The author argues that these supposed binaries in fact overlap to create hybrid categories that are far more representative of the malleable and shifting loyalties and interests that make up relationships within and between subcultures. He therefore refers throughout the book to scholar-fans, fan-scholars, fan-consumers, etc.

His account is intended as a general introduction and synthesis of the myriad of theories regarding fan culture, also suggesting that it is possible (and important) to arrive at a general theory of media fandom. He also aims to ‘explore how cultural identities are performed not simply through a singular binary opposition such as fan/academic, but rather through a raft of overlapping and interlocking versions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This makes locating cultural ‘power’ or cultural ‘resistance’ in any one group (fans/producers/academics) extremely difficult.’

  1 – Defining Fandom and Setting the Premise for this Study

Hills asserts that the ‘everydayness’ of fandom in itself hinders its definition, meaning that most people have preconceptions of what being a fan entails, many of which might be unfounded or simply grounded in prejudice. He suggests that fandom is not fixed object of study that can be ‘picked over analytically’, but always essentially performative. Fandom, he explains, consists of an identity which is (dis) claimed and performs cultural work, yet different ‘performances’ of fandom all share a sense of contesting cultural norms. This means that claiming the identity of a ‘fan’ remains ‘improper’ within dominant cultural discourses, in a sense seen as a weaker form of cultural identity based on a commitment to seemingly trivial cultural products. Claiming fan status may on the other hand, he concludes, ‘provide a cultural space for types of knowledge and attachment.’

While Hills recognises the importance of Jenkins’ work in extending the ‘imagined subjectivity of the academy into the cultural spaces of fandom via discussions of fan knowledge and expertise’ he cautions that only recently has Jenkins exercised a self-reflexive recognition of the strategies he has used.

2 – Moral Dualisms

The author strongly suggests that fandom should be represented in its own terms rather than merely being used to form part of moral dualisms. Offering the idea of hybrid and overlapping identities as a better and more representative alternative, he nevertheless acknowledges that these identities present us with an entirely new set of issues that need to be analysed. The identity of the ‘scholar-fan’, for example, presents negative consequences for representations of fandom because it ‘tends to leave the imagined subjectivity of the rational academic firmly in place, simply extending this to cover the cultural practices and experiences of fans.’

The imagined subjectivity mentioned above has myriad effects within academia affecting respect, status and the threat of pathologisation, and this ‘means that where academics do take on fan identities, they often do so with a high degree of anxiety:’  Burt scathingly criticises such hybrid academics, characterising then with the greed to ‘have it all’ while retaining the right to judge the fandoms they engage with and find them lacking. Hill recognises some insights in Burt’s thinking, yet points out that it too is grounded on a moral dualism; that of fan’s self-absence versus  the academic’s attempts at rationalisation.

These moral dualisms permeate the very cultural foundation on which fandom and academia are founded. These are ‘created and sustained by systems of cultural value which defend communities against others… academics and fans both value their own institutionally-supported ways of reading and writing above those practices which characterise the other group’. The mutual marginalisation caused by these moral dualisms means that ‘scholar-fans are typically looked down on as not being ‘proper’ academics, while fan-scholars are typically viewed within fandom as ‘pretentious’ or not ‘real’ fans.’

 Hills refers to these disruptive and dividing subjectivities as ‘imagined’ because they do not in fact correspond to the actual subjectivities of either group; ‘Academics are not resolutely rational, nor are fans resolutely immersed. Academic knowledge is not always meaningfully ‘testable’, nor is fan knowledge always ‘informal’ or ‘experiential’.

3 – Contradiction of Fandom

Hills fans are in a way ‘ideal consumers’ (Cavucchi 1998:62) with highly stable and predictable consumption habits, they paradoxically hold strong anti-commercial beliefs. The essential contradiction of fandom therefore is that fans are ‘commodity-completists’ while simultaneously expressing anti-commercial beliefs or ideologies.’ Unlike Jenkins and Lancaster, Hills refuses to address this imbalance by ‘recuperating fan-consumers as ‘producers’ and ‘creators’. He instead embraces this essential contradiction of fandom by refusing to explain it away. The author therefore believes that the preservation of that cultural contradiction is important and that approaches favouring one side of it will inevitably falsify the fan experience.  He concludes by saying that ‘The best we can hope for is a theoretical approach to fandom which can tolerate contradiction without seeking to close it down prematurely.’

Hills draws on Adorno’s theory of the ‘dialectic of value’ which considers fans as being ‘simultaneously inside and outside processes of commodification, experiencing an intensely personal ‘use-value’ in relation to their object of fandom, and then being re-positioned within more general and systematic processes of ‘exchange-value’. ‘The fan’s appropriation of a text is therefore an act of ‘final consumption’ which pulls this text away from (intersubjective and public) exchange value and towards (private, personal) use-value, but without ever cleanly or clearly being able to separate out the two.

Hills encourages us to think of fans as performers, displacing the emphasis on the text-reader interaction, and concludes by quoting the work of De Certeau, who saw consumption within a model of consumer appropriation. The model depends upon a rigid separation between producers and consumers who ‘poach’ or ‘appropriate’ the producer’s products.

4 – Fan Sociality and Status

Hills looks at the work of Bourdieu on processes of cultural distinction as a means for analysing how fan ‘status’ is built up. ‘It allows us to consider any given fan culture not simply as a community but also as a social hierarchy where fans share a common interest while also competing over fan knowledge, access to the object of fandom, and status.’ Bourdieu also introduces the idea of the ‘playful’ fan, playing in the sense of recognising the rules of their specific fan culture, building up different types of fan knowledge and skill most relevant to that culture in order to gain distinction. Hills does, however, criticise the way Bourdieu links all fan thought and activity directly to class, heavily limiting the application of his theory to such widely diverse communities. The centrality of the concept of ‘the economy’ of culture excludes any type of fandom that does not fit into corresponding modes of competitive and calculative ‘play’

Hills criticises academics such as Fiske and Thornton for overemphasizing the importance of cultural capital perhaps in detriment to social and symbolic capital. He also accuses them of not reflecting on the moral dualisms (Fiske’s ‘good’ popular cultural capital against ‘bad’ economic capital, ‘pained’ fan victims (in Bacon-Smith 1992) against ‘poaching’ fan victors (in Jenkins 1992a) constructed within their academic accounts.

The author points to the fact that the ‘discursive mantras’ of both fans and academics tend to be taken at face value in ethnographic studies, assuming that both groups can fully account for their discursive practices. In addition to this, ‘fan ethnographies have focused on fans of single texts or narrow intertextual networks, treating these fans as naturally-occurring (and spectacular) communities. This tends to close down the investigation of how we may, as subjects, negotiate our way though multiple fandoms of varying intensities at different times.’

5 – Players and their ‘Little Madnesses’

Hills argues that fans should be viewed as players in the sense that they ‘become immersed in non-competitive and affectionate play. What is distinctive about this view of play, he suggests, is that it deals with the fan’s emotional attachment and suggests that fans may imaginatively create their own sets of cultural coundaries. Kleinian and fantasy-based approaches, according to Hills have a tendency to positioning the fan as lacking, recreating the academic moral dualism of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.

Winnicon defines some emotional attachments within culture as ‘little madnesses’ which, according to him continue throughout our lives as a way of maintaining mental/psychical health. ‘In this reading, fandom is neither pathological nor viewed as deficient; instead it can be theorised psychoanalytically as a form of ‘good’ health. Such an account can also be turned on the figure of the academic, for whom theory and theorists can provide a personal and idiosyncratic ‘third space’ for play activity. Just as fans create the contexts of their fan cultures, so too do academics create new contexts for future work through the interplay of affective play and ‘tradition’ (producing academic movements such as ‘deconstruction’ or even something called ‘cultural studies.’

Hills concludes that fan cultures are neither rooted in an ‘objective’ interpretive community or set of texts, nor are they atomised collections of individuals whose ‘subjective passions and interests happen to overlap. Fan cultures are both found and created, and it is this inescapable tension which supports what he terms the ‘dialectic of value’ that is enacted by fan cultures.

6 – Fandom as ‘Cult’

Hills suggests that ‘cult texts and icons…share ‘family resemblances’ such as endlessly deferred narrative, hyperdiegesis, auterism and contigent denaration. This implies that cult status cannot be viewed as entirely extratextual or fan-led.’ He does clarify, however, that ‘the text itself cannot exclusively determine whether or not it will be poached. (quoting Smith 1999:68).

Hills argues that fans make use of religious discourses of ‘cult’ because they lack the restrictive text-specific nature of aesthetic arguments as well as preserving a place for  ‘self-absence’ – which is important to accommodate the somewhat irrational contradictions of fandom – while still allowing for accusations of complete fan irrationality to be warded off.

He adds that fans often feel the need to defend or justify fan activities, yet tend to unintentionally become enmeshed in connotations of  ‘religious fanaticism’ or ‘detachment from reality’. ‘The discursive defence of fandom which draws on religious terms hence reintroduced the possibilities of stigmatisation which it seeks to evade.’ Hills argues that positions which wholly disassociates cult discourses from religious sentiments (as do many fan accounts) are relying on yet another simplistic moral dualism.

Hills suggests that cult status hinges on leaving a certain space fro interpretation, speculation and fan affect which cannot be closed down by final ‘proof’ or ‘fact’. ‘Even texts which appear to offer closure or resolution can be mined by fans for endlessly deferred narrative.’  This endlessly deferred narrative together with ideologies of romanticism worked through the notions of  ‘uniqueness’ and ‘art’ (via the figure of the auteur) are two of the major factors that generally define cult status. This concept of endlessly deferred narrative could also be applied to videogames, as they by their very nature do not offer final ‘proof’ or closure.

7 – Performative Consumtion (relevant to cosplay)

Hills introduces the term ‘performative consumption’ as a way of capturing the contradictions between use-value and exchange-value represented and staged by fan culture. He argues that this is a useful term because it refers to oscillations between intense ‘self-reflexivity’ and ‘self-absence’ characteristic of fan culture. He unpacks this notion by suggesting that practices such as impersonation and costuming can embody and physically replay the self-reflexive/self-absence contradiction of fandom.

‘By blurring the lines between self and other, fan impersonation challenges cultural norms of the fixed and bounded self. Criticism of fan impersonation tend to be produced within ‘common sense’ notions of ‘good’ voluntarist individualism, therefore dismissing fan-impersonators as lacking a ‘strong enough’ self-identity’.  This notion, however tends to ignore the finer working of fan culture in favour of judgement of individuals. This theory could be applied to practices such as cosplay in videogames.