Fanhackers

I was recently lucky enough to read an advanced copy of Henry Jenkins and Robert V. Kozinets’s forthcoming book, Frames of Fandom: Fandom as Co-Creation, which will be the fifth book in a 15 book series exploring all the many and various aspects of fandom. So it struck me that this would be a good time to catch Fanhackers’ readers up on the first four books of the series.

For that reason, I’m giving a larger than usual excerpt from book 1 of the series: Frames of Fandom: Defining Fandom. In that book, Jenkins and Kozinets articulate their larger vision for their project and its wide-ranging scope. Interestingly, in it, Henry Jenkins exp that his mentor, John Fiske, “had wanted Textual Poachers to provide a general introduction to fans and fandom in contemporary culture.” But Jenkins

“could not write such a book. There was not enough research yet.  Only now, following three-plus decades of expanding waves of scholarship, could I imagine doing so, and even here, we’ve ended up with fourteen such books rather than one.”  (55-56)

The first four books in the series, Defining Fandom, Fandom as Audience, Fandom as Consumer Collective, and Fandom as Subculture are already available at Amazon; in the coming weeks I’ll do excerpts from these in the leadup to Fandom as Co-Creation. –FC

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Frames of Fandom is a book series intended to advance our most forward-thinking vision of what fans, scholars, and industry insiders need to know about fans and fandom. With numerous examples that cut across the gamut of fanships and fandoms, each book offers a different frame through which to examine the contemporary phenomenon of fandom. The books reflect some of our experiences and discoveries as Fandom Studies and consumer culture researchers. The juxtaposition of these two fields may sometimes be jarring since fandom studies start with a much greater skepticism and even resistance to business interests than consumer culture research does. The industry gets much wrong about fans, often acting in ways that damage, trivialize, and exploit their culture. We consider many of these critiques. But we also understand that fans operate in the West within consumer capitalism and will inevitably be drawn into close relationships with commercial franchises and brands. The question is what kinds of relationships they will have, and that is the central question that drives this series. 

Beyond combining fandom studies with brand research, other elements of our approach are also unique. First, these are books about fandoms, not fans. Their perspective shifts from thinking about isolated individual audience perceptions to embracing the collective dimension of fandoms, which is increasingly interrelated with technologies and devices. Second, this series of books explores the fan universe around the globe. There have been historic divides in fandom studies between media, sports, and music fandoms that mirror the divides many of us experienced in high school between nerds, jocks, and popular kids. As it has within academic fields, these divides have resulted in unfortunate silos. Sports fandoms were largely studied as part of sports science faculties and journals, while music studies handled music fandoms. Cultural and media studies focused, for the most part, on literary and media fandoms and only occasionally touched upon sports and music fandoms. Consumer researchers dabbled here and there, but mainly framed fandoms as related to brand gatherings. We are trying, the best our own expertise allows, to cut across those divisions here to show what these various kinds of fandoms, brandoms, brand communities, and subcultures of consumption have in common. Furthermore, we make major efforts to include, as best as we can, the full range of race, gender, ethnic, sexual orientation, and other social positions, and also to include representation from around the world and not just the more intensely studied mainstream and American and European fandom contexts. 

So, whether you are a student delving into the particulars of modern fan cultures, a brand manager seeking to unlock the potential of fan engagement, or a fan activist wondering how fandom might offer resources for social change movements, we have designed this series to offer you something that we hope will be valuable and unique.

Defining Fandom: Book 1 Defining Fandom is the first book in the Frames of Fandom series. Here, we define and discuss the nature of fans, fanship, and fandom. Defining Fandom provides a fundamental conceptual grounding in the notion of fans, fanships, and fandoms; we introduce the auto-ethnographic style of the series, which draws heavily from the aca-fan tradition and the work both authors have written in that modality. Here, we define fans as people who passionately engage with their “fan object,” which is not a physical object but a media or consumer culture production like EXO, James Bond, or Boca Juniors (or, in Rob and Henry’s cases, Batman, Famous Monsters, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Led Zeppelin, Patti Smith, Dune, The Beatles, and many others). As fan activity becomes more social, involving people such as friends and family, it stretches into fanship. Fans become members of a fandom when they join a collective of others who share their passion and interest in the fandom object and partake in participatory culture. Being a fan and partaking in fanship are personal states or identities; being in fandom is connection and affiliation. Fandoms are composed of some of the most passionate, connected, creative, critical, and/or active fans. Fandoms gives participants an outlet through which they celebrate, support, critique, reimagine, and derive pleasure from the activities related to the object of their fandom. We use the definitions from Defining Fandom as the foundation on which we build and expand across the series.  (Defining Fandom, 173- 174)

Through events like the annual Eaton Conference, the collection seeks to continue opening access by a combination of mixed public and scholarly activities in order to simultaneously foster fan enthusiasm and increase academic consideration, not least because they are often so tightly linked.

Lee, Regina Yung. 2011. “Textual Evidence of Fandom Activities: The Fanzine Holdings at UC Riverside’s Eaton Collection.” In “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0271.

Then, does this assume, that the archival process itself can bring the fan enthusiasm and academic consideration closer in itself?

Today’s Go-To Piece of Criticism comes from Bridget Kies, one of the chairs of the OTW’s journal committee, author of Murder, She Wrote (Wayne State University Press, 2025) and co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (University of Iowa Press, 2022). Her choice: the wildly influential Lisa Duggan. –FC

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Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism”, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 175-194.

Almost everyone who references this work or tries to define “homonormativity” uses the exact same quote from the chapter. (Really, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use a different quote!) The line is that homonormativity is “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them” (p. 179). Why so many fan studies scholars go to this work is because many of us approach fan studies from a gender/sexuality viewpoint, and Duggan’s idea of “homonormativity” explains shifts in LGBTQ activism toward things like marriage equality and adoption laws and in LGBTQ identities toward assimilation over radical queerness or transness — and that normative politics and identities are the better understood and respected in society. As fan studies scholars, it’s interesting to see when fan works resist homonormativity that is present in so many source texts with LGBTQ characters (offering up other vibrant queer and trans possibilities) or when fan works turn straight characters from the canon into LGBTQ people but from a homonormative prespective (so, for example, slashing characters but not really changing values of marriage and monogamy). Because fan works are a place where so many possible pushbacks to culture can happen, looking for examples of homonormativity and rejection of it can be really fruitful to show us fans’ sexual politics, values, and aspirations.

–Bridget Kies, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Production, Oakland University

Kristina Busse is one of the founding editors of Transformative Works and Cultures as well as the co-editor of some of the most influential works of fan studies, including Fan Fiction and Fan Cultures in the Age of the Internet (2006) and The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (2014). Her own monographs include Framing Fan Fiction (2017) and the forthcoming Fan Fantasies and the Politics of Desire, co-written with Alexis Lothian.  She and I are also currently co-editing a book called Reading Fanfiction/Fanfiction Readings for the University of Michigan Press.  –FC

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I’d like to feature two scholars whose ideas resonate in a lot of early writings on the appeal of slash fan fiction, especially as it was initially conceived of—qua Joanna Russ—as “pornography by women, for women, with love.” Both books look at a range of literary works and tease out the way psychosexual drives, historical fantasies, material realities, and cultural ideologies exclude women even as they feature centrally as objects of triangulated desire and constitutive exclusion.

Leslie A. Fiedler, Life and Death in the American Novel (1960): 

An archetypal relationship…haunts the American psyche: two lonely men, one dark-skinned, one white, band together over a carefully guarded fire in the virgin heart of the American wilderness; they have forsaken all others for the sake of the austere, almost inarticulate, but unquestioned love which binds them to each other and to the world of nature which they have preferred to civilization. (187) 

Eve Sedgwick, Between Men (1985): 

Each of these novels sites an important plot in triangular, heterosexual romance—in the Romance tradition—and then changes its focus as if by compulsion from the heterosexual bonds of the triangle to the male-homosocial one, here called “erotic rivalry.” In these male homosocial bonds are concentrated the fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and explosive violence; all are fully structured by the logic of paranoia. At the same time, however, these fantasy energies are mapped along the axes of social and political power; so that the revelation of intrapsychic structures is inextricable from the revelation of the mechanisms of class domination. (162)

–Kristina Busse, Independent scholar

Posted: Francesca Coppa

I like serial storytelling; television, podcasts, longfics that we read one chapter a time for its ability to refer back to itself and weave several threads. These narratives would be overly pressured in the form of cinema, theater, the like. A thesis or a paper tend to build up an argument, in similar manner, from beginning to (happy) end, from introduction, through research question, methodology, literature review, results to discussion and conclusion.

It is a special enjoyment to present my thoughts here in serial form and I believe it has its use.

Fanhackers exists to highlight that fans and academics write the same discourse together, but in different ways. Therefore, highlighting all the places where the same thing is discussed is one thing we could or should do, making the methodology of these different ways visible is another.

If I was to write a paper about the information behaviour of fans, only a fragment of what I posted about could be shared. The way I weaved multiple threads of questioning instead of one hypothesis or research question or how I kept reading new literature which shaped earlier ideas, even initial definitions has no place in a paper but is more reminiscent of the very much nonlinear and divergent way the research process itself works.

Many aca-fans would admit to at least a passing fancy to library and information sciences, but this particular story started with a specific paper.

Price, L.; Robinson, L. (2017). ‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities. Journal of Information Science, 43(5), 649-664. doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2020-0089

I was fascinated with the question as much as with the methodology. I started searching to see if the authors continued this research further. They have written more about the distinct information behaviours of fans, but using different methodology. In the meanwhile, I started looking into what else has been written about the topic since these writings made references to the lack of research in this area. In addition to the information behaviours of fans, another topic that came up was the archiving of fandom – two practices that certainly inform one another but both are little researched (compared to information behaviour in general) and is also less formalised and more fluctuating in a way than what we usually think of as archiving. Thus, I started reading about both questions which brought more literature with slightly different definitions and different possibilities for researching them. These past few posts could provide a bibliography for the research question segment part of a paper (though, with the suggestion from any reasonable reviewer to narrow the scope down), but to actually write that segment would require some significant restructuring. With the initial interest in how fans seek and organise information, to a detour to why the ways and best practices of fannish ephemera is relevant, some literature on how the already existing archival systems could incorporate fanworks and finally, turning back to the question of how fandom already archives itself through fans’ distinct information behaviour and how this can inform information practices in general.

The real scholarship might just be the questions we made along the way.

Author: Szabó Dorottya

Kirsty Sedgman describes herself as a Doctor of Audiences, and her wildly popular and highly readable books include On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better (Faber & Faber, 2023) and The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience (Palgrave, 2018) – as well as the collection Theatre Fandom (U Iowa 2025), coedited by Matt Hills and me. 

Her latest book, How To Understand Theatre Audiences, was just released in the UK and is forthcoming in the US.  Her contribution to Fanhackers is from a foundational scholar: Raymond Williams. –FC

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The title and author of the work:

Williams, Raymond (1960) Culture & Society, New York: Anchor Books

‘I do not think of my relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses; we none of us can or do. The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know. Yet now, in our kind of society, we see these others regularly, in their myriad variations; stand, physically, beside them. They are here, and we are here with them. And that we are with them is of course the whole point. To other people, we also are masses. Masses are other people. There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.’ (319)

How I use this:

It’s easy to think about ourselves as complexly nuanced individuals who have power and agency over how we make use of mass and social media, and about other people as passively vulnerable, easily manipulated or influenced by the things they watch, read, and hear. This quote reminds me not to fall into the trap of seeing fans in this way, as an undifferentiated mass.

–Dr Kirsty Sedgman, University of Bristol

Posted: Francesca Coppa

Today’s Go-To Piece of Criticism comes from Suzanne Scott, and it’s a wonderful quote from a book that is not cited enough, I think, in fan studies, despite being an absolutely critical underpinning of the field.  Girls and Subcultures by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber shifted the whole field of subculture studies, which previously really only talked about male subcultures because those were the ones that were visible in public space:  bikers, mods, rockers, Teddy boys, punks etc. It was McRobbie and Garber who pointed out that female subcultures tended to operate very differently….  Suzanne Scott herself is one of the most significant scholars to build on this work: her book Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU 2019) looks at the ways in which women and girls are still seen and treated differently when they do fandom.  –FC

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“The objective and popular image of a subculture as encoded and defined by the media is likely to be one which emphasizes the male membership, male ‘focal concerns,’ and masculine values. […] Female invisibility in youth subcultures then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle, for a variety of reasons.”

“It might be suggested that girls’ culture of the time operated within the vicinity of the home, or the friends’ home. There was room for a great deal of the new teenage consumer culture within the confines of the girls’ bedrooms. Teenage girls did participate in the new public sphere afforded by the growth of the leisure industries, but they could also consume at home, upstairs in their bedrooms.” 

From “Girls and Subcultures” by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (1977)

I view much of fan studies as a direct response to McRobbie and Garber’s call to arms, course correcting the “structured secondariness” of women in accounts of subcultural participation by centering the practices of girls and women in the field.  Despite being written in response to a very specific moment in the development of media subcultures and scholarly accounts of them, I return to McRobbie and Garber’s essay again and again, finding it newly resonant and inspiring each time. Most recently, I was drawn back to their discussion of the ways that girls’ participation in and expression of subcultural identities might be contained to their bedrooms in an effort to theorize high end cookware aimed at aging and affluent fans and domestic spaces like the kitchen as an emergent space for fannish expression.  The authors push us to think broadly about how identity (situated at a specific sociocultural moment) shapes reception within subcultural communities. They also pointedly prompt us to think about how our positionality as scholars shapes the work we produce, demanding that we be attentive to the less visible but nonetheless vibrant practices of media consumption that escapes our immediate view as researchers, and cautioning us against the “vicious cycle” of erasure that not moving outside of one consistent account of a community can perpetuate. 

– Suzanne Scott, Associate Professor
(University of Texas at Austin, Department of Radio-Television-Film)

Posted: Francesca Coppa