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Fan Cultures
A fan culture forms when a group of fans organizes around their shared interest in a media text or personality. The best-known, most visible examples of these cultures include Star Trek fans, Elvis impersonators, and “Dead Heads,” or Grateful Dead fans. However, fan cultures exist for an extensive variety of television programs, films, books, comic books, actors, and musicians. Among young people, one can find fan cultures for everything from Harry Potter to The OC.
Like any culture, organized fan communities operate within a set of norms and rules of behavior. Frequently, behaviors that are acceptable within the fan culture carry a different meaning for the outside observer. For instance, the culture at large may view as aberrant dressing up like a favorite character for a film premiere or fan convention. Within the fan community, however, this costume wearing makes sense as one of the many activities in which fans engage as they enjoy and pay homage to what they love.
Young Harry Potter fans, dressed as witches, await the arrival of author J. K. Rowling before a reading of her fifth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Some 4,000 schoolchildren gathered on June 26, 2003, to hear Rowling read from the book five days after it was launched around the world. On the first day, it sold 5 million copies in the United States, breaking sales records previously set by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. That record was broken in July 2005 by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which had first-day sales of 6.9 million in the United States.
Studies of Fan Cultures
To understand fan cultures, researchers often employ the ethnographic approaches used by anthropologists in the field, including interviews with and observation of members of the culture. In a study of young women fans of Beverly Hills, 90210, for instance, E. Graham McKinley watched episodes with groups of fans, observed how they talked to each other about the show, and then interviewed the girls.
Whereas this and other studies have examined fans' talk about the object of their fandom, another area of interest in the study of fan cultures is the role of fans as cultural producers. For example, one study has looked at websites created by girls devoted to teen heartthrob Chad Michael Murray, and another has examined websites created by fans of female-oriented, or shoujo, anime (Japanese animated series like Pokémon that have become very popular in the United States). Drawing on studies of mostly adult fan cultures, these studies of girls' fan cultures share an interest in fans as active audience members who interpret and use texts in their lives.
In what is considered a seminal work in fan culture research, Henry Jenkins found that fans rework or “poach” the original text to suit their own needs through fan fiction writings—original stories written by fans using a show's characters and universe. Jenkins found themes of resistance to dominant cultural ideologies in these fan works. Other studies, however, including those examining girls' fan cultures, have not found these same themes of resistance. Rather, they have found that these fans focus on the things that typically interest girls: boys, romance, and relationships. This lack of resistance to a “male-oriented” culture does not mean that these girls are not actively using the texts. In fact, these studies find that the girls negotiate their identities within their fan cultures and that they are very active as both interpreters and producers of content.
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