Content area
Full Text
The current era of fan studies is typically marked by the publication of Henry Jenkins's (1992) Textual Poachers and Camille Bacon-Smith's (1992) Enterprising Women. Both books explore the subculture(s) of media fans, revealing the richness, complexity, and meanings of fan activities in important new ways. Since that time, fan studies has exploded as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, and cross-national focus of inquiry. Intersecting audience studies, media studies, and consumption studies in ways that advance all three areas of inquiry (as well as others), recent studies of fans and fandom force us to rethink key questions of identity, performance, practice, genre, gender, sexuality, self, affect, race, ethnicity, and nationalism.
The articles in this issue represent significant advances in fan studies to date. Matt Hills ("Patterns of Surprise: The 'Aleatory Object' in Psychoanalytic Ethnography and Cyclical Fandom") focuses on overlooked patterns of consumption in fan studies. Through psychoanalytic case study analysis, he introduces the notion of cyclical fandom to explore new questions of fans' self-discovery and self-transformation through...