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- Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
Journal of Fandom Studies, The - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2019
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Finding the child fan: A case for studying children in fandom studies
By Kyra HuntingAs fan studies increasingly explores understudied fan communities this article calls for the inclusion of children as a crucial overlooked group of fans. Drawing upon research that considers fandom throughout the life course, it argues that fandom is an important part of childhood and one that may look different than it does for adult fans. I argue, the extent to which children’s media consumption practices resemble fan practices has obscured the fact that children can be fans. In this article I consider the impediments to considering the fandom of children, the ways in which children may be acting as – if not labelling themselves as – fans, what doing so can offer both fandom studies and children’s media studies and I lay out some suggestions for beginning the process of examining the practices and sites of children’s fandom.
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Play moods across the life course in SKAM fandom
Authors: Line Nybro Petersen and Vilde Schanke SundetThis article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-constructed in online fan communities. We analyse how these play moods are negotiated across the life course for participating fans. Play moods are closely tied to the playful modes of fan practices, and by gaining a greater understanding of the moods that fans engage in at different stages of their life course we gain new insights into fan play as it relates to issues of age-related norms in fan communities. Specifically, this article analyses the Norwegian teenage streaming drama SKAM (Shame) (NRK, 2015–17), which was produced for a target audience of 16-year-old Norwegian girls but ended up capturing the hearts of people of all ages across Scandinavia and internationally. This study is based on interviews with 43 Scandinavian fans aged between 13 and 70. The participants were all active on social media (Facebook, Instagram, the show’s blog, etc.) while the show was on the air and the interviews offers insights into issues of age-appropriateness as it relates to fan practices. As such, fans ‘police’ both themselves and each other based on perceptions of age, while also engaging in practices that are by nature playful and may be considered subjectively and culturally ‘youthful’ or ‘childish’. The article combines theory of play and fan studies with a focus on the life course and cultural gerontology in order to highlight these tendencies in the SKAM fandom.
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Celebrating nostalgia or critiquing naivety: Reading pop music reunions through discourses of the fan life course
More LessThis study explores how fans give meaning to pop music reunions through the lens of the life course. It does so through a content analysis of forum comments about TV series The Big Reunion, which reunites chart-topping music acts from the past decades. The fans interpret The Big Reunion in three modes closely related to their life-course position: first, now young adults, the fans read the reunion as a nostalgic phenomenon. Second, they consider the reunion as an ironic event. Third, they question The Big Reunion’s formula by reflecting on it through the prism of their current position in the life course. These readings reveal how the fans celebrate a nostalgic reflection on the pop acts of their youth; yet also offer a critique on their former, ‘naïve’ teenage/child-selves.
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When the Pet Shop Boys were ‘imperial’: Fans’ self-ageing and the neoliberal life course of ‘successful’ text-ageing
By Matt HillsI follow Harrington and Bielby’s (2018) call for more work on ‘texistence’ – how fans’ self-ageing and the text-ageing of pop-cultural texts become intertwined. I focus on the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys (PSB), formed in 1981. Lead singer Neil Tennant coined the term ‘imperial phase’ (2001) to describe the success of their album Actually (1987), and this terminology has been embraced by PSB fandom; enduring fans consider their fandom in relation to imperial/post-imperial phases. I consider how PSB fans desire a return of the ‘imperial’, refuting any text-ageing ‘narrative of decline’, as well as counterfactually reimagining the duo’s career success. Fannish interpretive community is based on celebrating the commercial authenticity of PSB’s music, articulating both text-ageing and fans’ self-ageing with neoliberalized concepts of the ‘successful’ life course (Clack and Paule 2019) and ‘uniqueness’ in marketized contexts (Nealon 2018). I thus argue that neoliberalism needs to be integrated into analyses of the contemporary fannish life course, even when fan objects (such as PSB) have been explicitly anti-neoliberal across their careers.
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Destabilization, adaptation and the long-term fan object: The search for continuity in later-life sports fandom
More LessWhilst there is a growing literature in fan studies on the ageing fan, there is a distinct lack of engagement with the body of work already established within the ‘ageing sciences’, such as gerontology. This article begins to address such issues by applying the gerontological notion of continuity theory to the study of later-life, long-term sports fandom. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 35 retired or semi-retired sports fans, all of whom are in the third and fourth ‘life ages’, this article argues for a theory of fan continuity whereby the fan adapts their relationship to the fan object in response to various challenges to their fandom. These challenges to the fannish status quo are destabilizations, which, upon an adaptation on behalf of the fan and ultimate re-stabilization of the fandom, result in an outcome which can be assessed on a positive–negative experiential continuum. This is a continuous process as the later-life adult looks for consistency of self, and continuity in fandom.
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Til death do us part? Fandom and the US death system
More LessThis study extends scholarship on age, ageing and fandom to the end-of-life context, exploring the question of whether fan identities and practices are salient at life’s end. A focus on mortality is not new to fan studies, as research on post-object fandom, transitions and endings in fandom, and zombie fandom have opened rich new research trajectories in fan studies. In this article I focus on potentials associated with the mortality of fans themselves, framed by prior work on the social practices of personal identities in the realm of death and dying. Situated in media studies, gerontology and thanatology, I draw on interviews with members of the US death system to explore fannish possibilities in the context of human transience.
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