Fans and Fan Culture

Abstract

Fans have become important to work in media sociology and cultural studies for a variety of reasons: they can be taken to represent a dedicated, active audience; they are consumers who are often also (unofficial, but sometimes official) media producers (Jenkins 1992; McKee 2002); and they can be analyzed as a significant part of contemporary consumer culture. Fandom – the state of being a fan – is usually linked to popular culture rather than high culture. People who appreciate high culture, often being as passionately partisan as pop culture's “fans,” are described as “connoisseurs” or “aficionados” rather than as fans (Jensen 1992). Whilst connoisseurship is typically deemed culturally legitimate, fandom has been analyzed as rather more problematic: the stereotype of “the fan” has been one of geeky, excessive, and unhealthy obsession with (supposedly) culturally trivial objects such as TV shows. Henry Jenkins has highlighted and opposed this negative fan stereotype, arguing that such portrayals of fandom should be critiqued, and that fans should instead be viewed more positively as building their own culture out of media products, and as selectively “poaching” meanings and interpretations from favored media texts. Jenkins, whose seminal workTextual Poachers(1992) helped to make fandom a viable object of academic study, suggests that the creativity of fans is downplayed in cultural common sense in favor of viewing fans as “cultural dupes” who are perfect consumers, always accepting what the culture industry produces for them. Against this narrative, depicted as belonging to the Frankfurt School of Marxist theorists such as Theodor Adorno as much as to forms of cultural common sense, Jenkins argues that fans discriminate keenly between and within their objects of fandom, developing an aesthetic sense of what counts as a “good” episode of television series such asStar TrekorDoctor Who(see Tulloch & Jenkins 1995).