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Fandom, homes and families: Home as an overlooked site of fannish practice
- Source: Journal of Fandom Studies, The, Volume 10, Issue 1, Mar 2022, p. 3 - 17
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- 05 May 2021
- 08 Jul 2021
- 01 Mar 2022
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Abstract
In this article I argue that the home is an overlooked site of fannish practice and the corollary that fan practices can be important to the place-making activities of domestic and familial life. Presented here are examples from a study of South African fans of global popular culture that centres both the place and the idea of home as a meaningful point of entry. In the article I offer four ways of thinking about fandom as a quotidian place-making activity: the ways that the home is coded and cultivated as specifically fannish through collection and display; the home as the site of much of the free and precarious labour that drives so many fandoms; the home as a source of cultural reproduction through intergenerational fandom as well as the gendered pleasures and consolations of fandom in the family; and, lastly, the home as a site of contested moral economies.
Funding
- South African National Research Foundation’s Thuthuka programme