Fandom, Emotion, and Meaning-Making

*Originally submitted February, 2025 for The Audience in Media and Communications course in fulfillment of the MSc Media and Communications program at the London School of Economics.

Question: Rather than being passive consumers, fans engage with the cultural texts they cherish from a place that blends celebration, protectiveness, frustration, and antagonism. How does this emotional complexity shape their meaning-making strategies?

Introduction

Media scholars have a long history of differentiating between active and passive audiences and audience behaviors. “Fans” have come to represent a highly active, engaged, and participatory segment of media audiences (Jenkins, 2012). Characterized by high levels of interactivity and participation (Carpentier, 2011; Jenkins, 2012), fans tend towards the development of an “interpretive community,” defined as shared traits among members of a fan community including media use and practices, shared meanings, and interaction about the texts (Costello & Moore, 2007, p. 126). The Internet and rise of Web 2.0 have often been recognized as “profoundly” altering the way audiences and fans interact with media; though many scholars argue that fan activities have always existed, the internet has just made these more visible and accessible (Bird, 2011; Costello & Moore, 2007, Jenkins, 2012, Ruggiero, 2000). While pre-internet fandom was seen as decentralized, limited in mass, and having decreased bargaining power, the internet, as described by Costello & Moore (2007), has the “potential to produce unified centers of resistance to influence the global industries of cultural production” (p. 140). Whether facilitated by the internet or not, fans remain highly emotional and actively engaged audience members who make meaning of their preferred media through varied activities and levels of intensity (Bird, 2011). I will argue that fans engage with and make meaning of media texts through three core activities: community and identity formation, negotiations of authenticity, and shifting production and power relations.

Community and Identity Formation

As referenced in the introduction, the very notion of community and sense of belonging are central to fandom across music, television, and film. The media and academia have historically portrayed fans as young, female, and overcome with “hysteria” and “intense idolization” (Rhein, 2000). Further, there is an assumption that these fans are making up for a lack of sociability through parasocial relationships and the passive consumption of popular culture (Rhein, 2000). However, all individuals in fan communities share a common interest that unites them and can even result in the formation of both on- and offline friendships. In a 2000 study of music fans, Rhein found that super-fans who most strongly associate themselves with fandom are not just hysterical teenage girls, but rather individuals who self-socialize through fan communities and engage in a broader range of fan, music, and song-related activities, thus increasing their pop-culture capital. These fans were also found to be more “culturally active” than non-fans, more likely to practice fan-related activities with friends, and more likely to agree that they have made friends through shared musical taste (p. 106). This study was conducted in 2000, before the internet had brought about the global social networking platforms that we are familiar with today, but still found a strong sense of community between super fans of the same artist (Rhein, 2000, p. 107). 

Even within a singular fan community, fans engage in different methods and levels of participation (Costello & Moore, 2007). Web 2.0 brought with it new modes of participation, with the internet lauded as a facilitator of community, aggregator of information, and flexible to the individual’s schedule (Costello & Moore, 2007, pp. 130-131). Costello & Moore (2007) found that there was a spectrum of audience involvement and interactivity (p. 132), ranging from lurkers who did not necessarily actively engage in online activity but still monitored it for information and to feel a sense of community, to those supplementing gossip and entertainment sources (particularly done by foreign fans), all the way up to broader active production such as running fan sites, providing news updates, and aggregating content (pp. 132-139). Though the specific activities that fans engage in differ from person to person, Costello & Moore (2007) found that all of the TV fans within their study shared a desire to actively distance themselves from portrayals of the “crazy” or “stereotypical” fan, and even became defensive when discussing their own fandom (p. 131-132). Further, these fans tended to select programs that they believed were more “intellectually stimulating” and therefore held themselves in higher regard than casual fans, seeing themselves as more active and critically engaged with the text. 

Across both television and music fandom, it is clear that while there is no one-size-fits-all approach to fan participation, fandoms at large offer a space for community-building and a sense of closeness, whether offline or online. 

Negotiated Authenticity

Beyond joining a particular community, fans must also negotiate their position as fan (with themselves and outsiders) so as to distance themselves from negative representations and justify their level of involvement in fandom. Within music fandoms particularly, fans not only negotiate their fan identities but also the authenticity of their favorite performer(s) in order to justify their strong affective relationships (King-O’Riain, 2012). Social media in particular allows celebrities to reconfigure the relationship between artist and fan into something more intimate and authentic, mimicking real-world friendship (Bennett, 2014). Though this negotiated authenticity takes multiple forms and carries many implications, I will discuss two here: corroborated/mediated authenticity in K-Pop fandom, and civic engagement motivated by perceived authenticity among Lady Gaga fans.

For K-Pop fans in the West, the V Live app allows them to overcome the lack of cultural proximity through frequent live stream performances and more “natural” live streamed content from K-Pop idols while also interacting with other fans in real-time (King-O’Riain, 2012). K-Pop fans are aware that there is a constant “authenticity management” from idols and those behind-the-scenes of K-Pop groups, and thus search for instances of perceived authenticity to negotiate the idol’s persona (King-O’Riain, 2012). These fans spend so much time consuming “live” content from idols, taking note of consistency in actions over time, from platform to platform, performance to performance, that they are convinced they truly know the real person (King-O’Riain, 2012, p. 2832-2833). This “corroborated authenticity” through mediated live performances requires fans to invest copious amounts of time and emotion into observing their idols in order to feel confident in their judgments of them, and to feel secure in their fan identities.

Perceived authenticity can have greater implications for fans outside of fan activities, including increased civic engagement. Bennett (2014) found that Lady Gaga successfully utilized the perception of proximity and confessional texts to cultivate a sense of closeness and authenticity with her fans, which encouraged philanthropic activity and made her fans more civically and actively engaged. Gaga used social media to craft an “authentic” online persona, or “genuine” self, separate from her celebrity/stage persona, leading Gaga’s fans to view her philanthropic efforts as authentically motivated, rather than self-serving (Bennett, 2014). It is apparent that fans are not just “passive consumers” of culture, but rather engage in deeper negotiations in order to feel validated in their fandom, feel closer to the objects of their fandom, and potentially influence offline and non-fan related activities.

Production and Power

At the most involved level of fan participation is fan production and attempts to influence industry decisions, particularly within film and television. This can take many forms, such as writing and publishing fan fiction and fan art, amateur filmmaking, bricolage, and attempts to exert influence over fans’ preferred programs (Costello & Moore, 2007). To illustrate this, I will use examples of fan fiction writing within the Mad Men community, and amateur production within the Star Wars community. 

Fan fiction, like music fandom, is typically seen as a predominantly young, female activity; this often leads to less tolerance for the production of fan fiction from the industry (Jenkins, 2012). While some scholars have portrayed fan fiction writing as a parasocial activity or simply motivated by personal desires (Jenkins, 2012), this is not always the case. Vinney & Dill-Shackelford (2018) observed both hedonic (media consumption motivated by seeking happiness, fun) and eudaimonic (media consumption motivated by seeking deeper meaning or insight in life) motivations for engaging with fan fiction. Their study on Mad Men fanfiction found that while only two stories were exclusively coded as hedonic, the rest had both hedonic and eudaimonic components, with the most commonly occurring theme being reflection and elaboration (Vinney & Dill-Shackelford, 2018, pp. 24-25). Many stories explored themes of infidelity, personal identity, negative emotions, and questions around what is important in life. Further, most stories were written by women through the perspective of a female character, allowing them to explore dynamics, issues, and relationships more relevant to their personal experiences through the narrative of the show (Vinney & Dill-Shackelford, 2018, p. 28). 

While Star Wars producers were adamant about not recognizing fan fiction and even attempting to remove it from circulation, they did try to support fans producing amateur films by supplying them with tools to create their own Star Wars content, as well as an online platform to showcase said content (Jenkins, 2012). However, producers and industry professionals constantly reworked these offerings in an effort to place strict guide rails on content production and only promote content that they deemed “acceptable” (Jenkins, 2012). This further exemplifies the potential barriers faced by fans when fandom and industry converge. Issues of copyright and the commodification of labor frequently arise in the production and dissemination of fan content, raising practical questions of how much fans should be recognized for their promotion of and engagement with their preferred media, as well as theoretical questions surrounding creativity and intellectual property (Bird, 2011; Costello & Moore, 2007; Jenkins, 2012). 

Conclusion

As illustrated above, fans remain a highly active and engaged media audience. I have argued that fans harness their emotional investment in their preferred media through three core activities: community and identity formation, negotiations of authenticity, and shifting production and power relations. Through these activities, with varying levels of participation, fans transcend the characterization of “obsessive” or “parasocial consumers” through performing and negotiating their fan identity. The heightened emotional investment and complexity of fans allows them to engage more deeply with media texts, create their own art, form interpersonal relationships, reimagine media narratives, increase their civic engagement, and occasionally attempt to influence industry professionals. While some modern scholars may push back against the narrative that the internet has increased participation and suggest that it has simply made interaction more visible (Carpentier, 2011), members of fan communities have long participated in grassroots and DIY activities and today use the participatory power of the internet to find new modes of participation and interaction. 

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