the magic circle

Posted by Henry Jenkins

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/7/4/frames-of-fandom-an-interview-on-fandom-as-audience-part-three

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.  

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.

Through both books the examples of fandom used are a mix of primarily North American fan cultures along with mentions of non-Anglophone ones, such as k-pop. While this mix certainly accomplishes the goal of showing the diversity of fandom spaces/objects/practices, how does the series also accommodate adequate consideration of the differences between them and the role of conflict in contemporary fandom communities? (Specifically, Book 2's overview of kinds of fans and their relationship to both each other and media texts/industries mentions the idea of fandom being where fans of marginalized identities can “appropriate” texts and refashion them to their own ends. There is also a side-bar that discusses the different ideas of appropriation and their complications, which is well taken. How does this discussion of audiences and their motivations interface with work on fandom spaces that has highlighted the roles racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc continue to play in fandom communities and their reworkings of media texts?) 

Henry: These are questions we’ve struggled with as we have been writing these books. The past decade has seen thorough and evolving critiques of fandom studies on the basis of race in particular, and we want to do the best we can to acknowledge those critiques and factor them into our considerations. We do so with an awareness that there is going to be a tension between the importance of representing a broad range of perspectives on these topics and also recognizing that as two white Anglo-American authors, this is not necessarily “our story to tell.”

All I can say is that we are trying to find our balance within this shifting terrain, and one way we do so is by highlighting the work of fandom scholars of color across all of these volumes and representing these debates through the insights they provide us. Fandom as Audience includes discussions of racebending Harry Potter, for example, that include the interpretive and expressive work of Black fans doing fan art and fan fiction to illustrate Stuart Hall’s notion of negotiated readings. Our book on Fandom as Subcultureforegrounds the example of a Black Disney bounder, considers the case of hijab cosplay, discusses the ways Black fans work around their marginalization in the mass media texts that inspire much of cosplay practice, and much more.  Fandom as a Public situates the recent discussions about “toxic fandom” or racism in fandom in the larger context of Nancy Frazier’s critique of Habermas’s claims about the “equal access to all” offered by the public sphere that emerge from his idealized understanding of the early modern European coffee houses. We show that contradictions about inclusion and exclusion surround the notion of the public from the start, and that we should not be shocked, though it is critical to understand, that fandom often falls short of its utopian ideals about creating a safe space for all who share passion for the same object.

One of the challenges, then, with trying to represent the broadest range of different perspectives and experiences through the books is that we can only represent the work that is already out there, and thus we are doomed to reproduce some of the blind spots in the existing literature. Our hope is that in mapping the field, we make the strengths and limitations of this work visible to emerging scholars, so they can focus their energies in ways that allow them to make original contributions.

Something similar can be said about the shift of fandom studies to encompass diversity on a transnational or transcultural, if not yet global, scale. My own current interests include supporting and amplifying work on fandoms in East Asia, particularly China.  I have started a research network that is bringing together a mix of researchers based in the United States, China, Korea, Japan, and beyond to do collaborative and comparative work together. This research group has two special issues of journals under development, one for the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and one for the Shanghai-based journal Emerging Media.We include such perspectives in every book in the series, but we also focus on it more explicitly in the Fandom as a Force of Globalization and Fan Locations books.

There and elsewhere, we pay attention to the tensions between pop cosmopolitanism/transcultural fandom (forms that connect across national borders) and fan nationalism (conflicts that seek to align fandom to national interests and to police borders between cultures). This is one of the key conflicts within fandom today, and to understand it, we may need to try to keep multiple and seemingly contradictory insights in mind at the same time. We signal the potential mobilization of fandom and fan-like structures by global strongmen in Defining Fandom, and we explore other forms of “toxic” or conflictual forms of fandom throughout all of the books. Our forthcoming book on Fandom as Public discusses some of the research on QAnon that has emerged within fandom studies, but we also look at ASMR fandom as a space where a more healing or therapeutic function emerged during the pandemic lockdown. We talk about the ways that the Chinese state encourages an entanglement between fandom and the national interests that restricts what can be said but also requires the performance of nationalism. But we also discuss how the free speech and participatory ethos of the Archive of Our Own struggles to deal with the structural and systemic racism that make it a sometimes uncomfortable space for fans of color.

We certainly have our own biases as researchers and mine includes a framing of the opportunities for cultural and political participation that fandom affords that is more optimistic than that of scholars drawn from critical theory and political economy. We also want to provide an overview of the field as a whole and that includes citing critiques of fandom and fandom studies. 

I appreciate your acknowledgement of the ways we discuss appropriation. From the start, fandom studies has centered on the ways diverse audiences appropriate and rework resources from mass culture as the basis of participatory culture. This has included the ways that groups marginalized in the source text speak back to media producers and re-story the media. Yet, we also have to acknowledge that there are ongoing critiques of cultural appropriation which have rendered that term problematic. How do we reconcile the two? Writers like Mikhal Bakhtin tell us that all cultural expression involves appropriation – the language we use does not come pristine from a dictionary but from other people’s mouths. Rather than a simple dismissal of appropriation, which would be inconsistent with other aspects of the field, we should ask harder questions and offer more nuanced accounts of the ethics of appropriation. When is it appropriate to appropriate?

I am not sure we have the answers to this question yet and perhaps not even the best framework for asking it, but at least we are acknowledging the problem here and considering some ways people are trying to address it. In Defining Fandom, there is a similar section where we consider the metaphor of consumer tribes and tribalism as it has been developed in consumer culture research and critique it from perspectives drawn from indigenous studies.

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.

http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2025/7/4/frames-of-fandom-an-interview-on-fandom-as-audience-part-three