A revealing look at the pleasure we get from hating figures like politicians, celebrities, and TV characters, showcased in approaches that explore snark, hate-watching, and trolling The work of a fan takes many forms: following a favorite celebrity on Instagram, writing steamy fan fiction fantasies, attending meet-and-greets, and creating fan art as homages to adored characters. While fandom that manifests as feelings of like and love are commonly understood, examined less frequently are the equally intense, but opposite feelings of dislike and hatred. Disinterest. Disgust. Hate. This is anti-fandom. It is visible in many of the same spaces where you see fandom: in the long lines at ComicCon, in our politics, and in numerous online forums like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and the ever dreaded comments section. This is where fans and fandoms debate and discipline. This is where we love to hate. Anti-Fandom,a collection of 15 original and innovative essays, provides a framework for future study through theoretical and methodological exemplars that examine anti-fandom in the contemporary digital environment through gender, generation, sexuality, race, taste, authenticity, nationality, celebrity, and more. From hatewatching Girls and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to trolling celebrities and their characters on Twitter, these chapters ground the emerging area of anti-fan studies with a productive foundation. The book demonstrates the importance of constructing a complex knowledge of emotion and media in fan studies. Its focus on the pleasures, performances, and practices that constitute anti-fandom will generate new perspectives for understanding the impact of hate on our identities, relationships, and communities.

Fans constitute a very special kind of audience. They have been marginalized, ridiculed and stigmatized, yet at the same time they seem to represent the vanguard of new relationships with and within the media. ’Participatory culture’ has become the new normative standard. Concepts derived from early fan studies, such as transmedial storytelling and co-creation, are now the standard fare of journalism and marketing text books alike. Indeed, usage of the word fan has become ubiquitous. The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures problematizes this exaltation of fans and offers a comprehensive examination of the current state of the field. Bringing together the latest international research, it explores the conceptualization of ’the fan’ and the significance of relationships between fans and producers, with particular attention to the intersection between online spaces and offline places. The twenty-two chapters of this volume elucidate the key themes of the fan studies vernacular. As the contributing authors draw from recent empirical work around the globe, the book provides fresh insights and innovative angles on the latest developments within fan cultures, both online and offline. Because the volume is specifically set up as companion for researchers, the chapters include recommendations for the further study of fan cultures. As such, it represents an essential reference volume for researchers and scholars in the fields of cultural and media studies, communication, cultural geography and the sociology of culture.

Introduction: why still study fans? / Cornel Sandvoss, Jonathan Gray, and C. Lee Harrington -- Fan texts and objects -- The death of the reader? : literary theory and the study of texts in popular culture / Cornel Sandvoss -- Intimate intertextuality and performative fragments in media fanfiction / Kristina Busse -- Media academics as media audiences : aesthetic judgments in media and cultural studies / Matt Hills -- Copyright law, fan practices, and the rights of the author (2017) / Rebecca Tushnet -- Toy fandom, adulthood, and the ludic age : creative material culture as play / Katriina Heljakka -- Spaces of fandom -- Loving music : listeners, entertainments, and the origins of music fandom in nineteenth-century America / Daniel Cavicchi -- Resisting technology in music fandom : nostalgia, authenticity, and Kate Bush's "Before the dawn" / Lucy Bennett -- I scream therefore I fan? : music audiences and affective citizenship / Mark Duffett -- A sort of homecoming: fan viewing and symbolic pilgrimage / Will Brooker -- Reimagining the imagined community : online media fandoms in the age of global convergence / Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and Bertha Chin -- Temporalities of fandom -- Do all "good things" come to an end? : revisiting Martha Stewart fans after imclone / Melissa A. Click -- The lives of fandoms / Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington -- "What are you collecting now?" seth, comics, and meaning management / Henry Jenkins -- Sex, utopia, and the queer temporalities of fannish love / Alexis Lothian -- The fan citizen: fan politics and activism -- The news : you gotta love it / Jonathan Gray -- Memory, archive, and history in political fan fiction / Abigail De Kosnik -- Between rowdies and rasikas : rethinking fan activity in Indian film culture / Aswin Punathambekar -- Black twitter and the politics of viewing scandal / Dayna Chatman -- Deploying oppositional fandoms : activists' use of sports fandom in the Redskins controversy / Lori Kido Lopez and Jason Kido Lopez -- Fan labor and fan-producer interactions -- Ethics of fansubbing in Anime's hybrid public culture / Mizuko Ito -- Live from hall H : fan/producer symbiosis at San Diego comic-con / Anne Gilbert -- Fantagonism: factions, institutions, and constitutive hegemonies of fandom -- Derek johnson -- The powers that squee : Orlando Jones and intersectional fan studies / Suzanne Scott -- Measuring fandom : social tv analytics and the integration of fandom into television audience measurement / Philip M. Napoli and Allie Kosterich -- About the contributors -- Index

Highlights the trailers, merchandising and cultural conversations that shape our experiences of film and television It is virtually impossible to watch a movie or TV show without preconceived notions because of the hype that precedes them, while a host of media extensions guarantees them a life long past their air dates. An onslaught of information from print media, trailers, internet discussion, merchandising, podcasts, and guerilla marketing, we generally know something about upcoming movies and TV shows well before they are even released or aired. The extras, or “paratexts,” that surround viewing experiences are far from peripheral, shaping our understanding of them and informing our decisions about what to watch or not watch and even how to watch before we even sit down for a show. Show Sold Separately gives critical attention to this ubiquitous but often overlooked phenomenon, examining paratexts like DVD bonus materials for The Lord of the Rings, spoilers for Lost, the opening credits of The Simpsons, Star Wars actions figures, press reviews for Friday Night Lights, the framing of Batman Begins, the videogame of The Thing, and the trailers for The Sweet Hereafter. Plucking these extra materials from the wings and giving them the spotlight they deserve, Jonathan Gray examines the world of film and television that exists before and after the show.

The field of fan studies has seen exponential growth in recent years and this companion brings together an internationally and interdisciplinarily diverse group of established scholars to reflect on the state of the field and to point to new research directions. Engaging an impressive array of media texts and formats and incorporating a variety of methodologies, this collection is organized into six main sections: methods and ethics, technologies and practices, identities, race and transcultural fandom, industry, and futures. Each section concludes with a conversation among some of the field’s leading scholars and industry insiders to address a wealth of questions relevant to each section topic.

Fandom, Now in Color gathers together seemingly contradictory narratives that intersect at the (in)visibility of race/ism in fandom and fan studies. This collection engages the problem by undertaking the different tactics of decolonization—diversifying methodologies, destabilizing canons of “must-read” scholarship by engaging with multiple disciplines, making whiteness visible but not the default against which all other kinds of racialization must compete, and decentering white fans even in those fandoms where they are the assumed majority. These new narratives concern themselves with a broad swath of media, from cosplay and comics to tabletop roleplay and video games, and fandoms from Jane the Virgin to Japan’s K-pop scene. Fandom, Now in Color asserts that no one answer or approach can sufficiently come to grips with the shifting categories of race, racism, and racial identity. Contributors: McKenna Boeckner, Angie Fazekas, Monica Flegel, Elizabeth Hornsby, Katherine Anderson Howell, Carina Lapointe, Miranda Ruth Larsen, Judith Leggatt, Jenni Lehtinen, joan miller, Swati Moitra, Samira Nadkarni, Indira Neill Hoch, Sam Pack, Rukmini Pande, Deepa Sivarajan, Al Valentín