Professor: Dayna Chatman

4.00 credits

• CRN 32278: Monday & Wednesday, 8:00-9:50 AM @ CHA 201

Do you consider yourself a “fan” of a specific film franchise, television series, or music artist? Does the object of your fan attention sometimes not gel with your gender, racial, or sexual identity? Has participation in fan communities strengthened your sense of self and affirmed your identity? Or do you struggle to participate in fan communities because you feel isolated or ostracized due to your identity? In this course, you can reflect on, write about, and share your personal fan/fandom experiences, observe other fan communities, and analyze fan/fandom culture and media texts.

This course introduces you to fan/fandom studies and focuses specifically on fans of media. In the early weeks of the course, you will learn about key concepts and debates through reading and discussing foundational theoretical essays and research studies. In the second half of the course, you will explore how fans’ various subjectivities (e.g., gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality) are strengthened, negotiated, challenged, and sometimes ridiculed within fandom spaces. Through in-class activities, you will use digital ethnography and textual analysis to examine and interpret online fan interactions and fan-made media such as fanfic, fan art, and fanvids. The culminating assignment for this course is an original research project in which you examine your or others’ participation in fandom using autoethnography as a method. 

Graduation Requirement:  This class will fulfill an Arts and Letters Colloquium and the HC 444H: US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.  If a student already has completed an Arts and Letters Colloquium, this course will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and the US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.