With stories of hysterical teenagers and obsessive fans killing for their heroes, fans and fandom get a bad press. The Adoring Audience looks deeper into fan culture, particularly as it relates to identity, sexuality and textual production.

What distinguishes fans from general audiences? Who is most likely to become a fan? This fascinating collection of essays explores the relationship between fans and their adored media products. Examining fandom as a distinct form of cultural activity, an eminent list of contributors discuss a range of topics. "Defining Fandom" assesses the economic, cultural, political, and theoretical positioning of fans. "Fandom and Gender" examines the hysterical response to the Beatles, female fantasies of Elvis and "groupies." "Fans and Industry" considers the extent to which the television industry regards fans as valuable to their enterprise. "Production by Fans" looks at fans as producers of popular culture (fan letters to pop stars and music production by science fiction fans).

This book explores popular music fandom from a cultural studies perspective that incorporates popular music studies, audience research, and media fandom. The essays draw together recent work on fandom in popular music studies and begin a dialogue with the wider field of media fan research, raising questions about how popular music fandom can be understood as a cultural phenomenon and how much it has changed in light of recent developments. Exploring the topic in this way broaches questions on how to define, theorize, and empirically research popular music fan culture, and how music fandom relates to other roles, practices, and forms of social identity. Fandom itself has been brought center stage by the rise of the internet and an industrial structure aiming to incorporate, systematize, and legitimate dimensions of it as an emotionally-engaged form of consumerism. Once perceived as the pariah practice of an overly attached audience, media fandom has become a standardized industrial subject-position called upon to sell box sets, concert tickets, new television series, and special editions. Meanwhile, recent scholarship has escaped the legacy of interpretations that framed fans as passive, pathological, or defiantly empowered, taking its object seriously as a complex formation of identities, roles, and practices. While popular music studies has examined some forms of identity and audience practice, such as the way that people use music in daily life and listener participation in subcultures, scenes and, tribes, this volume is the first to examine music fans as a specific object of study.

Contains qualitative studies examining the role of the media in the formation of the social, sexual and cultural identities of today's youth.

Exploring the influence ""action"" films have on audiences, this book considers how people relate to and are influenced by such films as Judge Dredd.

Having ninety percent of its members who are women, this is a study of the worldwide community of fans of "Star Trek" and other genre television series who create and distribute fiction and art based on their favorite series. This community includes people from various walks of life - housewives, librarians, and professors of medieval literature