Subculture & Fandom

• Fandom doesn’t always apply to the geographical area
  • Invariably means a description of age
  • Not specifically talking about a collective appreciation of followings or forms, if we’re talking about subculture, we’re talking about the groove. We’re looking at the ways the groove articulate, formulate, and understand the object or fashion.
  • The communal concept of fandom is an idiosyncratic concept.
  • These things of course are relative to the sorts of objects of fandom (i.e. sports), a collective sense of being a sports fan.
  • More individualistic concepts are collections (record, watches)
  • Conceptualized in academics.
  • First person to bring it to an attention to academics is John Fiske.
• John Fiske (1989)
  • Fandom = resistance to dominant social order
  • Meaning of popular culture is polysemic (many readings read upon the same text), that is, popular texts can be read and understood in different ways by fans.
  • Fans construct their own meanings from particular texts
  • Aesthetic function cannot be determined by royal commodity.
  • What happens is meaning of values are caught on things by individuals according to their various influences in their everyday lives.
  • Textual conventions
• According to de Certeau:
  • Contemporary everyday life – a site of struggle – disempowered individuals subvert the meaning of products and symbols imposed on them by industrial capitalism.
  • According to Fiske – this achieved through what he calls “semiotic guerrilla warfare”
  • Semiotics – series of meanings embedded to a product, text or image.
• Fandom is:
  • Collective support and/or admiration for –
    • A film/TV personality
    • A musician/singer/band
    • A sports personality/team
  • A collective celebration of mutual taste/preference in –
    • Film/TV genre
    • Music
    • Sports activities/team
  • A ritual gathering (physical or virtual)