Results by title

Disability and Fandom discusses the accessibility and welcome of fan spaces, and it explores how disability functions in fan practices. In a readable, personal style, Katherine Anderson Howell shows the overlaps between disability studies and fan studies, analyzing how fandom operates in physical and digital fan spaces. She argues that it is time for fan studies to let go of the idea of fans in general as marginalized or as powerless groups.
         Anderson Howell examines how key fandom platforms—including cons, Tumblr, Archive of Our Own, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok—set up user interfaces that may mask their true values, potentially decreasing access and creating a system by which disability remains stigmatized. Readers will find case studies of fan fiction, disability influencers, anti-fans, trolls, and celebrities. The argument is made for incorporating disability into the analytical tools of fandom so that we may begin with better tools and better questions.
 

Celebrities depend upon fans to sustain their popularity and livelihood, and fans are happy to oblige. With social media they can follow their favorite (or least favorite) celebrities’ every move, and get glimpses into their lives, homes, and behind-the-scenes work. Fans interact with celebrities now more than ever, and often feel that they have a claim on their time, attention, and accountability. In Fame and Fandom, the contributors examine this tumultuous dynamic and bring together celebrity studies and fan studies like never before.

In case studies including Supernatural, Harry Styles, YouTube influencers, film location sites, Keanu Reeves, and celebrities as fans, readers find new approaches to fan/celebrity encounters and parasocial relationships. This is the go-to volume on the symbiotic relationship between fame and fandom.
 

Fandom, Now in Color gathers together seemingly contradictory narratives that intersect at the (in)visibility of race/ism in fandom and fan studies. This collection engages the problem by undertaking the different tactics of decolonization—diversifying methodologies, destabilizing canons of “must-read” scholarship by engaging with multiple disciplines, making whiteness visible but not the default against which all other kinds of racialization must compete, and decentering white fans even in those fandoms where they are the assumed majority. These new narratives concern themselves with a broad swath of media, from cosplay and comics to tabletop roleplay and video games, and fandoms from Jane the Virgin to Japan’s K-pop scene. Fandom, Now in Color asserts that no one answer or approach can sufficiently come to grips with the shifting categories of race, racism, and racial identity.

Contributors: McKenna Boeckner, Angie Fazekas, Monica Flegel, Elizabeth Hornsby, Katherine Anderson Howell, Carina Lapointe, Miranda Ruth Larsen, Judith Leggatt, Jenni Lehtinen, joan miller, Swati Moitra, Samira Nadkarni, Indira Neill Hoch, Sam Pack, Rukmini Pande, Deepa Sivarajan, Al Valentín

This collection is the first to offer a close study of fan generations, which are defined not only by fans’ ages, but by their entry point into a canon or their personal politics. The contributors further the conversation about how generational fandom is influenced by and, in turn, influences technologies, industry practices, and social and political changes. As reboot culture continues, as franchises continue expanding over time, and as new technologies enable easier access to older media, Fandom, the Next Generation offers a necessary investigation into transgenerational fandoms and intergenerational fan relationships.

Contributors:
Maria Alberto, University of Utah
Mélanie Bourdaa, University of Bordeaux Montaigne
Meredith Dabek, Maynooth University
Simone Driessen, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Yektanurşin Duyan, Mardin Artuklu University
Dan Golding, Swinburne University of Technology
Bethan Jones, Aberdale, Wales (UK)
Siobhan Lyons, Sydney, New South Wales (Australia)
L. N. Rosales, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Andrew Scahill, University of Colorado, Denver
Janelle Vermaak, Nelson Mandela University
Cynthia W. Walker, St. Peter’s University
Dawn Walls-Thumma, independent scholar
Neta Yodovich, University of Haifa
 

When Alina Simone agreed to write a book about Madonna, she thought it might provide an interesting excuse to indulge her own eighties nostalgia. Wrong. What Simone discovered instead was a tidal wave of already published information about Madonna—and her own ambivalence about, maybe even jealousy of, the Material Girl’s overwhelming commercial success. With the straight-ahead course stymied, Simone set off on a quirky detour through the backroads of celebrity and fandom and the people who love or loathe Madonna.

In this witty, sometimes acerbic, always perceptive chronicle, Simone begins by trying to understand why Madonna’s birthplace, Bay City, Michigan, won’t even put up a sign to celebrate its most famous citizen, and ends by asking why local bands who make music that’s authentic and true can disappear with barely a trace. In between, she ranges from Madonna fans who cover themselves with tattoos of the singer’s face and try to make fortunes off selling her used bustiers and dresses, to Question Mark and the Mysterians—one-hit wonders best known for “96 Tears”—and Flying Wedge, a Detroit band that dropped off an amazing two-track record in the office of CREEM magazine in 1972 and vanished, until Simone tracked it down.

Filled with fresh insights about the music business, fandom, and what it takes to become a superstar, Madonnaland is as much a book for people who, like Simone, prefer “dark rooms, coffee, and state-subsidized European films filled with existential despair” as it is for people who can’t get enough of Madonna.

An influential star of British pop for more than three decades, Morrissey is known for his outspoken and often controversial views on class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Among critics and his many fans, he has long been seen as an anti-establishment figure who continues to provoke devotion, argument, and spirited debate. 

This is the first collection of academic essays to focus exclusively on Morrissey’s solo career, and this important book offers a nuanced and rich reading of his highly influential creative and cultural output. Covering a broad range of academic disciplines and approaches, including musicology, ethnography, sociology, and cultural studies, these essays will be a must for fans of Morrissey or the Smiths, or those seeking to make sense of the many fascinating complexities of this global icon and controversial figure.

When the San Diego Comic-Con was founded in 1970, it provided an exclusive space where fans, dealers, collectors, and industry professionals could come together to celebrate their love of comics and popular culture. In the decades since, Comic-Con has grown in size and scope, attracting hundreds of thousands of fans each summer and increased attention from the media industries, especially Hollywood, which uses the convention’s exclusivity to spread promotional hype far and wide. What made the San Diego Comic-Con a Hollywood destination? How does the industry’s presence at Comic-Con shape our ideas about what it means to be a fan? And what can this single event tell us about the relationship between media industries and their fans, past and present? Only at Comic-Con answers these questions and more as it examines the connection between exclusivity and the proliferation of media industry promotion at the longest-running comic convention in North America.
 

From writing fan fiction to campaigning for better media representation, fandom and participatory culture have long been seen as tools to resist dominant narratives and fight for a better future. But participatory culture is not always socially and politically progressive; rather, as Participatory Culture Wars demonstrates, it can be politically regressive and socially reactive. Communities coalesce around the exclusionary and the misinformed.
         Fans, fandoms, and fan practices are no longer the realm of media and popular culture; they have been adopted and co-opted across the contemporary political terrain. This volume offers specific examples and suggests approaches that can help make sense of the constantly shifting interaction between fandom and politics.

Contributors:
Alfred Archer, Renee Barnes, Simone Driessen, Xing Fan, Monica Flegel, Zoe Hurley, Bethan Jones, Sklaerenn Le Gallo, Judith Leggatt, Georgina Mills, Peng Qiao, James Rendell, Mel Stanfill, Michelle Stewart, Rebecca Williams, Christina Wurst

Examining celebrity and fan studies together, Professor Superstar argues that academia shares key traits with fandom, including collective emotional investment, shared interpretation of texts, and identity formation. Universities are often seen as isolated from everyday life, creating an atmosphere of both fascination and resentment. Some academics even go on to become field-specific microcelebrities. Some celebrate their influence while others resent their prominence, leading to both fandom and anti-fandom and reflecting broader social struggles as universities become battlegrounds for economic and political debates. The audiences engaging with academia extend beyond the students and faculty directly involved, creating multiple and conflicting interpretations of what academia represents. Public perceptions of academia are shaped less by its reality than by competing narratives about its role in society. By taking these dynamics seriously, we can better understand the cultural forces shaping both admiration and hostility toward higher education.

What happened when J. K. Rowling’s mega-blockbuster—born in the United Kingdom and launched to global heights by Hollywood and the full force of Western marketing—came knocking on President Putin’s door? The arrival of boy wizard and international star Harry Potter in a recently neoliberal Russia was enormously influential, but neither smooth nor uncontested. The franchise quickly became a lens that focused Russian ambitions and fears during an era characterized by both the hegemony of globalized popular culture and a nationalized conservative backlash. 

With crisp, engaging prose, Eliot Borenstein leaps from Harry Potter into an exploration of the culture wars and moral panics sparked in Russia by Western-inspired children’s literature, extending back into the Soviet period and through the invasion of Ukraine. As cultural products pitched ostensibly to children, the Harry Potter books and films became the perfect objects for criticism, translation, adaptation, parody, attack, mimicry, and meme-making, allowing Russians to carve out their own space in the worldwide market of magical multiverses.