Acquiring Fan Lifestyles
Complicating fandom's relationship to consumer culture
Description
Through essays that critically engage with fan participation within consumer, material, and brand cultures, Acquiring Fan Lifestyles explores how fandom is increasingly imagined by brand owners and consumers as a lifestyle. The authors highlight a range of often overlooked fan practices and sites of engagement, including home decor, health and wellness, sustainable fashion, luxury goods, and other lifestyle categories, looking to brands such as Target and Ruggable as well as fandoms such as Twin Peaks and LEGO. They examine how individuals who claim the identity of “fan” engage in acquisition practices that are intended to demonstrate said fandom, as well as how individuals come to discover their fandoms through acquisition. In so doing, they seek to complicate the ways people participate in fandoms via acquisition; practices that are neither inauthentic nor co-opted, but rather blur the boundaries between fandom as subculture and fandom as lifestyle. Acquiring Fan Lifestyles takes seriously what acquisition and lifestyle affords fandoms and fan agency, decision making, and labor without dismissing the possibility of fan activity being constrained by and reshaped within market and class-based ideologies.
Elizabeth Affuso is Academic Director of Intercollegiate Media Studies at The Claremont Colleges. She is the coeditor of Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity.
Avi Santo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.