Fandom Before “Fan”: Shaping the History of Enthusiastic Audiences

These are interesting times for reception theorists, especially those who study fandom, an extraordinary form of audiencing that includes everything from emotional attachment to performers to obsessive collecting. In particular, the nature of fandom’s extraordinariness has changed a great deal in the past several decades, thanks to the advent of the Internet and digital production. Previously “abnormal” fan practices have not only become more and more accepted but also explicitly supported and nurtured by new technologies and reframed by niche marketing. We live in an age when “following” a stranger because you “like” her or him represents a harmless form of networking. As Twitter encourages us, “Follow your interests.”¹

What has fascinated me most, however, is not the specific quality of these shifts but rather the ways they have begun to shape our understanding of fandom as a historical phenomenon. When I talk to my students about fandom, they often marvel at what it must have been like before the World Wide Web. “How did fans find out about things?,” they ask. “Where did fan communities exist before Facebook?” As an ethnographer who did extensive fieldwork with popular music fans in the late 1980s and early 1990s—not that long ago—I was at first amused by the naïveté of these questions, but then I realized that there was something more going on. My research activities had, without my knowing, shifted in tone: my interviews had become oral histories; fanzines and tapes had become artifacts. Fandom had developed a past. Even more fascinating, fanzines and fan fiction, conventions and collecting, fan mail and pilgrimages—the core areas of focus in the burgeoning field of fan studies—had started to become the foundational past of fandom, its origin. If today’s fans are seen as the result of social media and “narrowcasting,” yesterday’s, by default, should be seen as the result of the culture industry and “broadcasting.”

At one level, this periodization is not surprising. Treating fandom as essentially a response to the rise of mass communications media in the twentieth century is an origin story that has been circulated in multiple popular fan-studies texts. In fact, the linking of fandom and media is emphasized by the general location of “fan studies” in communications and media studies departments in the United States and Britain. When most scholars outside of fan studies think about “fandom” at all, they likely associate it with the consumption of science fiction television or moments in pop culture (such as the Beatles’ 1964 arrival in the United States), sensing that it has to do with technology, the star system, consumption, and the complexity of self-formation and intimacy in the modern era. As Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein note in the recent issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, “The novelty of modern fan communities is often overestimated in research that sometimes seems to assume that fandom began with Star Trek.”²

I have nothing against the linking of fandom and media, but we need to think carefully about how this conception of fandom implicitly limits our ability to think about it historically. Although much of what we call “fandom” is clearly mediated, I worry about the extent to which those of us who study fandom are missing behavior in areas not generally in the orbit of the mass media—museum going, for example, or concert listening, or even novel reading—which might point to a longer historical trajectory that includes the nineteenth and even the eighteenth century. I wonder whether scholarly work that is not explicitly about “fandom” but that nevertheless has addressed extraordinary reception practices—Robert Darnton’s “Readers Respond to Rousseau” or Susan Stewart’s On Longing are good examples—is fully included in scholarly discussion of fandom and its meanings.³ On the whole, I worry about the disciplinary, institutional, and generational blinders we might be wearing when it comes to creating the history of fandom.

It is tempting simply to point to the emergence of the slang term “fan” in the early twentieth century as a clear indicator of fandom’s beginnings. This...