Frames of Fandom: An interview on Fandom as Audience (Part Two)

BOOK 2: FANDOM AS AUDIENCE

Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets recently released the second book in their Frames of Fandom book series, Fandom as Audience. The ambitious project will release 14 books on various aspects of fandom over the next few years. A key goal of the project is to explore the different ways that different disciplines, especially cultural studies and consumer culture research, have examined fandom as well as the ways fandom studies intersects with a broad range of intellectual debates, from those surrounding the place of religion in contemporary culture or the nature of affect to those surrounding subcultures or the public sphere.  

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Pop Junctions asked two leading fandom scholars, Paul Booth and Rukmini Pande, editors of the Fandom Primer series at Bloomsbury, to frame some questions for Jenkins and Kozinets.

SEE PART ONE

what is a ‘fan’?

I'm curious about the conceptualization of what a “fan” is. Does that definition change between books? 

Rob: We took special care to define what we mean by “fan,” “fanship,” and “fandom” early in the series, and we did this not because we thought the terms were unfamiliar, but because we found that they were being used inconsistently, even by experts. Sometimes “fandom” referred to an individual’s enthusiasm, for instance, but at other times it described a collective entity. We needed to have that conceptual clarity to move forward with the other work we wanted to do in the series. So, although the definition does not change from book to book, it does develop, and we add nuance to its various elements. We build on them, return to the definition, even challenge it from different angles—but, fortunately, the foundation holds.

Our distinction is rather simple, yet essential. Fanship is a personal, passionate relationship between an individual and a fan object. It’s an orientation, an emotional and cognitive investment in a piece of culture: a team, a singer, a show, a brand, a game. Fandom, by contrast, is what happens when that fanship becomes social. When fans affiliate with others, when they participate in shared rituals, critique, creativity, or community, they enter into fandom. Fandom is thus always a collective formation of some kind. It includes norms, histories, values, and practices that are produced, shared, and sometimes contested by its members.

We think this distinction is powerful because it travels. It works across domains—music, sports, fashion, theme parks, politics, celebrity, brands. It respects solitary fans who have never set foot in a forum or a fan con, while also giving us language to talk about the intense collective energies that swirl around franchises like BTS, Formula One, Taylor Swift, and the UFC. It helps us map different kinds of involvement without being forced into ranking them. It also allows us to develop and accommodate the many digital advances that have altered the terrain, trajectory, and capacities of fans and fandoms, most notably those involving social media.

We also emphasize that fandom is not a static identity. It moves, changing through our lives and across our different activities. Fans shift in and out of fandoms over time. Their levels of involvement change. Our framework accommodates that fluidity, offering something more than a typology, and less than a rigid model. It’s a way to think about how people organize meaning through the passionate cultural engagements they form both alone and together.

So no, the definition doesn’t change. But it does get tested, elaborated, and put to work. That was the point. We didn’t want to assume we already knew what fandom was. We wanted to build a foundation strong enough to support fifteen books and flexible enough to grow with them. 

Henry: Each frame allows us to see things we would not see otherwise. Star Trek surfaces in almost all of the books because it was the starting point for both of us and because it has been so foundational for both media fandom and fandom studies. Other fandoms, such as those around Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, K-pop and Harry Potter, appear often across the books. Each time they surface, though, we add some new depth as we look at them from another vantage point. We may discuss how Black fans of Harry Potter explore the possibilities of a mixed-race Hermoine in Fandom as Audience and fan responses to J. K. Rowlings’ transphobic comments in Fandom as Activism.  Other examples are more local – we consider how Netflix has built Wednesday to address multiple audiences in Fandom as Audience or how a public sphere about gender and sexuality issues surfaces around the comic books Sex Criminal and Bitch Planet in Fandom as Public or how Good Omens inspired an online exploration of spirituality issues in Fandom as Devotion.

In terms of the purpose of these books, at one point you mention that you hope the series will help practitioners – marketers, brand managers – to interact with fan communities on the principle of “do no harm.” How does this work within contemporary fandom spaces which are increasingly polarized and where “harm” can be conceptualized very differently by different fan groups? Is there a consideration of ethical issues facing fandom researchers and practitioners? Is there a space for discussion of toxicity in fandom? 

Henry: We do not have a separate book on fan ethics – perhaps we should. But I’d like to think that ethical issues – for researchers, for practitioners, and for fans – surface across every book in the series. The goal of creating a conversation between fandom studies and consumer culture research is not to teach industry how to better “exploit” fans but to help them to understand the richness and complexity of fandom as a site of cultural experience within the context of a consumer economy. To serve those ends, we often include passages that show points of friction between fans and industry – for example, book 2 includes a discussion of the concept of fans as surplus audiences, how Alfred Martin has taken up the concept of “surplus Blackness” as a means of critiquing the racial assumptions guiding contemporary franchises, and the ways that “queer baiting” has been critiqued within fandom studies. In Fandom as Co-Creation, we dig deep into the literature on fan labor and explain why many existing industry practices that claim to “honor” fans actually exploit them. We link this work to the debates around the Paramount guidelines on Star Trek fan cinema and a larger consideration of intellectual property law, transformative works, and fair use.  

We definitely will be taking up sites of conflict between different groups of fans, including reactionary backlash by white male fans against women and fans of color, and we definitely deal with the growing literature on so-called “toxic” fan cultures, especially in Fandom as Public. I am sure we will face criticism on the balance of different perspectives here. Even with the large canvas this book series provides us, we will not be able to discuss everyone and everything, and our own blindness and privilege will be on display. But in creating this framework, we will create something that other scholars can push against and call attention to what is still missing in a field of research that for too long was shaped by presumptions of whiteness and Anglo-Americanness.

Rob: Yes, “do no harm” is a principle we offer to practitioners, but we don’t mean it naively. We’re fully aware that harm, like toxicity, is a contested category. What one fan sees as righteous defense of their values, another sees as overreaction or harassment. What a marginalized fan calls a reasonable and direct critique, a showrunner might experience as outlandish abuse. And from the point of view of an authoritarian government, even playful remix culture or satire can read as dangerous thought crime. So when we talk about harm in fandom spaces, we’re talking about something that always has to be contextualized socially, culturally, and politically. 

Fandom gives people a channel for strong feelings. Love, anger, grief, obsession, loyalty, and betrayal: fan communities are pulsing with these emotions. In an age when formal institutions often fail to reflect people’s values or listen to their concerns, fandom has become one of the few arenas where people feel like they can speak together about and maybe even back to power, or act to reshape culture in their own image or into forms that suit them better. That’s why governments monitor fan spaces. That’s why platforms struggle to manage fan conflicts. That’s why brands court fans and fear them at the same time.

We’re not trying to sanitize that energy, though. We respect it, and we are doing our utmost to try to understand it. Across the series, we return to the idea that fandom is a passionate form of cultural participation, not a passive state of appreciation. It’s not neat, and it’s not always polite. Sometimes it’s defiant. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s cruel. But it is always meaningful to those within it. And when that passion becomes collective—when it organizes, critiques, remixes, or revolts—it forces industry and institutions to listen. That’s not toxicity. That’s power and culture being built and rebuilt.

Of course, there are behaviors that cross lines. There are moments when fandom mirrors or reproduces structural harms—racism, misogyny, queerphobia, nationalism. We don’t make excuses for those things, of course, but we also don’t believe you can understand or engage with fandom by labeling entire communities as “toxic” from the outside. Those elements, like racism and misogyny, are not particular to fandoms or fans–they are all around us, and some fans express them, as one would expect. There is a bigger picture, however, in the study of how norms are negotiated within fan cultures, how boundaries are drawn, how accountability functions—or fails to. Those are interesting and important discussions to have, beyond simply labeling this or that phenomenon or behavior as “toxic” or “inclusive.” We think this sort of intellectual elaboration happens alongside viewing fandoms not only as expressive publics, but as moral economies, with their own forms of justice, solidarity, and exclusion.

Ethics, in that sense, is not a separate topic in the series. It runs through every volume, because we are always asking what these relationships—between fans and brands, fans and each other, fans and society—require and demand. We don’t claim to have the final word. But we hope the series opens space for that ongoing conversation and models the kind of respect and critical generosity that we believe fandom itself, at its best, embodies.

 More to come in Part Three.

Biographies

Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era.  He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.

Robert V. Kozinets is a multiple award-winning educator and internationally recognized expert in methodologies, social media, marketing, and fandom studies. In 1995, he introduced the world to netnography. He has taught at prestigious institutions including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business and the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. In 2024, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research and also awarded Mid-Sweden’s educator award, worth 75,000 SEK. An Associate Editor for top academic journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, he has also written, edited, and co-authored 8 books and over 150 pieces of published research, some of it in poetic, photographic, musical, and videographic forms. Many notable brands, including Heinz, Ford, TD Bank, Sony, Vitamin Water, and L’Oréal, have hired his firm, Netnografica, for research and consultation services He holds the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, a position that is shared with the USC Marshall School of Business.