“Oh my god, how did I spend all that money?”: Lived experiences in two commodified fandom communities

Abstract

This research explores the role of commodification in participation in celebrity-centric fandom communities, applying a leisure studies framework to understand the constraints fans face in their quest to participate and the negotiations they engage in to overcome these constraints.

In fan studies scholarship, there is a propensity to focus on the ways fans oppose commodified industry structures; however, this ignores the many fans who happily participate within them. Using the fandoms for the pop star Taylor Swift and the television series Supernatural as case studies, this project uses a mixed-methodological approach to speak directly to fans via surveys and semistructured interviews to develop an understanding of fans’ lived experiences based on their own words.

By focusing on celebrity-centric fandom communities rather than on the more frequently studied textual fandoms, this thesis turns to the role of the celebrity in fans’ ongoing desire to participate in commodified spaces. I argue that fans are motivated to continue spending money to participate within their chosen fandom when this form of participation is tied to the opportunity for engagement with the celebrity. While many fans seek community from their fandom participation, this research finds that for others, social ties are a secondary outcome of their overall desire for celebrity attention, which becomes a hobby in which they build a “leisure career” (Stebbins 2014). When fans successfully gain attention from their celebrity object of fandom, they gain status within their community, creating intra-fandom hierarchies based largely on financial resources and on freedom from structural constraints related to education, employment, and caring.

Ultimately, this thesis argues that the broad neglect of celebrity fandom practices means we have overlooked the experiences of many fans, necessitating a much broader future scope for the field.