In 1992, Lisa Lewis edited The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, an anthology that brought together disparate work on enthusiastic audiences of music, film and media, and captured a significant moment in the maturation of fan studies. At the time, scholarship on fandom was limited and not readily identified in conventional indexes of academic research. One might find passing interpretations of fannish consumption in post-war mass culture critique, Birmingham School scholarship on popular culture, or celebrity studies. And ethnographic research on readers and television viewers in the 1980s had only begun to offer more specific analyses. Lewis' book was one of the first to envision this dispersed work as part of a lively, serious and unified field of enquiry.
Today, enriched by nearly two decades of monographs on fan cultures, theoretical analysis of fandom as a concept, and journals dedicated to fan scholarship (Transformative Works, Journal of Fan Studies, Participations), fan studies now has an institutional history, complete with reigning paradigms, accepted methods and competing theories. The field has also changed thanks to the digital age, which has weakened the reign of the mass culture industry. Niche marketing, social networking and digital archiving have made fan clubs, fanzines, autograph-seeking and bootlegging markers of a new past. Mark Duffett, an established researcher of Elvis fan culture, has stepped into this moment as the field's documentarian and advocate; besides editing a 2013 issue of Popular Music and Society dedicated to fandom, he has published two new books that seek to stage fan studies for a new generation of students and scholars.
Popular Music Fandom, an edited anthology of essays from a conference held in 2010 at the University of Chester (Duffett's home institution), represents an intentional updating of Lewis' work. Not only is Popular Music Fandom similarly published by Routledge, but it includes essays by Fred Vermoral and Joli Jensen, both of whom anchored Lewis's book. And, like the Adoring Audience, Popular Music Fandom seeks to establish a new moment in fan studies, offering the latest thinking about how older models of music fandom centred on celebrities and technology might operate in world of media convergence.
Throughout, the authors consciously distance themselves from foundational fan scholarship, framing their own work as not ‘artist-centered’ (Hills) or ‘Bourdieuian’ (Peter), or about youth subculture (Hasan), pop and rock (Whyton) or mediated texts (Sandvoss). Instead, the focus is on exploring new topics and methods. Electronic dance music, for instance, is the subject of two essays, one by Beate Peter on collective and subjective meanings of dancing and another by Cornell Sandvoss on tourism as a constituent element of EDM fandom. Tony Whyton provides a glimpse at the phenomenon of musician-as-fan, as embodied in John Coltrane fandom, extending both fan research and jazz studies. Duffett offers a short but helpful keyword approach to fan discourse, contextualising, for example, fans' specific uses of the word ‘love’ and calling for researchers to attend to such emic definitions in analysis.
Overall, the book's goal to ‘update’ Lewis's The Adoring Audience is laudable but limiting. While The Adoring Audience felt transformative in 1990, its conceptual scope doesn't necessarily translate to today's fan studies landscape. Popular Music Fandom does not survey fan studies in the same vein, for example, as Sandvoss and Harrington's Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2007), which sought to push the field's assumptions with thematically linked essays on global trends, anti-fandom and historical fandom. In particular, the authors in Popular Music Fandom do not go out of their way to address broader musicological, historical or ethnographic research over the last two decades, by people like Susan Fast (Led Zeppelin fans, tribute groups), Deena Weinstein (heavy metal fans), Theo Cateforis (post-punk fans), Jocelyn R. Neal (country music fans), William Echard (Neil Young fans), Chris McDonald (Rush fans), Stephanie Pitts (classical listeners) and Nancy Baym (online fandom). Insights on music and participation from sound studies (Jonathan Sterne, Emily Thompson, Anahid Kassabian, Michael Bull), a growing body of work with direct relevance to the study of popular music fans, don't appear either. As a result, the book might come across as a bit disengaged for those immersed in these other discourses.
Duffett's other effort, Understanding Fandom, is an introductory text for university undergraduates. The book has a clear and accessible focus on ‘media fan culture’, which, for Duffett, means ‘positive, personal, relatively deep, emotional connection with a mediated element of popular culture’ (p. 2). While one might quibble with the absence of ‘mediated elements of popular culture’ in Duffett's conception (sports? video games? romance novels?), he is clear about his editorial decisions. He acknowledges the importance of sports fandom, for example, but explicitly brackets it from his study as too differently ‘tribal’ and competitive than music or media fandom. His strategy is primarily educative: to usefully and clearly explain the methods, discourses and debates that emerge from thinking about a body of work on fandom.
Even then, explaining and organising the range of work on fandom in film, television and music studies is a significant challenge. Since the 1930s, scholars have made sense of fandom in a variety of terms: alienation, consumption, a struggle for hegemony, agentive poaching, identity formation, enhanced sociality. Theorists have uncovered, ethnographers translated and ‘aca-fans’ advocated. Duffett wrestles with an obvious question that few scholars today ask: can we bring together these deductive and inductive approaches to media fan culture and develop a more general field theory?
Duffett indicates that it might be possible. He succinctly addresses issues common to film/television/pop, from the persistent association of fandom with deviance to the work of fandom in inflecting gender identity and sexual orientation, something that he has researched in his own ethnographic work with Elvis fans. Most original is Duffett's exploration of the process of becoming a fan, something that allows him to cohere a long history of theories about participation, including turn-of-the-century ideas about contagion, religious conversion and totemism, as well as new theories, such as Lawrence Grossberg's notion of ‘affective sensibility’ or therapist Bert Hellinger's framework of a ‘knowing field’. Most useful, especially for students, might be the final chapter, which explicitly explores diverse methods for researching fandom, focusing on the ethical and definitional issues involved in outsider-, insider- and auto-ethnography.
As Duffett himself acknowledges, the book's framework means that he cannot cover everything and must make choices about which theory to explain rather than mention. Interestingly, such choices sometimes push against a demonstration of how ‘fandom’ might work as a shared analytic category. The short chapter on ‘Fan Practices’, for instance, is organised well, sorting myriad behaviours into ‘pleasures’ of ‘connection’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘performance’. However, he necessarily gives the most emphasis to fan fiction and collecting without deeply exploring the complexities of more culturally specific practices, like music listening in domestic life or mobile device television-viewing. In terms of music fandom, he intelligently addresses celebrity and performance, and offers new insights by linking those themes to non-musical phenomena, but he does not address narrower issues, such as music and memory, or the changing history of sound engineering, in a way that would likely satisfy popular music researchers.
This does not diminish the book's immense value as an introduction to media fandom. Duffett's authoritative voice and theoretical acumen are much needed as fan studies becomes a pressing subject for more than a few graduate researchers. A general field theory of fandom may be an impossible ideal, but Duffett does convincingly demonstrate that the project of taking such a goal seriously, of trying to identify commonalities in media fan studies, itself can help one to realise fandom's full potential as an analytical catalyst. As Duffett asserts, ‘Fandom is about consumption and production, resistance and collusion’ (p. 288, emphasis in original).
Considered together, Duffett's books suggest the ways in which fandom remains a rich topic for exploration. Longstanding debates, around fandom's relationship to religion or collecting, for example, have been re-contextualised by digital culture and revived as fruitful lines of enquiry. New themes in fan studies are emerging: fandom as expressed through new genres like EDM; comparative fan studies; historical fandom; ideas about the ‘performance of emotion’; the contingences of gender and race in fan cultures; and the continued inter-animation of media and culture in the networked world.
Fandom will probably never be embraced by academics with the same intensity as ‘subculture’ or ‘consumption’. It's too vernacular a concept, with too much baggage. Yet, studying the phenomenon of the passionate audience has proven remarkably useful for making sense of human attention, social interaction and identity in our changing mediated world. Duffett's books are constructive maps for that work.
