ABSTRACT
Fan studies has had much to say about fan cultures and communities, but rather less to say about how people become fans in the first place. Indeed, in his textbook Understanding Fandom (2013: 124), Mark Duffett goes so far as to describe this issue as an ‘elephant in the room’. In a sense, it is understandable that fandom has typically been theorised as communal, cultural and social: this means that it can be studied as a pre-existent, lived identity. However, by focusing on specific fan communities, the phenomenology of fandom has been somewhat downplayed and marginalised in much scholarship, as have accounts of how people become fans in the first place. Likewise, trajectories of fandom have been displaced by reified, fixed models of what it means to be a fan:
too often theorizations … have been based on restrictive typologies, rather than considering the process, development and … fluidity of being a contemporary … fan. … These also tend to present static models, which fail to recognise the … temporality of individuals’ locations within these communities. (Crawford 2004: 38)
Rather than media fandom being thought of as inherently intertextual, moving across the artefacts of popular culture and drawing them together into historicised, biographical networks of affect and meaning, fandom has instead typically been defined singularly. That is to say, fans are approached and defined as singular fans of ‘X’; Doctor Who fans, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, Twilight fans, and so on:Very few studies address the origins of an individual’s fandom; for many scholars ‘fan’ is a kind of consumer category into which someone simply falls or does not fall … In such studies, there is no ‘becoming a fan’; rather ‘being a fan’ simply appears as a mode of audience participation. (Cavicchi 1998: 41)
The difficulty is that by ‘fixing’ fans into rigid communities and object-based categories, academia frequently loses the capacity to consider how people can be fans of multiple texts at the same time, as well as how people might move through and between different fandoms over time. Contained by concepts of community and culture, fandom partially loses its lived connection with a ‘narrative of the self’ (Giddens 1991: 76).