Introduction

Many point to 1992 as the year that the field of media fan studies was officially established, marked by the publication of Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and the edited collection The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Though the origins of the field can be traced back to a wide array of work within television studies, feminist media studies, queer theory, and (sub)cultural studies from the 1970s onwards, fan studies represented a break from pre-existing work on audiences and reception on a number of key fronts. First, scholars actively sought to speak back to pathologized representations of fans within both journalistic and scholarly discourse (Jensen, 1992). They accomplished this, second, by framing fans as resistant readers and media producers in their own right, focusing on both the communal and creative dimensions of fan culture. Third, and finally, this early work overwhelmingly focused on female fans, often suggesting that fan culture functioned as both a feminine and feminist space for commentary on popular media representations (Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins, 1992; Penley 1992).