Cinema Journal 54 I No. 3 !

Spring 2015

discrete Japanese cultural heritage that underpins its role in contemporary Cool Ja
pan government branding initiatives.
There are a few missteps in The Soul ofAnime, most notably in Condrys provocative
discussion of impassioned male fans of moe, an aesthetic embodied in anime in
florid images of dewy-eyed, buxom young girls that walks a sometimes too-fine line
between innocence and sexuality. His assertion that, in eschewing work, marriage, and
procreation, moe fans might constitute an alternative to normative masculinity echoes
arguments of female resistance to heteronormativity in fans reading and writing of
slash fan fiction. However, as Condry acknowledges, there is little examination here
of the specific and not-untroubled gender dynamics at work in male appreciation of
moe, and his intriguing theory falters without it. Overall, however, such problems are
few and far between. Noteworthy for its intimate perspective on the myriad people
who collectively create anime, and particularly for individual case studies that beg
comparison with the broad concerns of fan studies today, Condrys book creates
its own potent negative space within which scholars and students alike might
collectively create new and heretofore-unanticipated connections between Western
(especially Anglo-American) and non-Western fan studies.

U nderstanding Fandom:
An In tro d u ction to the Study o f
M edia Fan C ulture
by Mark Duffett. Bloomsbury Publishing.
2013. $100 hardcover; $29.95 paper. 342 pages.

reviewed by A nne G ilbert

olleagues ask me with some regularity for

reading suggestions to introduce fan stud
ies into courses on media, culture, or com
munication. Although fandom is an effec
tive way to introduce a range of relevant top
ics, I often find myself at a loss for appropriate
readings to suggest in these situations. There are, of course, excellent
in-depth analyses of fandom, but as in other disciplines, scholarship
in fan studies can frequently take the basics for granted and skip over
definitions of fan practices or discussions of the significance of the
field in favor of more complex arguments.
Mark Duffetts Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of
Media Fan Culture is therefore quite valuable as a primer; his book uses

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fans and fan studies as a means to give context to key terms, theoretical frameworks,
theorists, and methodologies of media and culture studies. Geared toward a wide
audience, Understanding Fandom brings together descriptions and coverage of fan
history with the work that has been done to critically engage those practices and works
to explain each. Duffett ultimately aims to provide an overview of existing approaches
to fan studies, contextualize the discipline, and explore the challenges within it. The
result is an accessible, comprehensive analysis of fan studies that distills fan history,
practices, and research into a series of key questions.
To' formulate his overview of the field, Duffett treads some familiar ground: the
book frequently revisits, unsurprisingly, Henry Jenkinss 1992 Textual Poachers and Matt
Hillss 2002 Fan Cultures, key works that provide much of the foundation for thinking in
the field today.1 But Duffett draws just as much from Daniel Cavicchis Tramps Like Us:
Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans, an insightful but often-overlooked work that
examines the practices of devoted music fans and celebrity culture.2
Duffetts choice of starting points has critical consequences for his introduction:
for one, drawing so heavily from the accepted names in fan scholarship effectively re
inforces existing privilege in fandom and fan studies. Revisiting great texts of fandom
means that fans covered in the foundational textsof Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who,
Elvis, and Bruce Springsteenget cultural and academic play, whereas feminized,
derided, or undervalued fandoms continue to be marginalized. Further, synthesizing
great scholars of the field means that new, critical questions being posed in emerging
research are similarly not part of the introductory approach. As a result, as an intro
duction for the classroom, Understanding Fandom is most effective with supplemental
instruction that points to the still-underserved elements of the discipline. Without this
context, this book provides a gateway to the field that may perpetuate existing limita
tions and biases toward individual practices, texts, and participants.
The foundation Duffett lays out in his approach to fan studies has other consequences
as well. Jenkins and Cavicchi, for example, are quite celebratory in their perspectives
on fans, and Understanding Fandom therefore begins with the assumption that fans are a
valuable commodity. Throughout the text, Duffett focuses on the boundary separating
fans from ordinary consumers, and he does so from the position that fans are always
more than consumers. . . . Fans are networkers, collectors, tourists, archivists, curators,
producers, and more.3
In addition to a positive perspective, Duffett synthesizes a significant range of fan
practice and therefore takes a broad look at fans. Jenkins and Hills largely concen
trate on products and practices of media fandom for science-fiction and fantasy film
and television, and Cavicchis focus is on music and celebrity fandom; Duffett brings
these together, along with work on fans of soap operas, horror, and other areas. Com
monalities pervade many forms of media fandom, and Duffett highlights the roles of
1

Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Matt Hills,
Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002).

Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: M usic and M eaning am ong Springsteen Fans (New York: Oxford University Press,

Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study o f Media Fan Culture (New York: Bloomsbury,

1998).

201 3), 21.

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I Spring 2015

community, resistance, consumption, and critique across fan practice, which provides
the means to investigate what fandom is and how it has been researched thus far.
However, distinctions among manifestations of fan cultures are significant, and Buf
fetts all-encompassing approach to his introduction means that he is comfortable with
complexities rather than definitions. There are no simple conclusions in Understanding
Fandom, and Duffett argues that a satisfying definition of fandom necessarily remains
somewhat partial and elusive.4 Instead, the fandom introduced here is one in constant
negotiation between the private and the public, the emerging and the entrenched, the
welcoming and the hierarchical, and the marginalized and the mainstream. Duffett
poses a question very early on Is fandom a coherent object?and his reluctance
to reduce fandom to a singular entity reflects a perspective of fandom as a series of
interrelated practices and phenomena rather than a homogenous or discrete object.5
Approximately the first half of Understanding Fandom explores fans and fan studies
from academic and popular approaches to situate fandom within a larger cultural
context. In the introduction, Duffett provides a concise, effective, and comprehensive
history of fandom that begins in the late seventeenth century with the emergence of
the term fan and proceeds through the shifting social and academic perceptions of fan
phenomena. The diversity of fan practice means that no account can be fully com
prehensive, of course, and Duffett acknowledges his focus on mainstream fandom
of the United States and United Kingdom, which again echoes a focus prevalent in
the discipline. However, the limitation of this focus is that, as an overview of fan stud
ies, Understanding Fandom does not engage in a critique of what is left out and what is
privileged by its curating of fandom.
Chapters 2-5 incorporate anecdotes and popular news coverage of fans with exist
ing traditions in fan research. Each of these chapters is incredibly comprehensive and
detailed and contains a thorough account of how fans are talked about, dismissed,
and celebrated, as well as the role of academic research in these perceptions. These
chapters do again tread familiar territory: chapter 2, Fan Stereotypes and Represen
tations, illustrates how fans are othered, reduced, and separated from audiences
and normal populations while at the same time being organized into an internal
system of prestige and marginalization among other fans. Chapter 4, The Pathologi
cal Tradition, features many accounts of fan dismissal as well, here considering the
perceived reputation of fans as psychological deviants. Duffett discusses how fans are
separated from the ordinary audience and the slippery slope of that separation.
The descent into fandom traverses addiction, epistemological confusion of reality, and
erotomania to ultimately provide the motivation for a casual perpetuation of the myth
that deranged fans, like John Lennon assassin Mark Chapman, are extreme cases
within fandom. Duffett effectively argues against fans being out of the ordinary, and
that isolated cases of extremism are wholly separate from fandom, and he moves on
to analyses of fandom as normal psychology. Duffetts efforts to counter the negative
perceptions of fandom are well reasoned and draw on evidence provided by a sub
stantial array of theorists but can nevertheless feel a bit outdated to scholars immersed
4

Ibid., 31.

Ibid., 18.

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in the field. There are years of research that investigate fan practice with nuance and
sophistication that, taken together, easily counter sensationalized news accounts from
decades past that depict fan deviance. 1 would love to think that cultural studies has
advanced to the point at which introductory work no longer must begin with an ex
haustively constructed argument for why its subjects are not pathological, abnormal,
or insane, but perhaps this is still a necessary beginning point for fan studies even today.
The two remaining chapters of Understanding Fandoms first half offer an overview
of academic fan research and key points of its evolution. Beyond the Text traces the
trajectory of early audience research, both empirical and ethnographic, through the
work of John Fiske, before arriving at Jenkins. This chapter covers traditional modes
of considering fans as resistant readers, rebels, and a powerless elitebut here, in
considering meaning and identification, Duffett is able to parse the range these pro
cesses have for different types of fandom. Individual affiliations with Doctor Who and
Madonna are juxtaposed to social meaning making, including Richard Dyers explo
ration of Judy Garland as a camp icon and Stanley Fishs work on interpretive com
munities; the result is an overview of how fans collectively formulate and circulate
discourse on popular texts. In How Do People Become Fans? Duffett outlines how
taste, affect, and religion influence how fandom, as a participatory endeavor and a
spreadable phenomenon, is theorized. In this chapter in particular, Duffett outlines
significant elements of how fandom is experienced, negotiating the division between
public and private, personal investment and identification, and collective emotion and
structuring. Duffett is content, however, to leave the guiding question of the chapter
without a definitive response; instead he suggests that the mysterious process of
becoming a fan is embedded in unconscious social assumptions and individual agency
that operate in conjunction with each other. Duffett briefly introduces the notion of
fandom as entry into a knowing field, a phrase that originates from Bert Hellingers
work on family constellations therapy.6 Entering into the knowing field means enacting
the emotions of those who embody the role, and Duffett contends that a loose bor
rowing of the concept captures elements of becoming a fan: [Fjandom is not (just) a
performed role, but rather a means of entry in to [sic] a realm of emotional conviction
where ones feelings can seem highly personal and yet not quite ones own.7 It is an
interesting assertion, and one that deserves more exploration than is carried out here,
but it does illustrate well the individual-collective balance of fan participation.
The final five chapters of Understanding Fandom build on the theoretical frameworks
laid out in the books first half but are less thorough and extensive than earlier chapters.
Fan Practices and Researching Fandom are practical guides, featuring succinct
overviews of productive fan behaviors, from slash to collecting to performance, and
how to study them, including the challenges of identifying subjects, collecting data, and
situating the researcher position. The limitation of these chapters, however, is that the
book is organized such that they are either too much or too little. Fan Practices goes
into detail about fan activity, but the significance of these behaviors has already been
6

Bert Hellinger, S u p p o rtin g Love: H o w Love Works in C o u p le R e la tio n sh ip s (Phoenix, AZ: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen,

2001 ) .
7

Duffett, U n d e rs ta n d in g F andom , 162.

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discussed in previous chapters, leaving this one quite thin. Researching Fandom, in
contrast, attempts to teach research methods, for fan research and in other contexts,
a project far too complex to be tackled in a single chapter, and one that therefore
receives inadequate coverage.
In the remaining chapters Fandom, Gender, and Sexual Orientation; Myths,
Cults, and Places; and The Fan Community: Online and OfflineDuffett explores
some of fan studies more current and divisive issues. These are, unfortunately, more
obligatory than thorough; Duffett includes only the most basic information on digi
tal connectivity, and his discussions on place and gender, in particular, are somewhat
anemic given the potential richness that each of these offers. If the earlier chapters
provide a rich overview of the tradition of fan studies, these are merely a quick indica
tion of the ideas: fan identification can be done through a gendered lens, and fandom
is often a space to explore gender and sexual identity; fans construct meanings that ex
tend beyond texts and spaces, potentially raising them to the status of myth; and there
is a social dimension of fandom in which individuals organize themselves digitally or
physically into a mutually supportive social grouping. The inclusion of these chapters
is important, of course, as they indicate some of the critical directions fan studies has
taken in the past ten to fifteen years; the abbreviated treatment, however, means that
Understanding Fandom is a worthwhile introduction to traditional thinking in the field
but requires more in-depth additions to effectively cover recent developments.
I find Understanding Fandom an incredibly useful text for the synthesis it provides of
a vast array of existing theoretical, historical, and journalistic coverage of fans. The
effort to provide an overview of the discipline, particularly as it introduces fandom as
an entry point to media and cultural studies, is a daunting one, but Duffett provides an
excellent starting point. The book is organized with key concepts bolded and defined
succinctly, with guiding questions and illustrative quotes to open each chapter, and
with a thorough and well-structured glossary at the end; these features, too, make
it an accessible and comprehensive introductory text. As an undertaking, of course,
Understanding Fandom is not without limitations: where it excels in breadth, it can fall
short in nuance, depth, and critical perspective. The book, too, needed additional
editing, as numerous misspellings, extra words, and typos made it to the final version.
But despite its shortcomings, Understanding Fandom is a worthwhile addition to the
library shelf, particularly as it fills a void in pedagogically appropriate introductions
and comprehensive references to the salient arguments that provide the foundation for
research into fans.
^

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