Guest Editors’ Introduction: Fans and the Objects of Their Devotion

The term fan, first used in 1889, is commonly assumed to derive from the word fanatic. Etymological study reveals, however, that it actually comes from the noun fancier, in the sense of someone being a dog or tobacco “fancier.” Despite the widespread pejorative use of fan to describe someone who fervently admires without much thought, most academics who study fans have chosen to focus on the ways in which they act as “fanciers” who possess discrimination and fine sensibilities. Such positive attributes of fans, these scholars assert, make them people who should be listened to carefully. John Tulloch, for instance, has asserted that fandom “marks . . . the society where experts are dethroned,” and, indeed, many scholars who have studied fans’ writing have used these long-neglected sources to argue that they represent rich evidence that differs from, and often works against, the emphases and conclusions of scholars, the supposed “experts.” Many years ago in a seminal essay, for example, Robert Darnton demonstrated how letters to Jean-Jacques Rousseau reveal not only tremendously intense and perceptive reactions to novels such as Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, but also feelings about the reading experience that differ greatly from modern attitudes. Numerous scholars have since followed Darnton’s lead to demonstrate how fans’ written interpretations of various cultural products vary widely from those offered by academics in a number of fields. Reception researchers who have taken a more ethnographic approach, including Janice Radway, Annette Kuhn, and Daniel Cavicchi, have learned much the same thing by interviewing fans directly.¹

Fan mail and interviews are not the only means by which scholars have attempted to gauge fans’ responses; a number have studied fans’ shrines to a given celebrity, soap opera luncheons, “cosplay,” websites, and other resources. Greatly vitalizing the study of fandom more recently has been the advent of numerous electronic means of recording fans’ opinions: e-journalism, blogs, Facebook, discussion circles, the “Customers’ Reviews” space on websites such as amazon.com, and Twitter—as long as screenshots are taken to protect against “second-thoughts-are-best” deletions. Examination of such materials has added exciting new dimensions to the field, not only because e-communications are often more easily accessible to researchers but also because they represent new types of response protocols and conventions. Equally important, e-fan writing can dramatically alter the relationship between fans and their objects of adulation by allowing fans to be acknowledged as producers rather than mere passive recipients of cultural messages, thereby often replacing the celebrity-recipient with other fans.

Research on fans has progressed a great deal from the era in which no one questioned a scholar who offered his or her judgment on a work’s reception without having consulted any resources detailing readers’, listeners’, or viewers’ responses to the work. It is unlikely, too, that any modern scholar would belittle the significance of fans’ responses by titling an article “Disraeli’s Fan Mail: A Curiosity Item,” as was done in 1954. Today the list of those taking fan mail seriously is steadily growing. Marsha Orgeron, Amy Blair, Karen Hellekson, Matthew Hedstrom, Emily Satterwhite, Corin Throsby, Barbara Ryan, and others have in the past decade published thought-provoking works that have revealed not only a great deal about fans but also about how responses to films, fictions, poetry, advice literature, and other materials function in society.²

Such research, though, has revealed weaknesses in the materials used to gauge fans’ responses. Writing about fan mail in particular, for instance, Jonathan Rose highlights the implicit bias and nonrepresentativeness of letters caches, noting that though fans’ letters “can offer an especially intimate portrait of a particular author’s reading public,” it is imperative that researchers “remember that these samples over-represent enthusiasts and under-represent disgusted or lukewarm readers.” Charles Johanningsmeier, too, has identified several additional issues that need to be taken into account when drawing conclusions from fan mail. In his work on the fan mail sent to—and saved by— the American author Willa Cather between 1908 and 1947, he points out that the majority of these letters reflect the opinions of more educated and confident readers. They also disproportionately compliment Cather on the works about which she felt most insecure and so sought praise. Thus, Johanningsmeier reminds us, the fan mail that is preserved depends heavily on the motivations of the person doing the saving. This lesson can be extended to include authors—academic and otherwise—who select particular fan letters to reproduce in published collections. For instance, Barbara Bowen and Mike Huber in 1993 published a sampling of letters (and gifts) to television comic Johnny Carson. Because they wanted their book to be popular, they sought to draw laughs by emphasizing the most unusual mailings—including several that bordered on the deranged.³ Bowen and Huber’s selections naturally raises the question: Were such mailings the norm, or are there a great many less “interesting” items sent to Carson that we should be analyzing, too?

Also often missing from preserved letter (and electronic posting) caches are the negative reactions to novels, movies, songs, and so forth, as well as the grounds for these reactions. How many authors, actors, and performers—or their agents—consciously chose to save such critical (in both senses of the word) materials? In addition, one cannot always trust what fans write to their objects of admiration. As Joan Shelley Rubin notes, researchers always need to be aware of the “vexing methodological dilemma” of the murky “relationship between convention and sincerity.”⁴ Indeed, fans often write in formulaic ways rather than out of sincere appreciation, while others flatter celebrities chiefly to prompt a reply, a visit, or a romantic/sexual assignation. The list of caveats in dealing with fan communications can seem endless. Yet despite such limitations of these materials, a great deal can be gained from studies of print and e-fan communication.

For instance, such communications can provide important information about reader behavior in general during a particular era. Because such information is revealed inadvertently and would presumably be the same for both positive and negative communications, it is not tainted by bias during the selection process. In addition, such communications can give us a better idea of what characteristics of particular works made them popular among “regular” fans during certain periods. They also provide clear, concrete evidence for the ways in which cultural productions can impact some people’s lives. For those who question the value of the arts in modern societies, fans’ testimony offers strong evidence that, for better and sometimes for worse, great numbers of people creatively incorporate into their lives the lessons they take away from their interactions with the arts.

Fandom, as seen in previous research and in the essays offered in this issue of Reception, manifests itself in a range of activities. In general, the study of fans weaves authority and enthusiasm with creativity, identity formation (including re-formation), and structures of assessment that set (yet also cross) boundaries in realms as varied—yet linkable—as “right” and “wrong” audiencing, approved and disapproved self-display, admirable and scorned uses of leisure, refined and déclassé arts appreciation, and, ultimately, “correct” and “incorrect” values. The essays that follow in this special-topics issue probe these realms with a range of analytical approaches to display a keen awareness of the rewards—and challenges—of working with the often “tricky” data of fan responses.

Barbara Ryan’s essay returns to a cache of fan mail that has already been examined by several scholars. Yet she finds a fresh angle from which to study writing to Bruce Barton about his best seller The Man Nobody Knows (1925) by taking seriously a note that other researchers have neglected, one that includes questions to Barton so offbeat that they could be dismissed as the anomalous input of a kook. Ryan demonstrates how even the concerns of readers such as these are well worth recovering. She does this by reading the fan’s note in conjunction with others in the Barton archive, as well as numerous fan letters sent to author Lew Wallace concerning Ben Hur, to uncover a deep-rooted concern among Jazz Age Americans about Jesus’ Jewishness.

The next essay, Linda Grasso’s investigation of fan mail sent to the noted artist Georgia O’Keeffe, serves as an excellent model of how to manage the challenge of working with an unusually large cache of such letters. By focusing on letter writers’ relationship to second-wave feminism, Grasso adds significantly to what is known of O’Keeffe’s “pin-up” status among middle-class American white women and challenges Betty Friedan’s assertion in The Feminine Mystique (1963) that women’s magazines all served hegemonically to subordinate women into weak “feminine” roles. The range of attitudes Grasso recovers in fans’ letters—from chatty to deeply admiring, and wistful to strengthened or edified—provides valuable information about a nexus of art, mediation, gender roles, and lived experiences in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as about the basis of O’Keeffe’s popular appeal. Celebrity research is enriched by Grasso’s discoveries about how correspondents took O’Keeffe’s personal example and artistry into their homes, jobs, and interior lives. Students of fan writing will especially appreciate the care with which Grasso charts links between media portrayals of O’Keeffe and the topics and tones evident in subsequent fan mail. Women’s historians, too, will be fascinated by Grasso’s argument that the ways in which fans “imagined O’Keeffe, responded to her paintings, and created an epistolary relationship reveals a great deal about how they negotiated being female.”

Fan mail from the past is not, however, the only sort of fan writing that repays attention. To analyze a disturbing episode from the present day, Josh Stenberg puts an unusual form of fan writing—a suicide note—at the center of his discussion of a recent cause célèbre in China. The author of this note, a man named Yang Qinji, from a depressed region of the People’s Republic of China, was not himself a fan of far-off Hong Kong’s glamorous actor and singer Andy Lau, but his daughter, Yang Lijuan, was—to the point of obsession. When Yang Qinji had done everything he could to help his daughter realize her dream of meeting Lau, yet had ultimately failed, he ended his life. With a keen eye on the print and electronic media that had made his daughter’s quest tantalizing fodder for the Sinophone media world, he left a note—intended for publication—accusing Lau of abandoning not just his Chinese heritage but also the Confucian-Buddhist identity that Stenberg shows had helped fuel Lau’s stardom. Stenberg’s narration of this tragedy is sensitive, clear, and thorough. His inquiry and analysis ably demonstrate how fans’ obsessions should not always be taken simply as interactions between individuals and their objects of devotion, because they can sometimes have much broader cultural and political implications.

Finally, Sara K. Howe’s account of an interactive and updateable web-based archive created by the studio that produces the Twilight films affords important insights into how fans’ devotion can be subtly managed by corporations to serve their own interests. By examining results of the Twilight Time Capsule’s invitations to fans to post photos, comments about favorite actors or films, and so forth via Instagram, Flickr, My Space, and the like, Howe explores a transmedia site in which fans converge and collide with a corporate sponsor. Her rhetorical perspective recasts the Time Capsule as a communicative and persuasive space in which meaning is made, communicated, and controlled by and among Twilight fans and media producers. Owing to the acuity with which Howe brings to light the exigency with which a film studio urges and certifies certain sorts of fan activities while discrediting or denying others, reception scholars will find extremely valuable her discussion of “the consumer/producer relationship, the relationships formed among fans on the site, and the powerful affective and creative relationships fans form with the sparkling world of Twilight.”

These essays’ topics, sources, and approaches thus range widely. They address various fan-writing research methods, celebrity culture, intense fan identification, and fan-corporate frictions. Further, they make substantial contributions to our collective understanding of U.S. civic concerns in the 1920s, the tensions evident in second-wave feminism, strains in a rapidly Westernizing China, and conflicts between individuals and corporations over meaning-making in e-fandom. We believe that these essays’ subtle and perceptive interrogations make this issue of Reception a solid introduction to current research on fan writing, as well as a guide to future inquiry. It is our hope that others will follow in these scholars’ footsteps.