The classic of fan studies I want to introduce today is a theoretical overview of the discipline from 2002. Indeed, in Fan Culture, Matt Hills explores the different theories of fan culture and the methodologies that had been used by
The Classics of Fan Studies: Lisa A. Lewis – The Adoring Audience
Perhaps only a fan can appreciate the depth of feeling, the gratifications, the importance for coping with everyday life that fandom represents. Yet we are all fans of something. We respect, admire, desire. We distinguish and form commitments. By endeavoring
Fan Studies x Digital Humanities: Part 1
So, a little bit of a different post today! Fanhackers will always be about making Fan Studies scholarship more accessible, but Fan Studies encompasses a whole lot of other methodologies and disciplines. This post will be the first of a
On fan culture and activism…
Fan culture offers a history of appropriation and critical engagement with pop culture that could inform broader activist strategies toward increased visibility and collective identity formation. Brough, Melissa M., and Sangita Shresthova. 2011. ‘Fandom Meets Activism: Rethinking Civic and Political
There is a general sense, from the language of industry-side people in big presentations or casual conversations, that the attendees [of San Diego Comic-Con] are “true believers,” supernerds who love — or will love — every scrap of geeky pop culture that comes their
GIFs in general comprise single looped images, but fans often create more complex GIF sets, which are “sets of images, sometimes animated, sometimes not, arranged in a grid of sorts to communicate as a whole” that have “evolved primarily on
Yet it is precisely users’ inability to establish effective boundaries on Tumblr that has led to the ongoing and still hotly contested diversification of fandom participation and expression. Tumblr-enabled fandom cross-fertilization—what Matt Hills (2015) calls transfandom—has contributed to the growth
The next stage of social TV is here. Drawing on promotional discourses, I argue that Facebook and Twitter’s shift from distributors of television network programming to their own original content is a natural extension of industry practice, but not a
As television outlets have proliferated through cable and streaming services, programming, both for adults and teens, has increasingly explored controversial and sensitive issues. Simultaneously, online fandom and social media engagement surrounding television has also proliferated, thus raising questions as to
This all raises the question: are there right and wrong ways to watch a television series? I am reminded of Immanuel Kant’s belief, outlined in his Critique of Judgment (1790), that when we consume art, we do so under the