Fan Cultures

Full content of this issue is available at: https://www.sic-journal.org/CurrentIssue.aspx?iid=17. Years after the Frankfurt School, Roland Barthes’s work, Laura Mulvey’s film analysis, The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, various essential books and readers on popular culture, countless conferences and gatherings on popular culture that have taken place all over the world, it may seem that trying to point out the importance of popular culture in yet another scholarly journal is mundane. However, certain phenomena prove that this kind of topic is a necessity: the omnipresence of comic-book adaptations – such as the recent Black Panther phenomenon that has many global and local social, cultural, political, and economic implications, not least through the money-making promotions of certain kinds of active citizenship (NGOs’ promoted voter registration in theaters) – or videogame adaptations and rampant sexism and racism in one of the most successful industries of the day, or constant claims about the connection between mental health issues and video games, as well as the ongoing on- and offline struggle to give the neglected, minor voices their representation in popular products, or the timely #MeToo movement that called out Hollywood first and then almost entire creative industries on violence, coercion, and taking advantage over women. Popular culture is an industry as well as a community; it is profitable and it is marginal; it is equally monumental and trivial. The truth behind one of the most analyzed aspects of human culture today shows that it is ever-changing, transformative, that it is one of the most productive praxes for creators and audience alike, and, in the end, that it has important social, cultural, political, and economic effects, simultaneously producing affects and emotionality.
While previous 16 issues of [sic] offered various analyses and treatments of popular culture (predominantly focusing on the issue of power in American, and other, popular culture), Praxes of Popular Culture is seen as [sic]’s first concentrated (and contained) attempt to point out the potential of different popular cultures, diverse topics they entail, and to open up a diverse discussion on how various knowledges and truths about race, gender, nationality, class, sexuality, ethnicity, among other things, are being produced.
This issue, therefore, brings detailed analyses of specific popular culture phenomena and products. Kevin Drzakowski explores determinism and free will within the universe of TV show Lost. Olfa Gandouz studies Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf from the perspective of corpus linguistics and discusses the approach’s potential when it comes to analyzing literary texts. Iva Šarić provides a narratologist’s approach to the comic-book adaptation of novel See You Up There, and Melodie Cardin, in “The ‘problem’ of Male Friendship in Supernatural and its Fan Fiction,” provides an invaluable insight into the phenomenon of fandom and fan fiction, an aspect of literary production that has led us, in some cases, to new movie hits and pop-culture products. Frances Tuoriniemi discusses representations of queerness, its “elisions and illusions” in Black Panther and Wonder Woman, as indicative of the need to appeal to the audience. When it comes to the role of popular culture in social changes, their interconnectedness and causality, Petra Požgaj presents an analysis of Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Florida Project. Shalini Harilal’s analysis of the hit video-game The Last of Us offers a specific new approach to video-game narratives, while Marko Lukić explores and furthers the discourse on Foucault’s dispositive and apparatus in his analysis titled “Gazing over Chaos: Panoptic Reflections of Gotham and the Failure of the Dispositive.”
The book reviews presented in this issue offer an overview of the latest multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work in the field of vampire studies (Emilia Musap), an interesting insight into the historical and contemporary traditions of Japanese samurai (Marko Lukić), as well as a review about citizenship studies, sexuality, and popular culture (Pavao Parunov). This section is complemented by a review of Ivana Čagalj’s poetry collection titled Paralaksa (Diana Njegovan) and a review which outlines the latest developments in theatre studies (Mirna Sindičić Sabljo).
Whether you are waiting for the conclusion of the 14th season of Supernatural, the first superheroine standalone movie from Marvel, the new reboots of Northern Exposure, new adaptations of fan fiction, or are taking pleasure in the wilderness and unpredictability of Red Dead Redemption 2, we hope that Praxes of Popular Culture will serve as intellectually provocative, challenging, and useful resource for your own study of popular culture, a study always containing some emotionality.
With this emotionality in mind we would like to conclude with a somewhat unexpected and non-traditional addition to this introduction. We would like to end by dedicating this particular issue to Stan Lee. The death of this artist, who was by many defined as the father of the modern (American) mythology, and whose work has inspired innumerable generations as well as entire industries, defined the end of an era. Popular culture will continue to grow and develop, and we will continue to consume it, enjoy it, debate it, and analyze it. However, from this point on, it will never feel the same. Thank you, once again, for all the adventures. Excelsior!

Not Here.

David Bowie has always been a significant figure of the screen. Through appearing in experimental music videos, tense television interviews, controversial live performances, biographical documentaries, and auteur
and genre films, he was a seminal, shimmering part of screen culture for more than forty years. His first television appearance was on the BBC’s Tonight program, in 1964, where he was interviewed about his newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. At this stage, when he was still called David Jones, we are introduced to not only his hunger for publicity but also his closeness to difference, of not quite fitting in.

David Bowie is, of course, not a single or singular star image: he has appeared as David Bowie and in and through various high-voltage, liminal, gender-bending personae, including Aladdin Sane (1971); he has appeared in self-reflexive cameo roles in such films as Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001); and he has taken on various serious acting roles, including the outcast poet-musician Baal in Baal (Alan Clarke, BBC, 1982), the vampire John Blaylock in The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), the murderous Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), and the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006).

Across the body of David Bowie’s screen work, one finds a great diversity in the type of roles he has taken on and the performances he has given, even if they are, nonetheless, all loosely bound by a profound alterity— a signification of difference...

The 2012 film The Hunger Games and its three sequels, appearing quickly over the following three years, represent one of the most successful examples of the contemporary popularity of youth-oriented speculative film and television series. This book considers "The Hunger Games" as an intertextual field centred on this blockbuster film franchise but also encompassing the successful novels that preceded them and the merchandised imagery and the critical and fan discourse that surrounds them. It explores the place of The Hunger Games in the history of youth-oriented cinema; in the history of speculative fiction centred on adolescents; in a network of continually evolving and tightly connected popular genres; and in the popular history of changing ideas about girlhood from which a successful action hero like Katniss Everdeen could emerge.

Introduction only uploaded.

Fans constitute a very special kind of audience. They have been marginalized, ridiculed and stigmatized, yet at the same time they seem to represent the vanguard of new relationships with and within the media. ‘Participatory culture’ has become the new normative standard. Concepts derived from early fan studies, such as transmedial storytelling and co-creation, are now the standard fare of journalism and marketing text books alike. Indeed, usage of the word fan has become ubiquitous. The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures problematizes this exaltation of fans and offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of the field. Bringing together the latest international research, it explores the conceptualization of ‘the fan’ and the significance of relationships between fans and producers, with particular attention to the intersection between online spaces and offline places.

The twenty-two chapters of this volume elucidate the key themes of the fan studies vernacular. As the contributing authors draw from recent empirical work around the globe, the book provides fresh insights and innovative angles on the latest developments within fan cultures, both online and offline. Because the volume is specifically set up as companion for researchers, the chapters include recommendations for the further study of fan cultures. As such, it represents an essential reference volume for researchers and scholars in the fields of cultural and media studies, communication, cultural geography and the sociology of culture.

Resumo
Com o crescimento da indústria de entretenimento, o conhecimento sobre a relação entre os consumidores e o consumo de experiências pode trazer importante contribuição para a área de marketing. Nesse sentido, o trabalho visa compreender os aspectos que demarcam o nível de envolvimento dos consumidores de entretenimento e quais aspectos caracterizam essa relação. Para isso realizamos uma survey com 328 consumidores da franquia cinematográfica da Marvel (MCU), um dos casos mais emblemáticos no setor. O questionário foi elaborado com base na escala NIP e acrescentado de questões sobre consumo de produtos e práticas relacionadas ao MCU. Os resultados evidenciam que estes consumidores de entretenimento apresentam envolvimento significativo com o universo Marvel, motivados sobretudo por uma face hedônica, além de um meio para a constituição de suas autoimagens.

Historically, emerging music and music-engendered forms of youth expression and aggregation have been considered a threat to mainstream culture, due to the belief that they can corrupt it at a societal level. Expanding on these insights, this article examines how one of these music-inspired youth cultures transforms oft stigmatized traits and behaviors (e.g., clothing, slang, tattoos) into communicational and bonding elements of an “alternative family.” Conducting a multimodal analysis of video documentaries, this study explores how the Juggalo community (a fan culture initially associated with the band Insane Clown Posse) socially constructs its identity as a countercultural family that embraces outcasts, rejects, and people who feel unfit for society. Specifically, this study looks into how the participants of this culture implement and negotiate multimodal forms of representation and communication at the “Gathering of the Juggalos,” a kaleidoscopic music/arts festival that functions as an annual “family reunion” for Juggalos from around the world.

Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer in this digital, globalist age. The title of this pioneering volume, Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan already gives an idea of the colorful, multifaceted realms the fans inhabit today. Contributors to this collection situate the proliferation of (often online) queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires as a reaction against the norms in discourses surrounding nation-states, linguistics, geopolitics, genders, and sexualities. Moving beyond the easy polarities between general resistance and capitulation, Queer Fan Cultures explores the fans’ diverse strategies in negotiating with cultural strictures and media censorship. It further outlines the performance of subjectivity, identity, and agency that cyberspace offers to female fans. Presenting a wide array of concrete case studies of queer fandoms in Chinese-speaking contexts, the essays in this volume challenge long-established Western-centric and Japanese-focused fan scholarship by highlighting the significance and specificities of Sinophone queer fan cultures and practices in a globalized world. The geographic organization of the chapters illuminates cultural differences and the other competing forces shaping geocultural intersections among fandoms based in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

There’s increasing evidence that, as media blogger Aja Romano notes, the “female, queer, genderqueer, nerdy, and unashamed” fans of Supernatural that make up the series’ own family are “diametrically opposed to the straightlaced mainstream audience [the series] wishes it had” [original emphasis] (Romano). These tensions reflect wider questions about what Mel Stanfill and Suzanne Scott, among others, have argued is the increasingly industrial orientation of fandom.  In this paper, using Scott’s concept of the “quality fan” as a guide, we will examine the models of female fandom—of Supernatural fandom—that have been incorporated into Sam and Dean’s diagetic world. Through an analysis of Becky Rosen, Charlie Bradbury, and Marie, we'll argue that reading these women through the lens of “quality” fandom undermines popular perceptions of Charlie and Marie as positive advancements in fan representation within the series. While they do embody much-needed injections of female [and queer] into Supernatural’s hammerhead heternormative world [amen], Charlie and Marie are ultimately presented as Winchester-approved models of female fan engagement with the show. And although much past scholarship has focused on the disciplinary nature of Becky’s portrayal, we suggest that the seemingly positive, “fan friendly” models of fangirls offered by Charlie and Marie function in manner that is similar to—but perhaps more insidious than—Becky’s. A close examination of the way these characters operate within the series and in the show’s wider industrial ecology underscores the difficulty of maintaining reflexivity in our field, as fans, when the very objects we study are increasingly intent on pulling us ever closer.

slides: http://goo.gl/NpV5yY