Millennial Fandom

Millennial Fandom
Author: Louisa Ellen Stein
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2015-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1609383559

No longer a niche or cult identity, fandom now colors our notions of an expansive generational construct—the millennial generation. Like fans, millennials are frequently cast as active participants in media culture, spectators who expect opportunities to intervene, control, and create. At the same time, long-standing fears about fans’ cultural unruliness manifest in rampant stories of millennials’ technological over-dependence and lack of moral boundaries. These conflicting narratives of entrepreneurial creativity and digital immorality operate to quell the growing threat represented by millennials’ media agency. With fan activities becoming ever more visible on social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter, Polyvore, and Tumblr, the fan has become the avatar of our digital hopes and fears. In an ambitious study encompassing a wide range of media texts, including popular television series like Kyle XY, Glee, Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, and Pretty Little Liars and online works like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, as well as fan texts from blog posts and tweets to remix videos, YouTube posts, and image-sharing streams, author Louisa Ellen Stein traces the circulation of the contradictory tropes of millennial hope and millennial noir. Looking at what millennials do with digital technology demonstrates the molding impact of commercial representations, and at the same time reveals how millennials are undermining, negotiating, and changing those narratives. This generation—and the fans it represents—is actively transforming the media landscape into a dynamic, culturally transgressive space of collective authorship. Offering a rich and complex vision of the relationship between fandom and millennial culture, Millennial Fandom will interest fans, millennials, students, and scholars of contemporary media culture alike.

Fandom and the Beatles

Fandom and the Beatles
Author: Kenneth Womack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-02-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190917873

More than 50 years after their breakup, the Beatles are still attracting fans from various generations, all while retaining their original fan base from the 1960s. Why have those first-generation fans continued following the Beatles and are now introducing their grandchildren to the group? Why are current teens affected by the band's music? And perhaps most importantly, how and why do the Beatles continue to resonate with successive generations? Unlike other bands of their era, the Beatles seem permanently frozen in time, having never descended into "nostalgia act" territory. Instead, even after the announcement of the band's breakup in 1970, the group has maintained its cultural and musical relevance. Their timeless quality appeals to younger generations while maintaining the loyalty of older fans. While the Beatles indeed represent a specific time period, their music and words address issues as meaningful today as they were during the Summer of Love: politics, war, sex, drugs, art, and creative liberation. As the first anthology to assess the nature of fan response and the band's enduring appeal, Fandom and the Beatles: The Act You've Known for All These Years defines and explores these unique qualities and the key ways in which this particular pop fusion has inspired such loyalty and multigenerational popularity.

The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom

The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom
Author: Melissa A. Click
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 714
Release: 2017-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317268253

The field of fan studies has seen exponential growth in recent years and this companion brings together an internationally and interdisciplinarily diverse group of established scholars to reflect on the state of the field and to point to new research directions. Engaging an impressive array of media texts and formats and incorporating a variety of methodologies, this collection is organized into six main sections: methods and ethics, technologies and practices, identities, race and transcultural fandom, industry, and futures. Each section concludes with a conversation among some of the field’s leading scholars and industry insiders to address a wealth of questions relevant to each section topic.

The Beatles and Fandom

The Beatles and Fandom
Author: Richard Mills
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1501346644

Sex, death and nostalgia are among the impulses driving Beatles fandom: the metaphorical death of the Beatles after their break-up in 1970 has fueled the progressive nostalgia of fan conventions for 48 years; the death of John Lennon and George Harrison has added pathos and drama to the Beatles' story; Beatles Monthly predicated on the Beatles' good looks and the letters page was a forum for euphemistically expressed sexuality. The Beatles and Fandom is the first book to discuss these fan subcultures. It combines academic theory on fandom with compelling original research material to tell an alternative history of the Beatles phenomenon: a fans' history of the Beatles that runs concurrently with the popular story we all know.

Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues

Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues
Author: Steve Redhead
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134821131

Soccer fandom has traditionally been seen as an important part of adolescent, generally male, identity making. In Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues , Steve Redhead shows how this tradition of youth culture of fandom has been eroded in the last years of the twentieth century by the more fleeting, style conscious allegiances inspired by television, films and music. The clubs that young people follow are determined by advertising and popular music; the games that they watch are brought to them by the globalized culture of television, as in the world cup staged in America; even their fears of so-called soccer hooliganism are determined by media-engendered moral panics at a time when the phenomenon itself seems to be dying away.

Anti-Fandom

Anti-Fandom
Author: Melissa A. Click
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479805270

A revealing look at the pleasure we get from hating figures like politicians, celebrities, and TV characters, showcased in approaches that explore snark, hate-watching, and trolling The work of a fan takes many forms: following a favorite celebrity on Instagram, writing steamy fan fiction fantasies, attending meet-and-greets, and creating fan art as homages to adored characters. While fandom that manifests as feelings of like and love are commonly understood, examined less frequently are the equally intense, but opposite feelings of dislike and hatred. Disinterest. Disgust. Hate. This is anti-fandom. It is visible in many of the same spaces where you see fandom: in the long lines at ComicCon, in our politics, and in numerous online forums like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and the ever dreaded comments section. This is where fans and fandoms debate and discipline. This is where we love to hate. Anti-Fandom,a collection of 15 original and innovative essays, provides a framework for future study through theoretical and methodological exemplars that examine anti-fandom in the contemporary digital environment through gender, generation, sexuality, race, taste, authenticity, nationality, celebrity, and more. From hatewatching Girls and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to trolling celebrities and their characters on Twitter, these chapters ground the emerging area of anti-fan studies with a productive foundation. The book demonstrates the importance of constructing a complex knowledge of emotion and media in fan studies. Its focus on the pleasures, performances, and practices that constitute anti-fandom will generate new perspectives for understanding the impact of hate on our identities, relationships, and communities.

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies
Author: Paul Booth
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1119237165

A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies offers scholars and fans an accessible and engaging resource for understanding the rapidly expanding field of fan studies. International in scope and written by a team that includes many major scholars, this volume features over thirty especially-commissioned essays on a variety of topics, which together provide an unparalleled overview of this fast-growing field. Separated into five sections—Histories, Genealogies, Methodologies; Fan Practices; Fandom and Cultural Studies; Digital Fandom; and The Future of Fan Studies—the book synthesizes literature surrounding important theories, debates, and issues within the field of fan studies. It also traces and explains the social, historical, political, commercial, ethical, and creative dimensions of fandom and fan studies. Exploring both the historical and the contemporary fan situation, the volume presents fandom and fan studies as models of 21st century production and consumption, and identifies the emergent trends in this unique field of study.

Fandom Is Ugly

Fandom Is Ugly
Author: Mel Stanfill
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2024-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1479824976

Highlights the importance of considering contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies The Gamergate harassment campaign of women in video games, the “Unite the Right” rally where hundreds of Confederate monument supporters cried out racist and antisemitic slurs in Charlottesville, and the targeted racist and sexist harassment of Star Wars’ Asian American actress Kelly Marie Tran all have one thing in common: they demonstrate the collective power and underlying ugliness of fandoms. These fans might feel victimized or betrayed by the content they’ve intertwined with their own identities, or they may simply feel that they’re speaking truth to power. Regardless, by connecting via social media, they can unleash enormous amounts of hate, which often results in severe real-world consequences. Fandom Is Ugly argues that reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand in hand, and to understand one, we need to understand the other. Mel Stanfill pushes back on two mainstream assumptions: that media and the pleasure of consumption are frivolous and unworthy of study, and that fandoms are inherently progressive. Drawing on a corpus of angry social media posts, Fandom Is Ugly finds that ugly moments happen when deep emotional attachments collide with social structures and situations that have been misunderstood. By holistically examining the forms of ugly fandom in cases that touch upon race, gender, and sexuality, Fandom Is Ugly produces a comprehensive theory of the negative sides of fan attachments.

Handbook of Research on the Impact of Fandom in Society and Consumerism

Handbook of Research on the Impact of Fandom in Society and Consumerism
Author: Wang, Cheng Lu
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 605
Release: 2019-10-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1799810496

Fans of specific sports teams, television series, and video games, to name a few, often create subcultures in which to discuss and celebrate their loyalty and enthusiasm for a particular object or person. Due to their strong emotional attachments, members of these fandoms are often quick to voluntarily invest their time, money, and energy into a related product or brand, thereby creating a group of faithful and passionate consumers that play a significant role in multiple domains of contemporary culture. The Handbook of Research on the Impact of Fandom in Society and Consumerism is an essential reference source that examines the cultural and economic effects of the fandom phenomenon through a multidisciplinary lens and shapes an understanding of the impact of fandom on brand building. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as religiosity, cosplay, and event marketing, this publication is ideally designed for marketers, managers, advertisers, brand managers, consumer behavior analysts, product developers, psychologists, entertainment managers, event coordinators, political scientists, anthropologists, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current studies on the global impact of this particularly devoted community.

Framing Fan Fiction

Framing Fan Fiction
Author: Kristina Busse
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609385144

Gathering some of Kristina Busse’s essential essays on fan fiction together with new work, Framing Fan Fiction argues that understanding media fandom requires combining literary theory with cultural studies because fan artifacts are both artistic works and cultural documents. Drawing examples from a multitude of fan communities and texts, Busse frames fan fiction in three key ways: as individual and collective erotic engagement; as a shared interpretive practice in which tropes constitute shared creative markers and illustrate the complexity of fan creations; and as a point of contention around which community conflicts over ethics play out. Moving between close readings of individual texts and fannish tropes on the one hand, and the highly intertextual embeddedness of these communal creations on the other, the book demonstrates that fan fiction is simultaneously a literary and a social practice. Framing Fan Fiction deploys personal history and the interpretations of specific stories to contextualize fan fiction culture and its particular forms of intertextuality and performativity. In doing so, it highlights the way fans use fan fiction’s reimagining of the source material to explore issues of identities and peformativities, gender and sexualities, within a community of like-minded people. In contrast to the celebration of originality in many other areas of artistic endeavor, fan fiction celebrates repetition, especially the collective creation and circulation of tropes. An essential resource for scholars, Framing Fan Fiction is also an ideal starting point for those new to the study of fan fiction and its communities of writers.