This chapter explores how anime fan audiences have evolved since the 1950s regarding the development of physical venues and digital platforms. Fan audiences as “produser” (Bruns, 2008) consume, produce, and use anime and its related content through their various activities such as producing derivative works (dojinshi fanzines, music videos, and even games), performing cosplay, engaging in contents tourism, and so on. Fans’ deep commitment was incited by anime booms that happened in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The 1970s saw the beginning of the Comic Market, where fans can communicate with one another by selling and purchasing fanzines and performing cosplay, although the issue of copyright infringement has remained unsolved. Moreover, since the late 1990s, the internet and social media have facilitated the dissemination of anime and other contents produced through media mix (i.e., multimedia franchises) on an international scope. They also serve as platforms for fans to interact with each other domestically and globally.

In 2015, a robust strain of slash fiction began to explore the nature of the intimacy shared between aides-de-camp Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens during the American Revolution. Comparing this vast body of writing to popular genres of eighteenth-century fiction, this chapter frames the phenomenon known as "Historical Lams" (Lams being a portmanteau formed by fusing the first syllables of each surname) as the great queer epistolary novel that got away. More precisely, I examine how literary fandom surrounding the Hamilton-Laurens bond ultimately theorizes the cultural function of fiction through eighteenth-century discourses integral to the rise of the novel. I conclude by arguing that this literature offers a valuable framework for reconsidering the world-building potential of reception in the making of queer pasts.

This chapter draws on experiences of mixing methods in the interdisciplinary research of dance, choreography, immersive performance/participatory performance, and fandom. Reflecting on the methods employed in the author’s book Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance, the chapter treats the research process as improvisational and compositional, emerging in tandem with the work being researched. These methods include audience research, choreographic analysis, participant observation, and analysing media content. The aim of the chapter is to make the research process explicit so other researchers might apply a similarly compositional approach in audience research in other performance contexts.

Clothing and style are important aspects of heavy metal culture, used by musicians and fans to identify with the broader values and norms of the subculture, and to communicate difference from mainstream culture. Denim and leather garments are fundamental to metal wardrobes, with band t-shirts worn nearly universally to signify particular metal preferences. For serious metal fans, battle jackets offer a unique way to demonstrate musical taste and dedication to metal. A battle jacket is a customised denim jacket (usually with the sleeves removed) embellished with band patches, badges, studs, hand-painting and other additions. Jacket customisation has been practised by fans for nearly as long as heavy metal has existed, and thrives in contemporary metal subcultures, bolstered by online jacket forums and patch trading opportunities. Historically, battle jackets can be connected with WW2 bomber jackets and custom motorcycle patch vests. For fans, battle jackets offer a way to externalise their allegiance to metal and to reinforce a sense of ‘outsider’ status. The jackets also carry highly personal meanings for their wearers and help to articulate a sense of self that extends beyond recreational fandom.

This chapter explores some of the practices, interactions, and preferences of readers and fans as part of their lived comics cultures. Engagement with the medium has taken various forms, from casual readership and sharing titles among friendship groups in childhood, through to being a collector. Beyond simply involving reading comics, fandom can incorporate a range of other activities as part of an enhanced commitment to the medium, and various activities are touched upon. Further, it looks at how readers, both historically and today, have accessed their comics in varied formats and across many genres in Britain and the USA, linking their lived experience with production. In looking into these issues, the chapter engages with the work of various publishers, genres, and titles. It also engages with how reading comics and participating in fandom intersects with both age and gender, which this chapter adopts as lenses to look at constructions of childhood and comics reading. A final aspect of the chapter relates to how fan and reader interactions in these spaces and participation in activities often vary according to gender. Indeed, it can be argued that comics reading and collecting has been heavily gendered regarding both production and reception.

As popular print ephemera, comics hold a complex and precarious relationship to preservation and duration, which has marked their status as “archivable” (or “non-archivable”) materials. This chapter sketches some of the different ways that institutions, producers, and audiences have coped with this fragility and have defined practices of preservation and collection. The chapter subsequently analyzes comics in libraries and archives, collecting practices by readers and fans, uses of archives in comics production. At each step, it pays particular attention to the importance of materiality, senses, formats, manipulation in the preservation of comics, connecting them to matters of copyright, library policies, and commercial interests. The importance of these parameters is set out against changing notions of archives and archival practice, especially under the impulse of their digital transformation. The broader picture considers the importance of medium specificity in an age of online archival plenitude.

We begin with a narrative about the vast inequalities between the 2021 women’s and men’s college basketball championships (sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association). These disparate events exemplify systemic inequalities across college athletics that we document with data showing sex-based disparities in participation, resource allocation, and leadership. We introduce a critical perspective on Title IX – the celebrated 1972 U.S. sex nondiscrimination law – arguing that aspects of institutions employed under nondiscrimination policy can nevertheless undermine the quest for equality. We outline a set of policy proposals to address gender inequalities. These include more aggressive enforcement of Title IX, policies to ensure equal resource allocation and protections for women student-athletes, and initiatives to increase opportunities for women’s industry leadership. We then theorize three routes to policy change – from the bottom up, top down, and outside in – as well as the institutional hurdles that stand in the way of change. Throughout this discussion, we make a concerted effort to highlight how sex segregation, inadequate representation, androcentric organizational culture, and market demands are hurdles faced not just by those seeking equality in athletics but by other marginalized groups as well.

A final possible path for change is from outside the system – that is, from the public and/or consumers of college sports advocating from the outside in. We theorize that fans will be less supportive of gender equity initiatives than the general public, given their investment in the product and the overwhelming media bias that places higher value on and coverage of men’s sports. We also predict those men who participated in formalized sports in high school will be more inured to gender inequalities and less supportive of aggressive change – a downstream socialization effect from participating in a sex-segregated system. We find strong support for our hypotheses, using a novel measure of fandom. We also find that parents with daughters who play sports express greater support for gender equity initiatives; however, this effect is dwarfed by the fandom and enduring high school sports dynamics. This shows barriers to change from the marketplace and the enduring impacts of sex-segregated institutions preventing change from the outside in.

Through a reading of the fanbase response to Sally Wainwright’s 2019 BBC/HBO adaptation of the Anne Lister diaries, Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks the following questions: what is at stake in bringing the diaries to the screen, and how does the process of adaptation queer time? In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original. With her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack not only rewrites history for a contemporary audience, but also queers our temporal relationship to the past. This chapter analyses how the fans’ intensive affective response to Gentleman Jack - variously described as a form of community building, of self-discovery, and of mourning and loss - merges the fictional and the original archive in productive ways. In this dialogue between the present and the past, the Lister archive continues to forge a queer trajectory that highlights the losses and gains of an occluded and rediscovered queer history. Wainwright’s refashioning of the Lister diaries for today’s television audience has in fact led us back to the ‘phenomenon’ that Lister was in her own time and to a new understanding of the importance of Lister for today.

Intersecting critical dance studies and performance studies, this chapter examines K-pop dance as an emerging popular dance medium. It situates K-pop music video choreography within the genealogy of popular dance scholarship by closely reading select point choreographies of iconic K-pop idols over the past decade, such as BTS, BIGBANG, Seventeen, PSY, EXO, BLACKPINK, and TWICE. Styles of K-pop music video include schoolgirls and schoolboys, beast idols and bad girls, dance-centric, experimental, and hybrid. While these categories are preliminary and overlap with one another, the basic styles of choreography open room for discussion on racial and gender identity, hybridity, authenticity, and tourism in transnational contemporary Korean dance beyond the mediated screen.

The global success of BTS demonstrates that their artistry and message have captured the attention of many. Similarly, their fandom, ARMY, has received attention for its ability to organize around social justice causes. While BTS and ARMY are pushing against and connecting across borders that often seem impermeable, this work does not happen with ease. How do people in a fandom that spans the globe both organize and educate within this fandom community? This chapter examines fandom through a case study. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests called attention to violence and racism against Black people after the murder of George Floyd. There were concerted efforts within the ARMY fandom to raise money and awareness for BLM. Many of these efforts began before BTS and their company announced support for BLM. It is important to recognize the fandom’s public-facing, collective work, and it is equally important to recognize the effort required to educate within the community about this and other social justice issues. This chapter identifies, tracks, and analyzes attempts being made in the fandom to educate and discuss race and racism around BLM by sharing stories of personal experience with racism, hashtags meant to encourage solidarity, and visual art.

Contemporary scholarship on fandom explores how communities are created through affinities of taste. Drawing on that work, this chapter argues that Cicero’s account in De Finibus and Pro Archia of his and his fellow Romans’ investment in and debt to Athenian literature experiments with the effects of passionately identifying with another culture – thus opening up ways of thinking and feeling about citizenship as an aesthetic property that transcends the limits of ethnic or linguistic identity. Hellenistic literature, organiSed in part around the trope of Athens as a universalist model of human excellence – a trope used first by Athenian writers and appropriated by writers in both Greek and Latin in the first century BCE – helps make the concept of universal citizenship thinkable, not only for Romans like Cicero but for readers over centuries (including scholars and students of 'classics' today) who shared and sustained his investment in the Athenian Greek past. This fantasy of cultural belonging obscures the violence of Roman imperial reality and helps explain the persistent appeal of 'classical' Greek literature.

In this chapter we ask: How and why do audience members become involved in using management ideas in their wider social contexts? Based on interviews with management practitioners who have attended management guru lectures, the findings presented in this chapter contribute to developing a broader understanding of significant, but relatively unexplored, areas of potential impact related to the social use of these ideas. First, by identifying three main forms of fan involvement associated with the use of management ideas which primarily occur outside an organisation (exaltation, socialisation and marketisation), the findings advance our view on the potential scope and primary aims of management idea use beyond organisational implementation. Second, we show how these forms vary significantly in their main drivers which are rooted in audience members’ differential skills sets and relevant communities – outside the setting of an organisation – they relate to. In addition, we show how these skills are made productive via different identificatory and commodificatory practices, and explain how these have specific implications for the broader impact of ideas.

Modern literature is being challenge and reinvented by fangirls who offer a model for feminist communal practice and are playing an important role in reshaping the practice of writing in public. Their influence is visible now; fandom broadly and fanfiction in particular has become a battleground, and. the visibility of women as fans and authors has brought with it violent backlash. The immediacy of online discourse and the speed with which reactions travel through social media bring the opportunity for fans to share their thoughts and creative work with the original texts’ authors and fellow fans, but this immediacy also extends to those expressing rage and dissatisfaction. Fanfiction and fan art—from “shipping,” or romantically connecting two or more characters, to the crafting of “alternate universes,” “crossovers,” and beyond—circulates on every social media network, offering new visions for whose stories can be told and who gets to tell them.

This chapter describes the ways in which a set of ‘romance’ signs create a landscape as the site of an individual adventure, journey of growth, and path to fulfilment. The structuring of romance affects is not only prolific in literature and folk tales, but has all kinds of implications for geophysical landscapes as well: from touristic discourses which describe specific destinations as sites of ‘romance’ and ‘adventure,’ to film narratives which intersect with tourism by leveraging on viewer fandom to popularize certain film locations, to the semiotics of amusement parks and other attractions.

‘Tape-trading’ – the sharing of illicitly recorded material between hardcore fans – was a small but important part of popular music consumption during the analogue and CD eras. Although the sharing of the same kind of musical material still exists today, the emergence of various networked technologies has fundamentally changed many of the features of tape-trading as a social practice. For example, there has been a great expansion of the amount of material being shared and it is being shared more quickly. However, there has also arguably been a reduction in the circulation of some of the artistically most significant material and some of the strong social ties among collectors have arguably diluted. In a variety of ways, the transformations that have occurred in tape-trading mirror trends within mainstream digital music consumption.