Introduction: Why Study Fans?

A Presidential Bromance: How Meme Culture Upsets Race, Gender, and Political Power Dynamics

“…The initial parallel between fanfic and internet memes is the creation on behalf of the creators. Fanfic has a history of being a social activity (Gray et al, 2017); fans gather online to write and share their appropriations, similarly to internet users creating memes for a totally new and/or different way to depict politicians’ identities in popular culture. Both are user-created content that can evolve into a collectively contributable activity.…”

Editorial: Fandom and Controversy

“…The concept of media fandom “refers to loosely interlinked interpretive communities, mainly comprising women and spanning a wide range of demographics in terms of age, sexuality, economic status, and national, cultural, racial and ethnic backgrounds, formed around various popular cultural texts” (Pande, 2018, p. 2). The study of such fandom practices and behaviors has often been viewed by Fan Studies scholars as a series of “waves,” with the first of these emerging in the early 1990s and characterized as the “Fandom is Beautiful” era (Gray et al, 2007). In this period, research “focused largely on fans and fan cultures as communities who worked together to help democratize the meaning-making in popular culture discourse” (Linden & Linden, 2017, p. 37), but was also seen to be “reinforcing a binary distinction between fans and ‘normal audiences’” (Sandvoss et al, 2017, p. 9).…”

Shipping on the edge: Negotiations of precariousness in a Chinese real-person shipping fandom community

“…Following Gray et al (2007), I argue that scholars should approach the desires, pleasure, and experiences of fans as agents in the existing social-technological and political structure. The next section first historicizes the boys' love (BL) or danmei culture in East Asia, then it presents real-person slash (RPS, or shipping) as a unique fandom subculture.…”