From Fan Culture/Community to the

Fan World: Possible Pathways and Ways

of Having Done Fandom
Matt Hills1

Recibido: 2017-07-16 Aprobado por pares: 2017-07-27

Enviado a pares: 2017-07-24 Aceptado: 2017-08-15

DOI: 10.5294/pacla.2017.20.4.2

Para citar este artículo / to reference this article / para citar este artigo
Hills, M. (2017). From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World: Possible Pathways
and Ways of Having Done Fandom. Palabra Clave 20(4), 856-883. DOI: 10.5294/pa-
cla.2017.20.4.2

Abstract
In this article I revisit concepts of fan culture and community, which have been
central to fan studies. Critiques of subcultural theory, along with fandom’s
fragmentation into “traditional” fans and “brand fans,” have suggested that
media fandom cannot be viewed as a coherent culture or community. Con-
sequently, I consider how a concept of fan world addresses some of the-
se emergent critiques of fan culture/community, setting out what a world
theory can offer current debates surrounding fandom. I draw particularly on
Howard Becker’s approach to art worlds (Becker, 2008) and Steven Connor’s
overview of world concepts (Connor, 2010). This allows me to elaborate on
a model of the fan world, moving away from a position where world theo-
ries have usually been adopted in relation to franchises’ world building to
think about the platforms and pathways through which fandom is perfor-
med today. Ways of “having done fandom” are chosen, more or less reflexi-
vely, by fans from an array of communal and individualized possibilities.
And “paths not taken” become counterfactual as fans follow certain bran-

1 orcid.org/0000-0002-8778-6530. University of Huddersfield, England. M.J.Hills@hud.ac.uk

856 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

ches of fan activity but not others, developing specific forms of fan specia-
lization and positioning rather than others (Giddens, 1991). The fan world
represents this open necessity of having to choose particular fan pathways
within the contemporary “participatory condition,” itself being comprised
of all possible versions and branches of fan identity.

Keywords
Fan culture; fan community; subculture; world; Howard Becker (Source:
Unesco Thesaurus).

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De la cultura/comunidad del fan
al mundo del fan: posibles vías
y maneras de hacer Fandom
Resumen
En este artículo retomo los conceptos de la cultura y la comunidad del fan,
que han sido centrales para los estudios de los fans. Las críticas de la teoría
subcultural, junto con la fragmentación del fandom en fans “tradicionales”
y “de marca”, han sugerido que el fandom de los medios no puede ser vis-
to como una cultura o comunidad coherente. En consecuencia, conside-
ro cómo un concepto del mundo de los fans aborda algunas de estas críticas
emergentes de la cultura/comunidad de los fans, exponiendo lo que una teo-
ría mundial puede ofrecer a los debates actuales sobre el fandom. Me intere-
sa particularmente el enfoque de Howard Becker sobre los mundos del arte
(Becker, 2008) y la visión general de Steven Connor sobre los conceptos
de mundo (Connor, 2010). Esto me permite elaborar un modelo del mun-
do de los fans, alejándome de una posición en la que las teorías del mundo
se han adoptado generalmente en relación con la construcción del mundo
de las franquicias para pensar en las plataformas y vías a través de las cua-
les se practica el fandom actualmente. Las formas de “hacer fandom” son
elegidas, más o menos reflexivamente, por los fans a partir de una serie de
posibilidades comunes e individualizadas. Y las “vías que no se toman” se
vuelven contrafácticas ya que los fans siguen ciertas ramas de la actividad de
los fans en vez de otras, desarrollando formas específicas de especialización
y posicionamiento de los fans en lugar de otras (Giddens, 1991). El mun-
do de los fans representa esta necesidad abierta de tener que elegir vías es-
pecíficas del fan dentro de la “condición participativa” contemporánea, que
se compone de todas las posibles versiones y ramas de la identidad del fan.

Palabras clave
Cultura del fan; comunidad del fan; subcultura; mundo; Howard Becker
(Fuente: Tesauro de la Unesco).

858 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

Da cultura/comunidade
do fã ao mundo do fã: possíveis
vias e maneiras de fazer fandom
Resumo
Neste artigo volto aos conceitos da cultura e da comunidade do fã, que têm
sido foco para os estudos dos fãs. As críticas da teoria sub-cultural, junto
com a fragmentação do fandom em fãs “tradicionais” e “de marca”, tem su-
gerido que o fandom da mídia não pode ser visto como uma cultura ou co-
munidade coerente. Em consequência, considero como um conceito do
mundo dos fãs aborda algumas destas críticas emergentes da cultura/comu-
nidade dos fãs, expondo o que uma teoria mundial pode oferecer aos deba-
tes atuais sobre o fandom. Interessa-me particularmente o foco de Howard
Becker sobre os mundos da arte (Becker, 2008) e a visão geral de Steven
Connor sobre os conceitos de mundo (Connor, 2010). Isto me permite
elaborar um modelo do mundo dos fãs, afastando-me de uma posição na
qual as teorias do mundo foram adoptadas geralmente com relação à cons-
trução do mundo das franquias para pensar nas plataformas e vias através
das quais se pratica o fandom atualmente. As formas de “fazer fandom” são
eleitas, mais ou menos reflexivamente, pelos fãs de uma série de possibili-
dades comuns e individualizadas. E as “vias que não se tomam” tornam-se
contra fáticas já que os fãs seguem certos ramos de atividade, e não outros,
desenvolvendo formas específicas de especialização e posicionamento dos
fãs em vez de outras (Giddens, 1991). O mundo dos fãs representa esta ne-
cessidade aberta de ter que escolher vias específicas do fã dentro da “con-
dição participativa” contemporânea, que se compõe de todas as possíveis
versões e ramos da identidade do fã.

Palavras-chave
Cultura do fã; comunidade do fã; subcultura; mundo; Howard Becker (Fon-
te: Tesauro da Unesco).

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 In this article I want to revisit and problematize the notions of fan
culture and community, which have been central—usually in unquestioned
and common-sense ways—to the emergence and consolidation of fan stu-
dies across at least several decades. Although the concept of fan community
has sometimes been questioned (Van de Goor, 2015; Hill, 2016; Hitchcock
Morimoto & Chin, 2017), an overarching notion of fan culture has more
often remained solidly in place, resonating with the broader acceptance in
media/cultural studies that a vast array of objects of study can be framed in
this way, from material culture to commercial cultures (Woodward, 2007;
Jackson et al., 2000) to popular culture and beyond. I have had a role in all
of this, publishing the book Fan Cultures in 2002, but the concept has con-
tinued to possess currency in the field, as witnessed by the similarly titled
Fan Culture: Theory/Practice some ten years later (Larsen & Zubernis, 2012)
and by the more recent Fans and Fan Cultures (Linden & Linden, 2017).
The first journal of fandom (2008–present) also retains an emphasis on
fan cultures that is flagged up in its title: Transformative Works and Cultures.

However, fan culture has, like community, begun to be called into

question. Writing in The Mediated Construction of Reality, for example, Nick
Couldry and Andreas Hepp (2017) argue that “instead of understanding
each and every fan culture necessarily as a single community, we might do
better to understand it as a complex figuration of figurations that links up
different local groups in a range of interdependent [and sometimes inde-
pendent—MH] activities” (p. 171). The suggestion is that we may need to
approach contemporary fandom not as a singular or coherent “culture” (if
we ever really could), but rather as a network of networks, or a loose affilia-
tion of sub-subcultures, all specializing in different modes of fan activity. I
will explore this in my opening section below, considering whether a con-
cept of fan world might work to address some of the emergent critiques of
fan culture/community and analyses of fragmentation. I will then move on
to set out in more detail what a world concept can offer contemporary deba-
tes surrounding media fandom, drawing on Howard Becker’s “art worlds”
and Nelson Goodman’s view of “worldmaking” (Becker, 2008; Goodman,
1978). This will enable me to elaborate on a model of the fan world here,
noting that world theories have usually been adopted in relation to media

860 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

franchises’ hyperdiegetic storyworlds and transmedia storytelling ( Jenkins,
2006, p. 114). That is, fans have been figured as consumers immersed in
“imaginary worlds,” investing their “affective labor” in others’ world buil-
ding (Hassler-Forest, 2016, pp. 10–11), rather than as inhabitants of a fan
world in their own right. Thus, one of my aims in this essay is to repurpose
the world concept, shifting it from its current place in world building dis-
cussions—which view fandom as a matter of retconning/fixing/contesting
commercial storyworlds—and towards a sense of how passionate audiences
can come to occupy specific positions in the fan world. First, though, why
might we need to move away from settled notions of fan culture?

Fan Culture? From Singular Community

to Critiques of Subcultural Differentiation
Although Henry Jenkins didn’t use the term in Textual Poachers (1992),
the media fans he studied were all fans of what has become known as
“cult TV”: Star Trek, Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, The Prisoner, Alien Nation,
Beauty and the Beast, and so on. Indeed, by focusing ethnographically on
a sense of fan community, Jenkins (1992) was explicitly building on ear-
lier subcultural theory, as well as feminist critiques of this. By initiating
this subculturally-indebted approach to media fandom, Jenkins (1992)
defined it as a

discursive logic that knits together interests across textual and gene-
ric boundaries. While some fans remain exclusively committed to a
single show or star, many others use individual series as a point of
entry into a broader fan community, linking to an inter-textual net-
work composed of many programs, films, books, comics (p. 40).

It is this “broader fan community,” not focused around lone TV

shows, that has underpinned the concept of fan culture, and which a num-
ber of scholars—Jenkins included—have gone on to view as crucial to
theorizing and understanding fandom. For instance, Alexis Lothian (2013)
has gone so far as to explicitly label the phenomenon subcultural fandom,
whilst Karen Hellekson (2009, 2015) has similarly emphasized the gift
economy shared by media fans, and its on-going detachment from “impo-
sed” commerciality.

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 However, the notion of a subcultural fandom, or a discernible fan
culture at least somewhat at odds with its neoliberal media context, has
become increasingly problematic in the era of social media and Web 2.0.
Kristina Busse and Jonathan Gray (2014) distinguish between “traditio-
nal fan communities and [the] new industry-driven fans… [of] contem-
porary convergence culture” (p. 431), for instance, and Henrik and Sara
Linden (2017) have also adopted a bifurcated approach to fandom, ad-
dressing “the similarities and differences between ‘traditional’ fans and
‘brand fans’… with an emphasis on (post)subcultural aspects and fans as
consumers in a capitalist consumer society” (p. 37). Rather than repre-
senting fandom tout court, fan community/culture becomes just one ver-
sion of media fandom here:

While fan studies in its early stages—…the “Fandom is Beautiful”

era—focused largely on fans and fan cultures as communities who
worked together to help democratize the meaning-making in popular
culture discourse, in recent years more emphasis has been placed
on fandom as empowering for individual members of fan networks.
What aligns these two modes of approaching fan studies is the focus
on fandom as participatory culture. (Linden & Linden, 2017, p. 37)

In fact, this doubling of fandom is present in Linden and Linden’s

very book title, which, by nominating Fans and fan cultures, starts to clea-
ve fandom into those who are part of a culture/community (the “traditio-
nal” fan) and those who, as “brand fans,” can operate outside any sense of
fan community or experienced fan culture.

This challenge to subcultural fandom, and hence to a notion of diffe-

rentiating fan culture, has also been emblematically debated between the
editors of the volume Fandom (now in a second edition; see Sandvoss et al.,
2017) and Francesca Coppa, writing in the Journal of Fandom Studies. Coppa
takes issue with the characterization of “first wave” fan studies’ analysis as
involving a “Fandom is Beautiful” approach (Sandvoss et al., 2017), and the
possibility that fan studies should move beyond studying fan community:

arguably this broadening of subject represents a change of subject. It

seems unfair to say that early fandom scholars overlooked the broad
spectrum of regular fans to focus on… the creators and participators

862 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

 for whom fandom was a way of life …­when that was precisely their
defined object of study. (Coppa, 2014, p. 74)

It is fan community—i.e., fan culture—that largely forms the object

of dispute here, with Coppa (2014) suggesting that “the fandom of Fan-
dom no longer describes a community of people” (p. 74). Responding to
this critique, the editors of Fandom argue that fan cultures should continue
to be studied alongside more individualized and personalized fan affects:
“Studies of fans need not all be discussing the same types of fans, practi-
ces, or engagements to have a symphonic quality when considered in total”
(Sandvoss et al., 2017, p. 10). However, they also argue that returning to a
“Fandom is Beautiful” or “first wave” stance would mean “misreading par-
ticular fan groups as singularly representative of all fan practices and moti-
vations” (Sandvoss et al., 2017, p. 10). The danger for scholarship here lies,
according to Fandom’s editors, in

reinforcing a binary distinction between fans and “normal audiences”

that much of the first wave of fan studies embraced, reaching as far
back as [John] Fiske’s work... The object of study is defined through
its adherence to a preconceived conceptual position leading to a cir-
cular logic: fans are found to be highly networked and participatory,
because to be considered fans they need to be highly networked and
participatory (Sandvoss et al., 2017, pp. 9–10).

In other words, asserting that “Fuck yeah, fandom is beautiful”

(Coppa, 2014, p. 74) allegedly means positioning fan community/culture
as “authentic” fandom versus a version of non-communal fandom viewed as
secondary, and as lacking in historical roots and knowledge (Busse & Gray,
2014, p. 431). Without the “group social participation” of fan communi-
ty, and the “critical sensibility that comes from engaging culture from the
inside, as someone with a defined role in the cultural ecosystem” (Coppa,
2014, p. 78), Francesca Coppa (2014) counters that fandom is “in danger of
being owned: our work, our communications, our relationships to and with
each other. Fandom is more than its economic/revenue potential” (p. 80).

The binary that underpins Coppa’s defense of fandom community is

thus not as clearly one of fan culture versus “normal audiences,” as Sand-

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voss et al. (2017) imply. Instead, the binary is one of fan community and
culture (“[b]eing in fandom”) versus thoroughgoing fan industrial co-opta-
tion. Nonetheless, there is a sense of fan culture as differentiated that underlies
the work of Coppa (2014), Hellekson (2015), and Lothian (2013), where
being “in fandom can change a person, who in taking on the identity of ‘fan’
may also come to take on additional identities—that of a writer, blogger,
film-maker, organizer, activist, etc.—that impact her sense of self and the
way she engages the world” (Coppa, 2014, p. 78).

If subcultural fandom and the concept of fan culture as differentiated

and differentiating—i.e. fan subculture vs. mainstream culture—have been
called into question through a doubling of kinds of fandom (communal or
individualized), then subcultural theory itself has undergone a similar split-
ting. For example, subcultural capital (Thornton, 1995), i.e., the specialist
knowledge that defines a “true” subculturalist, has been divided into “mun-
dane” and “transgressive” variants by Keith Kahn-Harris (2007). A tension
between “the joys of collective activity” and “radical individualism” remains
present here (Kahn-Harris, 2007, p. 122 and p. 127), with mundane subcul-
tural capital being “oriented towards the… collective… It is a form of capi-
tal accrued through a sustained investment in the myriad practices through
which the scene is reproduced” (Kahn-Harris, 2007, p. 122), whilst trans-
gressive subcultural capital “can be claimed through a critique of the sce-
ne itself ” (Kahn-Harris, 2007, p. 127). The “mundane” form means fitting
into a subculture (or fan culture), whereas its “transgressive” version means
“displaying uniqueness” by criticizing the culture from within (Kahn-Ha-
rris, 2007, p. 127).

Erik Hannerz (2015) has likewise set out “a model of two distinct sub-
cultural patterns of meaning based on how the mainstream is defined and
positioned as well as how the subcultural sacred is mobilized and authen-
ticated” (p. 35). Drawing on extensive empirical work (as does Kahn-Ha-
rris), Hannerz (2015) identifies these patterns as “convex” and “concave,”
where “a convex pattern bends outwards, defining the mainstream as ex-
ternal… and a concave pattern bends inwards, positioning the mainstream
as internal” to the subculture (p. 35). Although this makes “the separation

864 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

from the mainstream a subcultural construction” (Hannerz, 2015, p. 36),
as we might expect, it also renders such a separation multiple. Subcultu-
ralists can “move in and out of these patterns, over time and between spa-
ces” (Hannerz, 2015, p. 36) as they define “authentic” participation (or
indeed fandom) against an externalized mainstream or a sold-out, com-
pliant, derivative and mainstream version of their own subculture. In fact,
Hannerz’s concave subcultural difference sounds uncannily like Frances-
ca Coppa’s dismissal of San Diego Comic-Con as inauthentic: “an indus-
try convention disguised as a fan convention” (Coppa, 2014, p. 80). And
at the same time, Sandvoss et al.’s (2017) call for a version of fan studies
that broadens out the “us” of fandom can sound a lot like Kahn-Harris’s
transgressive subcultural capital, aiming to critique fan studies’ focus on
versions of fandom that have been powerfully marked by whiteness, for
example (Fathallah, 2017).

Fan studies has, perhaps, been a little slow to integrate developments

in subcultural theory into its understandings of media fandom. By doing
so, and hence by thinking about “fan cultural capital” (Hills, 2002, p. 57)
as mundane/transgressive, or as occurring within convex/concave patterns
of anti-mainstream meaning, we might successfully complicate dominant
notions of fan culture. However, such developments merely substitute bi-
nary fan communities for a singular notion of fan difference, resituating
“authentic” fan difference as a matter of division within the fan communi-
ty. Fan culture may already have become far more plural than this. As Loui-
sa Stein (2015) observes in her book Millennial Fandom:

Just as professionalism as an aesthetic may move through commer-

cial and fan work, so too may the ethics of professionalism extend into
fan communities and to the creative works of fans. These ethics can
come directly in[to] conflict with even such a seemingly core fannish
value as the… right to transform. Rather than being uniformly held
millennial fan values, affective collectivity and fan transformation exist
in tension with discourses of individual professionalism. (p. 160)

Such diversity can thus incorporate what Oliver Carter (forthco-

ming) has termed “fantrepreneurship” or the “fantrepreneur”—someone
who makes money from the small-scale (and possibly grey market) com-

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mercial exploitation of their fan knowledge. Such activity, e.g., fans set-
ting up small businesses on Etsy to supply materials such as colored yarn
to multiple fandoms (Cherry, 2016, pp. 166–167), can occur without fan-
dom necessarily positioning this as a “concave” subcultural mainstream.
Whether designing T-shirts or dyeing yarn, “petty producers” have of-
ten been accepted within fandom (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998, p.
150). Consequently, splitting the phenomenon into “brand fans” opera-
ting within neoliberal entrepreneurialism and “traditional” anti-commer-
cial fans may be reductive (Hills, 2017a). The subcultural differentiation
of media fandom starts to seem problematic or even unsustainable here,
as Adrian Athique (2016) has argued:

For audience researchers, probably the most discussed “point of

convergence” in the Internet era is that between fan subcultures and
mainstream audiences. It appears that the contemporary “mains-
tream” is not, after all, a dispassionate and generalized alternative to
cult behaviors, but actually a vast field of overlapping fan cultures.
Consequently, …the enabling anthropological concept of subcultures
as singular communities is dead in the water (p. 153).

Instead, we could argue that subcultural fandom continues to imagi-

ne itself —and be imagined by at least some scholars—as a differentiated
domain of fan practice on the basis of an idealization: “this idea of a com-
munity is idealistic and nostalgic and exists in contradiction with the ex-
periences of community members so that it portrays an ideal rather than
a lived reality” (Hill, 2016, p. 40). Rosemary Lucy Hill terms this an “ima-
ginary community,” arguing that fan studies needs to not only focus on
the “visible fans” of “subculture” but also “those whose fandom is usually
hidden” (Hill, 2016, p. 37; see also Sandvoss et al., 2017, pp. 10–11) rather
than performed in public or online.

Another critique of fan subculture as a “singular” community comes

from Thomas Lindlof ’s (2015) attack on the concept of interpretive com-
munity. This notion has also been present in fan studies from at least Henry
Jenkins’ (1992) Textual Poachers onwards (in fact, it is applied in Cassan-
dra Amesley’s 1989 journal article on “How to watch Star Trek”). Lindlof
(2015) argues that interpretive community as a “concept is… inadequate

866 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

because of its traditional focus on an isolated text that stays the same for all
audience members. This focus is dramatically at odds with …the mobility
of reading/writing strategies within and across platforms” (p. 30). Instead,
given the many platform-specific or even forum-specific audience groups
that can form in relation to media texts, Lindlof (2015) ponders whether
there may now be “a cultural long tail: a vision of incredibly numerous in-
terpretive communities receding into the distance” (p. 33) as they each sha-
re their passions online with a particular group that cannot be aligned with
an overarching fan community or culture. As he asks, “[w]here is the com-
munity located if it isn’t attached to a single text…?” (Lindlof, 2015, p.33).
On this account, fans reading their fan object through an engagement with
fanfic archives (De Kosnik, 2016), e.g. fic tagged at Archive of Our Own,
wouldn’t necessarily constitute “subcultural fandom,” (contra Lothian, 2013,
p. 545), but would simply act as one version of fan interpretive communi-
ty among many non-coalescing and separate others. At this point, it beco-
mes questionable as to how useful it remains to think of fandom in terms
of fan community and culture—we are quite some distance from Jenkins’
(1992) “broader fan community” (p. 40).

An alternative term has appeared within these debates over fan cul-
ture/community, however, and it is one that may offer a productive way
into theorizing fandom’s multiplicity, its specializations of practice within
differing networks, and its increasing permeability to commercialism or
neoliberalism within a diverse array of activities and interpretations. With
fandom’s subcultural differentiation potentially giving way to internal divi-
sion or communal/individualized versions of “subcultural capital”, and with
varied incarnations of fandom occurring outside subcultural domains, the
notion of fan culture has become ever more stretched. Or, rather, it has be-
come ever more applicable only to a subset of fan discourses, experiences
and practices: “if ‘everyone’ is a fan, then we must move beyond subcultu-
res” (Linden & Linden, 2017, p. 43). Here is how Henrik and Sara Linden
justify their critique of fan subculture:

although participatory culture is a positive force it may be that the

value of fandom as transformative agency has been overrated.

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 The whole world is like a computer game with pre-decided options
to choose from. They may seem vast, but they are limited. (Linden &
Linden, 2017, p. 50)

And here, in turn, is how Francesca Coppa, opposing the kind of

position that Linden and Linden set out, argues in favor of maintaining a
focus on subcultural fandom/fan culture:

a fan studies that takes as its subject the self-identified fans who
participate in some kind of fan culture—as writers, artists, vidders,
film-makers, con organizers, community moderators, coders, archi-
vists, game designers, bloggers, wikifiers, cosplayers, beta readers,
gif-makers, episode reviewers, fanwork critics, fandom activists,
and more—is a fan studies that is focused on a rapidly growing net-
work that can have, and is having, huge real world effects. (Coppa,
2014, p. 77)

Each side of this debate anchors its (moral) claim over what fan-
dom “is” with some concept of the world—“the whole world” limits how
differentiated or anti-commercial fandom can be for Linden and Linden,
whereas it is the “real world” that demonstrates the material outcomes
of subcultural fan creativity (and transformative works) for Coppa. The
world, though, is always discursively situated outside fandom in these dis-
cussions: it is the limiting frame, or the space that fan productivity acts
upon. This is an image that Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and Bertha Chin
(2017) perfectly encapsulate when they observe that “fandom is always
performed against a backdrop of real-world events, constraints, and sub-
jectivities” (p. 181). But what if we didn’t use some undefined and suspi-
ciously untheorized concept of the “whole” or the “real” world to anchor
ontological claims surrounding contemporary fandom? What if rather
than treating the world as a common-sensical “backdrop” to fan cultu-
re, we thought about the fan world in ways that might respond to criti-
ques of subcultural fandom and fan difference? This is the argument that
I want to develop here. To do so I need to take a detour through theories
of worldness before re-articulating fan studies’ approaches with a more
refined view of the fan world.

868 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

Fan World? From World Building
to Conditions of Open Necessity
World building has been the leading way that world-related concepts have
entered fan studies over the past decade or so, following on from Henry
Jenkins’ (2006) argument in Convergence Culture that media “storytelling
has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environ-
ments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or
even a single medium” (p. 114). Edited collections (Boni, 2017) and sole-
authored monographs (Hassler-Forest, 2016) have explored fan practices
in relation to transmedia storytelling (Freeman, 2017) and world building
where the fictional “world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the fran-
chise—since fan speculation and elaborations also expand the world in a
variety of directions” ( Jenkins, 2006, p. 114). But this tendency leaves the
world concept in play only for “imaginary worlds” and how they might inter-
sect with and incite fan activities (Saler, 2012; Wolf, 2012). Possible worlds
semantics has also underpinned a related and influential approach within
narratology (see Thon, 2016, p. 39, for a list of key scholars).

Whether “imaginary” or “possible”, these are contained and crea-

ted worlds which can be consumed for pleasure as well as learnt about and
mapped by fans. Immersion is often assumed to be a crucial fan pleasure of
such worlds (Hills, 2017b), and Marie-Laure Ryan (2017), in a percepti-
ve discussion of “Why worlds now?,” suggests that the “phenomenological
conception of world [underlying media-technological imaginary worlds]
rests on two properties:… worlds are immersive… and… they are inte-
ractive” (p. 9). Ryan (2017) argues that although “[c]osmology and phi-
losophy may be part of the cultural background against which the notion
of world rose to prominence, …the force that truly explains its current po-
pularity… is the media that bring imaginary worlds into our lives” (p. 10),
and furthermore that fandom can render any mediated immersive world
interactive through the generation of fanfic and fan art, etc.

However, rather than relegating cosmology and philosophy to the

cultural background in favor of foregrounding transmedia world building
and imaginary worlds as work on fandom has tended to do, I’m interested

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in these definitions and debates. Ryan (2017) notes that world concepts
have become ever more expansive, ranging cosmologically from the “sen-
se of world as a celestial object, functioning as container for a variety of life
forms… [to] an infinity of worlds because space is infinite …and has room
for all possible arrangements of matter” (p. 4). Similarly, possible worlds
theory has set out to explore a “multiverse” (Ryan, 2017, p. 5) of counter-
factuals. Both cosmologically and philosophically, then, world has come to
stand in for “everything that exists” (Ryan, 2017, p. 9), in marked contradis-
tinction to the “medial/technological perspective on worlds” (Ryan, 2017,
p. 9) that has typically been favored in work on fandom.

Steven Connor (2010) sets out succinctly what is at stake in these

two different approaches when he furnishes a “ludicrously brief history
of the concept of ‘the world’,” noting that “the phrase ‘the whole world’
does not seem to appear frequently in English until the sixteenth century.
I can find no instance of it before its appearance in William Tyndale’s Pa-
rable of The Wicked Mammon of 1528” (pp. 29–30). For Connor (2010),
drawing on Nelson Goodman’s (1978) theory of “worldmaking,” which
has also been used to theorize fictional/imaginary worlds (Nünning &
Nünning, 2010),

The most important difference between what Goodman seems

to mean by “a world” and “the world” is the following: A world is
strongly determined but weakly determining. By contrast, the world
is strongly determining but weakly determined. … It is not just the
largeness and variousness of the world that makes it unspecifiable. It
is because the world is an open necessity. There is no necessity for
the world to be constituted in any way in particular, but it is absolu-
tely necessary that it will come to be constituted in some particular
way or ways that are always more finite than the current possibilities.
(Connor, 2010, p. 42)

In marked contrast, Connor (2010) argues that a world, which can

be a symbolic or fictional world, or indeed “the same kind of thing that we
refer to when we use words like cultures, civilizations, mythologies, frames
of reference, discursive regimes, idioms, games, rituals, clubs, cliques, clans
and gangs” (p. 42) is generated and sustained by “frameworks [that] can be
so strongly and persuasively specified, …their grammar… so readily legible,

870 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

… [that this] makes it impossible for them to contain us. We can step outsi-
de them precisely because we can see around them” (Connor, 2010, p. 42).

On this basis, it may seem that Steven Connor would view fan cul-
ture as a world of specifiable discourses and grammars that fans can oppo-
se, opt out of, or “step outside” of if they are felt to be too constricting. But
this would merely replay a notion of fan-cultural or subcultural differentia-
tion under a different guise, reading fandom as a “gang” that one can move
in and out of without any cultural consequence. Yet fans’ lived experience
occurs not merely in “a world” but necessarily in “the world” (again, I want
to avoid a splitting which reduces the world to a backdrop or shadowy ex-
ternal figure that fans engage with). And as a result,

being in the world means only being able to have lived in one world.
Of course one is able to choose, maybe constrained to choose,
among many worlds. But one will have chosen only one, or only one
conglomerate. The world is an issue of the future perfect… a retros-
pective construal. (Connor, 2010, p. 42)

Indeed, Anthony Giddens (1991) locates this as a sociological fact

when he theorizes late modernity and people’s self-narratives: “Because of
its reflexively mobilized… dynamism, modern social activity has an essen-
tially counterfactual character” (p. 28). That is, possible worlds cease to be
an arcane matter of modal logic and inform social actuality:

In a post-traditional social universe, an indefinite range of potential

courses of action (with their attendant risks) is at any given moment
open to individuals and collectivities. Choosing among such alter-
natives is always an “as if” matter, a question of selecting between
“possible worlds.” Living in circumstances of modernity is best un-
derstood as a matter of the routine contemplation of counterfactuals
(Giddens, 1991, pp. 28–29).

On this account, fandom is not merely a world among a multiplicity

of cultural or subcultural worlds, as Nelson Goodman’s (1978) concept of
worldmaking would perhaps imply. Rather, the fan world emerges through
a necessary choice between alternatives: to become part of a self-identi-
fied fandom (or not); to do so through specific social media platforms or

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as part of specific fan groups (or not); to do so by attending fan conven-
tions (or not); to devote specific time and economic resources to “being a
fan,” and so on.

Rather than forming a closed system of highly legible rules or gram-

mars (a fan-cultural perspective), I am arguing that fandom has increasin-
gly displayed a “largeness and variousness… that makes it unspecifiable” in
Connor’s (2010, p. 42) sense: i.e., lived fandom will “come to be constitu-
ted in some particular way or ways that are always more finite than the cu-
rrent possibilities” (Connor, 2010, p. 42) comprised by what it could mean
to be a fan. Does one write fanfic? Collect kinds of merchandise or screen-
used props/costumes? Blog about a beloved fan object? Craft material ar-
tefacts resembling those that appear in popular media?

It may be objected that the fan world has no “open necessity” (Con-
nor, 2010, p. 42) insofar as one does not need to become a fan of anything.
But this objection neglects to consider the extent to which, in the current
conjuncture, participation has become a “general condition in which many
of us live… It has become a contextual feature of everyday life in the li-
beral, capitalist, and technological societies of the contemporary West”
(Barney et al., 2016, p. vii). Such a “participatory condition… both envi-
ronmental (a state of affairs) and normative” (Barney et al., 2016, p. vii) is
eminently distinguishable from the participatory culture which Henry Jen-
kins (1992) identified with media fandom in Textual Poachers. Rather than
the issue being whether one wants or chooses to become a subcultural fan, the
question now becomes: if “participatory culture is the norm, how does one
who does not like to share his or her… convictions and attitude take part
in such a process?” ( Janissary Collective, 2013, p. 261). And although par-
ticipatory culture is not coterminous with fandom, I would argue that the
emerging distinction that multiple scholars have marked out between “tra-
ditional fans” and “brand fans” or “industry-driven fans” captures a sense
of this “participatory condition” where even those who do not self-identi-
fy as part of a fan community can nonetheless be perfectly well analyzed
and theorized, on the basis of their digital practices, as a kind of fan, i.e., as
following one possible pathway within the wider fan world.

872 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

 As well as constituting an “open necessity” within the current socio-
historical context (and not only in the West), what I am beginning to term
the “fan world” also displays another kind of openness. This further condi-
tion is grounded in Howard S. Becker’s work on art worlds, where Becker
(2008) concludes that his

analysis centers on some kind of collective activity, something that

people are doing together. Whoever contributes in any way to that acti-
vity and its results is part of that world. The line drawn to separate the
world from whatever is not part of it is an analytic convenience, not
something that exists… So the world is not a closed unit. (p. 376)

By emphasizing this type of openness, Becker contrasts his use of a

world metaphor to that of Pierre Bourdieu’s competing “field” image (Bour-
dieu, 1993), suggesting that Bourdieu’s stance reinforces a problematic view
of fields as overly bounded, excessively competitive rather than also being
co-operative, and exaggeratedly oriented around a scenario in which “the
power to define what is important or acceptable” rests “stably with one set
of actors” (Becker, 2008, p. 379). In contrast to this, Becker (2008) argues
that “the idea of ‘world’ makes sense” (p. 379) if we adopt a more inclusi-
ve and decentered approach:

everyone who participates in making a work participates in making it.

The advantage of that tautology is that it shows us how to incorporate
into our conception of art-making the people who are conventionally
left out of such an analysis: the technicians, the money people, all
the people I have called “support personnel” (Becker, 2008, p. 384).

And even more explicitly, again contra Bourdieu’s theorizations, Bec-

ker (2008) states that “[a]rt worlds do not have boundaries around them,
so that we can say that these people belong to a particular art world while
those people do not” (p. 35). This also runs strongly counter to a view of
subcultural fandom, and thus of differentiated fan culture. Taking Becker’s
art world as another model for the fan world would therefore mean recog-
nizing how fandom is supported and enabled by a range of professional cul-
tural intermediaries (those working in PR and paratextual industries, for
instance) as well as people seemingly “outside” a fan community also de-
serving and requiring fan studies’ analysis. As Becker (2008) observes, “it is

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not clear what to include in an analysis of art worlds and what to leave out,”
and limiting study to “what a society currently defines as art [or in this case,
fandom – MH] leaves out too much that is interesting,” as well as allowing
“the processes of definition by members of the society, which ought pro-
perly to be the subject of our study, to set its terms” (p. 37). In other words,
as long as what counts as art is disputed, given that “[a]rt worlds typically
devote considerable attention to trying to decide what is and isn’t art, what
is and isn’t their kind of art, and who is and isn’t an artist” (Becker, 2008,
p. 36), then such authenticity claims should be set to one side by scholars.

I would argue that, analogously, the same must be true for those wor-
king in fan studies: rather than allowing members of fandom to set the terms
of fandom’s study, we should remain open to marginal cases as well as those
where people are not interested in claiming the name or definition of fan-
dom (Becker, 2008, p. 37). Just as art worlds may expend great energy on
trying to pin down “their kind of art”, so the fan world can also extensively
police what should be counted as “authentic” fandom (Pope, 2017, p. 88 and
p. 90) as well as “their kind of fan” for a specific fan grouping, network or
specialization in practice. If we (re)construct binaries in scholarship which
valorize traditional fans as somehow more authentic than industry-driven
or brand fans then we are positioning one possible pathway within the fan
world as “true” fandom, and hence prioritizing just one particular way of
doing fandom that is “always more finite than the current possibilities” (Con-
nor, 2010, p. 42). Rather than selecting out one possible world of fandom
(which may also happen to be the branch of fandom occupied by that par-
ticular acafan), analyzing the fan world means considering how self-iden-
tified fans (and those who do not use the label) can be located among the
series of possibilities, platforms and practices that go to make up fandom’s
relational array. Such varied incarnations of (disputed or unauthenticated)
fandom cannot academically take on a “symphonic quality,” however, as
Sandvoss et al. (2017, p. 10) imply, for the very reason that these different
pathways and possibilities will necessarily resolve the specific fan’s practi-
ces into having “lived in one [possible] world” of fandom where “one will
have chosen only one” way of being a fan (Connor, 2010, p. 42). Hence,
different versions will be subjected to the disapproval, discursive policing,

874 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

othering, or more-or-less active neglect (and even ignorance) of those oc-
cupying alternative branches of the fan world. The possibilities for ways of
having done fandom do not cohere into a single community, whether inter-
pretive or not. Neither can they resolve into any harmonious or final set at
the level of academic cataloguing, and nor are they part of an overarching
culture, instead remaining fractious, fractionated and in some cases merely
disconnected from one another. For example, skilled and knowledgeable
fanfic writers may, at the same time, have little to no knowledge of high-end
fan collectors’ practices, and vice versa. Rather than participating in a mu-
tual othering or devaluation of one another’s fan practices, these ways of
having done fandom may simply remain counterfactual within each type
of fan specialization.

Although this world concept has largely been neglected in fan studies,
it is in fact briefly present in Jenkins’ (1992) seminal Textual Poachers. Despi-
te drawing his major theoretical inspiration from Michel de Certeau, Jenkins
(1992) also touches on the relevance of Becker’s art world conceptualiza-
tion, making this something of a path not taken for fan studies, it might be
said. However, by integrating Becker’s work into his overall view of a “bro-
ader fan community,” Jenkins (1992) tends to read art worlds as if they can
be closed units rather than opening on to a range of supporting figures and
hence having an ultimate indeterminacy. As Becker (2008) himself puts it:
“I am not concerned with drawing a line separating an art world from other
parts of a society” (p. 35), whereas Jenkins (1992) views media fandom as
constituting “its own distinctive Art World… founded less upon the con-
sumption of pre-existing texts than on the production of fan texts… These
institutions are the infrastructure for a self-sufficient fan culture” (p. 47). In
fact, Becker (2008) notes that art worlds, as he uses the term, “typically have
intimate and extensive relations with the worlds from which they try to dis-
tinguish themselves” (p. 36). They may self-represent as self-sufficient, but
this is not at all the sociological reality, as Becker (2008) points out. And re-
ading this against Jenkins’ appropriation of art world, it is possible that Tex-
tual Poachers adopts fan community as fandom’s self-representation to such
an extent that it shifts, theoretically, into depicting such community as a so-
ciological and cultural reality, contra Becker’s cautionary note.

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 And yet, Jenkins’ use of art worlds remains subtler and more multi-
valent than this, because he also concedes that in “one sense, fandom cons-
titutes one component of the mass media “art world”, something like the
‘serious audience’ which Becker locates around the symphony, the ballet,
or the art gallery” ( Jenkins, 1992, p. 46). This is closer to Becker’s usage of
the term, insofar as it doesn’t seek to separate out fandom from official me-
dia producers, “money people,” or “support personnel.” But Jenkins (1992)
offers this application of Becker’s ideas first, before then turning to his more
familiar assertion of fandom’s differentiation and distinction. Indeed, this
is an argument that has never quite gone away; Jenkins offers a restatement
of this self-sufficiency notion, for example, in a recent discussion with Da-
vid Gauntlett (2015, pp. 49­–51). We might also suggest that the two quite
different applications of Becker that Henry Jenkins countenanced back in
1992 are not that far away from where the field of fan studies finds itself in,
say, Linden and Linden’s Fans and Fan Cultures in 2017, i.e., with one ver-
sion of fandom that is a component of the media industry, and one version
that continues to imagine itself as a self-sufficient fan culture.

Although Becker’s approach has not really been developed in fan stu-
dies to date, it is worth noting that it has previously provided a pathway out
of some of the aporias and difficulties of subcultural theory. In Networks of
Sound, Style and Subversion, Nick Crossley (2015) theorizes the “music
worlds” of punk and post-punk, focusing on the cities of Manchester, She-
ffield, Liverpool, and London. Crossley (2015) observes that the terms
subculture and world have actually been used interchangeably by the Chi-
cago School and others, but he ultimately identifies problems with subcul-
ture as a concept, including the issue that it struggles to make sense of any
“heterogeneous ensemble” (Crossley, 2015, p. 27) of styles or tastes. Set
against this weakness, Crossley’s (2015) relational sociology examines UK
clusters of post-punk activity which have possessed strongly networked ties
of competition and co-operation—usually mobilized within specific ci-
ties—but which have also shared mediated and weaker ties with networks
in other national cities. At the same time, Crossley (2015) follows Becker
by not excluding music artists and support personnel from his mapping.
The outcome is “clusters… [that] do not remain completely closed off from

876 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

one another [and] the emergence of hubs” (Crossley, 2015, p. 233), making
the national “music world” of post-punk not simply a subculturally diffe-
rentiated domain, or a coherent scene, but instead a network of networks.
Indeed, Crossley (2015) argues that networks may be more enduring than
the tastes and stylistic conventions that they are linked to at any given mo-
ment—hence Manchester’s post-punk activity gave way to dance music in
the 1980s (p. 246). Theorizing post-punk and dance as different subcultu-
res would miss these networked continuities, as would theorizing many cult
TV fandoms as entirely different fan cultures when they are likely to share
at least some common fan networks both offline and online.

Conclusion: World in Motion

In this article I’ve suggested that we need to take seriously the way in which
fan studies has begun to split analyses of fandom between “traditional” and
“brand” or “industry-driven” fans (Linden & Linden, 2017, p. 37; Bus-
se & Gray, 2014, p. 431), as well as paying close attention to related de-
bates surrounding the place of “first-wave” fan studies and its “Fandom is
Beautiful” approach (Coppa, 2014; Sandvoss et al., 2017). These develop-
ments—along with work in subcultural theory (Kahn-Harris, 2007; Han-
nerz, 2015)—all pose the question as to what place fan community/culture
should have within contemporary fan studies. In response, I’ve argued that
continuing to prioritize fan culture (especially by treating this explicitly or
implicitly as “true” fandom) fails to consider how fandom imagines and
idealizes its community, as well as failing to address the diverse and indivi-
dualized ways in which fandom can now be performed. To this extent, I am
in agreement with the editors of Fandom (Sandvoss et al., 2017). However,
although it may be reasonable to assert that “if ‘everyone’ is a fan, then we
must move beyond subcultures” (Linden & Linden, 2017, p. 43) and con-
cepts of fan difference, it hardly follows from this “participatory condition”
(Barney et al., 2016) that fan studies is somehow redundant, nor indeed
that a “third wave” can merely broaden out its cataloguing and theorizing
practices (Sandvoss et al., 2017, pp. 10–11).

Instead, I have proposed that we draw on “world” theories (Becker,

2008; Connor, 2010) to re-theorize fandom not as community versus in-

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dividualization, nor as an empirical scattering of fan voices and experiences
to be academically taxonomized, but rather as a set of pathways or branches
which can close down what it means to be a fan for any given person. There
are a series of possible ways of doing fandom, or rather ways in which fan-
dom will have been done (Connor, 2010, p. 42), that go to make up a net-
work of networks. Some fan practices remain separated from others, and
some might act as nodes bringing diverse versions of fandom together tem-
porarily (corporatized conventions), whilst still others could limit whether
one is viewed as a “true” fan by groups on specific platforms, or in particu-
lar interpretive communities. Rather than mapping the fan world, the point
here is to recognize its fuzzy boundaries and openness, so that theorizing
fandom can mean more than merely empirically studying self-declared fans
(instead including “support personnel” along with those whose fandom may
be disputed or unclaimed), as well as not erecting an a priori or misrecog-
nized line separating the fan world “from other parts of a society” (Becker,
2008, p. 35). Third-wave fan studies have, to date, lacked any strong sense
of a fan world. But by shifting our lenses from well-established, common-
sensical views of fan culture (as subculturally differentiated and communa-
lly constructed) we might begin to perceive fandom in a series of new ways
that can go beyond debates over, and performances of, fan authenticity, and
which can address where and how acafans or scholar-fans are themselves
constituted in the fan world, perhaps having access to certain pathways and
practices of fandom. Moving from fan culture to fan world means conside-
ring how contemporary fandom is “reflexively mobilized” through “an es-
sentially counterfactual character” (Giddens, 1991, p. 28). Being socialized
into a fan community means being policed in relation to communal norms.
Participating in one platform-based articulation of fandom (e.g., Tumblr)
means having less time and energy to devote to establishing a fan presen-
ce elsewhere online. And choosing not to participate in a specific fandom
but to experience one’s emotional attachment to a text in more private ways
might render this “inauthentic” to those for whom “true” fandom means
being part of a historically-rooted group. All are possibilities that become
(counter)factual as fans follow certain branches but not others, whilst the
overall fan world represents the “open necessity” of having to choose a path
within our participatory condition.

878 From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World... - Matt Hills

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