"Andy Ruddock has suggested that “the politics of fan research involves asking how rich an interaction the fan has with the cultural world,” pointing to recent developments in the articulation of fandom studies and object‐relations theory as a means of understanding how fans “find security in a changing world through external objects whose familiarity creates feelings of comfort and power.” Understood in this way, we can conceptualize the central question of transcultural fandom studies as what happens when these external objects, made familiar through activities and patterns of consumption that give fans affective possession of them, provoke the very instabilities and discomfort they are intended to assuage?"
"In his overview and analysis of the study of affect in research of fandoms, Hills observes that work aspiring to retain a recognizable claim to ideological critique historically has positioned fans’ affective interest in media such that it cannot “underpin the generation of new cultural formations and context. The fans’ ‘oppositional subculture’ must always precede and culturally support fan interpretation and affect, rather than vice versa.” Seeking to reinstate affect to a generative place within fan studies, Hills reads it against the backdrop of the object‐ relations theory of British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott. A less trauma‐infused alternative to Freudian and Lacanian theories of infantile separation from the mother, Winnicott proposed that a child’s attainment of autonomy from the mother is predicated on its use of what he termed the “transitional object.” Winnicott theorized that through experiential play with the transitional object, the child enters into what he calls a “potential space” in which s/he is able to internalize the object sufficiently to imaginatively create (i.e., imbue it with meaning) and manipulate it. In the context of fan studies, in which media constitute the transitional object, the shift from the external – what culture ‘does’ – to the internal – what meanings fans give it – is critical, insofar as it ceases to compel productivity as a baseline for serious consideration. The act of playing leaves open the possibility that nothing is produced beyond the subjective enjoyment of an object, which in turn disarticulates fandom from a necessary relationship to its sociopolitical context.
"A the same time, the possibility of transformation is always latent in the potential space of play, and it is in this sense that object relations theory speaks specifically to the question of the role and effects of nation and culture within transnationally‐situated transcultural fandoms. Such fans typically bring their own (fan) cultural competencies to bear on their affective enjoyment of transcultural media, merging domestic cultural repertoires and foreign media in a potential space of perfect understanding. Yet, in so doing, they flirt with the dissonances and disjunctures through which cultural subjectivities may be transformed, and to assume that such transformations are necessarily ‘progressive’ in the “normative...bourgeois‐ leftist [sense] common in cultural studies” is to underestimate the intensity of the clash of imagination and reality. If, as Hills suggests, media “texts can be used creatively by fans to manage tensions between inner and outer worlds,” in the transnationally‐situated transcultural context they equally can be disillusioning, destabilizing the ontological security of the fan in such a way as to compel a choice between progression and regression."
[case studies ensue, then in conclusion]:
"The intersection of the internal and external worlds of fandom – its imaginative and material practices, its affective and empirical experience – is where, in the transcultural context, the politics of fandom lie. The ways in which the fans of one culture understand and negotiate the differences of another with which they have constructed a subjective intimacy, as well as their lived interactions with the places and people of those other cultures, are a telling indicator of the potential – and limitations – of fandom to effect transcultural transformation. By way of tracing the various ways in which Japanese female fans have interacted with the Chinese cultural, and Hong Kong local, contexts of their Hong Kong star fandom, I have examined two key modes of Japanese women’s fan activity: dōjinshi production and star okkake. As my analysis of star‐centered dōjinshi demonstrates, fans’ appropriations and manipulations of Chinese language and Hong Kong star personae in so‐called ‘parody’ dōjinshi reveal a specifically fan cultural orientation of which national/ethnic difference was but one ancillary attribute. The negotiation of such difference came to the fore only in those works that sought to rationalize fans’ interpellation by the Hong Kong stars with whom they enjoyed a subjective intimacy as ‘Japanese’, revealing a diversity of ways in which fans attempted to maintain the ontological stability of their affective fandom.
In my discussion of the star‐centered travel and okkake practices of transnationally mobile fans, I have discussed the ways in which fans’ experiences of ‘media’ spaces throughout Hong Kong similarly worked to intensify their cross‐border feelings of intimacy with stars. The sense of ‘being there’ provoked by visits to the sites of filmmaking, as well as encounters with ‘real’ stars in their Hong Kong habitus, conveyed a sense of the authenticity of stars that frequently reinforced their existing star personae. Where disjunctive experiences of stars threatened fans’ perceptions of them, they performed the imaginative work of framing these experiences within the context of their existing knowledges, at once maintaining the seeming stability of the star persona while, at the same time, reinforcing their own sense of ‘mastery’ over its discourses. Here, too, differences of national or ethnic culture were minimized through recourse to a fannish interpretative framework.
Finally, this chapter has examined the emergence and implications of fans’ national self‐reflexivity as a means of understanding the transformative potential, as well as limitations, of transcultural fandom. I have argued here that what transformations are effected are the result of fans’ lived experiences of the intersection of inculcated ways of understanding different ethnicities and perceptions of their own national, gender, and fan subjectivities. Such transformations, I argue, are less a destination than a process, continually inflected by new encounters and knowledges that, at best, help fans successfully negotiate the “mundane pragmatics of neighborliness” on a regional, and global, scale.
The works I use here are:
Roger Silverstone, "Television, Ontological Security and the Transitional Object" (1993)
Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (2002)
Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (2005)
Andy Ruddock, Investigating Audiences (2001)
and, of course, D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971)
Dissertation is here (Ch. 3 for the case studies)
