Constructing the fannish place: Ritual and sacred space in a Sherlock fan pilgrimage

Abstract

Abstract The majority of studies of pilgrimage focus on sites and journeys marked as religious or spiritual by their histories or so designated by their participants, with only a small proportion of the literature addressing pilgrimage and the so-called secular. Yet in the case of fan pilgrimage – travels by fans to places associated with a text, celebrity or creative production – arguably the opposite problem occurs. Considerations of fan pilgrimage often ignore the religious connotations of the term in favour of a stricter separation between spiritual and secular. Understandings of fan pilgrimage places as mere points of convergence between fiction and reality or opportunities for fans to negotiate that separation miss the depth of the fan pilgrim’s experience of and creative contributions to fannish spaces. This article corrects that imbalance by approaching fan pilgrimage places as sacred spaces, constructed, ritualized and experienced in much the same way traditionally religious spaces are. The author argues that fan pilgrimage sites concentrate and bring into focus the multiple geographies of fans’ relationships to texts and celebrate – even sanctify – their entanglement. Like some shrines, they are materializations of interpretive paradigms. This article uses the case of the Sherlock pilgrimage place at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London to demonstrate the complexity of the sacred landscape at a fan pilgrimage site and the agency of fans in constructing it.