This book is a practical and theoretical guide for anyone interested in researching popular media, popular culture, audiences, and fans. Unlike most books, Theoretical Perspectives does not talk about media texts or fan communities. Instead, it critically explores the workings of fan scholarship: research on popular media and fan culture done by scholars who are often fans themselves, showing and challenging how we have constructed certain ideas about what fans and fandom are, and how to study them/as a fan. Analysing scholarship on two transmedia franchises (The Marvel Cinematic Universe and the BBC’s Sherlock) with the help of extensive international participant discussion, Theoretical Perspectives explores and unravels established, popular theoretical frameworks and value systems on taste and legitimacy, subversion, filtering and safe spaces, neoliberal capitalist realism, and fannish dispositions to offer new approaches for anyone who wants to create a better understanding of fans, fandom, and themselves.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Why Study Fan Scholarship?
- What I Am Talking about When I Am Talking About “Fandom”
- What to Expect from This Book
- What Not to Expect from This Book
- 1. Conceptualising Fandom: Community and Resistance
- Fandom and the Imaginary Community
- Categorisation and Exclusion
- Structuring the Good Fan
- Fan Status as the Golden Standard
- 2. Theorising Fandom: From Capital to Disposition
- The Limitations of Capital
- Disposition and the Function of Practice
- Unpacking the Space of Practice
- Panoptic Sorting and Dispositional Regulation
- 3. Fan Scholarship and the Fannish Disposition: The Case of the BBC’s Sherlock
- Sorting Different Strands of Studies
- Sherlock as a Symbol of Societal Values
- Discursive Reproductions of Established Value Systems
- 4. The Good Fan and the Safe Space
- Filtering Mechanics and Convenient Sorting Practice
- Filtering and the Figure of the Audience
- Safe Spaces and Contamination
- Being Sorted and the Issue of Reflexivity
- 5. Fan Scholarship and Neoliberal Realism: The Case of the MCU
- Structuring Legitimacy through Unity and Fidelity
- Discursive Constructions of Success and Destiny
- Comic Books as a Symbol of Societal Value
- 6. Reflexivity and Fannish Disposition
- Managing Disappointment
- The Scholarly Desire for Isolation and the Claim to Community
- Against a Binary Structuration of the Reflexivity Imperative
- Fandom Is Great: The Fannish Disposition as a Method
- Conclusion
- From Imaginary Community to Fannish Disposition
- Theorising Fan Scholarship
- Embracing Dispositional Insecurity
- Bibliography
- Index