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The essay explores the development of informal fan groups in the context of the late Soviet Union. It argues that despite being influenced by Western fandom, the countercultural potential of its actions led to specifically Soviet meanings of fandom. With a constant influx of images of fan practices around the world since the 1960s, a minority of young Muscovites had begun to imitate these since the early 1970s. The developing fan movement, however, combined violent behavior with a sense of cultural superiority. To belong to an almost global fan movement meant to trump fans from other Soviet republics that had not yet introduced such practices. The big movements in Moscow especially elevated themselves above others—thereby reproducing earlier hierarchies of the multinational Soviet Union.

This introduction briefly introduces the book’s topic and historical scope and establishes “the convergence culture industry” as an analytical framework. This portmanteau of Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “the culture industry” is positioned as a polemic, but nonetheless one that can help us understand the gendered mainstreaming of fan culture and attempts to standardize fan identities and practices in the digital age. As the title of the introduction suggests, it also situates this moment within fan and geek culture (and the privilege of white, straight, cis-gendered men in it) within a broader array of antifeminist pushbacks against “political correctness” and “social justice warriors.” Accordingly, the introduction concludes with a consideration of whether systemic attempts to remarginalize female fans within both fan culture and fan studies might be productively, if allegorically, framed through the GOP’s “War on Women,” emergent “Men’s Rights” and alt-right movements, and nostalgia for a lost status quo.

This chapter explores the complexities of local culture beyond the models of cultural dimensions with a Chinese user case. It regards Chinese graduate student Mei’s late night message exchanges as a new form of fan innovation and a literacy practice. In comparison to Brian’s orality practice in the previous chapter, this chapter discusses how different cultural preferences lead to different use and genre patterns of text messaging and contribute to different meanings. It exemplifies the dialogical nature of technology in cross-cultural technology design and illustrates many factors, other than cultural dimensions, contributed to this particular local use. Meanwhile Mei’s case also epitomizes the importance of “constructive subjectiveness” in technology design as her identity as a sports fan was a driving force in her creative way of using and localizing a technology.

This chapter shows how the very deadliness of the commodity form—its radical detachment from any traditional context—ultimately extends the affective range and reach of popular music. It argues that the rock counterculture was founded not against, but through technological manipulation, commercial standardization, and consumer desire, and thus provided fans with new, more thrilling ways of inhabiting a national scene defined by market identities and taste cultures. Somewhere between Marcel Duchamp's arty toss-off and Elvis Presley's tossed-off art, a certain indifference comes to infect popular culture at large. In the end, this chapter focuses on the experiences and emergent sites of fandom, arguing that, with each cut, the King presented his body as an affectively charged and fully mediated public body and that, with records, radio, television, and film, his revolt extended—from one savvy fan to the next—across the body politic at large.

This chapter evaluates six prevalent interpretations of football's popularity in the United States and suggests that overlooked is the symbolic connection of football for both players and fans to frontier mythology and the psychological use of football as a framed outlet for hypermasculinity in a feminizing modern culture. This analysis also helps explain the sport's lack of diffusion to other continents when compared to baseball and basketball.

Chapter 6 examines the localization of screening community during Hong Kong’s 1960s industrial modernization. It examines the intersections among gendered labor, the Chinese patriarchal family, celebrity culture and fandom, through films starring 1960s idols, Connie Chan Po-chu and Josephine Siao Fong-fong. While fandom and celebrity culture were created by the real demographics of an increasing number of female workers who became Connie’s and Josephine’s fans, their viewership became discursive sites that contributed to the constructions of a gendered community both within and outside of traditional Confucian familial hierarchies. My analysis of films such as Her Tender Love ((Langru chunri feng, dir. Lui Kei, 1969) and Teddy Girls (Fenü zhengzhuan, dir. Lung Kong, 1969) demonstrates that masquerade not only becomes a point of identification for fans, but also a focusing lens for the convergence of seemingly conflicted experiences of teddy girls and factory girls. As much as they embodied the contradictions of urban industrial modernization, factory girls and teddy girls (both on- and off-screen) and their experiences constructed youth fandom as a discursive site for the creative imagining of freedom and empowerment. And both contributed to making and screening of the industrializing and modernizing city that was 1960s Hong Kong.

This paper analyzes gender performativity in the form of cross-dressing cuteness through cosplaying by a popular male-cosplaying-female fan group “Ailisi Weiniang Tuan (Alice Cos Group)” based in China. Drawing from cute studies, gender/queer studies, and fan studies, this paper examines the phenomenon of fake girls as a venue of redefining the boundaries of identity and gender using cosplaying and the notion of cuteness to achieve queerness to address the issue of gender performativity through queered cuteness in today’s China.

Steampunk aesthetics in the production design of Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film production of Sherlock Holmes and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) reinforces a burgeoning alliance between steampunks and traditional Sherlockian fan cultures.  This chapter explores how such a presentation of the character and world of Sherlock Holmes further popularlizes steampunk aesthetics for mass-market consumption and demonstrates the natural fit of a steampunk interpretation for this most popular of Victorian narratives.It also discusses how the film’s attraction for steampunks enthusiasts makes it a remix of the character and story for contemporary sensibilities rather than the more usual pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle’s style and voice that reinterpretations have so often been. Finally, it extrapolates that this process of “remix,” that is replicated across other literatures and their interpretations, might be the correct descriptor for the larger aesthetic and cultural movement of steampunk.

Chapter 2 explores how the fan culture surrounding the early film industry’s female celebrities—not just performers, but writers, directors, editors, and producers—placed them in a new kind of western frontier, where they appeared as resourceful, independent, and ambitious pioneers out to achieve fortune and success. This publicity drew women, figuratively and literally, to the picture business by attracting the female fans who were central to the rise of Hollywood and to the reputation and identity of modern Los Angeles. Ultimately, the celebration of these women as feminist avatars by writers like Louella Parsons led fans to believe that they were helping to midwife an industry that was wide open to their new desires.

Drawing on discussions of “fandom” in the twentieth century, this chapter treats relationships that are, or seek to be, mainly affective and that explicitly entail constructing the author as a charismatic individual (although one who is also approachable). The chapter shows that fans, unlike clients, do not contact the author for practical help but instead write to establish an emotional link with a famous writer and thereby give greater meaning to their lives. It includes a discussion of fetishists, letter-writers who sought to exchange with Scott things that were charged with significance. The individuals treated are mostly obscure, but there are a few correspondents known to Scott scholars or socially important in their own day, who nevertheless functioned as fans because they sought to share or tap into the great man’s charisma or authority. Finally, the chapter shows that Scott at times gave credence to the longing of his fans.

The star system in France emerged around 1910 as theatre and music-hall stars crossed over into film, but only really took off in the 1920s with the establishment of a wide-ranging film press, and the sharp rise in cinema attendance in the mid-1920s. French actors had to contend, then as they do now, with American or American-based stars in particular. None the less, by the end of the decade there was a flourishing star culture comprising both French and non-French names. Pierre Batcheff was one of the leading jeune premiers of his time, foreshadowing the popular heroes of the 1930s while still looking backwards to both the Romantic hero of the nineteenth century, as well as the exotic New World star most keenly represented by Rudolph Valentino. Seen from the vantage point of the mid-1940s, Batcheff might well have seemed a transitional form of masculinity. This chapter looks at Batcheff as a jeune premier, as pin-up, and as a surrealist star and describes fan culture during his time.

This chapter provides an extended inquiry into the psychodynamics of southern gospel. It identifies a reciprocal process of sentimental exchange in the music that sustains a surreptitious modernity within a fundamentalist culture. This dynamic operates just beneath the surface of consensus about the music and about evangelicalism as a structure of belief. Methodologically, the chapter draws on literary critical readings of song lyrics in relation to analysis of live performance and the music's fan culture. It shows how the music allows the individual to confront feelings of doubt, insecurity, fear, isolation, and general spiritual discontent—even or especially when these feelings might contradict orthodox doctrine—without ever putting the individual in direct, public conflict with orthodoxy. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how a shaky but workable pluralism takes hold within evangelical fundamentalism.

This book is about musical performance on film, the use of music within film and film musicals: a triple focus that articulates the complex relationship that exists between music and the cinematic text. While the film musical has always been seen as the main vehicle for cinematic musical performance, it is by no means the only place where singing, dancing, jazz bands or even on-screen orchestras are featured. Indeed, the sheer range of musical performances or what we call ‘musical moments’ that have appeared throughout cinema history, together with the extraordinary procession of featured stars and performers is remarkable.

The Life of Melania the Younger is filled with emotional language and emotionally charged interactions between characters. Desire, zeal, distress, and other emotions paradoxically drive events in a narrative about a woman exceedingly successful in the art of self-control. This chapter examines the function of emotions at the intersection of gender, class, and religion in the Life of Melania the Younger and within the context of late antique hagiography, which typically privileged desire, grief, and maternal love as the standard feminine emotional repertoire. The Life provides a handbook in elite emotional behavior for the emerging Christian ascetic set by presenting a woman deft at the art of public and private self-fashioning.

This chapter focuses on the ‘rediscovery’ of Virgil’s tomb in the Renaissance, exploring its position in the cultures of scholarship, travel, and leisure. Clusters of poets’ graves sprang up around the so-called ‘tomb of Virgil’ in Piedigrotta near Naples, re-establishing it as a site of literary succession and inspiration; the tomb played a central role in the construction of Neapolitan urban identity and was a popular site for early modern travel and leisure, a role it still retains today. Generations of visitors to the tomb have felt a strong personal connection to the poet, a connection they have chosen to mark by leaving graffiti or notes at the tomb, by taking away laurel leaves, and by reciting and producing poetry at the site.