- Bronies have frequently been written about as the poster children for unexpected fandom demographics, but they aren’t alone. Writing about “The Male Fandom of the Disney Princesses”, Steven M. Johnson said “Maybe it was because I grew up in a family with two older sisters and no brothers — but in my house, videos of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty played every single day — and I enjoyed them just as much as my sisters. Dads don’t have any need to worry or feel funny if their sons are Princess fans. Just like the great Disney heroes, the Disney heroines can teach your kids, male and female, valuable lessons of strength, independence, and pursuing their dreams.”
- While academic discussions of fandom have explored its cultural implications, it’s also revealed activity obscured by assumptions about who takes part in what. Anthropologist Meghan Ferriter has been studying the fandom of the US Women’s soccer team on Tumblr. “What the USWNT fandom actually discusses and creates are representations of the USWNT, players, other fans, opponents, and other popular culture narratives…Mediated sport discourse, as well as USWNT fandom Tumblr disourses, provide accounts; neither reality nor clean interpretation of events. Rather, as with discourses of mediated sport, Tumblr discourses present a version of events that speaks to broader social relationships and understandings of sexuality, national identities, gender, and imply relationships of power.”
- WhatCulture.com suggests that pandering to preconceived fannish notions will be the downfall of the Hollywood machine. “There is a virus sweeping the boardrooms of film studios throughout Hollywood. It is a bitter, poisonous little blighter that sucks the joy and originality out of anything it touches. It is a self-serving, self-aware, tyrannical strain of social profiling. And it is quickly dominating the way in which films are conceived and made. It is eating away at filmmakers, and rapidly controlling the output of every major studio in modern cinema. It is known only as the ‘Fanboy’ plague.”
What assumptions have you seen perpetuated about fandom? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.
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