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25 The Other Side of Fandom Anti-Fans, Non-Fans, and the Hurts of History Diane F. Alters If a typical fan is someone who is immersed in a popular culture product, such as a television show, a movie, or even a book, and who might criticize the product from the perspective of one who wants only to make the product better, what about the viewer or reader who seems to offer nothing but active dislike? How might we understand the anti-fan who has plenty of opinions but dislikes a show so much that he or she seldom watches? And what about the non-fan who might watch only rarely but still finds the show or movie meaningful (Gray 2003: 73)? This chapter suggests that we can learn much about a society by studying anti-fans and non-fans who are doing cultural work as they engage with, edit, or reject a variety of television programs, books, and other media in the context of the home. Using case studies based on ethnographic interviews of two sets of parents, this chapter argues that these particular anti-fans and non-fans created an ideal time-space nexus in their homes when they used media. Not only were they engaged in a process of identity formation, as Morley writes (Morley 2000) and as my colleagues and I have observed in other situations (Hoover, Clark, & Alters with Champ & Hood 2004), but they also engaged in “the indispensable dialogue with the past that accompanies any present” (Lipsitz 1990: 81) when they regarded mediated popular culture. The results recall Bahktin’s chronotopic process of exchange (Bahktin 1981: 254), when history, the parents’ experience, and cultural products were mingled and exchanged. In their dialogues with the past and their contemporary experiences, these parents created their own special chronotopes, or time-spaces, within the 344 family home.1 In the process, they linked their homes to the larger world through popular culture. Examining how they did so can help us understand the contradictory processes that define and maintain a culture. In these case studies, I look at two sets of parents, the Walkers and the Farmers. They are anti-fans of some cultural products and non-fans of others, and in each case they worked in their views of history, contemporary times, their memories of television when they were children, and their roles as parents when they talked about the shows. To illustrate, I focus on their distinctly different views of the television show Ellen2 and of a variety of children’s cartoons. Their views of the text were emphatically social—that is, their views of U.S. society were bound up in what they said about television shows, movies, and books. They incorporated their views of contemporary U.S. society and history into the shows’ chronotopes, creating ideal time-space nexuses, or domestic chronotopes, in their homes. The work these two sets of parents undertook to evaluate popular media is cultural work.3 Whether this work keeps the dominant culture going or exposes its cracks is an open question, to be answered over a longer span of time. But it’s possible to look more narrowly at the parents’ cultural work as examples of Raymond Williams’s (1961, 1977) notion of a selective, interpretive process—for my purposes, a microprocess—specific to each family. This chapter suggests that the chronotopes of these two families are examples of two important but very different structures of feeling in contemporary U.S. society: a conservative, looking-to-the-past one that contains residual as well as dominant elements of the culture, and a more overtly contemporary structure of feeling that contains more dominant elements but in important ways distorts the past in terms of the present. The ways the four parents constructed their chronotopes in this process seem very much related to Fredric Jameson’s notion of “strategies of containment ,” or interpretive codes that deny contradictions and offer the illusion of narrative closure. A strategy of containment masks the “totality of history,” including the “hurts,” which are contradictions that would be unbearable without these strategies (1981: 52–53). Like Williams, Jameson conceives of people’s readings of the past as “vitally dependent on our experience of the present” (1981: 11). Drawing from Jameson’s concept, George Lipsitz observes that history contains unbearable contradictions that are graspable only indirectly, through popular culture (1990: xiii). Indeed, it was when they were asked to talk about popular...

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