Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

I was thinking about the ways in which our conversations about media fandom based around television or film have focused on the commercialization of of fan texts as a corporate strategy. Clearly, certain fan texts (Star Wars leaps to mind) have a massive corporately-owned commodity culture associated with them. Others may be equal in terms of the collection of items such as unofficial costumes and fanfic, but some of this fan activity has been connected with the idea of the gift economy.

Sports franchises also sell costumes in the form of jerseys, and officially licensed trading cards and baseballs and footballs and the like. I was wondering whether or not the class considered sports fandom more commercialized than other fandoms we have examined, as well as to what extent the fans who buy the items associated with their team are participants in the corporate structure of the leagues vs. in the ideas of avatar and identification we have discussed in earlier weeks i.e. the wearing of a favorite stars jersey while playing in order to play out a fantasy.

The sports fan seems to be relatively overlooked in most of the literature we have read for the class due to the “mainstream-ness” of it… I, however, feel that this is not the case.  Yes, there are some inactive fans that get season tickets or go to championship games; however, is this so different from average consumers who watch episodes of shows without any real connection to the fandom?  There are a variety of subcultures surrounding sports; take fantasy sports like football and baseball.  Fantasy sports allow for mock drafts, player rankings, and fantasy games that seem quite similiar to fan fiction (in that the fans are taking the characters and putting them on different teams and created situations to see how they will fare.)  It also seemed to fit into several of the “Ten ways to rewrite a television show” that Jenkins discusses on pg. 163.  There can be a refocalization on players that a fan might feel has been overlooked by the media, as well as cross overs and dislocation in the form of different team members playing together. 

Fan artifacts such as jerseys, signed baseballs…etc often illict as much money (if not more) than some of the klingon forehead pieces that we saw on the Trekkies documentary.  The culture of the fans creates the worth of the artifact.  Even though some athletes are more widely recognized, the true fans are a distinct group.  Just as Harry Potter is incredibly mainstream– the fandoms, fan fic, slash and conventions are set apart from the average reader.   I feel that sports fandom is quite similar and worth investigation.