Fan studies is an academic discipline that analyses fans, fandoms, fan cultures and fan activities, including fanworks. It is an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, which emerged in the early 1990s as a separate discipline, and draws particularly on audience studies and cultural studies.
Definition and scope
Fan studies analyses fans, fandoms, fan cultures and fan activities, and provides a theoretical framework for investigating audience responses and fan-created works. It is an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, which draws particularly on audience studies and cultural studies, but is also informed by diverse fields including literary theory, communication studies, anthropology, ethnography, psychology, media studies including feminist media studies, film studies, television studies, internet studies and queer theory, as well as the study of legal issues around copyright and fair use.
In its broadest definition, fan studies encompasses the study of fan culture and community, and associated fan activities, across a range of fandom types including media fandoms, music and celebrity fandoms, and sports and games fandoms, and covers both Western sources, such as Star Trek, Doctor Who and Star Wars, and non-western sources, such as anime, J-Pop and K-Pop. Some definitions focus on media fandom, and much study is limited to Western Anglophone sources, especially television and film. Fan activities of interest cover a wide range including joining fan clubs, attending fan conventions, visiting locations, exchanging spoilers, collecting and cosplay, as well as the creation of fanworks, such as fan fiction, fanzines, fan art, podcasts and fan vids. Fan studies also addresses common tropes in fanworks such as slash, hurt–comfort and Mary Sues.
History
Fan studies grew out of cultural studies research examining the reception of popular media by fans during the 1980s and early 1990s, drawing on work by Stuart Hall, John Fiske and others. The emphasis shifted towards examining works created by fans. The earliest academic publications in fan studies appeared in the mid-1980s; these include "Romantic myth, transcendence, and Star Trek zines", by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diane Veith (1985 or 1986), and "Pornography by women, for women, with love", by Joanna Russ (1985). The fan historian Francesca Coppa draws attention to a 1975 book, Star Trek Lives!, by the non-academic authors Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston.
The field is generally considered to have been founded with a cluster of publications in 1992: Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, by Henry Jenkins is considered particularly formative, and Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, by Camille Bacon-Smith, which pioneers an ethnographic approach, is also commonly cited. Other works from the same year included by some scholars include "Feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture", by Constance Penley, and the collection The Adoring Audience, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, in particular the paper by Fiske, "The cultural economy of fandom".
Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington identified three waves of fan studies in 2007: ethnographic research, which views fans collectively; cultural studies, considering the "replication of social and cultural hierarchies within fan- and subculture ... as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural, and economic capital"; and what Paul Booth terms "everyday fandom", where fandom is considered to be "part of the fabric of our everyday lives" and the study of fandom is used to gain understanding of contemporary life.