How to Know When You Should Quit Your Research Project, or Why Fan Studies and Sports Studies Need Each Other

Sport, I decided, was the thing I liked that I wouldn't write about. My desire to understand what people got from books, films, video games, and other media they consumed on purpose was what led me into academia. My timing was fortunate: unlike earlier scholars of popular culture, I found mentors who appreciated and supported this quest and a friendly community of fellow academics (and academically inclined fans) to discuss and debate with. There were whole journals dedicated to anime and manga, conference panels on fan fiction, anthologies about comics, new societies and scholarly interest groups around video games, long-standing research projects on young adult fiction and political activism. The one area of media my newfound niche didn't seem interested in talking about, in fact, was sports. And that was fine with me. When your work, personal interests, and social circles all merge, it's only healthy to have some things set apart. No one but my partner and my pets needed to know that I hibernate with the TV every two years to watch (and scream at) every minute of the World Cup, both men's and women's.

Given that I now teach a course called Sports Fandom, you can see how that's gone. When I started researching e-sports, or competitive video gaming, I actually did so with an eye to said work-life balance—maxing out the "hours played" Steam achievement tracker for RPG (role-playing game) after RPG is as close as I'll ever come to online gaming. Academics who study popular culture of all kinds often gravitate toward material they are already personally familiar with, but as classic anthropological theory points out, there are also unique insights possible when one sets out to intentionally learn a (sub)culture's practices, interpretive conventions, favored texts, and so forth. This was my plan with e-sports. My research methods complemented existing sports studies, which favor quantitative approaches and validated scales to understand fan motivations, rather than in-depth personal knowledge. The field draws from psychology and sociology rather than psychoanalysis and ethnography, often with an eye to advising sports marketers, managers, and teams rather than speaking with the fans. Of course, as postcolonial anthropology has explained in detail, the danger of such an approach is that researchers will objectify the population "under" study, placing themselves as removed, unbiased authorities precisely because they are cultural outsiders. This is a perennial topic of discussion in my sports fandom course. Sports fannish students are often outraged at some scholars' blasé critiques of sports fans' intelligence, politics, and imbrication in late-stage capitalism, with the assumption that no one "like that" would ever read their work. Anyone who has read about media fans from the perspective of the Frankfurt School of critical theory knows what I mean.

This concern has been central to the development of fan studies. Scholars who were also fans developed the blurred "aca-fan" identity and centered feminist and queer theories.¹ But as Rukmini Pande points out, "the framing of media fan communities as subcultural and powerless vis-à-vis the producers of popular media texts has also allowed for their unproblematic slotting into a vulnerable site/space that can be exploited by a researcher for their own benefit"—for example, academics championing resistance to (some) structural inequalities while ignoring fannish adherence to and support of others, particularly white supremacy.² Such blind spots are particularly easy to develop when aca-fan researchers share both privileged and marginalized identities with many of the fans they study. Rebecca Wanzo argues that fan studies' otherwise difficult to understand repetition of sports fan stereotypes (and lamentations that "cosplay is mainstream if you're at a sportsball game!") functioned as a disavowal of fan studies' own problems with whiteness and resulted in the de facto exclusion of much African American aca-fannish writing on sport.³

It's a cultural (and fan) studies commonplace to observe that who you are and where you perch as you look at culture informs what you...