Understanding Fandom

An introduction to the study of media fan culture

By

MARK DUFFETT

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury

Publishing Plc

First published 2013

© Mark Duffett, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

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3
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or
organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of
the material in this publication can be accepted by
Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

eISBN: 978-1-6235-6086-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Duffett, Mark.

Understanding fandom : an introduction to the study of media

fan culture / by Mark Duffett.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4411-5855-0 (hardback) – ISBN

978-1-4411-6693-7 (paperback) – ISBN 978-1-62356-086-7
(e-pub) 1. Fans (Persons) 2. Mass media– Social aspects.
3. Mass media and culture. I. Title.

HM646.D84 2013

302.23–dc23

2013020885

4
Contents

Foreword: What If? – reimagining fandom

Matt Hills

Acknowledgements

1Introduction

2Fan stereotypes and representations

3Beyond the text

4The pathological tradition

5How do people become fans?

6Fan practices

7Fandom, gender and sexual orientation

8Myths, cults and places

9The fan community: online and offline

10Researching fandom

11Conclusion: The frontiers of fan research

Glossary

Notes

5
5

How do people become fans?

Starting points

•What can we learn from ideas like contagion, taste and

emotional affect about the way that people become fans?

•Is fandom a substitute for religion?

•When it comes to personal identity, how can we combine

ideas that say fandom is both a journey and a destination?

Gregory Peck: Hello there. You came all the way from
London [to America] for this evening, did
you now?
Peck’s fan: Absolutely. I’m speechless – I don’t know
quite what to say.
Gregory Peck: So tell me about yourself?
Peck’s fan: Well, I’ve admired you for many years. I
wanted to see for myself whether you really
are what you appear to be on-screen.
Tonight has proved to me that you are what
you appear to be.
Gregory Peck: (chuckling) Well I hope so. I hope it isn’t a
put on for all these years.
Peck’s fan: No. That’s what I wanted to find out for
myself. I thought, ‘The hell with it: I’m
going to blow all my savings and I’m going
to going to come here and see for myself

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 what you are like’. And I’m so glad I did;
it’s been the experience of a lifetime.
Gregory Peck: (shaking hands) God bless you. Thank you
for coming.
A Conversation with Gregory Peck (KOPPLE, 2001)

Media fans are just people. Like anyone else, they can be
rational, biased, stubborn, critical, tired, liberal or
open-minded. One of the central differences between fans and
other people, however, is that they have experienced
a meaningfully different feeling to others and cannot always
rationally explain why. Researchers have described this as a
kind of self-absent quality. A feature-length documentary
called A Conversation with Gregory Peck (Kopple 2001) was
made using footage of the classic screen icon’s retirement
tour of America. In the documentary, Peck recounted his tales
about life in Hollywood to live audiences of his
now-middle-aged fans. One lady, who came all the way from
England, met her idol backstage and entered into a friendly
conversation with him. What is evident from the conversation
was that Peck’s fan was achieving a lifelong dream and
discovering whether he actually fulfilled his own media
image. She was not just emotionally excited by the encounter,
but seemed self-absent too. In the midst of the contradictory –
but I am sure much anticipated – moment when her dream
came true, she neither knew quite what to say nor did she
begin the process of trying to relate to Peck as one ordinary
person to another, even though she finally got a chance.
Peck’s invitation for her to talk about her own life was met
with her restating her role as his fan. From one perspective
this seems like irrational subservience. From another, it can
be seen as a logical attempt to maintain the thrilling consented

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inequality that is an essential part of the star-fan divide. In
that sense her fandom functioned as much for her as it did for
him. Their mutual encounter also opens up questions: Why
she was a Peck fan? What role did emotion play in her
fandom in the first place? Had she set Peck up as a religious
idol? And, central to this chapter, how do people like her –
that is, people like us – become fans?

Any discussion of how anyone becomes a fan has to contain a

theory of why fans are who they are and why they do what
they do. Most researchers examine the fan community or its
representative individuals, as if personal fandom had always
existed and was a timeless, all-encompassing identity. The
origins of each individual’s fandom therefore represent an
‘elephant in the room’ in fan research. One perspective on
this is to say that real life is much more complex than any
theory, so our time might be better spent in situ examining the
meanings and politics of real historical moments experienced
by actual audience members rather than trying to devise a
master plan. However, popular theories proliferate in the
absence of any convincing explanatory framework that
accounts for new personal fandom as a biographic transition.
In other words researchers are failing to fill a popular demand
and leave their object wide open to crude stereotyping. What
follows will draw on academic arguments from media
research about taste, contagion, affect and religion. My aim is
partly to clear a path for two additional contributions to the
field. The first suggests that researchers could productively
examine one element from the influential sociologist Emile
Durkheim’s notion of religion to explain the emotional ‘buzz’
when fans meet their heroes. The second contribution
suggests that when people

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become fans they enter a ‘knowing field,’ (i.e. a field of
emotional knowing): a terrain of conviction that defines their
fannish identity. Both these ideas aim to avoid the
reductionist view that fandom is primarily about fascination/
obsession (entirely personal) or about contagion/hysteria
(entirely social). If we understand it as both personal and
social, where each dimension is experienced through the
other, then the real question becomes how to bring the
personal and social together in a productive way that unravels
the mysteries of the phenomena.

Beyond contagion

In his book-length discussion of fan cultures, one of the

questions asked by Matt Hills (2002a, 88) was how personal
fandom starts. How does one from any number of mine texts
become mine and start my fandom? Why do only particular
performances light my fire? There have been many answers
to that question. In his classic research on music listening,
Theodor Adorno (1938/2001) suggested that jitterbug
enthusiasts produced their own fannish enthusiasm as an
advertisement for the wares they consumed and thus aimed to
‘infect’ those around them. Common sense suggests there
may be something in what he is saying. Indeed, one of the
useful things about the idea of contagion is that it implies a
significant experiential difference between the individual’s
state before and after the start of their fandom. Contagion is a
common colloquial explanation of fandom, but how useful is
it in explaining precisely how people become fans?

Contagion-based arguments are deceptive as they smuggle a

series of assumptions into the discussion that may not be
helpful. By suggesting that individuals are vulnerable victims

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they associate fandom with pathology. They also imply that
fandom is merely about being in the right place at the right
time. If the idea of contagion suggests that a fan can be
‘contaminated’ by each new interest then it appears to strip
them of their agency. Yet it is also true that the beginning of
any fannish attachment can feel overwhelming. Contagion
seems impersonal in implying that any individual can be
‘bitten’ by the bug of a fan interest. Unless we accept the
metaphor of immunity as something more than a blunt figure
of speech, it fails to explain why some individuals do not
become fans. Contagion also arguably implies that fandom is
‘contracted’ with relative speed primarily due to ‘exposure’ to
an outside source. Sometimes media genres such as
melodrama are described as having a contagious tendency in
that they seem to be able to convey emotion from the screen
to the audience by staging a compelling series of dramatic
events (for a critical discussion see Hills 2010b, 101). More
crudely, such ideas point
down a path that leads to the notion that heavy metal songs,
violent films or other contentious media products are to blame
for making people commit terrifying acts of evil. Media
effects arguments like these place causation in to the hands
of products themselves. We should be wary of making such
claims: they fail to see that audience members have a degree
of choice and responsibility when it comes to their own
actions, even when they are informed by the media or use
products as an inspirational resource (see Barker & Brooks
1998 for an extended discussion). Also, ideas about
contagion – as Sarah Ahmed points out – see emotion merely
as an unchanging social property able to be passed
unproblematically from one body to the next (2004, 10). For
Ahmed, emotion creates the very surfaces and boundaries that
allow all kinds of objects to be delineated (10). In other

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words, it is not a relay baton so much as tool for
understanding what matters. In light of these general warning
signs, it may be possible to start analysing key moments to
mark out the role of ‘contagion’ in interpersonal encounters
that have led to people finding their fandom.

In this section I will draw on Thomas and O’Shea’s 2010

book Chicks Dig Timelords because the first person essays
are by non-academic contributors describing various
experiences of fan initiation. A first example suggests that
potential fans sometimes feel moved when they realize the
sheer numeric size of a particular fan base:

Star Trek fandom lured me in for a time, mostly by simple

fact that most of my friends were active in it . . . But Trek
palled – for which I’m relieved, given how it’s all turned
out – and I found myself in a rather strange position. I was a
fan without fandom. Fortunately that didn’t last long. PBS
lured me back to Doctor Who with Sunday night reruns. The
show’s charms prevailed against half a decade of entrenched
cynicism, and I shamefacedly admitted that I had treated it
unkindly. Then a friend convinced me to visit Gallifrey One,
a Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles, whereupon I
learned that the fandom still thrived. Hello, thought I. Maybe
there’s still some fun to be had here. And, unlike other
fandoms, the fact that I was female seemed quite
incidental. . . . (Mead 2010, 56; emphasis mine)

If Johanna Mead’s use of terms like ‘lured’ and ‘charms’

implies seduction and contagion, there is also something more
at work here. Her idea of being ‘a fan without fandom’ is
fascinating because it suggests that telefantasy fandom (at
least) might be more of a learned predisposition towards

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media consumption than a personal epiphany. However, one
can never recognize oneself as ‘a fan without fandom’ before
the first time one is a fan; the first episode seems to come
quite out of the blue. What Mead is therefore talking
about is actually that she had previously experienced fannish
pleasures from her engagement with a particular media genre,
and she wanted to rediscover those pleasures with a new
object of interest.

As Adorno has suggested, the dedication of existing fans – if

they are like us or what we aspire to be – can at least act as an
indication that something is worthy of closer attention. For
instance, eventual Doctor Who fan Tara O’Shea was intrigued
when she met an alluring stranger named Fred who dressed in
a home-knitted scarf at a sci-fi convention: ‘I decided
afterward that a show that inspired such loyalty and passion
had to have something going for it. Intrigued, I started
watching on my local PBS broadcasts of the show, and
peppered Fred with questions . . .’ (2010, 98). On one level
this might seem like a classic case of contagion, but Tara did
not say that Fred’s fandom caused her own; he only prompted
her to investigate the material. The process extends across
close relationships too. Helen Kang recalled, ‘I wanted to be
part of [my friend] Robert’s fandom, too’ (2010, 41). As part
of the Music in Daily Life Project at SUNY in Buffalo,
Daniel Cavicchi also found listeners who discovered artists in
parallel with their siblings. One woman, for instance,
discussed how she discovered several artists such as Joni
Mitchell at the same time as her sister, and she felt a sense of
‘female camaraderie’ about them (1998, 180). This kind of
camaraderie inspires people to explore their siblings’ record
collections as a form of peer identification, whether at the
time or later in nostalgic reverie.

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Another relevant example is that parental or romantic
relations can trigger what appear to be processes of contagion.
Couples often look for, and find, shared objects. As Lynne
Thomas explained:

And then I fell in love with a Doctor Who fan. Michael had
his work cut out for him – I didn’t even know what that mean,
to be a fan, in the active fandom sense of the word. He slowly
introduced me into media properties that had fandoms we
could enjoy together, like Xena: Warrior Princess. Later, we
added Buffy, Angel, Firefly and The Avengers, along with
Doctor Who (2010, 81).

What is interesting here is that Lynne and Michael’s

relationship is the pretext for investigating a common object.
They both assume that finding something appealing in the
same series would deepen the bond between them. Indeed,
many couples meet and marry through fan communities.
Their shared fandom is taken as an indicator of compatibility.
A common focus also helps to establish intimacy by
providing something that they can both enjoy. More work
needs to be done on the way that individuals explore media
culture on self-motivated quests to understand their nearest
and dearest, or dearly
departed. Equally, parents can try to hand down fannish
passions as gifts for their children. Kate Bush scholar Laura
Vroomen noted that fans who passed on their musical taste to
their children or stepchildren were not just securing the
ongoing existence of the fan base; they were establishing a
bond and a teaching relationship that allowed them to share
knowledge within their family environment (see 2004, 244).
Vroomen’s analysis is interesting here because it focuses on
fans’ motives for socially declaring their interests. It raises the

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issue of how fandom functions and is used within an
immediate social environment, in this case the family. Liz
Myles has discussed how her mother had been an avid Doctor
Who fan since the series began in 1963:

She made sure that my sister and I were brought up on a

steady stream of nineties VHS releases. It wasn’t a complete
success: my sister thought all this space and time adventuring
was a lot of daft nonsense (though that didn’t stop her flailing
in terror at Haemovores in ‘The Curse of Fenric’), but I was
convinced that Doctor Who was surely the most brilliant and
exciting story ever told. (2010, 137)

Myles’ story shows that because each instance depends on the

personality of the would-be fan, contagion is not a fully
adequate explanation. If it were universally the case, everyone
exposed to a product would become interested. Such accounts
begin to raise significant issues for the contagion theory.

There are also many subtle problems with the contagion idea
that collectively create a major case against it. First, fans’
efforts to encourage those around them to join with their
interests often fail. In their homes and workplaces many are
separated from others of a similar passion, which is why they
may seek out like-minded friends in fan clubs or online:
‘Almost all fans to whom I spoke felt misunderstood or
unwelcome in the eyes of those around them. Such isolation
ranged from toleration to downright hostility’ (Cavicchi 1998,
161). Second, one of the key problems with the contagion
idea is that people can be familiar with media products as
audience members for many years before discovering that
they harbour a fannish interest. Lynn Thomas explained how
she became a Doctor Who fan:

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As Michael’s collection grew, so did my affection for the
series. But I didn’t become a real fan, not really, until I saw
Ace take on a Dalek with a souped-up baseball bat in
‘Rememberance of the Daleks’. Because traveling with the
Doctor may be hard, frustrating, and dangerous, but it sure
beats the hell out of being a waitress in an intergalactic malt
shop. At that moment, something clicked in my brain, saying,
YES. THIS. I get it. Ace became my companion, and
Sylvester McCoy became my favourite
Doctor. I was ready for a Who convention. . . . (2010, 82;
emphasis in original)

In this case, the individual’s recognition of something in the

text and how it related to her identity led her to declare she
were a fan, as if she found part of themselves in the text.
While many such ‘becoming a fan’ stories contain elements
of social initiation, contagion can be seen as a post hoc
rationalization of a more complex process. Specifically, while
Adorno’s living advertisements for the text can have a role to
play in the genesis of fandom, more often than not they
simply provide an invitation or motivation to evaluate the text
and explore more of the catalogue. They do not constitute a
full explanation because they do not offer a full account of
causative. Contagion replaces a comprehensive theory of the
origins of personal fandom with a simplistic figure of speech
that both neglects the agency of the would-be fan and can
play into other questionable ideas.1

Taste

One position on fandom is that it is purely a matter of

personal passion and individual taste. In his 1984 book
Distinction, the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu

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argued that taste is a social system rather than a purely
personal choice: ‘Taste classifies and it classifies the
classifier’ (1984, 6). Bourdieu came to his diagnosis by
studying subtle differences in the lifestyles and cultural
preferences of French citizens at different places in the class
hierarchy. Induction is the idea that researchers who are
relatively unencumbered by theory can go out and study the
world then observe patterns from which they build new ideas.
Bourdieu’s relatively inductive, monumental study of French
society and its cultural life exposed many subtle distinctions
in the ways that ordinary people lived. One field of activity
that he described was cinema, where he noticed that
working-class spectators tended to be more interested in
particular actors and Hollywood films, while more
middle-class spectators talked about directors and European
films. In effect, these class-based audiences had slightly
different objects of interest. Bourdieu’s analysis covered
similar distinctions in a range of cultural repertoires including
food, wine and interior decoration. His conclusion was that
people used taste to separate themselves from the others who
were closest to them in social space. Most of us can spot the
cultural difference between individuals who are far apart on
the class spectrum, but it is really the subtle distinctions and
more arcane forms of knowledge – like knowing whether a
good bottle of Beaujolais should ever be served chilled – that
distinguishes those ‘in the
know’ from the uninitiated. From this, Bourdieu created a
functional schema that showed how these distinctions were
reproduced. Offering the idea that individuals accumulate
cultural capital (and therefore using an economic metaphor
for a sociocultural process), he proposed that each person
claimed their place in society by acquiring a stock of
knowledge that reflected their particular social position. The

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sociologist discovered that upbringing and formal education
both constituted central channels through which people
learned about these fine gradations. As they unconsciously
strived to locate themselves in social space, each individual
cultivated (mentally stored up) a personal stock of learned
predispositions in what that Bourdieu called his or her
‘habitus’. To successfully exploit this stored knowledge is to
display your cultural capital and therefore align yourself with
a very particular social grouping. Each individual lets his/her
habitus accumulate a stock of cultural capital that can then be
displayed to an advantage. The acquisition of taste is thus a
subtle game of one-upmanship that each of us (perhaps
unknowingly) plays with our closest neighbours in order to
climb, or at least keep our place in, the social system. Taste is
therefore a means we use to competitively classify ourselves
as social beings.

How useful is Bourdieu’s work in understanding fandom?

After its publication, the theory started to become an
orthodoxy in the social sciences and was examined by media,
film and music scholars. His ideas have a ring of common
sense about them, especially when one considers words like
‘hip’ and ‘cool’ or popular expressions like, ‘Keeping up with
the Jones’s’. There are also subtle intersections between
Bourdieu’s notion of taste and ideas about fandom. His work
also enables us to examine fandom’s relation to social status
and the social hierarchy, dimensions sometimes missing from
utopian accounts of the subject. It allows us to see how fans
play with social rules (Hills 2002a, 46). On one level, a
straight reading of this research might relate fannish
distinctions to slight differences in social status. This means
that fans can, in theory, reveal their class positions by
investing in particular cultural objects. An example might be

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the ‘underground indie’ trash cinema fans who despise
‘archivist’ trash cinema fans, when less discriminating
outsiders would place them both in the same category (see
Hills 2002a, 61). However, fans can struggle over issues that
Bourdieu could never have predicted.

John Fiske drew on Bourdieu’s work for his chapter in Lisa

Lewis’ 1992 book The Adoring Audience. He argued that fans
displayed cultural capital in their regular exchanges of
knowledge. Fiske adapted Bourdieu’s work by talking about
an unclassed ‘popular habitus’ that supported fandom. As part
of his project to show fans as an active audience, he used
Bourdieu’s conception of taste to suggest that unlike the
existing stereotypes suggested, fans were neither passive nor
culturally duped. When Simon Frith (1996, 19) suggested
that popular music fans were a highly discriminating
audience, he also found common ground with Bourdieu.
Perhaps Bourdieu’s ideas are therefore best used to examine
how fans take up their roles within the institutions of the fan
community (56).

There is no doubt that after steeping themselves in the

conventions of their genres, fans display levels of knowledge
and create bonds within their peer groups. They constantly
make distinctions that are lost on outsiders. Horror fan Mark
Kermode provided a good example of this:

For a horror fan, the recognition of these recycled elements is

a crucial part of the enjoyment and appreciation of the
movies. At its most basic, this is merely a rarified form of
‘getting the joke’, of feeling ‘in the know’, of understanding
that a knife is never just a knife. Produce a chainsaw
on-screen in a horror film, and the devoted fan will

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automatically click into a celluloid history dating back to
Tobe Hooper’s ground-breaking Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
and the marauding to the present day via the parodic excesses
of Motel Hell, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Bad Taste, The
Evil Dead and, of course, Texas 2, 3 and 4. To a genre fan, a
chainsaw is not a threatening weapon – it’s a magic talisman,
conjuring up a heritage of horror. (1997, 61)

Comments like Kermode’s help us to understand the way that

genre appreciation – here knowing the local meaning of genre
symbols – can be both a display of cultural capital and badge
of membership within a specific fan community. Another way
in which this works is through knowledge of cultural
producers who are not well known to mainstream audiences.
For instance, if you live outside Italy but know who Dario
Argento is then you are probably a fan of horror cinema.2 The
distinction between fans and ordinary audience members is
also signified when media fans sometimes adopt a language
of aesthetics to distance themselves from less knowledgeable
listeners. Bruce Springsteen, for example, has been read by
his fans through an aesthetic framework similar to that used
for high culture – emphasizing complexity, clarity, novelty
and seriousness – which helped his fans separate themselves
from ordinary music consumers (see Cavicchi 1998, 122).

There are, however, some fundamental problems with

applying Bourdieu’s ideas about cultural taste to fandom.
Matt Hills argued that Bourdieu’s theories have caught on
because they resonated with the concerns of cultural critics
(2002, 56). How useful is it to examine fandom as an indirect
cultural function of class distinctions? To adapt the French
sociologist’s work wholesale to fandom is to misread it in the
context of its time: ‘Strictly speaking, Bourdieu does not

223
attach the label of “fandom” to the dominant bourgeoisie;
there
is something always culturally “improper” about fandom in
his account’ (Hills 2002a, 48). To an extent I think Hills is
right here. One of the most crucial passages in Bourdieu’s
work was actually a footnote on popular music stardom that
has been ignored or forgotten by subsequent writers. When he
did his fieldwork, he noted:

Thus the [hit] song, as a cultural property which (like

photography) is almost universally accessible and genuinely
common (since hardly anyone is not exposed at one particular
moment or another to the ‘successes’ of the day) calls for
particular vigilance from those who intend to mark their
difference. (1984, 60)

To work efficiently, cultural texts therefore have to lend

themselves to distinctions that are esoteric and visible only to
a suitably select fraction of the players. In other words,
numerically popular mass culture – like, say, James Bond,
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), Harry Potter or ‘Hey Jude’ by
the Beatles – is enjoyed by all class fractions, so it cannot
lend itself to the game of taste and is exempt from the
process. Also, the media, society and popular culture have
changed significantly since Bourdieu conducted his field
work. Although people still make cultural distinctions, what
has changed significantly is the clarity of class as a
sociocultural grouping, and the type and predictability of
many of the formerly telling alignments between class
position and taste. Bourdieu’s work suggests that moral
evaluations stem from the cultural struggles between classes
(Hills 2002a, 49). This origin had to be transcended to
understand it in relation to fandom. In some ways cultural

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distinctions perhaps seem to be even more refined than before
and are less about class. The concept of taste as social
classification has therefore been subjected to considerable
criticism, as it appears rather monolithic and generalizing.
Some cultural objects are multivalent in terms of their cultural
caché: they have very different connotations for different
audiences. For example, in America, Doctor Who fandom
was ‘hip’ but only in certain social circles. On the one hand
the show represented an Anglophile pleasure from the exotic
United Kingdom (Nye 2010, 103). On the other, being a
Doctor Who fan was ‘social suicide’ in school for American
girls, because, unlike Star Wars, nobody had heard of the
show (McGuire 2010, 118). Fan cultural capital is often,
therefore, of limited value outside the fan community; it is
precisely because it cannot easily be converted into economic
or academic status that its ‘purity’ may matter (Hills 2002a,
52).3

Another problem is the extent to which application of

Bourdieu’s ideas presupposes that fans prioritize their
interests in a calculating and rational process. The theory
closes down alternative interpretations of fandom by
returning us to the figure of the logical and socially
competitive individual. Ultimately, Bourdieu-style readings
locate fandom as a compensation for social powerlessness.
Ideas about cultural capital paint fans in the making as
‘committed utilitarians, assessing the options that are open to
them before deciding’ yet becoming-a-fan stories show us
that fandom does not work like that: fans seem more
pleasantly overwhelmed than calculating (55). An interesting
example here comes from Bye Bye Baby, a memoire written
by the American author Caroline Sullivan, a rock fan who
eventually became a music journalist on the other side of the

225
Atlantic for one of Britain’s quality national newspapers, The
Guardian. As Sullivan explained:

Credibility was all about the music you liked, and our town
wasn’t like urban Newark or Jersey City, where kids listened
to trendy disco music. Millburn’s affluence took its toll in a
surprising way. Kids could afford to buy as much dope as
they could smoke, and with dope came the desire not to listen
to hip disco but to Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd and, pain me
though it does to recall, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. (1999, 9)

She added, ‘we were getting into Yes and Zep’ (10), but
another interest emerged to take over from her fascination
with the music of these ‘credible’ rock bands when, as part of
the audience for The Howard Cosell TV Show, she witnessed
a satellite link-up with young pop band The Bay City Rollers:

After they finished ‘Saturday Night,’ there was a stage

invasion that resulted in [lead singer] Leslie briefly being
knocked unconscious. This was after the satellite link-up had
ended so we didn’t see it, but I knew how those girls felt. I
wanted to invade that stage myself. The moment the show
ended my bud Sue rang. ‘My God,’ she breathed, ‘Eric’.
When she said that, I knew something weird was happening
to us. Sue, who was five voluptuous years older and even
more of a music fan than me, wasn’t a girl who fell in live
with teenybopper groups. We’d met six months before at a
Queen gig, and had taken to going to shows together, she
always with her camera in tow. (35)

Sullivan was highly aware that identifying as a fan with tartan

teenyboppers Bay City Rollers would seem tacky and was not
what anyone of her age and status should do. She explained,

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‘My entire Rollermaniac career was a struggle between
knowing they were no Led Zep and loving them anyway’
(20). It was as if her romantic attachment to the Rollers gave
her a fannish motivation that thoroughly trumped the game of
taste played among the older teens in her native Millburn.
While Caroline Sullivan ‘came out’ as a Rollers
fan, those who admire ‘inappropriate’ objects often struggle
to keep their identities hidden. Ultimately, Distinction can
help us understand the social licensing of particular fannish
objects. We can say that the game of taste occurs alongside
fan activities, delineating socially acceptable objects.

In her book on playlists, haircuts and record collections,

Sarah Thornton (1995) extended Bourdieu’s ideas about taste
to discuss the sociology of electronic dance music. She
described forms of club culture in which ‘subcultural capital’
was not correlated to class. For Thorton, the habitus
(cultivated stock of cultural distinctions) is not primarily
located in each individual’s head but exists instead in
fashionable niche media. Clubbers contrast their participation
to those who settle for a supposedly feminized and lower
class clubbing ‘mainstream’. Rejecting the chains of
provincial drinking parlours and mainstream clubs who play
‘handbag house,’ they perceive a hierarchy of different clubs
to visit and use access to relatively obscure social networks
and niche media to seek out the ones with an underground
reputation. Being ‘in the know’ therefore allows interested
clubbers to visit hip and underground places that have a
cultural caché recognized most widely within their own
subculture. In theory, therefore, if we update Bourdieu’s ideas
for contemporary society (and hold its social structure
relatively rigid), Distinction can help us explore the cultural
wavelength in which an individual fan might feel comfortable

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choosing their object. It can provide a working guess at the
causes of debates within and between fan communities. Yet it
cannot fully explain why each of us picks our own particular
cultural object or why we invest quite so much emotion in it.

Affect

What had she been waiting for so stubbornly all her life?
What had she expected? . . . ‘He is holy’. For the first time
ever she hears a man being described as ‘holy’ during his
lifetime. She herself would have described him as ‘unusual,’
as very unusual, for otherwise she would not have become
seriously ill from all those years of thinking about him. She
did not even think that it had anything to do with ‘love’.
Rather a deep, unhealable fright from her meeting with him,
which had been carefully prepared by the vision of ‘The Man
of Jasmine’.

UNICA ZURN (1994, 73)

The poet Utica Zurn’s vivid and creative surrealist story The
Man of Jasmine is about one woman’s journey to find a man
who has so intensely haunted her life. Zurn’s story
simultaneously reflects how Zurn is overwhelmed and
empowered, rendered frustratingly desperate by her
fascination with a mysterious face (who in real life was the
artist and photographer Hans Bellmer). The story was
subtitled ‘Impressions from a mental illness’ indicating that
Zurn’s particular interest was pathological: an infatuation and
obsession that was damaging to herself. Her ‘Man of Jasmine’
was a seductive projection based on everything that Zurn
could wish for. His aura affirmed her own worth and
creativity, and yet he was always a lost object, a step away

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from her grasp. While there are important differences between
ordinary fandom and Zurn’s narrative and while the
comparison is highly problematic in some respects – and the
last two decades of fan studies have aimed to escape from it –
there is also something about Zurn’s description that chimes
with some forms of fandom: the idea that iconic figures might
be ‘holy’ in their own lifetime, the unrequited fascination
with a stranger’s face, the projection of expectations on to
someone who is not there. The experience of emotion is
central or at least initiatory to many forms of fandom.
Theorizing involves a process of emotional estrangement that
is challenged, in some ways, when emotion and fandom are
the research objects. Most academic traditions aim to preserve
an aura of impartiality and emotional neutrality in the
research process. The metaphor of textuality tends to focus on
semiotic meaning rather than emotional experience. Matt
Hills has questioned a focus on meaning at the expense of
emotion and encouraged other researchers to focus on the
emotive rather than cognitive dimensions of fandom (see
Hills in Jenkins 2006, 5 and 139). Screen icons, pop stars,
boybands, comic book heroes are all too often Men of Jamine,
and socially celebrated as such. How can we discuss the
emotional aspect of fandom as a personal and shared activity,
without resorting to psychological models like the ideas of
hysteria or parasocial interaction? How, then, can we study
our emotionally charged connections?

Academics need a plausible language through which to talk

about emotion (Jenkins 2006, 26). One way of thinking about
it in cultural studies has been to use American scholar
Lawrence Grossberg’s idea of affect. Grossberg emerged as
one of the most important thinkers in cultural studies during
the 1990s. His career has followed a trajectory from writing

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about popular music and the evocation of collective emotion
to considering issues of cultural policy and civic governance
(see Grossberg 1992 and 2011). Furthermore, Grossberg’s
ideas built on a much older tradition. Early in the twentieth
century one of the key questions for Marxists was why
socialist revolutions had never actually happened in modern
societies. Antonio Gramsci formulated a concept called
hegemony to answer that question. Hegemony is the idea that
an alliances of elite groups maintain their status in a process
of cultural leadership in which ordinary people are given what
they want. My own work has applied this idea to the way that
the British Royal family used popular music to create a
national celebration (see Duffett 2004a). Royal spectacles like
the Diamond Jubilee Concert in June 2012 attempted to
attract a broad cross section of the public by offering a wide
range of musical performances. The Royals have therefore
traded off a little of their traditional privilege for endorsement
from ‘rock royalty’. It does not matter whether the Queen
actually likes popular music; what matters is that most of the
general public cannot say that they do not like it. Hegemonic
formations therefore use undisputed premises to further
political goals. In the wake Diana’s tragic death in 1997,
events like the Diamond Jubilee Concert have helped to
rescue and revamp the Royals.

Hegemonic incidents happen in history and they must be

placed in their temporal dimension. Grossberg’s particular
concern was how, as times changed in the shift from the
1960s to the 1980s, communitarian radicalism had lost its
bedrock of political support, and how its central emblem –
rock music – had shifted meaning to become a part of
right-wing hegemony. He was fascinated by the way that
music of one generation had been drained of all its meaning

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and edge, but still sounded the same and could then be used to
sell the opposite set of values. To explain why the social
meaning of cultural forms could shift so radically, Grossberg
began to consider the collective experience of emotion. To
discuss it he used the term ‘affect’. Affect, for Grossberg, is
not something inherent in the text itself (supposed meaning)
nor something that individuals invest in the text (emotions,
desires); instead it is ‘a socially constructed domain of
cultural effects’ that makes the text matter in a specific
historical situation and place, and makes it come alive, giving
it a resonant tone. In that sense, affect guides the whole
possibility of emotion and is meta-emotional. By structuring
collective ‘maps of mattering,’ affect organizes why things
matter (see Hills 2002a, 91). Yet it is a somewhat hazy idea.
Despite Grossberg’s carefully constructed definitions of the
differences between the two concepts, other researchers have
argued that he frequently equates affect and emotion. Many
writers have also tended to use ‘affect’ as a form of academic
shorthand for ‘emotion’ or ‘emotional resonance’ when in
fact it highlights the way that shifts in context can change how
much a cultural form matters and the strength of emotion that
the public feels about it. As Grossberg explained:

The very form of affective difference . . . [means] the subject

[here the fan] is constituted nomadically, by its movement
across different fields of affective difference. The affective
subject is always transitory, defined by its qualitative and
quantitative trajectories. . . . Affect defines, then, a condition
of possibility for any political intervention; it is however,
ideologically, economically and libidinally neutral except as it
is articulated into these systems under specific historical
conditions. (1997, 160–1)

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Here Grossberg emphasizes that when societies move through
contrasting eras (say, the 1960s to the 1980s), patterns of
collective feeling seem to shift so that some things matter and
others feel irrelevant as time goes by. Attention to affect
means examining the redrawing of the playing field within
which we experience a weight of feeling about what matters.
Grossberg’s idea of affect is interesting because it locates
emotional resonance as a kind of fluid essence that can be
attached to and detached from specific social and cultural
forms (here from socialism and counterculture). It advances
upon crude notions of social control by asking us to see
collective emotion as part of a process of political
engineering.

In recent years ‘affect’ has been widely adopted as a term

within academic studies of culture. Introducing their edited
collection on the subject, Seigworth and Gregg (2010) clarify
and explore the nation a little further. For them, affect is an
open-ended concept that refers to both potentials, spaces and
forces of encounter. It is both impersonal and intimate, a
force of encounter that impinges on us from the outside. In
this formulation affect is always in situ and always in process.
It is also unconscious, at some times seductive, and at others
impelling:

Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacity

to be acted upon. Affect is an impingement of extrusion of a
momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as
well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces
and intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that
pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body and
otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between
and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very

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passages or variations between these intensities and
resonances themselves. (1; emphasis in original)

Quite apart from the seemingly ever-expanding nature of both

the concept and its definition, what is interesting here is that
notions of affect rather wrestle with the idea of human
agency. Even used as a loose template that simply draws
attention to the way that human emotions are not individual
but emerge from a context of wider shifts, the idea is still
freighted with certain assumptions. At worst, it is in danger of
reproducing the questionable notion of contagion (‘intensities
that pass body to body’) without explaining how it happens.
Nevertheless, affect is still an interesting and flexible idea.

Why might it be useful to discuss the weight and direction of

emotion? If we take affect more loosely to mean emotional
intensity, it gives us another
dimension beyond semiotic meaning through which to
examine the role of popular culture in people’s lives.
‘Meaning’ is a head-led term, not a term for bodily sensations
or passions, yet its operation is intrinsically related to affect
(Jenkins 2006, 24). That is important because a 3D version of
meaning is greatly needed to grasp signs which have an
emotional weight as well as interpretational dimension (25).
We might therefore think of semiotics and affect as two
opposite potentials by which we can place or measure a text,
for instance, as ‘simple and emotionally arresting,’ or
‘complicated and boring’. Although the text’s meaning and
emotional pull can be envisaged along two dimensions, in
reality they work together. For example, a symbol – perhaps a
deep, primal, archetypal one, like a mother figure – has a
meaning and at the same time, for that reason, it strikes us as
having an emotional weight for us. The term ‘affective

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semiotics’ captures this inevitable union combining semiotic
interpretation and emotional charge. For Hills, however, good
academic work should be able to speak about fandom in a
way that everyone can immediately grasp; even the term
‘affective semiotics’ is itself therefore alienating (see Hills in
Jenkins 2006, 27).

Personal fandom originates in a process of emotional

investment. It starts with a frisson of excitement, even if that
then motivates some less immediately exciting practices like
critiquing or discussing texts. Fan loyalties and disputes
frequently and perhaps inevitably raise strong feelings.
Furthermore, fans tend to report feeling empowered by their
interests. They often describe their connection in terms of a
pleasant sense of shock, captivation or reinvigoration.
Performance generates feelings of connection and
exhilaration, a ‘high’ felt by both the performer and their fans
(Cavicchi 1998, 90). In some discussions, this boost becomes
a source of sustenance that helps people to get through
difficulties in their lives. The emotional dimension of most
forms of fandom is, nevertheless, hard to describe. Sue
Turnbull (2005) has talked about ‘ekphrasis’: the attempt to
recover in words the emotional effect that a performance has
on its viewers. When Springsteen stopped lingering over past
glories and played more recent songs, Cavicchi noted, ‘As a
result, I felt less relaxed nostalgia and more strong feelings of
empowerment and energy; the rapid transitions between
songs filled me up with electricity and sound and a strange
sensation that I could do or be anything I wanted’ (1998, 31).
Researching fans of David Bowie, Nick Stevenson found that
‘Apparently during periods of stress and emotional turmoil,
many of the male fans suggested that Bowie’s music had
helped them . . . Bowie is rediscovered at times of intense

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insecurity or emotional vulnerability’ (2009, 84 and 94).
There are many stories about personal fandom helping people
through episodes of illness, divorce or bereavement. These
stories suggest that rather than compensating for an essential
‘lack,’ fandom is a source of personal power
that people turn to at different points on their life journey. As
Stevenson explained, ‘During many of my interviews, it was
striking how a connection to Bowie acted as a relatively
permanent anchor through many men’s lives’ (85). Although
the emotional impact of fan attachments is hard to describe,
what can be said is that it has a powerful effect.

Another aspect of fan attachment is that it can restructure

notions of what is public and what is private. The sense of
connection that each fan feels for a famous actor, singer,
writer or musician can alter and restructure their spatial
experience. As the last chapter showed, traditional narratives
of celebrity describe fans as something akin to human swarms
physically intruding upon their icons. Stars are portrayed as in
danger of having to abandon their privacy – and sometimes
even their sense of self – in exchange for the social and
material benefits of being publicly celebrated by their fan
base. In reality, the private and the public are psychological
domains not so clearly bounded as by any physical spaces that
people inhabit. For example, writing on the nature of public
rituals Jack Santino has explained:

Many apparently public events are in fact private, and some

are personal, conducted in the company of only one other, or
even alone. Still, many of these kinds of solitary actions
might be understood to be performed for or in the company of
a ‘virtual’ or an assumed imaginary audience . . . whenever I
see a penny on the street I pick it up, because my deceased

235
mother used to do this. When I do it, there is a very real way
in which she is present, despite whatever else I may or may
not believe regarding death and the afterlife . . . there is an
imagined audience that not only witnesses but shares in the
ritualized activities. (2009, 11)

Santino’s discussion demonstrates that the received

distinction between public and private space is radically
challenged by ordinary experience. In that sense, fans who
connect with their heroes in different contexts can find
themselves inhabiting public and private spaces in a dualistic
or contradictory way. Introducing a piece on horror fanzines
by David Sanjek, his editors explain, ‘all fanzines are, in
essence, public expressions of private pleasures’ (see Sanjek
2008, 419). They also talk about ‘private fandoms for Erotic
thrillers’ (see Mathijs & Mendik 2008, 5). Television viewing
has further weakened the distinctions between the public and
private sphere (Harrington & Bielby 1995, 117). A surprising
number of rock fans find their passions by watching
recordings of live concert events. Their private viewing
experience is informed by indications of their band’s
popularity as they view its public performance in their living
room. Music fans actually present at the events talk about
‘being in the same room’ as their heroes, even if that room is
a large capacity arena. Locating moments of connection
between the star and fan as private can also make them feel
more personal and intimate. For Cavicchi a successful Bruce
Springsteen concert can change the valence of its location: ‘It
felt less like a concert and more like a private party’ (1998,
34). If music fans acknowledge that they are in a very public
space where the collective mass of the crowd very much
matters, then they can also act out a more personal, private,
emotional connection to the figure on stage as part of that

236
experience. Academics like Henry Jenkins have strategically
described fandom as a public, communal activity, but many
fans operate much more in private: Sue Wise exaplained
‘mostly my interest in Elvis took the form of a solitary hobby,
a private thing between “him” and “me”’ (1990, 393).
Sometimes this can reflect a sense of social ostracism. Laura
Vroomen, for instance, described how individuals can pursue
‘private fandom’ in order not to upset family members or
house mates who do not share their taste (2004, 246). The
point here is that fandom facilitates conceptions that combine
the private and public in ways that ultimately serve the
individual.

Whether experienced in public or private, the emotional

‘buzz’ that people get as fans is worthy of attention. In
instances where fandom is about celebrity-following, it can be
extended to say people get a buzz from the idea of meeting a
celebrity on an individual footing. Everybody to some extent
tends to follow a humanist epistemology of celebrity: we
know that behind the texts and images are ‘real’ people –
individuals with bodies, minds and hearts just like us – but
individuals who are both more popular and less private than
us. In a media culture everyone is surrounded by electronic
traces of these celebrities. Modern media forms – television
shows, Websites, films, recorded music – constantly offer us
a wealth of sounds and images as promissory notes, evoking
the idea of intimacy with them. One thing that attracted some
American fans to Doctor Who, for instance, was that the
actors who made it visited fan conventions and were more
accessible than Hollywood glitterati (Nye 2010, 109). The
question for scholars researching affect and fandom is,
therefore, why does the idea of immersing oneself in a
particular narrative or getting closer to a favoured celebrity

237
give rise to such strong feelings? A first step in answering
that question is to realize that while feelings originate in the
body (Ahmed 2004, 5), and many therefore claim they are
natural, their meaning comes from the ways that we
inadvertently generate, understand and frame our
experiences. A good analogy for this is to consider the idea
that two people go on a rollercoaster ride, one knowing that
he/she will love it and the other dreading it. Although each
one’s body has the same physiological experience, they
interpret it differently in relation to what their minds
anticipate, feeling excitement and anxiety respectively. In that
sense, unspoken and shared assumptions can determine
individual beliefs
which then prompt the emergence of emotions. Fandom is not
entirely a personal emotional activity. It is, in fact, a common
experience based on the fulfilment of shared unspoken
assumptions, translated by the individual into their own
sensations, then later manifest in communal experiences.

Religiosity

This sculpture is a disgrace. Instead of honoring Michael

Jackson for his many contributions to the music industry, you
chose to ridicule him in this manner. For your information,
MJ was not dangling his baby, but showing the baby to his
fans who asked to see the baby. I urge you to remove this
sculpture and replace it with one that honors Michael
Jackson’s amazing talents and humanitarian
accomplishments.

DANIELA HAIRABEDIAN, a Michael Jackson fan4

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In November 2002, Michael Jackson visited Berlin to pick up
Germany’s most coveted entertainment award, the
Millennium Bambi. A large crowd of fans gathered to
welcome the superstar at the Adlon hotel. Appearing on a
fifth-floor balcony, Michael greeted the appreciative throng
by showing off his young children. He partially covered
Prince and Paris with blankets to protect their privacy. In the
excitement, Jackson accidentally dangled nine-month-old
Prince Michael II over the railing and cradled him with one
arm only. Some of the onlookers were shocked and the
incident prompted a media frenzy. The story was reported by
The Sun in Britain with the headline ‘You Lunatic’ while The
Daily Mirror settled for ‘Mad Bad Dad’ and its editor urged
for Jackson’s arrest. Berlin authorities launched a preliminary
probe to determine if his actions constituted the endangering
or neglect of his children, but then decided not to open an
investigation. Critical of the lack of prosecution, German
welfare advocates of the Child Protection Association said
that Jackson was shielded from the law because of his fame.
Soon he issued a statement via his lawyer in which he called
the incident a ‘terrible mistake . . . I got caught up in the
excitement of the moment. I would never intentionally
endanger the lives of my children’. There is no evidence to
contradict Jackson’s interpretation and in retrospect it is easy
to see how his actions were framed by antagonistic media
perceptions that dismissed him as an eccentric, perhaps
insane, unfit parent.

Especially when stars have long running careers, their

reputations are fluctuating concerns. Michael Jackson’s death
in the summer of 2009 catalysed a widespread resurgence in
appreciation for his musical contribution and in part eclipsed

239
his ‘Wacko Jacko’ image. In April 2011, his fans were
dismayed,
then, to see that the Los Angeles-based artist Maria von
Kohler recreate the baby dangling incident as a clay sculpture
on the first storey of Premises Studios in Hackney Road, East
London. The statue, which von Kohler called Madonna and
Child, predictably raised the ire of Jackon’s following. A
barrage of angry messages were posted on the company’s
Website, with one fan even threatening to set the studio on
fire. Its chief executive, Viv Broughton, replied in The Daily
Mail:

How can a work of art that’s faithful to a real event be

construed as an attack on anyone? Madonna and Child is as
much about extreme fan worship as it is about Michael
Jackson. Lots of people have come here to view it. Most
people think it’s brilliant.

What was the artist trying to do? A gallery description of

themes in her work explained:

A consistent interest in the portrayal of heroic or propagandist

figures, acts and symbols in their countless forms often
provides a starting point for von Köhler’s work. It references
historical, religious and political propaganda and iconography
in art, toys, junk shop trinkets, the media and public spaces
. . . The underlying feeling permeating the work is a sense of
living up to a seedy, desperately coveted yet sinisterly
unattainable, non-existent ideology.5

As an example of fan-baiting, Kohler’s Madonna and Child

did its job in creating controversy by manipulating the fans
and the media. The sculpture’s aim, evidently, was to equate

240
fandom to fundamentalism and it did so by exposing fandom
as a moralistic structure of feeling. The implicit claim that it
made was that fans are characterized by their bias: their
loyalty to the star, their selective perception of his or her
public image, and arguably their blindness in relation to
Jackson’s less appealing moments. A much-followed
performer is, to many fans, like a friend or family member:
someone that they feel they know, love and try to protect. The
Michael Jackson fans and Kohler became locked into a
predictable contest over how Jackson should be seen, which
was itself a moral question. Henry Jenkins has described how
fans share values and collectively lever what he calls a ‘moral
economy’ (2006, 55). If communal fandom so frequently
involves voicing a shared morality, would it be fair to say, as
Kohler implied, that it is a religion?

Many academics have directly compared fandom to religion.

David Giles (2000), for instance, likened fan texts to religious
scriptures of the Middle Ages. Similarly, reporting on John
Frow’s work, Nick Stevenson showed how
Frow inferred a metaphysical basis for celebrity culture:
‘Basically, Frow argues that by identifying with a star we
attempt to defeat death. By connecting with a
more-than-human being, we seek to move beyond ordinary
human temporality into the mythic and sacred’ (2009, 89).
Notions of fandom as a search for the sacred are common
currency (see, for example, Neumman 2006). Yet even if the
fans use a spiritual vocabulary, there are also strong reasons
for questioning the idea that fandom is simply a surrogate for
religion. One of the most obvious is that the idea is, at worst,
somewhat derogatory to both fans and religious worshippers.
In popular culture, the notion that fandom resembles religion
is an ongoing joke that acts to normalize mainstream

241
audiences by locating fans as misguided, irrational and servile
zealots, people who believe in their heroes against all the
evidence and at any cost. Matt Hills (in Jenkins 2006, 17)
suggests that religious analogies contain a kernel conception
of ‘false worship’ that limits them. The central problem of
applying notions of religious conviction to fandom – even
sympathetically – is therefore that the comparison maintains a
derogatory perception of the phenomenon.

One of the reasons not to entirely dismiss the idea that

fandom is like religion is that the Judaeo-Christian roots of
Western society have subtly saturated it with a legacy of
archetypes and ideas. As Chris Rojek has put it: ‘Celebrity
culture is secular. Because the roots of secular society lie in
Christianity, many of the symbols of success and failure in
celebrity draw on myths and rites of religious ascent and
decent’ (2007, 175). Another reason is that enthusiastic
fan-academics, even self-declared ‘insiders’ like Rupert Till
and Daniel Cavicchi, maintain the comparison. Matt Hills, for
example, has claimed:

Fandom both is and is not like religion, existing between

‘cult’ and ‘culture’. ‘Cult’ discourses are thus not entirely
hollow and empty . . . Undoubtedly one of the major
problems with linking fan cultures to either religion or
religiosity – and this is a problem for both fans and
academics – lies in identifying what is actually meant by
‘religion’ in the first place. (2002a, 118)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘religion’ is a

system of faith and worship; a human recognition of
superhuman power, and, especially of a God figure who is
entitled to obedience. Rupert Till has reduced the prominence

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of worship in this definition by saying that a religion is a
genuinely-held belief, not an opinion or view based on
provisional knowledge (2010, xi). The predictable,
spectacular, public displays of collective exuberance around
stars mean that casual comparisons between fan phenomena
and religion are widely circulated. Many media performers
exploit the analogy,
particularly in popular music, where – as the famous ‘Clapton
is God’ graffiti found in a London station in 1967
demonstrated – the ‘rock god’ epithet is longstanding. Some
acts have directly evoked the comparison in their stage
shows. Michael Jackson did so in 1996, when he performed
‘Earth Song’ at the Brit Awards in England and pulled a
crucifixion pose on stage. Cliff Richard has made allusions to
the promise of redemption in his lyrics and videos, not just
through lighting, elevation, gesture and posture, but also by
adopting themes such as asexuality and benevolence to the
poor (see Löbert 2008, 77). Springsteen has sometimes played
the role of an evangelical preacher in his shows (Cavicchi
1998, 30). Artists from Jim Morrison to Jon Bon Jovi have
struck crucifiction poses on stage, arms outstretched as if
encompassing or saying they belonged to their audience. Still
other performers have knowingly parodied the idea that the
public worships them. Beyond these popular comparisons,
fans themselves sometimes use spiritual figures of speech and
a religious vocabulary. Though sensitive to its sensationalist
connotations, both performers and their audiences borrow the
language of religious conversion to talk about their
experiences. Star Trek fans sing about being ‘born again’ and
their duty to see that everyone is ‘saved’ (Jenkins 1992, 250).
As Cavicchi explains, ‘fans often talk about introducing
someone to Springsteen’s music as “converting” them . . .
Often fans use the idea of conversion in a specifically

243
religious sense, logically seeing the act of introducing
someone to Springsteen’s music as a kind of proselytizing’
(1998, 42). In other words, religious figures of speech are a
way to talk about the personal experience of having so rapidly
transferred allegiances.

Discussing fans’ use of spiritual language, Matt Hills said in

one interview that fans used religious metaphors in their
becoming-a-fan stories, but Jenkins noted that political
conversion narratives also use the ‘conversion’ metaphor.
Hills countered that fans do not use party political language
(see Jenkins 2006, 22). It seems that spiritual metaphors are
more useful as they capture the emotional transcendence of
fan experience. Fans often refer to a live rock show as a
religious or spiritual experience. They report being filled with
the spirit, or feeling a sense of closeness to their star.
According to Daniel Cavicchi, ‘Fans even talk about the
importance of the larger audience in terms of their own
fandom, and the power of being part of the audience is a
common theme in accounts of concerts’ (1998, 88).6
Communitas is an idea proposed by anthropologist Victor
Turner which suggests that individuals at live mass public
events can feel blissfully united and are thrilled to realize that
they at one with the assembled community. For Cavicchi,
however, fandom is not primarily about communitas: ‘While
social, celebratory abandon with
others is important in fans’ encounters with the music, it is
always secondary, whereas individual, critical appreciation is
primary’ (1998, 122).

Why do fans, then, use religious terminology? Religious

discourses highlight instances of shared faith that do not
require external real world ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ to come into

244
play. Fans use religious language in quotes or to describe
specific moments, but commentators forget that such fans are
speaking the same language in a very different way to others
outside their community. Hills suggests that religion provides
a shared vocabulary that sanitizes (makes sane) fans’ common
experiences (see Jenkins 2006, 20–1). The vocabulary can
then allow them to avoid the question, ‘Why are you a fan of
this particular object?’ Instead they can celebrate their
conviction without having to justify their attachment or
explain why rational comprehension seems irrelevant (Hills
2002a, 122). This raises the issue that religious language
could be no more than a convenience: a way to speak about
experiences that are hard to directly express in words.

Some researchers have sincerely pursued the comparison

between fandom and religiosity. Music fan specialist Daniel
Cavicchi has produced one of the most sympathetic and
discriminating insider discussions of fandom and religion so
far. According to Cavicchi, ‘while religion and fandom are
arguably different realms of meaning, they are both centred
around acts of devotion, which create many similarities of
experience’ (1998, 51). Fandom is more than metaphorically
connected to religion because, for Cavicchi, it contains
several structural parallels: the development of a close
attachment to an unobtainable other, a kind of moral
orientation, a daily life devoted to interpretation and a
community based on a shared if vague assumption of
devotion (186). However such parallels ‘do not mean that
fandom is religion; rather they point to the fact that fandom
and religion are addressing similar concerns and engaging
people in similar ways’ (187). According to Cavicchi, then,
fandom and religion are similar experiences that have

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different meanings (51). He makes the closest connection
when discussing narratives of fan initiation:

On the whole, fans use the idea of conversion only as a

metaphor to signify the degree of dedication and commitment
Springsteen usually inspires. However, a closer look at fans’
accounts of their experiences shows that the concept of
conversion serves as more than simply a metaphorical
description of fans’ degree of feeling; it actually describes in
detail the process of becoming a fan. In particular, the
descriptions of transformations found in narratives of
becoming a fan are remarkably similar to those found in the
conversion narratives of evangelical Christians in the modern
United States. (43)

While Cavicchi’s comparison is carefully considered and

sympathetic, part of the issue here is that a comparative
metaphor can never be factual. Indeed, there is only a limited
empirical fit between fandom and religion as there are
probably more differences than similarities (Jenkins 2006,
20). As Cornel Sandvoss has stated, there is a significant
difference between references to religion in fandom and the
idea that fandom is a religion (2005a, 62).

Any solid analysis must face three crucial problems that

directly challenge the idea that fandom is a substitute for
religion. These are, first, that it has no central theology,
second that fans can ‘worship’ more than one ‘deity’ at a
time, and third, that the idea rests on a questionable
conception of human need. Taking each in turn, the first thing
to notice is that fandom ‘lacks an absolute, other-worldly
framework’ that would make it resemble religion (Sandvoss
2005a, 63). While any fan may report mysterious emotions

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and experiences, he/she is not connected to sacred texts that
explicitly offer promises of salvation in an after-life. Also,
unlike monotheistic believers, fans can pursue several
dominant and lesser interests at the same time. Erika Doss’
1999 study Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith & Image illustrated
how fan researchers can encounter problems if they do not
aim to inductively understand fandom. Doss started her
analysis in rational comparative mode by asking:

Why Elvis? Why has Elvis Presley been sanctified as the

central figure in what some are calling a quasi-religion? Why
not some other popular culture matryr who died young like
John Lennon, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, or,
more recently, Kurt Cobain or Selena? Why is Elvis – more
so than Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and JFK –
consistently held up as ‘icon of the twentieth century’? (1999,
2)

Beyond the difficulty of calling fandom a ‘quasi-religion’

what Doss misses here is that fans are not arriving at their
attachments by making comparisons between either Elvis or
Buddy (they can like both); or Elvis rather than Jesus or
Martin Luther King. My own PhD research with 150 Elvis
fans suggested that only a fraction of them listened
exclusively to Elvis (Duffett 1998, 222). If they have a picture
of him, it suggests that they have developed an interest, but it
does not necessarily imply a decision to ignore Buddy Holly,
Malcolm X or anyone else. A fan’s passion for Elvis may
actually inspire him/her to learn about such people. In another
example from the world of a sci-fi, we can see that
individuals can embrace multiple fandoms. It is the
relationship between different personal fandoms that is
intriguing here:

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Many fans accepted Doctor Who as their secondary fandom,
coming to it from Battlestar Galactica (the original series
with Lorne Greene, that is),
Star Wars or Star Trek, but a few of us had Doctor Who as
our primary or sole favourite . . . I liked Star Wars and Star
Trek and many of the others, but I loved Doctor Who. (Nye
2010, 108)

Much like this non-exclusive fandom, furthermore, people

often follow their fannish interest and practice their chosen
religion at the same time, without any necessary conflict.
Fundamentally, the notion that human beings have, at root, a
universal need that can be served by either religion or fandom
is very much open to question. Insofar that they imply fans
need God but find Michael Jackson or Star Trek instead, the
frequent comparisons between fandom and religion resemble
a widely-challenged 1970s media research paradigm: uses
and gratifications. In other words, the religion or religiosity
idea essentializes religion as a universal and ahistorical
human need when it might be more insightful to reverse the
equation and see it as a product of social discourses. What we
never see from advocates of the argument – and this is
indicative of their stance – is the logical counterpart to their
theories: the application of ideas from fan research to
religious worship. Fans are (mis)taken as worshippers, but
devoted Christians and others are never analysed as ‘fans of
God’. Even the phrase sounds sacrilegious.

Grappling towards a compromise, some writers have

attempted to square the circle and explain how fandom is like
but is also not like religious activity. For Aden (1999),
fandom is not a substitute religion, but it does contain a
place-bound conception of a better society in the shape of a

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‘promised land’ (also see Sandvoss 2005a, 63). While there
may be some credence in the idea that the media can offer
interested viewers certain kinds of utopian fantasy moments
based on constantly deferred intimations of equality and
intimacy with stars, the question here is whether God should
form part of an explanation. Some more recent writers have
updated their terms of reference, by moving beyond religion.
In the 1990s, the idea of religiosity emerged in academic
circles to describe the place of religious practice in a changing
society. Writers increasingly contested the notion that modern
life was experienced as a purely secular and rational activity
which squeezed out any personal need to explore faith.
Instead they argued that ordinary people remained enchanted
by spirituality in daily life and practiced their faith in less
formal but more diverse ways. Bowie researcher Nick
Stevenson noted that recent consumers have rather a casual
‘pick and mix’ relationship to religion (2009, 89). Matt Hills
(2002a, 117–19) and others have therefore begun to explore
the idea that fan researchers should think in terms of
neo-religiosity rather than religion. This may be an attempt,
however, to stretch an idea that does not quite hold up.

For better or worse, metaphors allow us to talk about things

that we can only just see. In the rest of this section, using a
case study approach, I will
explore why researchers have pursued the religious
comparison and how we might salvage one element of the
sociology of religion without creating an explanation that
lends itself to lambasting dedicated fans. What is interesting
about the religiosity explanation is that it so frequently gets
applied to fandoms that are considered lower on the cultural
hierarchy: populist, low brow, lower-middle-class or
working-class. It is rarely suggested that fans of Bob Dylan,

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for example, have substituted fandom for religion, even
though they may be every bit as dedicated as Elvis fans. In an
examination of the widespread application of the religiosity
idea specifically to Elvis, in 2003 I demonstrated that what
began as a joke about the perceived tastelessness of certain
forms of fandom soon became an academic concept
describing the perceived religious zeal of real fans who never,
as such, claimed the label for themselves (see Duffett 2003).
The religiosity comparison therefore shows the subtle but
significant power that academics can wield, especially when
they create theories based on metaphors that purport to
explain the intentionality of other people. Comparisons are
always interpretive devices rather that empirical facts. A
strategic approach in this context would be to sidestep issues
of the accuracy or actuality of each comparison and instead
examine theorists’ motivations. ‘Religious’ representations of
stars like Michael Jackson and Elvis by middle-class cultural
commentators – and their academic equivalents – imply a
shared concern about the emotional overload of star
performances and the public’s ecstatic response. Moreover,
they tend to coincide with moments where the reputations of
such icons are becoming more legitimate and established,
posthumously welcomed by mainstream society. For
example, around the time Graceland first opened to the
public, Albert Goldman’s infamous ‘hatchet job’ biography
(perhaps that should read hatchet job ‘biography’) Elvis
subjected its charge to a full character assassination and
unleashed a grotesque parody of Presley into the mainstream
media. By the mid-1990s, Elvis was in the news again
because members of the babyboom generation were pushing
to make one of their most-loved performers part of America’s
cultural furniture.7 As Greil Marcus said, ‘He had put his
stamp on the nation, just as the nation was now putting his

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stamp on its mail’ (2000, 175). For a man who had been dead
for well over a decade, Elvis’s prospects were looking good.
In the wake of this process of rehabilitation, however,
scholars increasingly began to create religious interpretations
of Elvis fandom.

In 1994, Simon Frith reported that ‘the academy never had

much interest in Elvis Presley’ (275). He went on to explain
that Elvis had been dismissed by critics of popular culture and
virtually ignored by musicologists, sociologists and writers
from cultural studies. However, within five years Gilbert
Rodman’s Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a
Living Legend (1996) was joined by Vernon Chadwick’s
conference reader In Search of Elvis: Music, Art, Race,
Religion (1997), and Erika Doss’s 1999 volume. Theologians,
sociologists and folklore scholars were now among those who
increasingly pondered whether Elvis fandom was religious
practice. In other words a sea change took place as the decade
moved forward. In the years after Simon Frith’s declaration,
folk anthropology, cultural studies, popular music studies and
the fine arts joined forces in a sustained effort to explore and
explain Elvis as a religious icon. When labelled by academics
and not by fans themselves, theoretical fan ‘religions’ are
cultural constructions that reflect the anxieties of social
groupings that constitute themselves through academia.
Instead of making an objective, neutral comparison, Doss
used the notion of religion because it supported her concern
as a representative of bourgeois culture: ‘I am a middle-class,
highly educated and highly opinionated college professor.
Perhaps more important, I’m not an Elvis fan – which I
explained in conversations with fans when they asked me
who I was and what I was doing’ (1999, 26). Having access to
the means of representation placed such researchers in a

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position of authority and enabled them, by continually
making the comparison, to sustain the idea of religiosity.
They could then interpret Elvis fandom as a ‘cult’ to fill their
own sociocultural agenda.

The religiosity notion became so pervasive that it operated as

an assumption and a structuring device, presiding over
academic interpretations of what fans actually had to say.
Once the metaphor was accepted, others were effectively
forced to speak through it, either in a confessional or resistant
mode. When it became more entrenched, the comparison then
operated as a guiding assumption in research. Fans who
denied the religious quality of their experiences were
interpreted, in the eyes of their own disbelievers, as either
lacking or lying. Writers like Ted Harrison discounted what
they said. Harrison looked for reasons why they seemed to
cover up. After asking whether fans prayed to Elvis, Harrison
said, ‘some will admit it, others not’ (1992, 67). Later he
added:

So it is that many Elvis fans will hotly deny any religious

suggestion that they have turned their hero into a cult
religious figure. In addition to the possible Protestant
reservations, they sense that for it to be perceived that they
have ‘deified’ a pop star will attract unwelcome ridicule. Fans
are very sensitive about the way people laugh about the very
idea of devotion to a rock and roll singer. Yet from time to
time a fan will ‘come out’. (75)

Though Harrison is a popular writer, academics reached

similar conclusions by similar logic. Erika Doss asked, ‘What
does it mean when adherents deny the religiosity of
something that looks so much like a religion?’ (1999, 73) It

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meant they could be presented as inflexible and blind to their
own predicament, or
hypocritical and shamefaced. The idea that fans’ interview
statements provided an honest and straightforward record
could not be entertained because they were supposed to be too
obsessed or ashamed to give a realistic picture of their own
experience. In effect the religious metaphor could then be
used to challenge the social practices of fans (Jenkins 2006,
19). It encouraged them to reign in their displays of emotional
conviction for fear that middle-class circles would reject them
as lacking in taste. It also silenced their views in the face of
estranged ‘experts’ who contended otherwise.

If the religious analogy has been used to attack fandom, is

there anything from the sociological theory of religion that
sympathetically and selectively might be worth salvaging?
Suprisingly, perhaps, I am going to suggest an affirmative
answer. In his classic 1912 book Elementary Forms of
Religious Life, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim
studied the social ecology of Australian clans engaged in
totemic religion. These societies were based, according to
Durkheim, on a fundamental division between the secular and
the sacred. Totems are material objects (sometimes people)
that embody the contagious essence of the sacred. Each totem
functions to mediate the emotional force of the social
collective. As part of this, Durkheim explains that the totem
feels energized as a focus of the spectacle who recognizes his
or her connection to the whole of the congregation:

This unusual surplus of forces is quite real: it comes to him

from the very group he is addressing. The feelings provoked
by his speech return to him inflated and amplified, reinforcing
his own. The passionate energies he arouses echo back to him

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and increase his vitality. He is no longer a simple individual
speaking, he is a group incarnate and personified. (2008, 158)

Clan members who gather to worship a totem therefore

unknowingly help to channel collective energy gained from
the group through the totem, who then gives back to the
individual worshipper. In a key moment that Durkheim calls
‘effervescence’, each emotionally heightened crowd member
experiences a life-changing jolt of electricity as they
subconsciously recognize a personal connection to the totem.
The energy in turn boosts the individual’s strength and
confidence. In this way he/she is connected to the social body
on a primal and mysterious level.

Academics such as Chris Rojek (2001, 56) have applied

Durkheim’s ideas to celebrity. However, elsewhere I have
cautioned against both the casual comparison of fandom and
religion and any wholesale application of Durkheim’s ideas in
popular music studies (see Duffett 2011a). The French
sociologist’s work rests on a distinction between the sacred
and the profane that seems inappropriate when applied to
commercial music or other forms of popular
culture. It also defines religion through a metaphysical
conception of afterlife that seems irrelevant. Nevertheless,
more attention to one mechanism from Durkheim’s
framework may be useful: in effect, celebrities are like
totems. As Pramod Nayar (2009, 4) explains, ‘A celebrity is
an individual or event that the public watches’. We also know
that people get a thrill from meeting their idols. For
Durkheim, ‘religion is above all a system of notions by which
individuals imagine the society to which they belong and their
obscure yet intimate relations with that society’ (2008, 170).
To elaborate, the crucial aspects of this are twofold. First,

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social electricity only exists insofar that individuals feel it.
The process of rousing such excitement is based on shared
assumptions, perceptions and experiences. Although nothing
literally leaps between people, those involved feel an intense
and undeniable human chemistry. Second, the mechanism of
effervescence is essentially productive. By shaping believers’
commitment to the group, loyalty and morality, it helps to
generate a part of their identity. The energizing loop of
human interaction, in which engaged participants feel thrilled
by gestures of attention from a more socially valued person
(the focus of attention), is therefore highly productive. I
mention ‘engaged participants’ here precisely because not all
audience members feel a strong positive link to the performer.

To adopt Durkheim’s ideas is not to reduce people to

proverbial cultural dupes, but instead to account for the
intensity of feeling experienced by a convinced fraction of the
audience.8 As Kerry Ferris puts it, ‘One person’s exciting
encounter may be another person’s routine “celebrity
sighting”, which may be yet another person’s uneventful trip
to the supermarket’ (2001, 46). By routinely aligning
performers and audiences, the media – and most obviously
the live music industry – brings the individual and collective
together in a way that I have previously described as a
‘symbolic economy’ (see Duffett 2009). To further focus on
the affective dimension of performance using Durkheim, we
can follow the process across three stages (though in practice
they happen together): in the first, the crowd has power in its
collectivity; in the second, the performer has a foundational
sense of well-being from the support of their audience; in the
third, each individual fan feels a thrill from the performer’s
attention.

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To deal with the first two phases, I wish to build on the work
of Steve Waksman (2007), who analysed the emergence of
arena rock in the United States during the early 1970s.
According to Waksman, the mass popularity of recorded
music had long given artists their relative status. However,
events such as the Beatles 1965 show at the Shea Stadium and
the countercultural festivals of the 1960s directly equated the
size of the live crowd with a sense of collective power and
freedom. Waksman looked at how the hard rock band Grand
Funk Railroad pioneered the practice of arena rock touring by
co-opting
a certain language that celebrated the sheer size of their fan
base. The group’s manager Terry Knight said, ‘Anybody that
can draw 55,000 people together at one time has got some
kind of power’ (Waksman 2007, 161). Whatever the historic
development of the arena rock idea, the assumptions that
undergird Knight’s statement are more than hollow rhetoric.
Contemporary music audiences tend to share them. Music is
widely seen as creating a sense of community. As Simon
Frith suggests, ‘Live music performance . . . is a public
celebration of musical commitment, a deeply pleasurable
event at which our understanding of ourselves through music
is socially recognized’ (2007, 14). In our society, popular
music therefore tends to come freighted with a pleasurable
inequality of popularity between the performer and individual
listener.

We are taught to understand that musical performance always

implies an audience: either a set of spectators for a mediated
product or a face to face crowd.9 We are also taught to
understand that a musician’s success depends on the
audience’s approval. Successful musical performance is a
means of mutual social empowerment. Charismatic

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performers are credited with actively bringing the audience
together. Describing punk rock veteran Iggy Pop, one
journalist in the NME recently explained, ‘In transforming
rock’n’roll concerts from mere spectacle into a profound
manacle-smashing collective experience, he truly is the
ultimate frontman’ (McKay et al. 2011, 13). Indeed, because
popular music is understood through romantic tenets that
invest it with an air of intimacy in public (as that is where
singers express personal emotions), it may be an especially
good vehicle to consolidate and augment what Robert
Cialdini (2001) has called ‘social proof’. Confident
performers know that they have been chosen to embody the
focus of the event and enjoy the power of that position. Tom
Jones expressed his experience of singing on stage by saying,
‘It’s a high that you just don’t get from anything else. When
you’re on there, and the band and the people, and it’s like –
wow! – you’ve gone into another place’.10 Here the important
point is not just that Jones is describing a thrill; it is that his
fans are feeling it too. Similarly, reporting on David Bowie
fans, Nick Stevenson noted that ‘during periods of stress and
emotional turmoil, many of the male fans suggested that
Bowie’s music had helped them’ (2009, 84). If such
responses were previously understood as results of sonic
enchantment or psychological lack, attention to Durkheim’s
schema suggests that music – or film acting for that matter –
can operate as a vehicle for stars to touch fans by
demonstrating both personal charm and mass popularity.

In response to the thrills they get, fans sometimes write back,

opening up the communication from their end. As one,
reproduced in Fred Vermorel’s book Starlust, wrote, ‘Here I
am, a little speck on Earth, sitting alone imagining that I

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could actually be communicating with David Bowie’ (1985/
2011, 157).
This strangely familiar correspondence verifies Durkheim’s
theory by locating a fannish thrill in momentarily
surmounting the power relationship between an ordinary
person and a performer of Bowie’s social value. Professor
Daniel Hertitz added to the discussion here by saying that ‘no
star aura is found within the aesthetics of the medium itself’
(2008, 65). It comes, instead, from our collective embrace of
the performer. Through the repetition of that process of
embrace the imagined world of deserved celebrity acquires a
kind of distant glamour. As Nick Couldry has explained:

It is ‘common sense’ that the ‘media world’ is somehow

better, more intense, than ‘ordinary life’, and that ‘media
people’ are somehow special. This is not based either on fact
or on a cultural universal, but rather is a form of
unconsciousness ultimately derived from a particular
concentration of symbolic power. The media sphere itself is
not different in kind from the world in which viewers live; it
is a part of the same world dedicated to mediating it. Yet,
through the naturalized hierarchy between constructed terms
‘media world’ and ‘ordinary world’, this division of the social
world is generally reproduced as legitimate. (2007a, 353)

There is a danger here in thinking that stars simply emerge

from a privileged ‘media world’ when instead that realm
simply represents an accumulation of stellar personalities; it is
the sum total of the performers deemed worthy of creating
and fronting popular media products. Although electronic
mediation can guarantee an audience that is both ‘real’ (a
statistical collective) and imagined by us (an ‘imagined
community’ that is the sum of the other private viewers or

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listeners), it is the approval of this audience which allows
each performer to become successful in a Durkheimian sense.
Finally, if such a performer convinces each of us (as
individuals), we only need to be reminded of his or her
popularity to feel thrilled by (the idea of) a personal
connection.

Becoming a fan: A mysterious process

Very few studies address the origins of an individual’s

fandom; for many scholars ‘fan’ is a kind of consumer
category into which someone simply falls or does not fall . . .
In such studies, there is no ‘becoming a fan’; rather ‘being a
fan’ simply appears as a mode of audience participation, part
of a larger historical context of industrialization or the rise of
mass entertainment.

DANIEL CAVICCHI (1998, 41)

For someone to be a fan, at some point they have had to

become one. Very few academics have studied this particular
phenomenon, but not due to a lack of material. Fans tend to
periodize their lives around autobiographic turning points
when ‘everything changed’ and they became interested. Their
initiation frequently becomes an important personal memory,
recalled and discussed with others. Autobiographical
first-person ‘becoming a fan’ stories are usually the first
things that fans talk about when they get to know others,
whether in person or online. Such stories allow each
individual to locate his or her fandom as a shift in personal
history. They enable people to mutually position their
identities by comparing and contrasting their particular
histories. Becoming a fan is marked by changes in both an

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individual’s subjective, inner self and social role. Personal
narratives seamlessly join those two aspects together.

Any attempt to understand the reasons for each individual’s

emergence as a fan, and the exact way in which it happened,
present a minefield of research problems for interested
scholars. Nobody first consciously plans to become a fan. It is
not something achieved by rational design. Individuals are
rarely conscious of the process until after it has happened. In
other words, becoming a fan is rather like driving past a
roadside spectacle on your biographic highway: your
perspective changes radically during and after seeing it, and
you might report the experience differently at various points
along the journey. This means that we have to treat
‘becoming a fan’ narratives very carefully as documents of
experience. Furthermore, while certain performances or
events have prompted large numbers of individuals to become
fans, the process cannot be predicted, pre-arranged or
stage-managed on an individual basis. In different cultures,
for different objects, emergent fandom also happens in very
different ways. Traditional ideas claim that mass culture is
immediately accessible to all comers and therefore different
to high culture since no need for a process of cultivation or
apprenticeship is required. Depending on the object of
interest, though, a degree of immediate social mentoring
sometimes happens before or after the key moment. Media
genres such as soap operas actually require sustained attention
to understand nuances of character and plot. Existing fans can
act as mentors and initiators, providing an education that
reduces the time needed to realize why episodes matter. As
Harrington and Bielby explain, becoming-a-fan stories that
involve a gradual journey of personal shifts are sometimes
tied to relationships with others:

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Most [soap] watchers depend on more experienced viewers to
help them make sense of the unfolding narratives, and people
must be patient enough to overcome their initial confusion
before they can become regular soap watchers . . . Most
people can clearly remember who introduced them to soap
operas and how old they were when they first started
watching them . . . Most of our respondents first began
watching soaps in a supportive environment, surrounded by
others with similar interests. (1995, 87–8 and 89)

Individuals who become fans do not exactly transform their

identities, because they never actually leave any aspect of
their previous identity behind. Instead, they find that a new
vista opens up of self-identified possibilities. The individual
changes how they see their identity. Before any social
proclamations, this form of affective change and
self-recognition must first take place inside the individual.
After a frisson of emotional connection and – perhaps more
importantly a recognition that it has happened – the crucial
moment in the emergence of a person’s fandom really comes
when they recognize their own fandom (‘I realized that I was
a fan’). Its particular process of emergence, however, can
sometimes be a gradual or drawn-out experience. Indeed,
Cavicchi compares ‘becoming a fan’ narratives to the two
kinds of religious conversion outlined by William James:
moments of self-surrender (in which a troubled person gives
up their struggle and is converted) and volitional (a gradual
move into new habits) (1998, 43). Some fans do not have a
clear moment of discovery and understand their shift more in
retrospect: ‘I have no real memory of ‘discovering’ Doctor
Who; it’s just something that’s always been part of my life,
for as long back as my memory goes’ (McGuire 2010, 118).
After the internal shift, further moments of outward initiation

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and discovery then take place and individuals usually start to
track down performances and speak to like-minded fans.

Bacon-Smith (1992) examined how fans become

self-identified and go through various levels of initiation such
as watching broadcasts, recording shows and learning about
fanzines and fanfic. Media playback technology is vital here
in allowing convenient access to material. Sometimes people
find it easier to maintain their fandom either because of an
interest in an ongoing (serialized) product, or because this
interest is boosted by an ongoing community:

Doctor Who wasn’t the only fandom I followed: Star Trek in

its various forms, Star Wars, Scarecrow and Mrs King,
MacGuyver, Blakes 7, Remnington Steele, The Avengers,
Sapphire & Steel, Adderly, Robin of Sherwood, Beauty and
the Beast, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1 – as well as others. Many
of those fandoms vanished as soon as the shows went of the
air. Others lingered awhile before their fans moved on. I
stayed with a Doctor Who fan because the fandom continued
to exist even after the show didn’t. Thanks to the Internet, I
could find like-minded fans to discuss stories and themes . . .
In time, I didn’t attend Doctor Who conventions because a
particular
star or stars would be there (since I had already heard most of
their stories before), but because it was a chance to visit with
friends I only saw once a year. (Sullivan 2010, 130)

In an internet age, intrigued potential fans can increasingly

exploit media convergence to create their own points of
contact with a phenomenon (Jenkins 2008, 57). However,
access to distributional technologies and exposure to cultural
materials does not determine the emergence of individual

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fandom. They are, in effect, facilitators: necessary, but not
sufficient conditions.

Individual fandom can be conceptualized, partly as a squaring

of identities where the potential fan discovers things they like
about the text. This squaring can mean a recognition of
pleasures, an understanding of creativity, or an appreciation
of attitude. Traditionally, referencing the metaphor of
addiction, such elements have been called ‘hooks’.
Harrington and Bielby found that various points of access
attracted fans to soap viewing:

While viewers are usually introduced to soaps by another

person, different access points (Whetmore and Kielwasser
1983, 111) within the genre hook the viewer: actor, character,
writing, storyline, costumes, or some other identifiable
feature. Some respondents follow favourite actors, writers,
and directors from show to show; others are loyal to a specific
show and its familiar community of characters. The idea of
different access points is important because it is central to
differentiating viewers from one another. Fans who scrutinize
acting skills, for example, can become frustrated with viewers
who are ‘hung up on the story’, and those who are loyal to the
entire fictional community of Genoa City, Corinth, Llanview,
or Bay City are aghast at others who can pick up or drop a
program seemingly at will. (1995, 89)

Individuals in the audience can at first be resistant to a

performance, but, as Cavicchi explains, ‘This indifference or
negativity is then radically altered. An individual hears a song
on the radio, reads a line in a book, or is dragged to a
Springsteen concert and simply becomes “hooked”. Such a
transformation is an epiphany, often described as mystical

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and inexplicable’ (1998, 43). Hooks are important as they
allow people of different identities to follow the same
phenomenon. For example, stars can have both deaf fans and
blind fans who find different ways to enjoy the performance.
Actions can also be hooks as they encourage fan commitment;
following a live show one fan explained to Cavicchi (1998) ‘I
can’t believe someone has that kind of power over me
[laughs]. He made me stand on a chair and yell, “Goobah,
goobah, goobah!” [laughter] But I did!’ (90). The idea that
hooks can include audience actions suggests both that they
are diverse and not directly causative; not everyone
‘gets’ them. New fans can initially be engaged as much by
performances as by performers as individuals: ‘Having a
personal relationship with Springsteen means that one feels
deeply about Springsteen the performer; in “becoming a fan”
stories, fans are not so much touched by Springsteen himself
as by his performance’ (55). This is particularly interesting as
it demonstrates that fans are less in love with stars, or, for that
matter, authors, than with the pleasures and possibilities that
those individuals can offer to them. Because they are
inevitably more emotionally engaged than the rest of the
audience, dedicated devotees can be both highly supportive of
the performer and highly vocal about below par moments –
paradoxically wishing for further glory in difficult times.
Unending attention is never guaranteed: if a hero reneges on
the relationship in some way, criticism and desertion can
follow. Singer Ricky Martin, for instance, disappointed many
of his Hispanic fans when a photo circulated online of him
headlining at George Bush’s 2001 inauguration ball.

An associated issue with hooks in the context of people

becoming fans is that fans can be familiar with a performance
for years before they perceive the hooks that finally attract

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them. When Daniel Cavicchi married a Springsteen fan, he
had known the Boss’s music for a long time, but he explained
that, ‘After we got married, I truly became transformed’. He
noticed a sign that his fandom for Bruce Springsteen had
started when he repeatedly played a b-side to the ‘Brilliant
Disguise’ single called ‘Lucky Man’ (1998, 51).

Given the methodological difficulties of engaging with the

process, it is not surprising that researchers have generally
kept away from the topic of how people become fans. When
they have done, their discussions have tended to focus on
questions of the role of individual agency in the process. One
way to explore that is to begin separating collective and
individual elements in theory, while admitting that they
always happen together in reality. Following Bourdieu’s work
on taste, the first social element to notice is that certain
objects are licensed and available to be chosen within shared
structures of taste. Fan identity necessarily begins as a
personal interest, but it can grow or wither due to the local
social context:

Fandom does not seem to flourish in a resolutely hostile

environment; its passions and attachments have to be linked
to a localized sense of cultural value and legitimacy, even if
this only occurs within the household or a small circle of
friends rather than the ‘imagined community’ of the fan
subculture. (Hills 2002a, 78)

In other words, while there are many cultural passions that we

could have in theory – focused on anything from boybands to
soaps, horror films to ballet – traditionally there have been
some things that are socially encouraged, and

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for Bourdieu they depend on our local social environment and
identity: nationality, ethnicity, age, gender, (dis)ability, class
and subculture. This does not mean that licensed, tasteful
objects are chosen every time. It means instead that
individuals are more likely to encounter and feel comfortable
choosing those objects. Furthermore, an individual’s personal
fandom does not always last:

I drifted away from Who fandom because of a teenage

estimation that if I continued with this all-consuming passion
I would never, in a million years, have any chance of getting a
girlfriend. Now, whether or not this was true, the fact that this
decision made cultural sense to me indicates the operation of
one aspect of a cultural system of value whereby media
fandom is/was linked to a sense of ‘failed’ or inadequate
masculinity. Living with this dimension I was not able to
simply pursue my fandom. Like [Sue] Wise, I felt under
pressure to reject it, even if I cannot recall any direct
challenge to my sense of masculinity. (85)

Matt Hills links the end – or perhaps more accurately the

temporary cessation – of his Doctor Who fandom with social
pressures that framed the world of Doctor Who fandom as not
fully masculine. In this case fan attachment is also connected
to the life cycle: on the same page Hills explains that he took
up horror fandom because it would allow him to express a
more mature adolescent masculinity. His reasoning is critical,
analytical and necessarily in retrospect. What is also
interesting is that although the experience of fandom begins
as a kind of innate impulse or moment of self-discovery, it
sometimes seems to end through pressures such as gender
ideals or notions of appropriate taste. The existence of
undeclared, ‘closet fandom’ implies that this is not always

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that case and, in the face of potential social ostracism, some
fans carry on their passions simply by hiding them.

One of the issues with the idea that there are social forces
guiding us to choose particular objects is that individuals can
make odd or awkward choices in relation to their social
identities. Moreover, particular configurations of events seem
to have a relatively predictable effect on increasing or
decreasing specific fan bases. Imagined friendship, which can
be an important element of fan attachments, is greatly
affected by the star’s death: ‘I was suprised at how much his
[Elvis’] death touched me . . . As I listened to records and
delved into clippings . . . the memories that were evoked had
nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with romance. The
overwhelming feelings and memories were warmth and
affection for a dear friend’ (Wise 1990, 337). Yiman Wang
(2007) has investigated fans of the pop and film star Leslie
Cheung, who
died in 2003. As one fan posted on the social networking site
LiveJournal, ‘I may sound like I’m a freak for being sad over
a dead celebrity, but . . . almost everyone who grew up in
Hong Kong in the ‘80s was, at one time or another [aware of
Cheung]’. Wang compares Cheung’s popularity to Princess
Diana and explains, ‘The term “posthumous fandom” is
meant to highlight Cheung’s increased charisma after his
death. As a dead celebrity, the iconic Cheung acquires a
spiritual dimension’ (2007, 327; emphasis in original).
Perhaps due to a combination of loss assessment, increased
publicity and reason to feel pity, star deaths are often
moments when fan bases extend considerably. Since most of
the public already know the star to some extent, repeated
exposure to their performance cannot account for the whole
phenomenon. Instead the star’s passing as a human being

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changes what we know about them and makes a qualitative
difference to what we can feel (i.e. a shift of affect). The
question then becomes why a star death does not make
everyone a fan. Cavicchi notes, ‘Throughout my fieldwork, I
did not come across any stories about groups of people
becoming fans en masse while, say, at a concert or listening
together. In fact, I would surmise that many fans might frown
upon such an occurrence as too connected with the uniformity
of a mass audience’ (1998, 53). In other words, although
certain events may sometimes prompt large numbers of
people to become fans, we have to conclude that individual
fandom still has a crucial, personal dimension. Some fan
conversions happen alone, others in the presence of fellow
initiates, but each must be experienced as a kind of individual,
personal event.

While fans have as great a capacity for conscious and rational

self-examination as anyone else, their own stories of
becoming a fan are usually characterized by an inability to
explain exactly how and why the process happened. We may
find the hooks, but it feels as if they have found us. One male
Bowie fan said to Nick Stevenson, for example, ‘It was like I
was meant to find him’ (2009, 91). As Matt Hills said, ‘Fans
do not claim agency in their “becoming-a-fan” stories, but
they do claim agency through their later “performances” of
fan identity’ (2002, 159). To cite a parallel example, Judith
Butler (1990/1999) has examined gender. Contesting
essentialism, she has claimed that even if gender feels like an
innate identity, it can be seen as a social performance. Butler
does not mean this in a voluntarist sense (i.e. masculinity or
femininity as something we elect), but argues instead that
each growing child responds to language and expectation,
growing up as if he/she matures by copying other people.

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Gender can therefore be seen as something gestural: a
performance without an origin. Fandom is often championed
as an act of consumerist free will primarily pursued by each
individual – but, like Butler’s idea of gender, it also seems
like an iteration-without-origin (Hills 2002a, 158–9). This
idea implies that fandom is not just the result of an individual
process of connecting
with popular culture. It presupposes that fandom itself is
primarily a role, an unconsciously learned predisposition to
the media – an idea that effectively returns us to issues of
contagion. Before completely dismissing it, however, one
might ask: Is it possible to be a fan without fandom? This
question seems strange, but if it is then fandom is more like a
deep state of consciousness. I am holding back from saying
an ‘existential’ state here because – even if fans sometimes
feel and speak of it in these ways – I do not think there is an
innate human need to be a fan (or fans would have existed in
all times and eras) and I do not think that fandom is
something inherently spiritual or metaphysical (attained like a
state of nirvana). Instead, various phenomena like the
emergence of fandom (seemingly, often in private), social
ostracism and closeted behaviour, suggest that fandom is a
passion that has deep personal meaning, not something acted
out for the sake of its performance or solely deployed to gain
‘face’. In a sense, then, on any scale of conviction of identity,
fandom is pitched on a level that is deeper than a casual role
(one held and expressed to socially manipulate others) but
less than an innate aspect of a person’s natural, existential or
instinctual being. To offer a parallel example, if someone has
a baby, they are a mother. Once they are a parent, they cannot
adopt or disregard the role as they chose, but may, for social
reasons, decide to express or conceal it at different times.
Unlike motherhood, however, fandom is neither the marker of

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a one-way existential shift (you cannot be an ex-mother, but
you can an ex-fan) and fandom has to involve a positive
attachment at some level (whereas, once you are a mother
then you always are one, even if you do not feel like it).

Given that fandom is something that initially happens as an

experiential shift inside each individual fan’s head, a central
point to realize is that the fan object can be real or imagined,
alive or dead. On one level it does not matter. For Daniel
Cavicchi the fannish self is in a constant process of
self-discovery and reshaped by its own sense of reflexivity
(1998, 136). A characteristically celebrated, self-absent
quality both locates the individual’s fandom as something
overwhelming – bigger than and beyond themselves – and has
led to its false and highly problematic social stereotyping as
something that is inevitably addictive (as if nobody ever
stopped being a fan), and, more important, the opposite to
rational subjectivity. However, formulations that retain the
mystery of the process of becoming a fan tend to assume that
we must be conscious of that process in order to understand
anything about it. If our fandom begins in ways that we do
not consciously understand as individuals, does that mean
such processes are inexplicable? Might it instead mean we
have unconsciously adopted assumptions – about the social
function of media in general, and about specific authors, texts
or performers in particular – that when activated or fulfilled
allow us to create, access or unlock
our fannish identities? The symbolic economy associated with
Durkheim’s theory of religion discussed in the previous
section may offer some hope here by giving us at least a
working hypothesis of affective mechanisms by which each
individual becomes a fan, particularly in a cultural field like
rock music. It suggests that the moment of enlightenment

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comes from a double realization, as each fan both (a)
recognizes the semiotic resonance of the text for him/her as
an individual and (b) fully understands its social popularity.
Because these two realizations may occur at different times
(or indeed both at once), the process may remain hard to
fathom from first appearances.

In the knowing field

In the early 1990s a series of books were published featuring

random dot autostereograms, optical illusions more
commonly known as ‘magic eye’ puzzles that relied on
viewers diverging their focus in order to see 3D shapes that
emerged from flat pieces of paper. The magic eye craze had
many readers squinting at strange puzzle pages, trying to see
ordinarily hidden shapes and patterns. In a sense, whether fast
or gradual, fandom begins like those magic eye puzzles. Fans
start to ‘see’ some things that others cannot. Their experience
may be informed by a range of factors. In television fandom,
for example, it is often a slow process because the narrative
gradually exposes an appealing play of creativity. Rather than
divergent pupils, the shift comes about through a combination
of two assumptions: an emotional attachment to someone or
something and a recognition that he, she or it has social power
(usually denoted by popularity). Since neither of these
assumptions is fulfilled by conscious intent, fandom feels
both overwhelming and empowering.

Sceptical of the idea that empirical studies such as interviews

could help researchers find new ways to understand the music
audience, Theodor Adorno claimed that ‘every answer one
receives conforms in advance to the surface of that music
business which is being attached by the theory’ (1938/2001,

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45; emphasis mine). In other words, for Adorno, music
audience members are like fish in water, unable to lead
researchers to new discoveries because they can only repeat
terms from the hype that contextualizes their cultural interest.
If fandom actualizes unspoken assumptions, then, a bit like
the Adorno’s famous fish in water, even highly critical or
reflexive fans may have limited discursive resources at their
disposal to comment on the origins of their interest. After all,
most ideas about fan initiation draw on limited discursive
resources: ‘passive’ manipulation by the culture industry,
pathological ‘vulnerability’ to contagion, ‘blinding’ religious
insights or the ‘active’ construction of resistant identities. In
this section I wish to
introduce a new term to the literature on fandom: that of
fandom as entry into a ‘knowing field’. This term orginates
from Hellinger’s work in family constellations therapy. What
follows will describe the nature of a ‘knowing field’ and
explore its usefulness as a heuristic device in fan research.
My argument is that attention to the experience of individual
fans can deepen our understanding of fandom as a
phenomenon.

Family constellations therapy emerged from the unique career

trajectory of the German therapist Hellinger whose biography
included a long spell as a Catholic preist and missionary to
Zulu tribes in Africa. During his work with tribal rituals,
Hellinger began to devise a workshop-based form of therapy
that allowed individuals or couples to see their
family-of-origin traumas embodied by fellow participants:

Representatives are chosen for essential family members and

are placed in physical relationships to one another . . . The
representatives are not asked to ‘play a role’ or to participate

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in a psychodrama. They are only required to note carefully
and precisely what they feel during movements in the
constellation. One of the phenomena that occurs is that the
representatives begin to feel movements, feelings and
reactions that seem foreign to their own personal lives. These
reactions may not be an objective truth about real family
members, but they allow hidden dynamics to come out into
the open and provide enough information to help the therapist
find movements that facilitate healing. (Hellinger 2001, 8)

While Hellinger himself does not use the term ‘knowing

field,’ it has been widely used to describe the representative’s
emotional experience of participating in a constellation. Entry
into the field primarily occurs when the participant is asked to
become a representative for the duration of the constellation.
Once they agree to being placed somewhere in the room, it
seems to them that they come to partially embody and
incarnate the feelings of the family member for which they
stand. This embodiment is a mysterious and mystical process,
an experiential leap which realigns part of their identity.
While fans are not in need of healing and fandom has no
obvious relationship to family dynamics, I think that a loose
borrowing of the ‘knowing field’ idea does capture some
important elements: that fandom is not (just) a performed
role, but rather a means of entry in to a realm of emotional
conviction where one’s feelings can seem highly personal and
yet not quite one’s own, since the experience of feeling
something strong and positive is shared by many others. At
least as a youth phenomenon, if fandom still seemed foreign
in the 1950s, its strangeness has now become something to
which society has grown accustomed. It is also – arguably –
the product of individual reactions

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to hidden, and not so hidden, ontological assumptions, social
dynamics and cultural resonances. The ‘knowing field’ is
therefore a terrain of affect, bounded by a threshold beyond
which one can say, ‘Yes, I know that I am a fan’. Different
forms of fandom have affective differences. Nevertheless, if
adapting Durkheim’s mechanism of effervescence can help
explain the affective rewards of celebrity-following, then in
several ways the ‘knowing field’ idea can also help us
understand personal fandom. First, the notion reminds us that
fannish emotions are both produced and productive. In other
words fannish emotions emerge from assumptions and their
fulfilment, but they can go on to shape other things such as
the collective, moral economy of fandom. Second, the idea
helps us to recognize that that personal fandom for a
particular object unites a process of emotional change with a
residency on a territory of affect. By ‘a process of emotional
change’, I mean feeling an affective shift by traversing a
threshold that separates fandom from disinterest. This can be
thought of as the would-be fan surpassing a base line, but it
can also be understood by recalling that if and when his/her
interest wanes, he/she will effectively cross back down in the
other direction.11 The territory of affect, meanwhile, is a
positively charged space: the ‘knowing field’ denotes a place
that is both inside each of us, and something notionally shared
by everyone in the fan base.

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