WATCHING YOU, WATCHING ME: REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE FANS AND FANDOM IN ACADEMIA, NEWS MEDIA AND POPULAR CULTURE

This project is a close examination of the representation of female participatory fandom, including scholarly work on fandom from the 1980s to the present, recent news media coverage of fan fiction, and a case study of fan responses to their own representation on the television series Supernatural. I will argue that outsider representations treat fans as a convenient Other, in order to normalize ‘mainstream’ relationships to media texts. This function is gendered, drawing on historical, philosophical and medical discourses which associate femininity with the body and emotion, and masculinity with the mind and reason. I close with a case study of television series Supernatural, which features recurring fan characters based on the program’s real fandom. Through a survey questionnaire, fans were given the chance to respond to these representations. A much more complex picture of female fan identity emerges from these accounts.

Name thesis:degree_name

MA

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Media Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Armstrong, Sara Breanne

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Knabe, Susan

• fandom
• fans
• fan studies
• online communities
• gender representation
• feminism
• reason vs. emotion
• television
• Supernatural

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/18693

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/18693