Fans and the People Who Love Them

[fangirljen]

I was confronted by something kind of random today. My co-worker, Matt, drew me into a conversation about Fandom. It was he who brought it up, which simply astounded me. He started the conversation by saying, "Hey, Jen. I think you should write a book about fandom." This is an idea that I've tossled about with for a while, but at the moment I'

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[kitsunealyc]

There's some interesting academic work being done on fandom that you might be interested in. The most famous is Henry Jenkins' _Textual Poachers_. Jenkins is a fan himself and his fandom is what lead him to the study of fandom, so it's an insider/outsider approach (he's also done a follow up book called _Science Fiction Audiences: Star Trek, Doctor Who and their Audiences_). I have a whole bib of books and articles if you're interested.

As for "extreme fans", watching this video makes me wonder how much some people spent on going to the Superbowl today, including tickets, travel, lodging, etc, to watch a live game with thousands of other people with whom they may or may not share anything except a love for football, or one of the teams, or painting themselves blue and orange. Yet these extreme fan behaviors are seen as socially acceptable in a way that spending $5000 on karate lessons is not (at least, as presented in this video).

I have many thousands of dollars of student loan debt because I love Ireland and tourism and am getting a doctoral degree in anthropology in those subjects. My fandom is more socially acceptable because I can eventually make a living doing it (and because what I do will have a positive impact on the lives of other people, I hope), but the obsessive passion that allows me to choose to spend all my time working and reading and thinking about the subject is not qualitatively very different from this woman's passion.

Our society tends to discourage extreme expressions of passion as alienating behavior, especially when that passion is focused on socially less-acceptable texts (i.e., sports, sanctioned artistic works and high technology are okay, but games, popular culture texts and low technology are not), but given the ennui I see everyday in the faces of some of my students, I'd frankly take a fan anyday.