Fanhackers

Today we move to the third book in Henry Jenkins and Robert V. Kozinets’s comprehensive series, Frames of Fandom. Fandom as Consumer Collective looks “at the historical, theoretical, and cultural dimensions that shape these collectives and their interrelation with consumer culture and the material world.”  I myself tend not to think of fans as consumers (or if so, only accidentally – as people who consume to produce all the things that fans make, like fanworks, events, and discourse), but certainly the history of fandom is tied up with a particular response to consumer culture as well as the collecting of various kinds of artifacts. Rob Kozinets starts the book by waxing poetic about his own Led Zeppelin fandom.  –FC

Rob writes:

My relationship with Led Zeppelin is a part of my physical surroundings, whether in my closet, on my bookshelf, worn on my body, displayed as LPs, or posed like my Little Jimmy. It is part of my digital environment, in my playlists, on my newsfeeds. Throughout my lifetime, I have engaged in ongoing (if sporadic) product acquisition. But it is also a dance between my memories, my feelings, my material and digital reality, the stories I tell myself, and my various relationships. Fellowships of things like Little Jimmy, then, are not just about posing and photographing actual plastic action figures in bookcase shelfies. They are about communities, both imagined and real, that are organized around the felt significance of cultural texts, sounds, and figures. Jimmy Page in his dragon pants, holding his double-neck up high, is both a relic and a totem. (39)

I’m doing a survey of the first few books in Henry Jenkins and Robert V. Kozinet’s 15 book fandom series, Frames of Fandom.  Today, we have another quote from Book 2, Fandom as Audience  – the entire series is full of useful taxonomies like the one below.  – FC

For convenience and tractability, the Fanship-Fandom Continuum breaks down fanship and fandom behaviors into six behavioral responses: (1) enjoying the fan object, (2) discussing that enjoyment with family and friends, (3) searching for and reading online information about the fan object, (4) attending a live fan object-based event, (5) regularly posting about the fan object, and (6) creating and sharing creative works based on the fan object with other fans. There are three other attitudes or behaviors that we can use and develop based on some of the categories we have discussed in this chapter. First are the non-fans who are unattached to,uninterested in, or unaware of crossing over. Next are anti-fans who passionately resist fan objects and fandoms. Last are the highly discerning and acquisitive devoted fan collectors, who are not to be considered mindless superfans.  (195)

I’m doing a survey of the first few books in Henry Jenkins and Robert V. Kozinet’s 15 book fandom series, Frames of Fandom. Two weeks ago, I introduced the first book in the series: Defining Fandom. Today and for the next couple of posts, we’ll look at Book 2, Fandom as Audience. These books are incredibly wide-ranging both in their surveying of fandom histories and in their carefully thought-out taxonomies and definitions. Depending on your research focus, one or another of the books might be useful to you. –FC

Fandom as Audience, this second book in the series, traces the historical and conceptual journey of fandom from traditional audience studies to the field of fandom studies. Beginning with the conception of audiences as spectatorial observers shaped by demographic categories, it traces the evolution of fandom up to the mid-20th century, when marketers, media producers, and researchers began to recognize the importance of segmentation and targeting. (7-8)

The roots of fandom studies can be found in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, UK (often described as the Birmingham School). Along with the historian E. P. Thompson, the literary critic Richard Hogarth, and the theorist Stuart Hall, the Welsh-born critic and novelist Raymond Williams is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of the cultural studies approach. More than any other piece of writing, William’s “Culture is Ordinary” (1989) set the tone for the British Cultural Studies movement. Williams offers a more inclusive model of culture, a concept Williams would describe more fully in Keywords (1976). Williams’ conception of culture contrasts with that of 19th-century cultural critic Matthew Arnold….Arnold’s approach was exclusive: only a very narrow selection of things, “the best” could be considered “culture,” and only a small number of people could be considered “cultured,” a metaphor drawn from agriculture where it originally referred to the cultivation of the land or the human transformation of the environment. William’s approach is expansive, embracing the arts and the sciences, the exceptional and the ordinary, the traditional and the emergent. For Williams, culture is at once the stuff of learning, an acquired set of skills and appreciations, and the stuff of experience, part of the daily lives of ordinary folks. Williams—then in his late 20s—opened the debate in 1958 with a blistering manifesto for a new approach, “Culture Is Ordinary.” Perhaps the essay’s most radical element is the way Williams pits his own lived experience growing up working class in the Welsh countryside against what his own mentors were teaching him at Cambridge: “When the Marxists say that we live in a dying culture and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask them, as I did ask them, where on Earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses are not what I have known and see.” Cultural studies commit themselves to better understanding the ongoing struggle over what counts as culture and who gets to decide what culture matters. (68-70)

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