Subculture Of Fans Research Articles

Contested Meanings: The Italian Media and the UltraS

Despite their presence in Italian football stadiums, the UltraS have been the subject of limited empirical research. I use the capital S to identify neo-fascist oriented fans to distinguish them from the wider football supporters ultra’ (Testa and Armstrong 2008; Testa 2009; Testa and Armstrong 2010a). This study is part of a series of publications to fill in this lacuna; it is part of an ethnographic research project carried out from 2003 to 2009. The research aimed to analyze the UltraS social world using as a sample two hardcore subculture of fans at the two main Rome football clubs - AS Roma and SS Lazio. With neo-fascist sympathies, these groups -the Boys at Roma and the Irriducibili at Lazio- are political and well-organized (Testa and Armstrong, 2010a).The present paper focuses on the relationship between the UltraS and the Italian media; the media are often considered by the UltraS as enemies because believed to be biased against them. To complement the ethnographic data, three renowned Italian sports journalists were interviewed in 2008. One was Franco Arturi, deputy director of La Gazzetta dello Sport, which is the most established and popular of the Italian sport newspapers. Another was Giuseppe Tassi, a sport journalist and deputy director of Quotidiano.net (internet edition of the Resto del Carlino, La Nazione and Il Giorno editorial group). The third was Gabriele Marcotti, journalist for the British The Times and the popular Italian daily IL Corriere dello Sport. Analysis stresses the importance of media coverage in influencing the UltraS deviant dynamics and suggests, considering the experiences of other European countries, a reduction of media attention towards the UltraS as a strategy to contain this phenomenon.

Contested Meanings: The Italian Media and the UltraS

Despite their presence in Italian football stadiums, the UltraS have been the subject of limited empirical research. I use the capital S to identify neo-fascist oriented fans to distinguish them from the wider football supporters ultra’ (Testa and Armstrong 2008; Testa 2009; Testa and Armstrong 2010a). This study is part of a series of publications to fill in this lacuna; it is part of an ethnographic research project carried out from 2003 to 2009. The research aimed to analyze the UltraS social world using as a sample two hardcore subculture of fans at the two main Rome football clubs - AS Roma and SS Lazio. With neo-fascist sympathies, these groups -the Boys at Roma and the Irriducibili at Lazio- are political and well-organized (Testa and Armstrong, 2010a).The present paper focuses on the relationship between the UltraS and the Italian media; the media are often considered by the UltraS as enemies because believed to be biased against them. To complement the ethnographic data, three renowned Italian sports journalists were interviewed in 2008. One was Franco Arturi, deputy director of La Gazzetta dello Sport, which is the most established and popular of the Italian sport newspapers. Another was Giuseppe Tassi, a sport journalist and deputy director of Quotidiano.net (internet edition of the Resto del Carlino, La Nazione and Il Giorno editorial group). The third was Gabriele Marcotti, journalist for the British The Times and the popular Italian daily IL Corriere dello Sport. Analysis stresses the importance of media coverage in influencing the UltraS deviant dynamics and suggests, considering the experiences of other European countries, a reduction of media attention towards the UltraS as a strategy to contain this phenomenon.

Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (review)

Reviewed by: Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters Anne Allison (bio) Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters. By William Tsutsui. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004. xii, 240 pages. $12.95, paper. A story of fandom and anxiety starts this memorable book about the history of Godzilla in U.S. culture. As a nine-year-old boy in Detroit in 1972, the author dresses up as his favorite icon—Godzilla. Though thrilled with the getup his mother has crafted, Tsutsui is humiliated when the other kids don't recognize who he is. When someone steps on his tail, the performance is ruined even further and Tsutsui slinks home, "my tail—quite literally—between my legs." The costume will never be worn again and the fantasy has been shaken. But, the boy "did not stop loving Godzilla" (p. 4), and it is to understand the complex and varied reactions Americans have had to this Japanese movie monster for a half century that William Tsutsui, now associate professor of history at the University of Kansas (and author of Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan), has written Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters. It is as an ambiguous figure—a Japanese movie monster badly dubbed into English—that Godzilla has circulated within American popular culture for a half century. Tsutsui, himself a diehard fan, freely admits his own bias all the while acknowledging the mixed nature of its reception and popularity. This figure first hit U.S. screens in 1956 as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the U.S. remake of the Japanese original, Gojira, which debuted in 1954. Produced by Tōhō Studios with a huge budget and big names in the business (Tanaka Tomoyuki as producer, Honda Ishirō as director, Tsubura Eiji designing special effects, Ifukube Akira writing the musical score, Shimura Takashi playing the lead human role), Gojira was a blockbuster hit. The North American rights were bought cheaply ($25,000) by U.S. movie mogul Joseph Levine whose intention, it seems, was nothing more than capitalizing on a monster movie boom already peaking in the United States. Adding the American actor Raymond Burr and shooting these scenes in only one day, the U.S. distributors also streamlined the movie's content by one-third and sanitized the atomic storyline that Gojira so dramatically carried in Japan. In this remixed, Americanized version that grossed over $2,000,000 in profits, Godzilla was sufficiently popular to become a staple—through its franchising in movie sequels/spin-offs and its spread into other media such as comic books, cartoons, and advertising—in American mass culture for decades. According to Tsutsui, the basic character as well as fundamental appeal of what turns out to be the longest-running film series in world movie [End Page 170] history (a total of 28 films by Tōhō, the latest released in December 2004) have remained the same over the years. Godzilla/Gojira is "a man in a rubber suit, pretending to be a mighty, giant lizard, drawn inexorably to the cities of Japan" whose appeal is "broad, unpretentious, and timeless" (pp. 44–45). How, why, and to what audiences such a character has fed the popular imagination (and commercial pocketbooks) is what Tsutsui aims to excavate in Godzilla On My Mind. Writing in a reader-friendly mode shed of academic pretensions, the author is overtly dismissive of the "predictably hyperintellectualized theorizing of fan subcultures in contemporary America." Announcing that there will be "none of that here" (p. 143), Tsutsui's style is personal and friendly, but also scholarly in offering a solid history of the Godzilla movies—in terms of production, story lines, reception, movie culture—in both Japan and the United States. There is much of great interest here, particularly in the way Tsutsui locates the cinematic monster against the backdrop of the cultural industries in both countries. In Japan, for example, Gojira was birthed during the heyday of the film industry in the 1950s and was targeted more to adult (than child) audiences to whom it offered a serious message about the dangers of (and Japan's...

The World of Anime Fandom in America

j What I think the various fan subcultures do is provide a space for community. They j allow people of diverse background and experience to form bonds around a common j interest They let people know that they are not alone in their likes and their passions. j Fan subcultures provide the sense of belonging that used to be common among most j American communities and families prior to the ig8os. Today kids are raised by doyj cares and public schools. Parents are too busy working and building careers to devote j significant time for family building and family life. Kids are just one of the many entries j on the day planner. . . . Fan subcultures help to provide a space for community where j people can come and be accepted for who they are. In a society as fragmented as j America has become, fan subcultures can provide an oasis for the weary soul.

The power of circulation: digital technologies and the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama

Focusing on the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV drama, this paper explores the way in which the fan subculture, in connection with digital technologies, has carved out alternative practices in the circulation, production and consumption of Japanese TV drama. As ‘minority audiences’ who are not targeted as the objects of capitalist interests, online Chinese fans invent spaces for Chinese transnational networking with self‐help and sharing, as a way of resisting the aloofness from marketing strategies of Japanese TV distributors in Asia. This case study reveals that the online Chinese fan clubs, the websites for downloads, pirated VCD markets, digital file conversion, and private VCD burning – all of these have linked endless networks for the digitalized circulation and consumption of Japanese TV drama. The online Chinese fans are guerrilla fighters in the politics of autonomy, network and low‐cost digital technology; they are attempting to break down time–space constraints and the official distribution hierarchy. Such fan practices shed light on the new trends of audio‐visual consumption via digitalization.

Culture Wars on the Net: Intellectual Property and Corporate Propriety in Digital Environments

The function of trademark law is to discursively construct and institutionally enforce particular notions of corporate identity as a property right. Intellectual property laws structure a field of meaning-making and thereby shape forms of symbolic practice. They create proprietary rights in a cultural commodity or commodity-sign — the trademark — and capacities to control its potential meaning and interpretation. The interconnected relationship between property and propriety is examined through an array of examples: from contestations over domain names, absolute ownership over trademarks and censorship, the emergence of digital communities comprising fan subcultures, as well as others. Ultimately, the Web has emerged as a digital battleground for corporate trademarks driven by the strategic logic of commodity fetishism, and counterhegemonic expressions of creativity, cultural meaning and identity formation, consumer choice, and labor rights structured through a guerilla logic of the populace.