States of Fandom: Community, Constituency, Public Sphere
STATES OF FANDOM: COMMUNITY, CONSTITUENCY, PUBLIC SPHERE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Hannah Ruth Mueller January 2017 © 2017 Hannah Ruth Mueller STATES OF FANDOM: COMMUNITY, CONSTITUENCY, PUBLIC SPHERE Hannah Mueller, Ph.D. Cornell University 2017 Approaching grassroots fan communities as political constituencies, this dissertation traces the historical development of self-organized fan groups from the 1930s to the present, focusing specifically on conceptions of community, the negotiation of public discourse, processes of decision-making, and fannish engagement with social and political issues. While fan studies scholarship previously has emphasized the relationship between text and fan, this study thus steers attention towards the relationships between fans themselves and articulates the interrelations between fan activism, transformative fan practices, and the discursive conditions within fandom. On the basis of archival and online-ethnographic research, the dissertation investigates crucial controversies in the Western literary science-fiction and fantasy community from the 1930s to the 1980s as well as in contemporary online transformative fandom to show how historical context, the demographic makeup of the fandom, fans’ use of communication technologies, and their self- conception as community influence the negotiation and resolution of internal conflicts. Drawing on different theories of community formation and the public sphere, the first chapter of the study proposes that pre-internet literary science-fiction fandom was dominated by a communitarian ideal that regulated in-/exclusion by prioritizing the community over its individual members. In contrast, transformative online fandom promotes the ideal of a non-hierarchical, inclusionary, unregulated alternative public sphere, in which the ethical principles of consensus-building have to be constantly re-negotiated.
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