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So, the gold standard of fan research that incorporates a first-person perspective is is autoethnographic research. Put simply, this research method integrates one’s personal world and the larger cultural world around them. “Like feminist and queer studies, fan studies often makes the personal political and academic. Using personal narratives and experiences to argue theoretical points, it often acknowledges if not celebrates the fact that scientific objectivity can only ever be a falsehood, that any observation, description, and theory always carries the imprint of the researchers themselves. So, it may be that the solution is a form of self-awareness and autoethnography.”[1]
Some important points about the method:
Back and forth autoethnographers gaze: First they look through an ethnographic wide angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience, then, they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations.[2]
It often involves personal narratives wherein scholars take on the dual identities of academic and personal selves to tell autobiographical stories about some aspect of their experience in daily life.[3]
Rather than believing in the presence of an external, unconstructed truth, researchers on this end [the autoethnographic end] of the continuum embrace narrative truth, which means that the experiences they depict become believable, lifelike, and possible. Through narrative we learn to understand the meanings and signifcance of the past as incom- plete, tentative, and revisable according to contingencies of present life circumstances.[4]
It is “always constrained by a particular time and space, the temporal and spatial coordinates in which the researcher has undertaken the research.”[5]
As Hills says:
The tastes, values, attachments and investments of the fan and the academic-fan are placed under the microscope of cultural analysis. Autoethnography aims to create a partial ‘inventory’ of the ‘infinity of traces’ deposited within the self by cultural and historical processes. Autoethnography also displaces the problems of assuming that the ‘real’ is always primarily discursive. This is possible because autoethnography asks the person undertaking it to question their self- account constantly, opening the ‘subjective’ and the intimately personal up to the cultural contexts in which it is formed and experienced. As a form of voluntary self-estrangement, autoethnography confronts the subject with a variety of possible interpretations of their self-accounts, and their self-accounts of their self-accounts. This process of persistent questioning throws the self into the realisation that explanations of fan and consumer activity are themselves culturally conventional. This realisation can open up the possibility of inscribing other explanations of the self; it can promote an acceptance of the fragility and inadequacy of our claims to be able to ‘explain’ and ‘justify’ our own most intensely private or personal moments of fandom and media consumption. The fragility of discursive accounts is exposed by this persistent questioning, provoking an investigation of why we stop self-analysis at a certain point by refusing to challenge privileged discourses. This endpoint of self-analysis does not reveal the ‘true’ discourse through which we can account for own cultural practices. Quite the reverse. (2002, p. 43)
Autoethnography does not simply indicate that the ‘personal is political’. Instead, it indicates that the personal—the heart of the self and the core of our cultural identity as we perform it—is always borrowed and alien. The logic of that borrowing is rarely evident to us, which is where the question of cultural politics can enter the equation, but the key statement of any autoethnography is that the ‘personal is cultural (Hills, 2002, p. 43).
Citing Hills, Booth notes,
Autoethnography in fan studies “asks the person undertaking it to question their self-account constantly” (Hills 2002: 72) and re-examine their own place within a particular fandom or fan experience. For Busse and Hellekson (2006: 24), this means examining the fan-self as “an investment and as an awareness of … subject positions” which creates “affect” in the viewer/ player. (2018, 433). [6]
Some sources that specifically relate fandom/active audiences to autoethnography as a method:
Stephanie Patrick, Becky with the Twitter: Lemonade, social media, and embodied academic fandom, CELEBRITY STUDIES, 2019, VOL. 10, NO. 2, 191–207 https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2018.1462721
Ross Garner, Not My Lifeblood: Autoethnography, Affective Fluctuations and Popular Music Antifandom, in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies – 2018 – Booth, ed.
Monaco, J. (2010) “Memory Work, Autoethnography and the Construction of a fan-Ethnography,” Participations 7(1), pp. 102–42, www.participations.org/Volume%207/Issue%201/monaco.htm.
Jessica Richards, Keith D. Parry and Daniela Spanjaard (2022) Studying Sports Fans Through Ethnographic Methods: Walk a Mile in Their Shoes In Routledge Handbook of Sport Fans and Fandom.
Hills, M. (2002) Fan Cultures. London: Routledge.
That being said, there are other entry points into studying fandom and active audiences in which you are a part (without putting yourself and your personal vulnerability on the line, as auto ethnography essentially demands). I’m cutting and pasting a lengthy exchange between luminaries in the field as they discuss this very point (citation at the end):
What does the scholarly identity of the aca-fan contribute to fan scholarship as a methodology (autoethnographic) and/or as an ethical stance (studying communities one is affiliated with)?
Mark Duffett: I’m assuming an aca-fan is someone who speaks from his or her own fan community and uses cultural studies as a vehicle to represent, support and promote it. In terms of gains, I discuss some in Understanding Fandom (2013): having a fannish relation may mean greater knowledge, responsibility, accountability, sensitivity, and experience. It may also allow fellow fans to disclose more about their pursuits. However, I do not think the story ends there. … Henry Jenkins is the original aca-fan, but if you go back to Textual Poachers (1992), to me his work often seems much broader than autoethnography. Some of those who followed in his wake, however, I think have stuck more squarely to autoethnography.There is something there about new students gravitating to fan studies to express their personal journeys in an academic context.That is a little different to saying that aca-fandom is ideally how fan research should be done.
There is also something interesting here about translation. Perhaps there is a kind of double claim to ownership going on in aca-fandom: just as fans assume ownership of their objects (recognizing chosen texts or heroes as theirs), so aca-fans assume a kind of ownership of their fan communities and position themselves as spokespeople, individuals who operate in a trans- lating role. Any ethnography (including autoethnography) is based on the premise of translating the details of a culture for a different audience and, therefore, maintaining an implicit distance. Aca-fan stances are based on the idea that participants, in particular fan communities, know more than outsiders, but I think that privilege is disappearing as fan cultures converge online. … “Inside” and “outside” are not there in same ways that they were,if they ever were.
Will Brooker: I agree with Mark on many of his points.We would first have to define aca-fan. … The term is taken to mean fans of popular culture—often, more specifically, science fiction, superheroes and fantasy, I think—who write critically about something they love, and about the communities around it, often but not always including an exploration of their own fan identity and their attachment to the fan object.That is what we tend to mean by it, but we could also consider that Shakespearean scholars are also, no doubt, fans of Shakespeare—the same must be true of most scholars of Dickens and Austen— although we do not use the term for them. Academics who write about politics are surely fascinated by politics and follow it in the same way as someone else might follow Star Trek, through routine patterns of viewing, through discussion, through communities and gatherings. Moving further away from my own area of understanding, I suspect most math scholars love mathematics. So, on one level, I would suggest that many or most academics are also aca-fans, studying something they are deeply and personally invested in, and balancing that investment with a scholarly objectivity.[7]
So one could clearly use the term aca-fan and study a fan-audience of which one is a part, but this would be done with an agenda of trying to remain objective, where autoethnography assumes that there is no such thing – one’s story is crucial to the truth of the lived reality for yourself and others, as you try to explain that ‘insider’ identity to others…
(lots of articles, including many we’ve read this term, use the term “aca-fan” casually … you can find many references to it if you’re seeking guidance on how to adopt this subject-position for your own analyses…)
- Kristina Busse (2018) "The ethics of studying online fandom" in the Routledge companion to media fandom, p. 15. ↵
- Ellis, C. (2008). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. AltaMira Press, p. 37. ↵
- Middlemost, Renee (2021) “Procaffeinating: Mapping regional coffee fandom via social media.” In Eating Fandom Intersections Between Fans and Food Cultures, p. 179. ↵
- Brit Kelley (2021). Loving Fanfction: Exploring the Role of Emotion in Online Fandoms. Routledge, pp. 123-4. ↵
- Booth, Paul. Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015, p. 107. ↵
- Paul Booth, "Board Gamers as Fans" in THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA FANDOM (2018) ↵
- Will Brooker, Mark Duffett, and Karen Hellekson (2018) “Fannish identities and scholarly responsibilities: a conversation.” In the Routledge companion to media fandom, pp. 63-4 ↵