Always-on fandom, Waiting and Bingeing

Abstract

This chapter considers how psychoanalysis can illuminate the ordinary, everyday experiences of being a fan. It argues that othering and aggression between different fan communities/groups has become more central in the digital age. Fandom becomes both intimately personalized and other-directed at the same time, resulting in an intensified and performative "authenticity-as-excess," which though it has a longer cultural history, becomes especially marked via social media. Fan studies has tended to stress fandom's "textual productivity" and textual creativity, frequently focusing on fan fiction to pay off these arguments about, and valorizations of, fandom. Fans are filling in time together, cooperating in sustaining their fan-cultural ontological security, and reassuring one another that this waiting can be endured without diminishing their fandom. Louisa Stein has rightly described much contemporary fandom as a kind of "feels culture": Millennial fans often tout emotional response – or what is known in millennial culture as "feels" – as a driving force behind their creative authorship communities.

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