Affective stance as positioning in an English-speaking online fan community

Abstract

This study analyses how affective stance is used for evaluation and positioning in fan discourse. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the paper focuses on affective stance verbs in an English-speaking popular media fandom on three social media platforms, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit. Fans use affective stance to construct positions in relation to the popular media franchise, in this case a popular Japanese manga and anime series. By combining quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis the study shows that stancetaking verbalises fans’ investment in the fictional world of the narrative media, in the franchise production, and in the context of fan productivity. The discursively constructed positions reflect common fan practices such as publicising fan affect and emotions, reviewing the franchise critically, and sharing textual fan productivity. The analysis associates platform differences with the social norms of the fans and the technological affordances that enable their interaction. Because hashtag-based interaction on micro-blogs is primarily indirect, the study argues that the interactive functions of stance can be understood in relation to the general fandom affect.