Fandom

Posted On January 14, 2023

The word fanatic’s original meaning in the 1520s was “insane person”. By the 1640s it meant “zealous person, person characterized by excessive enthusiasm” ^[1]Available at: <https://www.etymonline.com/word/fanatic?ref=etymonline_crossreference> [Accessed 4 January 2023]. and it’s this meaning that has more or less stuck. The word fan, abbreviated from fanatic, meaning ‘devotee’ ^[2]Available at: <https://www.etymonline.com/word/fan#etymonline_v_1112> [Accessed 4 January 2023]. originates from the late 19th century, originally to refer to American baseball enthusiasts.

The word fan has never been used to describe someone with bourgeois taste. (Jenkins, 1992, p. 17) One wouldn’t describe opera, ballet, theatre or fine art aficionados as ‘fans’. The word implies a kind of unhinged behaviour that isn’t associated with the cultured individuals who populate those worlds. Fandom is much more earthy, it is much more grounded in unbridled emotion than one witnesses from the audience even at the end of a spectacular performance of a symphony by Richard Wagner. Though there may be multiple encores where the conductor and lead violinist leave the stage and come back to thunderous applause and occasional shouts of ‘bravo!’, classical music audiences never ‘squee’.^[3] Available at: <https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/squee-history-and-usage-interjection-verb> [Accessed 4 January 2023].

Entry into fandom exists only for those with uncouth and underdeveloped tastes (Jenkins, 1992, p 16). Sports, films, comic books, popular music, television shows, science fiction. Ones devotion to these forms of mass culture implies a kind of cerebral inferiority. They are not intellectually developed enough to appreciate theatre, instead they are ‘film fans’. They are not even cultured enough to appreciate ‘world cinema’, instead they are ‘cult film fans’. Fans exist on the outskirts of culture and are often seen to be abnormal or even to threaten the moral fabric of society, as happened in 1950s America with the war on comic books (Armstrong, 2018).

Fans remain on the peripheries of acceptability. They are seen at best at objects of amusement, at worst they are ‘saddos’ wasting their lives. Get a life (Saturday Night Live, 2013). Awkward, weird, introverted rejects.

And yet in the past decade ‘fandom’ has hit the mainstream. Comic Cons are huge business. Film franchises are designed from the start to allow for a fully formed type of fandom to pop up around them. Merchandise and tie-ins are a required element of marketing. And yet, this isn’t a true fandom. Fandom is something that grows organically. To be a ‘fan’ is more than simply liking a performer or a film or tv programme or a film genre. Jenkins (1992) identifies fans as having several different qualities.

1) Fandom involves a particular mode of reception (Jenkins, 1992, p.284) There are specific ways of watching or reading texts that are unique to each fandom. Fans watch tv or films or read texts with an extreme attention to detail. They view or read them multiple times, studying them, creating meaning, sharing interpretations with other fans. This requires the fandom to be connected to each other in some way for this to operate properly. It isn’t enough just to watch and re-watch a film on your own, it requires an interaction with others in order to be a part of fandom.

2) Fandom involves a particular set of critical and interpretive practices. (Jenkins, 1992, p.284) One gains entry to fandom by learning the way that particular group practices its fandom. They create a kind of ‘meta text’ surrounding the object of their affection. The films, tv programmes, musicians, actors are reflected in fans’ own personal lives. The lines between consuming and living are blurred. Consumption of the text is nothing unless it subsumes ones life. Life means nothing without being subsumed by the text. The text, fandom, life are all one “unified whole” (Chin, 2010).

3) Fandom constitutes a base for consumer activism. (Jenkins, 1992, p.284) Creators require fans; fans require creators. Fandoms exert a kind of control over the creators that normal consumers do not. The act of creation becomes a group project. The text often only exists because of the demands of the fandom. Creator, fans and text have a symbiotic existence. Is any text ‘real’ if it doesn’t have fans?

4) Fandom possesses particular forms of cultural production, aesthetic, traditions and practices. (Jenkins 1992, p.285) Fan art, fan fiction, fan videos, fan music. Fandoms appropriate their objects of affection, breaking down the lines between creator and consumer. Every fan is also a potential writer, filmmaker, performer, artist. Fandom is often the first point of contact people have with ‘creativity’. It provides people with both a focus and an outlet for their ingenuity. Very often fans end up in careers that started within fandom – writing, costume design, filmmaking, photography, theatre. Fandom is used as a path to professionalism (Chin, 2010).

5) Fandom functions as an alternative social community. (Jenkins, 1992, p.286) Fans have their own etiquette and their own language. Each specific fan culture is entirely inscrutable to outsiders. Fans are often in competition with one another to discover who is the more ‘pure’ fan. Tests of trivia knowledge and questions of how long you have been a fan will quickly determine a hierarchy amongst newly acquainted fans. Opinions of different online forums or websites act as a shibboleth to determine what subgroup of the fandom you belong to. (Chin, 2013)

My life has been lived within fandom since the age of 9 when I first liked Steve Martin. I’d loved his song King Tut. (Saturday Night Live, 2013) My mother bought me his album ‘A Wild And Crazy Guy’ (Martin, 1978) (we can talk about my parents’ inappropriate media choices for me throughout my childhood another time) and I listened to it endlessly. I still find myself saying lines from it all these years later. I had pictures of him on my bedroom walls. I wore a fake arrow through my head. My friends at school gave me a pin badge with King Tut on it. I was the weirdo who liked Steve Martin – everyone else like Abba or The Bee Gees or whoever, I don’t even know, because I didn’t take part in the normal cultural life of a 9 year old. I liked Steve Martin. It made me different.

Steve Martin started me off on a life of fandom. Each one of my fandoms, big or small, have informed me, shaped me, guided me, made me. Each one is a part of me, intrinsically linked to me. Remove one of them and you no longer have Me.

These obsessions have been all-consuming, sometimes briefly for a few months, sometimes taking over my entire life for years at a time. It goes beyond knowing the lyrics to albums by people or bands such as Aretha Franklin or Ben Folds or The Smiths or The Talking Heads or Duran Duran, it is about how those lyrics explain me and my life to myself. It goes beyond knowing the entire dialogue of films such as The Breakfast Club, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Female Trouble, it is about how those films have filled my thoughts and my time sometimes more than ‘real life’. It goes beyond knowing all of the dialogue, all of the songs and most of the movements of the actors in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975), it is about how my whole entire existence for the better part of 7 years revolved entirely and exclusively around the film. Everything I did, everything I said, everything I thought was about the film. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been my longest standing fandom of all.

Rocky Horror was a fandom through which I was first able to discover my own creativity, a fandom which gave me the freedom to explore my interest in performance, a fandom which required me to learn how to sew, design costumes, make props, build sets, put on shows, manage budgets, manage people and set me up for a creative career lasting 30 years- including significant work within the film industry as a “professional fan” (Chin, 2010) on Sunshine, 28 Weeks Later, The X-Files: I Want To Believe, Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull- is a fundamental part of who I am. It allowed me to be me. Don’t Dream It, Be It and all of that.

Bibliography

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Armstrong, A., 2018. Comic Books, Censorship, And Moral Panic. [online] Mudd Manuscript Library Blog. Available at: [Accessed 28 December 2022].

Bedden, P., 2014. Perry Bedden’s Rocky Horror Picture Book. London: Rocky Horror Preservation Foundation.

Booth, P., 2018. A Companion To Media Fandom And Fan Studies. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.

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Saturday Night Live, 2013. Star Trek Convention – Saturday Night Live. Available at: [Accessed 15 December 2022].

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