Introduction Why Study Fans? Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington Most people are fans of something. If not, they are bound to know some- one who is. As much as we all have a sense of who fans are and what they do, the question arises as to why we need to further study a phenomenon we seem so familiar with. Why do the questions of which television pro- gram, music, or artist we follow make an important contribution to our understanding of modern life? How can a focus on pleasure and enter- tainment be justified at the end of what will enter history books as a cen- tury of violence, driven by rapid social, cultural, economic, and technological change, and with the twenty-first century set to follow the same trajectory? What contribution can the study of fans make to a world faced with war, ethnic conflicts, widening inequality, political and reli- gious violence, and irreversible climate change, among other disasters? The laconic answer to these questions is that fandom matters because it matters to those who are fans. However, beyond this, the contributions fan studies have made have varied in the course of what we, in retrospect, can summarize as three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades. “Fandom Is Beautiful” For the first wave of scholars who took their particular inspiration from de Certeau’s (1984) distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the disempowered, the consumption of popular mass media 1 2 Introduction: Why Study Fans? was a site of power struggles and fandom the guerilla-style tactics of those with lesser resources to win this battle. The study of fandom was thus automatically considered a worthy cause, one that represented and cham- pioned those disadvantaged within society, as fans, in John Fiske’s words, are “associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race” (1992: 30). Within this tradition, which spanned from Fiske to Henry Jenkins’s (1992) canonical Textual Poachers, fandom was automatically more than the mere act of being a fan of something: it was a collective strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities that in their subcul- tural cohesion evaded the preferred and intended meanings of the “power bloc” (Fiske 1989) represented by popular media. Fan studies therefore constituted a purposeful political intervention that sided with the tactics of fan audiences in their evasion of dominant ideologies, and that set out to rigorously defend fan communities against their ridicule in the mass media and by non-fans. Joli Jensen (1992), for instance, highlighted the similarities in the portrayal of fans as part of an undifferentiated, easily manipulated mass in media representations and early mass communica- tion scholarship. Instances of such stereotypical treatment, which always involve a deliberate distancing from fan audiences, still persist today. When in November 2005 the fourth installment of the Harry Potter films opened in theaters across North America, much of the media coverage exhibited inordinate fascination with the fan cultures that surround this multimedia blockbuster. The New York Post offered a two-page spread on “Potterheads: Wizards of Odd,” in which writer Maureen Callahan described, as her subtitle reads, how “adult fans go hogwart’s [sic] wild as new Trekkies” (2005: 46–47). Seemingly an earnest attempt to enter into the mind of the fan, the article in its frequently snide tone and vocabulary and its belittling of fans as “otherwise functioning adults” “in the weird house” (2005: 46) reveals a firm desire to understand fandom solely as Other. While more thoughtful commentary is provided courtesy of Syra- cuse University’s Robert Thompson later in the article, his lead quote asks, “Who better than the socially awkward to be engaged by a story about a kid with no friends, abused by his guardians, who becomes a sav- ior with stigmata on his forehead?” The point of reference to which the Post resorts in its effort to illustrate the social inadequacy of Potterheads is familiar to anyone who has ever given a thought to the stereotypical media coverage of fans: the embedded infographic compares Potterheads Introduction: Why Study Fans? 3 to Trekkies, listing, for instance, the future employment of a Potterhead as “Extrovert IT help desk worker,” while the Trekkie is deemed an “Intro- vert IT help desk worker” in waiting (2005: 47). The invocation of “Trekkies” (particularly as “Trekkies” rather than their preferred “Trekkers”) once lent particular vigor to the defenses of Star Trek fans in the first wave of fan studies by playing a key role in the work of five of its earliest champions: Camille Bacon-Smith, Henry Jenkins, Roberta Pear- son, Constance Penley, and John Tulloch. The assumption of an underlying duality of power that marked the first wave of fan studies has, however, attracted increasing critical scrutiny for two key reasons: first, the Post article reveals how it is all too common for fans to be dismissed as Others. As the wealth of literature on Othering makes clear, the Other is always a reflection and a projection of ourselves (see Said 1979). Moreover, as Stallybrass and White (1986) have illustrated, frequently our gaze at the Other is imbued with significant desire and longing. This, however, still applied and applies to media as well as schol- arly representations of fandom. For all their sympathy, early fan scholars who were outsiders to the fan communities they studied ultimately pulled back from their observations, concluding, “right, now we can arrive at the truth that the fans don’t yet recognize about their own political activity” (Jenkins 2001: n.p) (see Hills 2002 on Penley). While subsequent work, including most notably Bacon-Smith (1992), Harrington and Bielby (1995), Jenkins (1992), and Tulloch and Jenkins (1995) allowed fans to speak of and for themselves and was often written by those inside respec- tive fan cultures, the rhetorical defense of fans by some first-generation fan scholars left media and cultural studies with considerable baggage. We could perhaps refer to this stage of fan studies as the “Fandom Is Beautiful” phase. As is common in the early stages of identity politics for groups heretofore Othered by mainstream society, early fan studies did not so much deconstruct the binary structure in which the fan had been placed as they tried to differently value the fan’s place in said binary. As such, early fan studies (and much of the work it inspired) often turned to the very activities and practices—convention attendance, fan fiction writing, fanzine editing and collection, letter-writing campaigns—that had been coded as pathological, and attempted to redeem them as cre- ative, thoughtful, and productive. Rhetorically, this work aimed to ren- der normative the very end point of caricature that popular and academic accounts of fandom often presented. However, as a result, rarely in such accounts do we encounter fans who merely love a show, 4 Introduction: Why Study Fans? watch it religiously, talk about it, and yet engage in no other fan practices or activities. As such, fandom in one of its most common forms was excluded from systematic academic study, and thus to all but those with engagement in fan practices, “fandom” in its academic definition risked being continually reified as Other, hence keeping many of the terms of the non-fan/fan binary alive, albeit differently valued. Fans in the Mainstream This leads us to the second reason for the various departures from the established canon of early fan studies since the mid-1990s, which in con- trast to the first point is not conceptual but historical: the public recogni- tion and evaluation of the practice of being a fan has itself profoundly changed over the past several decades. As we have moved from an era of broadcasting to one of narrowcasting, a process fueled by the deregulation of media markets and reflected in the rise of new media technologies, the fan as a specialized yet dedicated consumer has become a centerpiece of media industries’ marketing strategies (see McCourt & Burkart in this vol- ume). Rather than ridiculed, fan audiences are now wooed and champi- oned by cultural industries, at least as long as their activities do not divert from principles of capitalist exchange and recognize industries’ legal own- ership of the object of fandom. Moreover, if representations of fandom in the media are still an indica- tor of its social and cultural recognition, there can be no doubt that the stereotypical coverage exemplified in the New York Post article on Potter- heads has given way to mainstreamed appreciation of being a fan. In fact, what is under attack in the Post article is not the state of being a fan as such but particular texts as objects of fandom. While Harry Potter fan- dom, according to Callahan and The New York Post, is infinitely geeky and fans the quintessential losers (albeit “extrovert” ones!), we can rest assured that the editors of the Post would not like to see this description extended to their loyal, pinstripe-wearing readership of New York Yankees fans who are extensively catered to in its back pages. Hence, what is at stake in the changing representation of fans in the mass media is more than the obvi- ous difference between sports fandom and fan audiences in other areas of popular culture, which Fiske highlighted more than a decade ago (1992) and which until recently led to the widespread disregard of sport fans in audience studies, not least because sport fans—in light of the violence and Introduction: Why Study Fans? 5 racism that marked much of their representation in particular in the 1980s—were a much less likely and indeed likable subject of study, who evaded the paradigm of a bipolar power struggle between hegemonic cul- ture industries and fans.