Applying Fan Studies Beyond Popular Culture

I wrote this essay for a book proposal that was rejected. I plan to continue to expand this idea, but I wanted to share what I wrote in case it will help others.

While increasingly common in everyday conversations, people utilize the term “fandom” for different purposes. One understanding of fandom is used to describe a community organized around an object of affection. That is, individuals feel an affinity for something, such as a movie, sport, or culinary dish, and gravitate toward others who share that affinity. The resulting fan community or collective, at a general level, is deemed as that object’s fandom. Such an organizing approach represents an outsider definition that deems fandom to exist when such a fan community coalesces. Brands, for example, utilize this conceptualization for marketing purposes, essentially equating fandom with a demographic to categorize, understand, explain, and target individuals based on a shared characteristic.

 From an insider perspective, fandom is commonly defined as the positive affinity, often some form of love, toward a particular object of affection from popular culture. This object of affection can be any entity or practice associated with a particular popular culture, such as celebrity, movie, game, food, sport, and so forth. Often this affinity is due to how the individuals interpret the object in relationship to their own lives and values. The affinity is then related to the behaviors people engage in, both externally and internally, in relationship to the object, such as how they interact with the object and other members of that fan community. Activities and behaviors are labeled as fannish when they involve decoding and recoding the object of affection, such as fanfiction, cosplay, and collecting merchandise – all of which allow the person to identify themselves as a fan of that object to others. This view on fandom is often then associated with more passionate and even obsessive emotions and activities. Simultaneously, this insider perspective allows for more nuanced distinctions based on differing types and levels of affinity. Such differences result in the variety of fan activities that provide fans in their communities with social, cultural, economic and political power. Such differences, of course, also engender intra- and inter-community conflicts, resulting in fan hierarchies, fan wars, fractured fandoms and toxic fandom.

While originally defined in relationship to elite or high culture, these two understandings of fandom can be applicable beyond popular culture. The central notion of an affinity towards some object of affection impacting people’s behaviors has come to define many types of relationships with the entities and activities of people’s everyday lives. While pushback may still exist from individuals who could be defined as fans of opera, ballet, and other types of high cultural activities – as they themselves may prefer the related concept aficionado – the fact remains that individuals have a positive affinity towards these objects. The unwillingness to be classified as “fans” may be due to the perception of “fandom” as frivolous, immature, and wasteful, in comparison to other aspects of life considered more worthy, educational, and necessary for life. This essay suggests a reconceptualization of “fandom” to draw on attitudinal research that could improve the application of fan studies beyond popular culture. This essay argues that fandom is subjectively experienced as an orienting framework for making sense of reality, one’s place within it, and one’s actions. The hope is that this perspective would both improve the study of fan conflict as well as improve the standing and value of emotions in the more “serious” areas of everyday life.

Fandom as Attitude

The common attitudinal model already shares many similarities with the concept of fandom. An attitude concerns a person’s beliefs, feelings, and intended behaviors towards some attitude object. An attitude is a learned set of beliefs and evaluations toward the object, with the learning occurring via education and/or experience. The object may be anything tangible or intangible, and may be something the individual has no firsthand experience with; the beliefs may be developed through personal, philosophical wrestling with ethics and morals, or they may be gained through socialization. Simply having beliefs about the object is not enough to generate any intention to behave in relationship to the object. The individual also needs emotional evaluations of that object, with such feelings related to the beliefs. This combination of beliefs and emotions then inform how the person intends to act in relation to the object.

Theoretically, the individual has evaluated the object and concluded what to do, and how to do it, given their rationalization process. For example, a person who believes climate change is real and worries about its impact on their life is more likely to support green energy than either the person who believes it is a hoax or the person unconcerned by it. In a sense, that first individual may also be a fan of green energy as their rationalization may result in a positive evaluation of green energy. Being a fan, traditionally, involves primarily attending to the person’s affinity toward an object of affection. That affinity is typically due to a positive evaluation of the object with a resulting affectation that resembles love. Thus, a person’s fandom already suggests an overlap with this attitudinal model: both concepts theorize the importance of an emotional evaluation in the development of behavior. Where they differ is on the emphasis the attitudinal model ascribes to the cognitive step in this process: a person’s beliefs provide the basis for the emotional evaluation. With fandom, beliefs are not disregarded, but they are often treated as secondary to the affective step. The rationalization process is less linear, as the cognitive and affective aspects of a person’s sense-making co-exist and interact more dialectically and subconsciously, with any linear processing more apparent only in reflection.

With emotional evaluations as their conceptual touchstone, it becomes possible to understand a person’s fandom as a particular attitude they have toward an object of affection. Defining fandom as attitudinal promotes the individual’s beliefs in relation to the object of affection as they exist in relation to their affinity for the object. Bringing attention to the fan’s beliefs provides pathways for understanding fan conflict, fandom propagation, and even the application of fandom and fan studies beyond popular culture. Indeed, defining fandom as attitudinal suggests the importance of fandom not just to a person’s everyday lives and communal relationships; it further suggests the importance of fandom, and thus emotions, to how people make sense of, co-construct, and cope with reality.

Conflict and Propagation

While the common conception of fandom suggests the core emotional evaluation involves love, this understanding of the affectation already simplifies a complicated feeling. Embodied and affective sensations exist without labels and only become “emotions” when individuals use agreed upon terms to communicate their embodied experiences and sensations. While research on emotions suggests humans share some common affective states, the labels given to them are socially and culturally dependent. What one individual may describe as love, another may describe as passion – and such differences occur when sharing a common language. The differences across languages and cultures greatly expands the possibilities of what emotions are used to label a person’s affinity for an object of affection. Such differences present the potential for miscommunication and differences of interpretation and opinion that lead to fan conflict.

Differences due to emotions are only part of the problem that can lead to fan conflict. The fact that these emotions also relate to and inform beliefs suggests that any miscommunication and differences of opinion can be compounded exponentially. People may join a fan community because of a shared affinity to an object of affection, with that shared affinity not being a particular emotion but perhaps a range of similar affective states. While they may be similar in terms to this range, a particular range does not preclude an assortment of beliefs associated with that object of affection. Attitudinal research suggests no one particular emotion always exists with any particular type of beliefs, and thus no particular beliefs lead to any particular emotions. Individuals may have the same beliefs about an attitude object and yet have different emotional evaluations and behavioral intentions. With that in mind, individuals may come to the object of affection from various belief systems and ideologies that in and of themselves conflict with one another.

Such ideological differences leading to fan conflict have become increasingly common in 21st century fan communities. Fan conflicts have manifested in video game fandoms (e.g., GamerGate), in comic book fandom (e.g, ComicsGate), and in a variety of other of other fandoms, including those that have been established for decades (e.g., Star Trek, Star Wars). Indeed, this presence of fan conflict has led fan scholars to review the history of fandom and fan communities to understand where conflict has occurred previously. While a fan community may community may share an affinity towards an object of affection, that fan community may also contain fractures based on ideological differences. Fan conflicts have resulted to opposing political philosophies that impact perceptions of liberalism, for example. Such conflict may be due to the impact a person’s beliefs have on their first being introduced to the object of affection.

As mentioned above, a person’s beliefs emerge through the dual pathways of education and experience. No one’s beliefs exist apart from other people’s beliefs: people come to believe what is good and bad, right and wrong, or true and false, based on what they see and hear from others. Beliefs are communicated to individuals, and then individuals use them to communicate about themselves to other people. Because beliefs are learned, people may not even be aware of their beliefs until a situation requires them to act upon those beliefs. This potentially subconscious nature of beliefs perhaps explains why beliefs have not been a central focus or concern in fan studies. Indeed, when combined with the potential multitude of believes that can be associated with a particular object of affection, perhaps made the prospect of mapping beliefs within a fandom a daunting one.

At the same time, this multitude and complicated relationship between beliefs and fandom can illuminate how any individual may be indoctrinated into a particular fan community, and thus how any particular fan community or fandom and its associated beliefs can be propagated. A person’s beliefs may make them more or less likely to be exposed to a particular object of affection, and to be more or less likely to develop an affinity for that object. The more complicated the nature of the object, such as the more features embedded in that object, then the more likely that a wider range of beliefs will become exposed to it and develop this affinity. A movie text, for example, contains audiovisual textual features that can be open to interpretation. Such a polysemous text is more likely to generate a diverse, polyvalent audience that will develop a fandom for that object. The more a text is open to interpretation by containing open or even empty signifiers, then the more likely a wider range of different ideologies may find connections to that text. In essence, then, a more complicated text allows for more individuals to find something to like about that object, and makes the object more relevant to people with disparate beliefs.

Once a person finds something relevant to their beliefs, they may become more connected to the fandom and fan community, and they may come in contact with associated objects of affection. Connected objects potentially present a proverbial rabbit hole into a network of objects, individuals, communities, and fandoms. Such a network further reflects attitudinal research on the interconnectedness of attitudes. Beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and fandoms do not exist separate from one another: they inform, influence, and develop each other as they serve the individual’s rationalization and sense-making processes. A person’s fandoms share commonalities in both emotional evaluations and beliefs. A person’s political, religious, and other beliefs share commonalities to their fandom beliefs. If an object of affection aligns with the individual’s political beliefs, then they are more likely to develop an affinity and thus fandom for that object. If that fandom then leads them to connected objects, their fandom attitude could strengthen. A strong attitude develops based on the number of beliefs, the perceived importance of those beliefs, and the intensity of the emotional evaluation. The stronger the attitude, the more likely it will predict the person’s behavior. Thus, the stronger the fandom, the more likely the person will act in accordance with it. In terms of a fandom, such strength could result in seeking more of that object or connected ones, resulting in further indoctrination into a fan community as well as increased association with the fandom to their sense of self. A heightened fan identity suggests the fandom attitudes have come to serve as primary sense-making frame.

While not problematic in and of itself, the centralization of the fan identity can result in defensiveness that produces fan conflict. Fan conflict and fandom indoctrination and propagation may not rise to the level of concern for the general public when the object of affection is just a popular culture text; however, the separation of frivolous and serious texts reflects an outsider perspective, as the individual’s subjective experience may deem any text to be either and both. Even that being said, the rise of fan conflict due to differing beliefs is not something to ignore simply because the content and the focus of the conflict is seen by a general public to be frivolous. Many fan conflicts have resulted in both online and offline harassment, including death threats and bomb threats, and the resulting trauma indicates they should not to be ignored. Furthermore, the overlaps in beliefs indicate that these so called fan conflicts could also be used to help explain conflicts that exist in what have been more traditionally seen as serious areas of life – particularly politics and religion.

Beyond Popular Culture

One derivation of the term “fan” comes from the term “fanatic,” which is often used to describe political and religious zealots. The fanatic and the fan are said to share a commonality in terms of their affinity, as both are seen by outsiders as having a disproportionately intense emotional evaluation of the object of affection. Indeed, some cultural critics even look at fan communities as in communities as containing religious elements, especially in the idea of what is sacred and what is mundane to the fan. Additionally, both fans and fans scholars often refer to their object of affection as their canon or the originating text upon which their fandom attitudes and activities are based. Some fan scholars have also studied the overlaps in religious beliefs with fandom beliefs and activities.

Additionally, fan scholars have studied the relationship between fan activities and political activities. This overlap often occurs in relationship to fan activism, which is used to describe fans who actively and vociferously support the canon to assert their power against the capitalist interests controlling that canon. Fan activism that has led to the resurgence and reviving of franchises such as Star Trek represent an example of this overlap between political agency and fan communities. Additionally, more recent fan scholarship has sought to understand fan activism in regard to political issues; for example, research has examined how fans use their organizing of fan communities to achieve particular charitable and political goals. These so-called fans-as-citizens demonstrate how a fan community may organize based on a shared affinity and shared political beliefs. Such a community does not represent the entirety of those who would consider themselves a fan of that object, but it does represent a fracture or specific faction within that overall fandom.

Furthermore, since the start of the 21st century, and the concurrent rise in accepting fandom, more journalists, cultural critics, and fan scholars have started to understand political communities as fan communities. These citizens-as-fans conceptions suggest people have begun to act in their political activism as fans act towards their object of affection, sometimes to deride citizens as improperly engaging in political activism. Such political fandoms demonstrate the importance of emotions to political processes, especially in popularist democracies. This application of fandom comes after centuries of emotions being decried as antithetical to the democratic process in Western political philosophy.

By contrast, it may be that the concern over political fandoms demonstrates the centrality of emotions to democracy, rather than the undoing of democracy. Understanding the centrality of emotion to democratic processes and political activism represents a contrast to the positioning of beliefs in popular culture fandoms. As mentioned above, fan studies has focused more on emotions and less on beliefs; simultaneously, the reverse has been true in terms of political science focusing more on beliefs than on emotions. In Western democratic politics, the result is often a lack of understanding as to why people do not vote in their best interest or what is considered rational – again, from an outsider perspective. A failure to understand the importance of emotions to people’s political activism, from voting upwards, has led to many problems within Western democracies at this point in the 21^st Century.

Consider the conspiracy theory community known as QAnon. QAnon has been studied and critiqued from a variety of perspectives, often with the focus being its beliefs regarding an international conspiracy that essentially compounds many longstanding conspiracies into one with its foundation in anti-Semitism. Focusing solely on the beliefs, however, undercuts any opportunity to effectively deal with the conspiracy theory. Focusing on the beliefs perhaps allows the critics to distance themselves by ridiculing the adherents, but such ridicule and stigmatization further cements the adherents’ feelings of victimization that helps fuel their allegiance to this particular conspiracy theory.

In a sense, QAnon operates as a political fandom with several different objects of affection that are polysemous enough to allow a diverse group of people to find a connection to their existing beliefs. Characterizing the conspiracy theory as a fandom may be seen both normalizing and trivializing this conspiracy theory. However, understanding it is a fandom foreground the emotions that are involved with the beliefs to demonstrate perhaps why adherents are immune to attempts to counter the facts of those beliefs. It may be that people found these conspiracy theories due to anxiety about their lack of control in the world, which is a common emotional evaluation associated with conspiracy theories. At the same time, they may not feel fear when it comes to these beliefs, especially if they see themselves as trying to help the world through their actions. Indeed, at the heart of their adherence to the conspiracy theory is their love for the truth and the world: they see themselves as being able to save the world through their actions. Only those who love the world attempt to save the world.

Their beliefs as to why it needs to be saved and how it needs to be saved may not be based on objective fact, but trying to counter their beliefs without an understanding of the love that is fueling their actions does not work. It may be that some adherents, in seeing that their beliefs do not align with objective facts, start to question their feelings and their overall adherence, but that is something that must be done internally and individually. Fandom often can result in defensiveness if the fandom is highly associated with a person’s sense of self. And love is associated with a person’s fandom. Without understanding the emotional aspect of QAnon adherence, any attempt to bring people out of the conspiracy theory logical, rational, and objective means cannot work.

Conclusion

What seeing the QAnon community as a political fandom demonstrates is the applicability of fandom as an attitude and the entirety of fan studies beyond popular culture. By understanding that a person’s fandom is a particular association of beliefs and feelings to behaviors, it becomes possible to see that a fandom is not just something we associate with leisure and entertainment. A fandom is actually something that helps people make sense of themselves, others, and all of reality. As with other attitudes, a fandom is developed through education and experience, and a fandom them impacts how a person interacts with and acts within reality. The stronger that fandom, the more likely they are to see it as central to how they think about themselves, others, and the world around them. The stronger that fandom, the more likely it will shape the fan’s sense-making and other behaviors.

If their fandom is highly associated with particular religious or political beliefs, that is just saying they have a particularly strong emotional attachment to the object that is deemed to be political or religious. It is not to say that person is necessarily a fanatic or a zealot. What it suggests is that people can be fans of a political or religious object without rising to that obsessive level and yet still have their actions in that political or religious arena be influenced by their beliefs and their emotional evaluations. Being emotional is not necessarily detrimental in relation to politics or religion. Indeed, emotions provide much of the motivation necessary to engage in behavior at all. Without any type of emotional connection to a political or religious object, the result would just be apathy. Apathy generates detachment, which is detrimental to communal activity in whatever form it takes.

Further Reading

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D. “Applying Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making Methodology to fan studies.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 33, 2020, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1701.

—. Fractured Fandoms: Contentious communication in fan communities. Lexington Books, 2018.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D. and joan miller. “Academic Dialogue: Why study politics and fandom?” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 32, 2020, https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1857.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D. and Brenda Dervin. “Studying audiences with Sense-Making Methodology.” In International Companion to Media Studies, edited by Angharad N. Valdivia and Radhika Parameswaran. Blackwell Publishing, 2013: 81-104.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D. and David R. Stanley. “Fans of Q: Online conspiracy QAnon as political fandom.” Midwest PCA/ACA, Virtual Conference, October 2020.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., David R. Stanley, and Linda Howell. “Fans of Q: The stakes of QAnon’s functioning as political fandom.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 66, no. 8, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042294.

Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., Linda Howell, David R. Stanley, Ralph Beliveau and Jessica Hautsch. “The Gates and Gatekeepers of the QAnon Fandom: A proposed structural model for a fandom’s propagation. Midwest PCA/ACA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 2021.