Category: Fandom
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Identification with Favorite Media Personae
I presented this study at my first International Communication Association conference in May 2005. It was the first major study I did by myself in graduate school. I remember making these slides to show on a projector — there was no PowerPoint! I should probably revisit it. Identification with Favorite Media Personae: A phenomenologically-informed conceptualization of…
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A Subject by Choice: The Agency of Fans
I wrote this reflection paper back in 2007 to consider how theories about subjectivation occurs in fandom. Which is to say, how fans of something willingly become identified with that thing they are a fan of. Subjectivation would argue that people passively become something through external ideological forces — that they have no say in…
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Thoughts on Sex in FanFic
Written in October of 2005… I started researching fan fiction, the creation of stories centered on characters or storylines of preexisting media texts, after I came upon a website for such creators and consumers. Recently one particular phenomenon has attracted my attention: heterosexual relationships wherein a character, depicted in her “home-text” as a strong, independent,…
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The Pop Culture Lens on Avatar: The Last Airbender
In the twenty-sixth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome friend of the podcast and return guest, Aaron Kashtan, to discuss the immensely popular hit from the early 21st century, Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008). In this episode – which at times features poor audio due to issues with Skype,…
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Pop Culture Lens on Akira
In the twenty-fifth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome friend of the podcast, Charley Reed, to discuss one of the most influential anime feature films of all time, Akira (1988). Charley is a tremendous fan of the anime and manga, as is Chris, and we wanted to talk bout…
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Convergent Wrestling: Call for Chapters
Official Call for Chapter Proposals Title: Colliding Inside the Squared Circle: The Convergent Nature of Professional Wrestling Editors: CarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Dominican University) & Christopher J. Olson (Dominican University) Purpose: The concept of convergence represents one of the most pervasive buzzwords in media studies, but with good reason. In essence, convergence concerns how the boundaries…
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Pop Culture Lens: Dungeons and Dragons
In the twenty-fourth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and I welcome friend of the podcast, psychologist in training, and long-time gamer Steve Discont to discuss the classic table-top role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. In this episode, we each recall our experiences with role-playing games, from Dungeons and…
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Cross-Gender Fandom
We understand a fan to be someone who’s affection for a media product to be above and beyond that of the rest of the audience (Jensen, 1992a, b). This affection involves higher and more various ways of engaging with the media product than others would exhibit. A common question in fan studies asks if this…
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This Jedi’s Reaction to The Force Awakens: An Autoethnography in Fractured Fandom
I didn’t go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens when it was released in theaters. I couldn’t bring myself to. And this is coming from someone who saw — willingly and enthusiastically — each of the prequels in midnight openings. I saw Phantom Menace numerous times in the theater — even while doing an internship…
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The Dark Side of Fandom
Last fall the call went out from the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (aka C2E2) for proposed panels for the 2016 convention. I had just been part of a very successful discussion at an academic conference that considered the problems, tensions, fractures that fans have been facing, online and offline, for years. But that was…
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