Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Media Anniversaries - Brand, Paratext, Event ... and the Hype of the Doctor -- 1 Marketing the 50th Anniversary - Brand Management and the Cultural Value of the Doctor -- 2 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary - Public Service Consumption in the Name of the Doctor -- 3 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary - Cinematic Liveness and the "Developing Art" of the Doctor -- References -- Index

"A guide to the assumptions, readings and writings of cultural theory, and an intervention in contemporary debates, this book will be invaluable to anyone involved in studying, teaching or researching media and cultural studies."--Bloomsbury Publishing

This article considers how popular/spreadable misogyny enters into Doctor Who fans' discourse communities via fan-cultural appropriation, mixing external political and internal fan discourses. This can oppose fannish communal norms such as "convivial evaluation" and "ante-fandom". The theoretical perspective taken in the article combines work on toxic fandom with anti-fandom to thus understand fan toxicity as "multiphrenic", i.e. drawing on multiple discourses and self-investments, including responding to its own anti-fans. The article goes on to examine YouTube voiceover-commentary videos from one communally-prominent Whotuber representing Not My Doctor anti-fandom, showing how they use devices such as the acousmetre and "stripped down" subjectivity to open a projective space for toxic fandom and enact a flat affect characterising what is termed "performative rationality". Crucially, leftwing narratives of toxicity and hate are completely inverted to the extent that Doctor Who and the BBC are presumed, without evidence, to "hate" straight white male conservative fandom.

This article considers how popular/spreadable misogyny enters into Doctor Who fans' discourse communities via fan-cultural appropriation, mixing external political and internal fan discourses. This can oppose fannish communal norms such as "convivial evaluation" and "ante-fandom". The theoretical perspective taken in the article combines work on toxic fandom with anti-fandom to thus understand fan toxicity as "multiphrenic", i.e. drawing on multiple discourses and self-investments, including responding to its own anti-fans. The article goes on to examine YouTube voiceover-commentary videos from one communally-prominent Whotuber representing Not My Doctor anti-fandom, showing how they use devices such as the acousmetre and "stripped down" subjectivity to open a projective space for toxic fandom and enact a flat affect characterising what is termed "performative rationality". Crucially, leftwing narratives of toxicity and hate are completely inverted to the extent that Doctor Who and the BBC are presumed, without evidence, to "hate" straight white male conservative fandom.

I follow Harrington and Bielby's (2018) call for more work on 'texistence' – how fans' self-ageing and the text-ageing of pop-cultural texts become intertwined. I focus on the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys (PSB), formed in 1981. Lead singer Neil Tennant coined the term 'imperial phase' (2001) to describe the success of their album Actually (1987), and this terminology has been embraced by PSB fandom; enduring fans consider their fandom in relation to imperial/post-imperial phases. I consider how PSB fans desire a return of the 'imperial', refuting any text-ageing 'narrative of decline', as well as counterfactually reimagining the duo's career success. Fannish interpretive community is based on celebrating the commercial authenticity of PSB's music, articulating both text-ageing and fans' self-ageing with neoliberalized concepts of the 'successful' life course (Clack and Paule 2019) and 'uniqueness' in marketized contexts (Nealon 2018). I thus argue that neoliberalism needs to be integrated into analyses of the contemporary fannish life course, even when fan objects (such as PSB) have been explicitly anti-neoliberal across their careers.

This article considers 'affective economics' in relation to the phenomenon of crowdfunding. It focuses on 'fan-ancing', where media fans are targeted by crowdfunding campaigns. Returning to Henry Jenkins' work enables consideration of how Veronica Mars' creator Rob Thomas has enacted a kind of affective economics by positioning himself as a fan-like showrunner, resistant to commercial/official industry practices, thereby according with Kevin Roberts' notion of 'lovemarks', as well as discursively prefiguring Thomas' use of Kickstarter for the Veronica Mars movie campaign in 2013. Taking this specific Kickstarter as a case study, I also theorise Veronica Mars' fan-consumers as 'crowdfunding poachers' who made the Kickstarter meaningful in relation to their own fan identities at the same time as willingly auto-commodifying their fandom. Focussing on how Veronica Mars Kickstarter–related producer and fan activities illustrate multiple circuits of exchange value and use value, I argue that an intensified 'dialectic of value' is in operation here.

Mimetic fandom is a surprisingly understudied mode of (culturally masculinized) fan activity in which fans research and craft replica props. Mimetic fandom can be considered as (in)authentic and (im)material, combining noncommercial status with grassroots marketing or brand reinforcement as well as fusing an emphasis on material artifacts with Web 2.0 collective intelligence. Simply analyzing mimetic fandom as part of fannish material culture fails to adequately assess the nonmaterial aspects of this collaborative creativity. Two fan cultures are taken as case studies: Dalek building groups and Daft Punk helmet constructors. These diverse cases indicate that mimetic fandom has a presence and significance that moves across media fandoms and is not restricted to the science fiction, fantasy, and horror followings with which it is most often associated. Mimetic fandom may be theorized as an oscillatory activity that confuses binaries and constructions of (academic/fan) authenticity. This fan practice desires and pursues a kind of ontological bridging or unity—from text to reality—that is either absent or less dominant in many other fan activities such as cosplay, screen-used prop collecting, and geographical pilgrimage. Fan studies may benefit from reassessing the place of mimesis, especially in order to theorize fan practices that are less clearly transformative in character.

Abstract
Following 'first wave' fan studies and the seminal Textual Poachers (1992) by Jenkins, much scholarly work has focused on fan fiction or fanfic. This article argues that an alternative genre of fan writing – the autobiographical account of fan memory/experience – forms part of media fandom's 'textual productivity'. Defining this as fanfac (reflexively produced fact or faction, often shaped to entertain fellow fans), I examine this mode of commemorative fan writing in relation to a case study of the British SF TV series Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–89, 1996, 2005–). Drawing on prior work in memory studies, I consider how fans' memories provide a resource that can be self-commodified and sold back to the fan culture, thus making fanfac very different to the typical social relations surrounding fanfic. Fans' production of textual memories can be thought of as a form of 'banal commemoration', which Doctor Who fans themselves auto-commodify within the 'commemoration industry' surrounding this TV series that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013. More so than 'textual poachers' creating fanfic, sections of UK and US Who fandom can be theorized instead as 'textual commemorators' producing fanfac, which contributes to, and sometimes contests, the fandom's collective memory.