This article investigates the motives for entering a digital fan community and becoming a fan for... more This article investigates the motives for entering a digital fan community and becoming a fan for the first time—and, subsequently, leaving it again—by focusing on these fans’ main entry and exit points. It looks at the fan community following the Norwegian hit show SKAM (2015–17), which grew over its four seasons into a global cult phenomenon with viewers and fans of all ages from around the world. Empirically, the article draws on forty-seven interviews with Scandinavian SKAM fans between the ages of thirteen and seventy. Based on these interviews, the article presents a tripartite model through which fan motivations are located in the intersections among intrapersonal, social, and transmedial factors.
This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-... more This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-constructed in online fan communities. We analyse how these play moods are negotiated across the life course for participating fans. Play moods are closely tied to the playful modes of fan practices, and by gaining a greater understanding of the moods that fans engage in at different stages of their life course we gain new insights into fan play as it relates to issues of age-related norms in fan communities. Specifically, this article analyses the Norwegian teenage streaming drama SKAM (Shame) (NRK, 2015‐17), which was produced for a target audience of 16-year-old Norwegian girls but ended up capturing the hearts of people of all ages across Scandinavia and internationally. This study is based on interviews with 43 Scandinavian fans aged between 13 and 70. The participants were all active on social media (Facebook, Instagram, the show’s blog, etc.) while the show was on the air and the interviews offers insights into issues of age-appropriateness as it relates to fan practices. As such, fans ‘police’ both themselves and each other based on perceptions of age, while also engaging in practices that are by nature playful and may be considered subjectively and culturally ‘youthful’ or ‘childish’. The article combines theory of play and fan studies with a focus on the life course and cultural gerontology in order to highlight these tendencies in the SKAM fandom.
This article is a study of fans of the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) in the context... more This article is a study of fans of the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) in the context of the revival series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), when the series returned with a four-episode special on Netflix after being off the air for nine years. The series revolves around a single mother and her daughter, and this article shows how fans use representations of familial relationships, generations and transitional life stages in their own life course as long-term fans. The article combines theory on long-running serial narratives, media generations and cultural gerontology with fan studies theory, and analyses email interviews with 27 long-time fans of Gilmore Girls aged between 21 and 67 years. This article argues that being a long-term fan with an intense relationship to a media text (e.g. constantly re-watching old episodes) disrupts fans’ experience of generational belonging through: (1) what is experienced as nostalgic or a lack of nostalgia; (2) shifting character identifications across the life course and cross-generational identification; and (3) constantly ascribing new meaning to the media text as fans experience transitional stages in their own lives.
In 2012, Celebrity Studies published a special issue entitled ‘Back in the Spotlight: Female Cele... more In 2012, Celebrity Studies published a special issue entitled ‘Back in the Spotlight: Female Celebrity and Ageing’. In her introduction, special issue editor Deborah Jermyn asks when it is that a woman becomes ‘old’ or ‘older’, thereby prompting us to think about changing understandings of ageing and old age in relation to female celebrities. The 2012 special issue sought to ‘serve as a rallying call’ (Jermyn 2012 Jermyn, D., 2012. ‘Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back’: ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity. Celebrity studies, 3 (1), 1–12. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar] , p. 10) for researchers to shed further light on ‘a culture where the representation of ageing and “older” female celebrities is by turns seemingly hopeful and newly affirming one moment, and destructive and retrograde the next’ (p. 10). Moreover, Deborah Jermyn and Su Holmes end their joint article in the follow-up volume Women & Celebrity: Cultures of Ageing (2015 Jermyn, D. and Holmes, S., 2015. Introduction: a timely intervention – unravelling the gender/age/celebrity matrix. In: D. Jermyn and S. Holmes, eds. Women, celebrity & cultures of ageing. Freeze frame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–11. [Crossref], [Google Scholar] ) with a call for broadening the field of interest from representations of (or lack of representations of) older celebrities in the media to also include audiences. This shift of focus would allow us to ask questions to the ways in which older viewers and users relate to older celebrities, how they use representations of ageing celebrities in their daily lives to negotiate their own problems of ageing, and how older audiences relate to celebrities and media texts as consumers. Jermyn and Holmes thus advocate for more empirical reception studies, lamenting that ‘questions of audience reception have so far been conspicuous by their absence in this regard, despite their centrality in understanding how ageing female celebrities come to “mean”’ (p. 19).
This special issue of Celebrity Studies responds to these calls by broadening the scope of study to consider not only ageing celebrities but also narratives of ageing and ageing audiences, with a particular focus on ageing fans. By making fan studies, celebrity studies, and ageing studies speak together, we are invited not only to think celebrity studies from new angles but also to challenge as well ideas of fandom and age as of ageing, gender and media. Although they emphasise various aspects, the following articles are thus located at the intersection of media studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, fan studies, and gerontology.
This article analyses representations of the ageing body in the live televised show Monty Python ... more This article analyses representations of the ageing body in the live televised show Monty Python Live (Mostly) (2014). The famous satire group performed in the O2 arena in London, and the show was telecast live in cinemas and aired on television across the world. In the show, the group members, now in their 70s, reprise a series of their most popular sketches and introduce a few new sketches. This analysis focuses on the ways in which representations of the ageing body intersect with representations of gender and sexuality in order to discuss how the boundaries for appropriation and subversion become blurred in the context of the show. This article combines theory of mediatisation with cultural gerontology and feminist theory in order to bring these issues to light. I argue that the show offers an appropriation of the female ageing body – often exemplified through cross-dressing – but also a subversion of sexuality for ageing bodies (both male and female). This article forms part of ‘Media and the Ageing Body’ Special Issue.
This article is a production study of two talk shows for the Danish television channel, TV2 Charl... more This article is a production study of two talk shows for the Danish television channel, TV2 Charlie: Meyerheim’s Talk Show (2006-) and Cecilie’s Book Show (2015-). TV2 Charlie is a niche channel (part of the TV2 network) that set out to target a mature and elderly audience when it started in 2004. The aim is to bring together mediatization research with production studies and cultural gerontology, and I argue that media logic is a useful analytical concept that allows us to describe production processes in concrete ways and, at the same time, understand the context-specific ways in which media play a role in societal changes. Thus, through a logic of operationalising conviviality at the channel level, the production level and the programme level, the programmes contribute to perceptions of ageing and old age that emphasise an increased need for stability and safety, on one hand, and a desire for feel-good moments, on the other. Furthermore, the programmes promote positive and active ageing in some instances while keeping old age invisible in other instances.
In this introductory article we offer a frame for understanding the relationship between the agei... more In this introductory article we offer a frame for understanding the relationship between the ageing body and the media as the focus for this special issue. As societies age, issues of representations of old bodies and people’s practices and embodied experiences with media technologies requires a deeper investigation. At the same time, contemporary society is undergoing processes of mediatization, which invites us to think of the ways in which media can be said to play a role in changing practices or changing representations regarding the older body. The introduction is concerned with this duality: the changing sociocultural conditions for the ageing body and the changing authority of media and its role for the ageing body. Finally, we briefly introduce the articles that are part of the special issue ‘The ageing body and the media’.
This article uses e-mail interviews with nine female fans to explore what it means to be a fan ov... more This article uses e-mail interviews with nine female fans to explore what it means to be a fan over the age of 50 of the popular BBC drama Sherlock (2010–). The research aims to better understand the role of fandom in later life, in particular how the participants in this study negotiate their perceptions of their subjective age in relation to being a fan in this part of their life course. This study combines theory on cultural gerontology with fan studies and mediatization theory in order to understand the dynamics and processes that guide fans' negotiations of subjective age as well as the role of fan practices and the affordances of social media in these processes. I argue that fandom, as a manifestation of a mediatized culture, augments the relevance of subjective age and informs the way in which participants in middle and later life perceive and negotiate their own subjective age specifically in relation to fandom as youth culture, women's passion, and creativity.
Using Raymond Williams essay from 1958, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, as a point of departure, we sugge... more Using Raymond Williams essay from 1958, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, as a point of departure, we suggest how processes of mediatization are implicated in cultural change. Through mediatization, culture has become ordinary in Williams’ sense of the word, though perhaps in an even more pronounced sense than he could have anticipated. As the studies in this special issue of MedieKultur demonstrate, mundane practices of everyday life – such as buying food, eating, drinking, and exercising – are increasingly addressed in public and discursively changed by various forms of media. At the same time, both mass media and digital media have made cultural experiences – from the artifacts of museums to the subcultures of the street – globally accessible, and interactive media increasingly allow everyone to contribute to cultural production and exchange. Formerly separate cultural domains like the reading of literature and news journalism are increasingly being integrated into a converging media environment. Finally, we introduce the individual contributions to this issue on Mediatization of Culture.
In this article I propose that we can understand talk and conversation in Sherlock (2010) fandom ... more In this article I propose that we can understand talk and conversation in Sherlock (2010) fandom on the micro-blogging site tumblr in three ways: (1) talk through appropriation, (2) talk through interpretation and (3) talk through imitation, and that we can see these through examples of mediatized talk. Sherlock is a popular 90-minute BBC TV series about Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, John Watson, in a contemporary setting. I apply mediatization theory to analyse how specific media logic and affordances shape the way in which fans talk and interact on this social media platform. Furthermore, the analysis includes theory from fan studies and audience studies in order to understand the cultural logic of fan communities, as mediatization is understood as a non-linear, dual process of transformation. Fans use textual narratives, fan-made narratives, popular memes and role playing when carrying out conversations. When these fan practices are intersected with the media logic and affordances of tumblr, conversations become complex, textually layered and use a variety of technological expressions, and, as such, these conversations become mediatized.
Today’s intensified blurring of boundaries between media, and between media and their audiences/u... more Today’s intensified blurring of boundaries between media, and between media and their audiences/users, is challenging our most basic understanding of genre as a principle of structuration and stability. However, it also diverts our attention to the equally basic logic that the blurring of boundaries needs frames in order for something to blur, to play, to question, for example, genre may serve as such a communicative frame. Terms like ‘genre hybrids’ and ‘cross genres’ have pointed to generic instabilities and experiments for a couple of decades now; yet, the technological development, the altered modes of media production and dis-tribution, the many practices of remediation on different levels and not least the inventive textual interventions by the co-called produser (Bruns, 2008) still renders the question of genre relevant: How should we understand genre today? What does genre mean, and how are genres being used? In which ways might genre be a productive term for conceptualising and comprehending the new digital media landscape, and, for example, help us understand what media are and how different media are guiding the communicative affordances and constraints on different platforms in different ways? And how might we refine our notions of traditional genre expressions, for example, in film and television?
Page 1. American television fiction transforming Danish teenagers' religious imagination... more Page 1. American television fiction transforming Danish teenagers' religious imaginations NYBRO PETERSEN E-mail: linenp@hum.ku.dk Abstract This paper argues that American television fiction with supernatural themes ...
... Petersen, LN , 2010-06-22 "Renegotiating Religious Imaginations Through Tran... more ... Petersen, LN , 2010-06-22 "Renegotiating Religious Imaginations Through Transformations of Banal Religion in Supernatural" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition ...
This article investigates the motives for entering a digital fan community and becoming a fan for... more This article investigates the motives for entering a digital fan community and becoming a fan for the first time—and, subsequently, leaving it again—by focusing on these fans’ main entry and exit points. It looks at the fan community following the Norwegian hit show SKAM (2015–17), which grew over its four seasons into a global cult phenomenon with viewers and fans of all ages from around the world. Empirically, the article draws on forty-seven interviews with Scandinavian SKAM fans between the ages of thirteen and seventy. Based on these interviews, the article presents a tripartite model through which fan motivations are located in the intersections among intrapersonal, social, and transmedial factors.
This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-... more This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-constructed in online fan communities. We analyse how these play moods are negotiated across the life course for participating fans. Play moods are closely tied to the playful modes of fan practices, and by gaining a greater understanding of the moods that fans engage in at different stages of their life course we gain new insights into fan play as it relates to issues of age-related norms in fan communities. Specifically, this article analyses the Norwegian teenage streaming drama SKAM (Shame) (NRK, 2015‐17), which was produced for a target audience of 16-year-old Norwegian girls but ended up capturing the hearts of people of all ages across Scandinavia and internationally. This study is based on interviews with 43 Scandinavian fans aged between 13 and 70. The participants were all active on social media (Facebook, Instagram, the show’s blog, etc.) while the show was on the air and the interviews offers insights into issues of age-appropriateness as it relates to fan practices. As such, fans ‘police’ both themselves and each other based on perceptions of age, while also engaging in practices that are by nature playful and may be considered subjectively and culturally ‘youthful’ or ‘childish’. The article combines theory of play and fan studies with a focus on the life course and cultural gerontology in order to highlight these tendencies in the SKAM fandom.
This article is a study of fans of the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) in the context... more This article is a study of fans of the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) in the context of the revival series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), when the series returned with a four-episode special on Netflix after being off the air for nine years. The series revolves around a single mother and her daughter, and this article shows how fans use representations of familial relationships, generations and transitional life stages in their own life course as long-term fans. The article combines theory on long-running serial narratives, media generations and cultural gerontology with fan studies theory, and analyses email interviews with 27 long-time fans of Gilmore Girls aged between 21 and 67 years. This article argues that being a long-term fan with an intense relationship to a media text (e.g. constantly re-watching old episodes) disrupts fans’ experience of generational belonging through: (1) what is experienced as nostalgic or a lack of nostalgia; (2) shifting character identifications across the life course and cross-generational identification; and (3) constantly ascribing new meaning to the media text as fans experience transitional stages in their own lives.
In 2012, Celebrity Studies published a special issue entitled ‘Back in the Spotlight: Female Cele... more In 2012, Celebrity Studies published a special issue entitled ‘Back in the Spotlight: Female Celebrity and Ageing’. In her introduction, special issue editor Deborah Jermyn asks when it is that a woman becomes ‘old’ or ‘older’, thereby prompting us to think about changing understandings of ageing and old age in relation to female celebrities. The 2012 special issue sought to ‘serve as a rallying call’ (Jermyn 2012 Jermyn, D., 2012. ‘Get a life, ladies. Your old one is not coming back’: ageing, ageism and the lifespan of female celebrity. Celebrity studies, 3 (1), 1–12. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar] , p. 10) for researchers to shed further light on ‘a culture where the representation of ageing and “older” female celebrities is by turns seemingly hopeful and newly affirming one moment, and destructive and retrograde the next’ (p. 10). Moreover, Deborah Jermyn and Su Holmes end their joint article in the follow-up volume Women & Celebrity: Cultures of Ageing (2015 Jermyn, D. and Holmes, S., 2015. Introduction: a timely intervention – unravelling the gender/age/celebrity matrix. In: D. Jermyn and S. Holmes, eds. Women, celebrity & cultures of ageing. Freeze frame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–11. [Crossref], [Google Scholar] ) with a call for broadening the field of interest from representations of (or lack of representations of) older celebrities in the media to also include audiences. This shift of focus would allow us to ask questions to the ways in which older viewers and users relate to older celebrities, how they use representations of ageing celebrities in their daily lives to negotiate their own problems of ageing, and how older audiences relate to celebrities and media texts as consumers. Jermyn and Holmes thus advocate for more empirical reception studies, lamenting that ‘questions of audience reception have so far been conspicuous by their absence in this regard, despite their centrality in understanding how ageing female celebrities come to “mean”’ (p. 19).
This special issue of Celebrity Studies responds to these calls by broadening the scope of study to consider not only ageing celebrities but also narratives of ageing and ageing audiences, with a particular focus on ageing fans. By making fan studies, celebrity studies, and ageing studies speak together, we are invited not only to think celebrity studies from new angles but also to challenge as well ideas of fandom and age as of ageing, gender and media. Although they emphasise various aspects, the following articles are thus located at the intersection of media studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, fan studies, and gerontology.
This article analyses representations of the ageing body in the live televised show Monty Python ... more This article analyses representations of the ageing body in the live televised show Monty Python Live (Mostly) (2014). The famous satire group performed in the O2 arena in London, and the show was telecast live in cinemas and aired on television across the world. In the show, the group members, now in their 70s, reprise a series of their most popular sketches and introduce a few new sketches. This analysis focuses on the ways in which representations of the ageing body intersect with representations of gender and sexuality in order to discuss how the boundaries for appropriation and subversion become blurred in the context of the show. This article combines theory of mediatisation with cultural gerontology and feminist theory in order to bring these issues to light. I argue that the show offers an appropriation of the female ageing body – often exemplified through cross-dressing – but also a subversion of sexuality for ageing bodies (both male and female). This article forms part of ‘Media and the Ageing Body’ Special Issue.
This article is a production study of two talk shows for the Danish television channel, TV2 Charl... more This article is a production study of two talk shows for the Danish television channel, TV2 Charlie: Meyerheim’s Talk Show (2006-) and Cecilie’s Book Show (2015-). TV2 Charlie is a niche channel (part of the TV2 network) that set out to target a mature and elderly audience when it started in 2004. The aim is to bring together mediatization research with production studies and cultural gerontology, and I argue that media logic is a useful analytical concept that allows us to describe production processes in concrete ways and, at the same time, understand the context-specific ways in which media play a role in societal changes. Thus, through a logic of operationalising conviviality at the channel level, the production level and the programme level, the programmes contribute to perceptions of ageing and old age that emphasise an increased need for stability and safety, on one hand, and a desire for feel-good moments, on the other. Furthermore, the programmes promote positive and active ageing in some instances while keeping old age invisible in other instances.
In this introductory article we offer a frame for understanding the relationship between the agei... more In this introductory article we offer a frame for understanding the relationship between the ageing body and the media as the focus for this special issue. As societies age, issues of representations of old bodies and people’s practices and embodied experiences with media technologies requires a deeper investigation. At the same time, contemporary society is undergoing processes of mediatization, which invites us to think of the ways in which media can be said to play a role in changing practices or changing representations regarding the older body. The introduction is concerned with this duality: the changing sociocultural conditions for the ageing body and the changing authority of media and its role for the ageing body. Finally, we briefly introduce the articles that are part of the special issue ‘The ageing body and the media’.
This article uses e-mail interviews with nine female fans to explore what it means to be a fan ov... more This article uses e-mail interviews with nine female fans to explore what it means to be a fan over the age of 50 of the popular BBC drama Sherlock (2010–). The research aims to better understand the role of fandom in later life, in particular how the participants in this study negotiate their perceptions of their subjective age in relation to being a fan in this part of their life course. This study combines theory on cultural gerontology with fan studies and mediatization theory in order to understand the dynamics and processes that guide fans' negotiations of subjective age as well as the role of fan practices and the affordances of social media in these processes. I argue that fandom, as a manifestation of a mediatized culture, augments the relevance of subjective age and informs the way in which participants in middle and later life perceive and negotiate their own subjective age specifically in relation to fandom as youth culture, women's passion, and creativity.
Using Raymond Williams essay from 1958, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, as a point of departure, we sugge... more Using Raymond Williams essay from 1958, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, as a point of departure, we suggest how processes of mediatization are implicated in cultural change. Through mediatization, culture has become ordinary in Williams’ sense of the word, though perhaps in an even more pronounced sense than he could have anticipated. As the studies in this special issue of MedieKultur demonstrate, mundane practices of everyday life – such as buying food, eating, drinking, and exercising – are increasingly addressed in public and discursively changed by various forms of media. At the same time, both mass media and digital media have made cultural experiences – from the artifacts of museums to the subcultures of the street – globally accessible, and interactive media increasingly allow everyone to contribute to cultural production and exchange. Formerly separate cultural domains like the reading of literature and news journalism are increasingly being integrated into a converging media environment. Finally, we introduce the individual contributions to this issue on Mediatization of Culture.
In this article I propose that we can understand talk and conversation in Sherlock (2010) fandom ... more In this article I propose that we can understand talk and conversation in Sherlock (2010) fandom on the micro-blogging site tumblr in three ways: (1) talk through appropriation, (2) talk through interpretation and (3) talk through imitation, and that we can see these through examples of mediatized talk. Sherlock is a popular 90-minute BBC TV series about Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, John Watson, in a contemporary setting. I apply mediatization theory to analyse how specific media logic and affordances shape the way in which fans talk and interact on this social media platform. Furthermore, the analysis includes theory from fan studies and audience studies in order to understand the cultural logic of fan communities, as mediatization is understood as a non-linear, dual process of transformation. Fans use textual narratives, fan-made narratives, popular memes and role playing when carrying out conversations. When these fan practices are intersected with the media logic and affordances of tumblr, conversations become complex, textually layered and use a variety of technological expressions, and, as such, these conversations become mediatized.
Today’s intensified blurring of boundaries between media, and between media and their audiences/u... more Today’s intensified blurring of boundaries between media, and between media and their audiences/users, is challenging our most basic understanding of genre as a principle of structuration and stability. However, it also diverts our attention to the equally basic logic that the blurring of boundaries needs frames in order for something to blur, to play, to question, for example, genre may serve as such a communicative frame. Terms like ‘genre hybrids’ and ‘cross genres’ have pointed to generic instabilities and experiments for a couple of decades now; yet, the technological development, the altered modes of media production and dis-tribution, the many practices of remediation on different levels and not least the inventive textual interventions by the co-called produser (Bruns, 2008) still renders the question of genre relevant: How should we understand genre today? What does genre mean, and how are genres being used? In which ways might genre be a productive term for conceptualising and comprehending the new digital media landscape, and, for example, help us understand what media are and how different media are guiding the communicative affordances and constraints on different platforms in different ways? And how might we refine our notions of traditional genre expressions, for example, in film and television?
Page 1. American television fiction transforming Danish teenagers' religious imagination... more Page 1. American television fiction transforming Danish teenagers' religious imaginations NYBRO PETERSEN E-mail: linenp@hum.ku.dk Abstract This paper argues that American television fiction with supernatural themes ...
... Petersen, LN , 2010-06-22 "Renegotiating Religious Imaginations Through Tran... more ... Petersen, LN , 2010-06-22 "Renegotiating Religious Imaginations Through Transformations of Banal Religion in Supernatural" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Suntec Singapore International Convention & Exhibition ...
Medialisering er blevet et centralt begreb til at forstå mediernes samspil med kultur og samfund.... more Medialisering er blevet et centralt begreb til at forstå mediernes samspil med kultur og samfund. Medierne spiller en voksende rolle inden for stadigt flere områder lige fra politik til familieliv. I takt hermed ændres betingelserne for menneskers kommunikation og indbyrdes interaktion, ligesom sociale relationer og organisationsformer påvirkes. Denne bog giver en grundig indføring i medialiseringsteori og viser gennem konkrete analyser, hvordan både massemedier og netværksmedier har bidraget til social og kulturel forandring. Analyserne behandler medialiseringen af idræt, leg, forældreroller, religion, politik, væbnede konflikter og frivillige organisationer. Bogen er skrevet af forskere fra Københavns Universitet, RUC, SDU, Aalborg Universitet og Aarhus Universitet. Den henvender sig til undervisere og studerende på videregående uddannelser, men kan læses af alle med interesse for mediernes indflydelse på kultur og samfund
This article investigates the motives for entering a digital fan community and becoming a fan for... more This article investigates the motives for entering a digital fan community and becoming a fan for the first time—and, subsequently, leaving it again—by focusing on these fans’ main entry and exit points. It looks at the fan community following the Norwegian hit show SKAM (2015–17), which grew over its four seasons into a global cult phenomenon with viewers and fans of all ages from around the world. Empirically, the article draws on forty-seven interviews with Scandinavian SKAM fans between the ages of thirteen and seventy. Based on these interviews, the article presents a tripartite model through which fan motivations are located in the intersections among intrapersonal, social, and transmedial factors.
This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-... more This article considers fans’ playful digital practices and focuses on the play moods that are co-constructed in online fan communities. We analyse how these play moods are negotiated across the life course for participating fans. Play moods are closely tied to the playful modes of fan practices, and by gaining a greater understanding of the moods that fans engage in at different stages of their life course we gain new insights into fan play as it relates to issues of age-related norms in fan communities. Specifically, this article analyses the Norwegian teenage streaming drama SKAM (Shame) (NRK, 2015‐17), which was produced for a target audience of 16-year-old Norwegian girls but ended up capturing the hearts of people of all ages across Scandinavia and internationally. This study is based on interviews with 43 Scandinavian fans aged between 13 and 70. The participants were all active on social media (Facebook, Instagram, the show’s blog, etc.) while the show was on the air and the interviews offers insights into issues of age-appropriateness as it relates to fan practices. As such, fans ‘police’ both themselves and each other based on perceptions of age, while also engaging in practices that are by nature playful and may be considered subjectively and culturally ‘youthful’ or ‘childish’. The article combines theory of play and fan studies with a focus on the life course and cultural gerontology in order to highlight these tendencies in the SKAM fandom.
Uploads
Papers by Line Nybro Petersen
[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]
, p. 10) for researchers to shed further light on ‘a culture where the representation of ageing and “older” female celebrities is by turns seemingly hopeful and newly affirming one moment, and destructive and retrograde the next’ (p. 10). Moreover, Deborah Jermyn and Su Holmes end their joint article in the follow-up volume Women & Celebrity: Cultures of Ageing (2015 Jermyn, D. and Holmes, S., 2015. Introduction: a timely intervention – unravelling the gender/age/celebrity matrix. In: D. Jermyn and S. Holmes, eds. Women, celebrity & cultures of ageing. Freeze frame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–11.
[Crossref], [Google Scholar]
) with a call for broadening the field of interest from representations of (or lack of representations of) older celebrities in the media to also include audiences. This shift of focus would allow us to ask questions to the ways in which older viewers and users relate to older celebrities, how they use representations of ageing celebrities in their daily lives to negotiate their own problems of ageing, and how older audiences relate to celebrities and media texts as consumers. Jermyn and Holmes thus advocate for more empirical reception studies, lamenting that ‘questions of audience reception have so far been conspicuous by their absence in this regard, despite their centrality in understanding how ageing female celebrities come to “mean”’ (p. 19).
This special issue of Celebrity Studies responds to these calls by broadening the scope of study to consider not only ageing celebrities but also narratives of ageing and ageing audiences, with a particular focus on ageing fans. By making fan studies, celebrity studies, and ageing studies speak together, we are invited not only to think celebrity studies from new angles but also to challenge as well ideas of fandom and age as of ageing, gender and media. Although they emphasise various aspects, the following articles are thus located at the intersection of media studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, fan studies, and gerontology.
[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]
, p. 10) for researchers to shed further light on ‘a culture where the representation of ageing and “older” female celebrities is by turns seemingly hopeful and newly affirming one moment, and destructive and retrograde the next’ (p. 10). Moreover, Deborah Jermyn and Su Holmes end their joint article in the follow-up volume Women & Celebrity: Cultures of Ageing (2015 Jermyn, D. and Holmes, S., 2015. Introduction: a timely intervention – unravelling the gender/age/celebrity matrix. In: D. Jermyn and S. Holmes, eds. Women, celebrity & cultures of ageing. Freeze frame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–11.
[Crossref], [Google Scholar]
) with a call for broadening the field of interest from representations of (or lack of representations of) older celebrities in the media to also include audiences. This shift of focus would allow us to ask questions to the ways in which older viewers and users relate to older celebrities, how they use representations of ageing celebrities in their daily lives to negotiate their own problems of ageing, and how older audiences relate to celebrities and media texts as consumers. Jermyn and Holmes thus advocate for more empirical reception studies, lamenting that ‘questions of audience reception have so far been conspicuous by their absence in this regard, despite their centrality in understanding how ageing female celebrities come to “mean”’ (p. 19).
This special issue of Celebrity Studies responds to these calls by broadening the scope of study to consider not only ageing celebrities but also narratives of ageing and ageing audiences, with a particular focus on ageing fans. By making fan studies, celebrity studies, and ageing studies speak together, we are invited not only to think celebrity studies from new angles but also to challenge as well ideas of fandom and age as of ageing, gender and media. Although they emphasise various aspects, the following articles are thus located at the intersection of media studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, fan studies, and gerontology.