ABSTRACT
Two decades ago the study of Star Trek fans by Henry Jenkins (1992) and Camille Bacon-Smith (1992) launched the analysis of fans’ interpretive communities by scholars within the US. These foundational works, along with Joli Jensen’s (1992) penetrating insights into cultural assumptions about fans in general, established the importance of studying fan cultures in order to understand the legitimacy, meaning and significance of fans’ practices. While this early scholarship focused on the specific forms of social interaction between fans in order to document the existence of fan communities and locate those communities relative to mainstream society, the wealth of fan research that has been produced since then has focused on how fandom is integrated with modern life (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 2007). Still, there remains considerable work to be done on fans’ individual motivations, enjoyment and pleasures that, according to leading fandom scholars, includes ‘furthering our understanding of how we form emotional bonds with ourselves and others in a modern, mediated world’ through participation in fan communities (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 2007: 10).
