Mary Jeanne Wilson

Book Review: Fan Cultures by Matt Hills

Fan Cultures By Matt Hills London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-24025-5 (pbk) 237pp. $25.95 With the resurgence of audience and fan studies as major currents within recent cultural studies work, any scholar attempting a project focusing on media fandom should already be aware of the many potential pitfalls and dead ends involved in such research. What Matt Hills Fan Cultures offers is a metaanalysis of theories of fan culture, and a systematic unpacking of the theoretical and methodological baggage surrounding the study of media fandom. A move toward a general theory of media fandom, one which does not focus on the fans of one particular media text, but rather on the transmedia and multimedia consumption of media fans (2), the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the various methodologies previously used by scholars. In doing so, Hills work represents a challenge to the established paradigms of fan studies, and also demonstrates multiple directions in which these studies could be pushed for more fruitful scholarship in this increasingly important area. Emphasizing the contradictions inherent in fandom, Hills outlines how media fans have been conceptualized in cultural theory. He pays particular attention to investigating the presumed separation between the fan and the academic, arguing that the rigorous division between the two is enacted not just from one, but both sides of the debate, and further that such mutual marginalisation would suggest that fandom and academia are co-produced as exclusive social and cultural positions (2). The imagined subjectivity of the academic as good subject (i.e. rational, legitimate) is dependent upon the image of the fan as its other for cultural afrmation and institutional validation. However, Hills is careful to stress that it is not the actual behavior of fans and/or academics that is measured in this dichotomy, but rather a subjectivity that is imagined and held in place through various operations of naturalization, including repetition and faith. The moral dualisms that emerge from this type of thinking have produced a situation in which fandom (including the work of fan-scholars) tends to be consistently devalued in academic discourse, even by those scholar-fans attempting serious engagement with fandom as a eld of study. Part I of the book, Approaching Fan Cultures, examines previous work on fan studies, offering methodological critiques and suggesting possible solutions. In this section Hills demonstrates how the reliance on moral dualisms structures the work around binariesthe academic vs. the fan, us vs. them, good fans vs. bad consumers, active fandom vs. cultural dupes. One result of these moral dualisms, according to Hills, is the production of a reductive and singular narrative of fan culture that cannot allow room for fandoms messy multiplicity and contradictoriness. This attention to competing processes within fan culture is a theme that continues throughout this section of the book, in which Hills investigates scholars use of Adorno to discuss the cult fans contradictory position as both fan and consumer. Turning to Adornos claim that material reality is essentially contradictory (33), he concludes that fans can never really separate themselves
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GET A LIFE?: FAN CULTURES AND CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION Lauri Mullens, editor, Spectator 25:1 (Spring 2005): 95 - 97.

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from the commodication processes of their fan object. Yet Hills refuses to allow the terms of the discussion to be reduced to the binary opposition between consumerism and resistance, preferring instead to embrace a suspensionist position that can accommodate a both/and position in which fans can be simultaneously inside and outside processes of commodication (44). Chapter 2 examines Bourdieus work on cultural distinction as a possible way to understand how fan communities and fan status are established. This model, he nds, contains great promise, but also signicant limitations for the study of fandom. The chapter also goes on to tackle the problematic moral dualism he nds in the application of Bourdieus work to fan studies. Chapters 3 and 4 address the use of ethnography and psychoanalysis
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respectively, taking on key scholars such as John Fiske, Camille BaconSmith, Henry Jenkins, and Lawrence Grossberg. In analyzing such specic applications of these theoretical models, Hills is able to demonstrate both the potentials and limitations of their approaches. While the rst section of the book offers detailed critiques of the major theories of fan cultures, laying the groundwork for Part II, Theorizing Cult Media, it is this second section that contains some of the books most engaging discussions. Looking at various case studies as well as theoretical models, Chapter 5 explores the use of the term cult to describe fandom, and the cult status of particular texts. In choosing to focus on cult texts, Hills rst explores fan religiosity and the cult status link to religious discourses. In Chapter 6, he investigates the possibility that cult media might be considered as a genre in itself, discussing shared formal properties of these cult media texts, which are otherwise linked solely by the fact that they have developed intense fandoms. Hills uses Wittgensteins notion of family resemblances to create a common set of characteristics of cult texts: auteurism, endlessly deferred narrative, and hyperdiegesis. Although Hills nally concludes that cult cannot be considered a genre in the traditional sense, these three qualities offer an intriguing model for future studies on cult texts and their links to one another. The nal three chapters of the book focus on other areas of the fan experience with case

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studies of fan tourism, cult geography, and the fan impersonator who uses the body as a site in which to enact fan devotion. These lively, yet theoretically rigorous investigations provide a sense of the variety of fan experience, as well as hint at the many avenues of inquiry that still need to be explored. Hills nal chapter provides a compelling discussion focusing on the growing importance of online fan communities. Recognizing that many of the foundational texts of fan studies predate the widespread emergence of the Internet, Hills identies the necessity for a major methodological shift in fan studies. He argues that current scholars must not think of online fan activity as an unobstructed view of the fan community, that avoids the pitfalls of traditional fan ethnography, but must view online activity as fans own performance of audiencehood. Hills complicates the concepts of the text and the commodity by proposing that the self-representation and self-performance of the audience-as-text creates a second-order or implied commodication of itself alongside the originating commodity-text, with the valued novelties of the latter crossing over into the equally novel and similarly valued speculations, rewritings, and framings of the former (177). Thus the increasing use of the web by fans and reliance on the internet for fan cultures research makes an acknowledgment of these shifts ever more important to emerging scholarship on fan

studies, and renders Hills interventions essential to understanding and studying the complex and contradictory area of fan studies. Fan Cultures is perhaps the most comprehensive review of fan studies literature available to scholars, and the only attempt at a general theory of fandom to date. Hills is able to offer deft critiques of a range of methodological approaches to fan studies while consistently recognizing the essentially contradictory process(es) that characterize fandom itself (182). The books greatest success is its ability to present possible ways to work through certain methodological dilemmas and thereby avoid the reliance on moral dualisms around which many earlier fan studies works structure their discussions. Hills work may be too detailed and complex to be called a general introduction for students. Those who have yet to read foundational fan studies texts as well as the theorists on which their methodologies are based (Bourdieu, de Certeau, Adorno, key works in psychoanalysis, etc.) may nd the depth of Hills work a bit overwhelming. However, the book is a must read for any serious scholar attempting to produce new work in the fan studies eld, as well as for those wanting to review and/or rethink their knowledge of fan studies work. The books extensive bibliography alone is an excellent resource for those working in the fan culture eld.

MARY JEANNE WILSON is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in the Critical Studies Department. She has a forthcoming chapter co-written with Ellen Seiter entitled Running on and Re-Running: Soap Opera Survival in the 21st Century in the book Thinking Outside the Box: Television Genres in Transition, edited by Gary Edgerton and Brian Rose. Her dissertation explores issues surrounding the collecting and archiving of soap operas and fan pleasure in rerunning the serial narrative.

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