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The Life of Fans: Fandom, Identity, and the Life Course

Fri, May 22, 13:30 to 14:45, Caribe Hilton, Flamingo A

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In his seminal investigation of the changing role of self and identity in modernity, Giddens’ (1991) attributes a person’s identity primarily not to one’s behaviour or the reaction of others, but one’s “capacity to keep a particular narrative going”. These narratives in turn are transformed by, yet also connect different life phases.

In the current stage of modernity that Zygmunt Baum has aptly described as ‘liquid modernity’, traditional markers of identity have become increasingly volatile. In liquid life, previously stable identity positions including employment (Harvey 1990, 2010), romantic relationships and kinship (cf. Giddens 1993; Beck-Gernsheim and Beck 1995) or geographically bound identity positions (cf. Tomlinson 1999) often no longer extend beyond life phases in the face of forces such as flexible accumulation, neo-liberalism, secularisation and migration.

The symbolic resources through which individuals construct narratives of self and associated articulations of identity in different life phases as well as across the life course, are thus increasingly found elsewhere; in particular in the quotidian routines and practices of media use. In a liquid world, the near ubiquitous engagements with mediated content are exceptional in their presence and persistence across the life course and thus become a focal point for the symbolic resources out of which modern identities and associated (increasingly voluntary) communities are constructed (Sandvoss 2003).

Nowhere is this more evident than in the engagements with those texts and textual fields that matter most to individual media users: objects of fandom. Within the vast landscapes of digital textuality, fandom provides a trajectory and focal point for committed, longitudinal and emotionally invested media use. Fandom, as the different contributions to this panel illustrate, thus fulfils a key role in generational identities as much as in the interplay between self-narratives, aging and the life course.

This panel explores the role of fandom and fan texts in the contemporary life course through four papers: Hills explores the role of the narrative techniques of fandom such as memoirs, autobiographies, and fanzine writings in the construction of ‘fannish lives’. Conversely, Click examines not the life of fans, but of a given fandom itself, as it ‘grows, adapts, and declines’. This interplay between fans and fan objects throughout the life course is analysed further by Sandvoss in his study of the relationship between life phases, generations and value in fandom. The notion of value is further explored from a fan object-centred perspective in Heljakka paper on the use of material toys by adult players, before Harrington and Bielby, in turning to ‘fan bereavement’, conclude the panel with an exploration of experiences of loss, grief and death in fandom.

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