

Update

I haven't made a post in a while but that in no way means that I've been neglecting my PIP. I've actually completed 2 processes of primary research which I'll post more on later. I am also going to be a participating observer at SupaNova on upcoming Sunday and so I'm pretty excited. I'll do another post for that too.

I've just been lacking in the secondary research department and I need to find a specialist of some kind. I'm thinking of trying to contact Henry Jenkins, one of the famous scholars, specialists, professors of fandoms in our time. He has a website http://www.henryjenkins.org/ which is highly informative and contains amazing sources such as interviews with other scholars of people he considers to be contributors to fandom studies and culture. Read some of his works first before I actually attempt contact so I don't look like an ass in front of him by asking stupid questions he's probably already answered in his thorough works of studies. I JUST WANT A LENGTHY FRIENDLY CHAT WITH THE MAN. FOR A WHOLE DAY. AT LEAST.

Andddddd when excitement all caps comes on, it's my cue to sleep. 

Websites to take note of:

Dr Gafia's Fan Terms:
It's pretty much as the title says
http://www.fanac.org/Fannish_Reference_Works/Fan_terms/

The definition of 'Fandom':
Notice how it was first known to be used in 1903 and the comments section
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fandom

"Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture"
By Henry Jenkins:
Online gold
http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/starwars.html


Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet
By Kristina Hellekson and Kristina Busse
Interesting and awesome, a contemporary take on cyberfandom. 
http://karenhellekson.com/?page_id=38

Spaceways - Harry Warner Jr.

I found a site online which offers the contents of Spaceways, one of the most early and influential fanzines in science-fiction fandom history. It was created by the noted fandom historian of that time, Harry Warner Jr, whom I mentioned in my summary of

The Communication of Fan Culture: The Impact of New Media on Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom by Betty Gooch. 

http://fanac.org/fanzines/Spaceways/

http://thebuffster.tumblr.com/

I'm a Buffy psychofan and so I follow up about 3 Buffy blog religiously. Came upon this and thought it related a lot to the appeal of online fandom. That sense of community and belonging where it is based on something you and complete, total strangers have a common love for. A something that would render you strange, weird and uncool in Real Life.

The Communication of Fan Culture: The Impact of New Media on Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom

By Betsy Gooch of the Georgia Institute of Technology

THE FIRST TWELVE PAGES

Probably the best site to help me start. I've gotten through 10 pages or more and have already WRITTEN, in my dusty logbook, 7 pages worth of notes about this. 4 of those pages are my own thoughts and gatherings about fandom and rough drafts of possible questions and ventures I should persue. 3 of those pages are completely filled with notes from this thesis.

Basically what I've gotten from the first 12 pages is what fandom is, what it involves and how it has evolved. There have been three generations of study: 1950s-1980s: the beginning of scholary investigation on fandoms, 1990-1999: media fans, 2000 to present: cyberfandom. However even the concept of fandom predates all of this. Nevertheless, the thesis gives me great information about what each generation entails and includes great examples of fandoms and prominent scholars for each era.

1950s-1980s:
Literary works, fanzines (unofficial fan magazines)

• Harry Warner Jr.
  Fandom historian and a fan himself. Noted the increasing of the blurred lines and crossover between science fiction and fantasy genres

1990-1999
More visual texts: film, television, comics/graphic novels. Media fans/mediafen who are starting to "shape the face of science fiction and fantasy on television through their dedication and inspiring love for the show and genre." Crossing over from just a personal hobby and obsession into the realm of reality and production (large scale fan campaigns and support)

• Forest Ackerman
  Coined term: sci-fi. Devoted fan turned professional writer and editor, investigated the progression of sci-fi as a genre in literature, film and TV
• John Tulloch
  Explains the relationship between producers and the audience. Investigates growing influence, power and authority of fans on the production of siginifcant shows (Doctor Who, Star Trek). This has grown more evident with the developement of techonology and communication
• Camille Bacon-Smith
  Talks about the fan community and the growing amount and influence of female fans (fanfiction helping them play out their fantasies and desires)

2000-Present
Cyberfandom, emphasis on the role of the internet for both the fans and how fandom operates.

• Henry Jenkins
  Explains relationship between fans with the television and film productions with the media culture (Production compant/actors etc.).
  "Textual Poachers": the emergence of ratists and authors who taker original material and create their own texts. This is said with affection though - in a positive light.
  "Fandom: a community of hardworking authors and artists trying to become closer to their favourite stories, films, television via reproduction."
  Significant emphasis on the growth in participatory nature of fandom.

Fan culture studies can further be divided into 3 areas of research:

• The historical documentation of individual fandoms
• Exploration of the cultural reasoning for and issues that occur due to fan activites
• The analysis of fan productions as cultural artifacts.

• (historical aspect of fandom -> consumer analysis of fan culture -> culture research on reasons behind fan productions)

Most of the notes I've just typed up are direct quotes from the thesis. I just summarised so that it can be understood more easily in layman terms. For more in depth information and a general great, geeky read, click this link or just the title for the full thesis. I don't claim to own any of this material or ideas.

Do Nice Guys Lose and Bad Boys Win?

I love this site. It inspired the previous post. Brought a lot of characters from past eras up which helped. I mainly love it because it led to a page about the "Byronic Hero". It talks about how the bad boy image was created in the 1900s by the notorious poet Lord Byron. It then proceeds to list examples from the past (Shakepeare era) to present (I love how they list characters and then just name the actor Alan Rickman as if the man himself was to just a natural brooder and just gets the roles).

Good finds. As soon I look into this more and try to find a few more things, I'll get right into the primary.

Do Nice Guys Lose and Bad Boys Win?
http://enlightenedwomen.org/do-nice-guys-lose-bad-boys-win/

"Dude watching with the Brontes"

I love this. It's pretty self explanitory. Basically parodising the two of the Bronte sisters "man-hunting" for their husband and liking the brooding ones which many of their lead male characters represent (Heathcliff anyone?) While the other sister just sees them as jackass jerks who are annoyingly rude.

Experiment

I'd like to perform an "experiment" (not sure if that's the right term), on a controlled focus group.
The plan is to get 3 different males, photograph each one 3 times. One photo the guy will be happy, another of him neutral, the last one of him "brooding" (so looking down, pouty, shameful, depressed, deep in thought. Something like that).

The girl has to rate each picture on a scale of 1-10 (1 being the least and 10 being the most attractive). This is to see if the brooding boy really is what females prefer today.

This experiment is based on/ is a simplified version of a scientific study

That link I just shared is one of many articles that say exactly the same thing (sometimes the wording is exactly the same as well). That women are attracted to prideful or brooding men more than the happy one. I chose that website specifically because it includes these quotes:

"The study also adds fuel to the notion that women are attracted to bad boys.

"Women are attracted to guys like James Dean, Edward the vampire. The guys who are flawed, but who know it and are tortured by it," Tracy said.(Jessica Tracy, a University of British Columbia psychology professor who directed the study.)

A slightly downcast expression of shame is an appeasement gesture that hints at a need for sympathy.

...

"When people want a long-term relationship they take much more into account than sexual attractiveness. How nice a person is, is a big thing," Tracy said.

"So we're not saying, don't be a nice guy," she said."