C. Lee Harrington

A life course perspective on fandom

In this article we explore a life course perspective on fandom, with particular emphasis on fandom and adult development. While there is growing interest in issues of age and aging within fan studies and within media studies more broadly, there is a tendency in this literature to discuss aging and the life course atheoretically, ignoring a rich body of scholarship in gerontology, sociology, psychology and human development that examines how lives unfold over time. Our goal in this manuscript is to make explicit what is typically rendered implicit in fan studies by drawing directly on life course perspectives to enrich our understanding of long-term and later-life fandom, and to suggest ways that fan studies might more fully account for fandom over time. This article thus synthesizes two bodies of literature that rarely inform one another: fan studies and life course scholarship.

Whose stories are they? Fans’ engagement with soap opera narratives in three sites of fan activity

Soap opera narratives are subject to multiple and conflicting claims of “ownership” about who is entitled to make evaluative judgments about quality. Our research examines how dedicated fans’ claims are mediated within three sites: fan clubs, daytime magazines, and electronic bulletin boards. These sites differ in the frequency and visibility of fan interaction and in the degree to which fan discourse can be managed by producers, which in turn shapes social interaction among fans and the legitimacy with which they can assert claims to the narrative.

Keep Your Fans to Yourself: The Disjuncture between Sport Studies' and Pop Culture Studies' Perspectives on Fandom

This essay explores different understandings of fans and fandom between sport studies and pop culture studies through presentation of survey data originally collected for a study on global fandom/global fan studies. Email surveys from 65 fan scholars around the world reveal important distinctions between sport scholars and pop culture scholars in terms of their basic understandings of fans and fandom, the role of self-reflexivity in fan research, and the location of sport and other pop culture scholarship in the academy. Analysis points to a disjuncture between sport and pop culture fan studies that ultimately limits the ability to fully understand the range of fan experiences and fandoms.

Opening America?: The Telenovela-ization of U.S. Soap Operas

The U.S. dominance of the international television marketplace has long been a central focus for media scholars and policy leaders concerned with television’s impact on national culture. Thus, research on the export of U.S. television programs has focused almost exclusively on its “one-way flow,” and relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to how programming from abroad fares in the United States or to how U.S. dominance in the global arena is affected as the industry adapts its products for export. This article contributes to the theoretical and empirical “opening up” of the cultural imperialism approach by considering how the U.S. television industry is influenced by program trends from abroad. In particular, it examines the impact of Latin American telenovelason the U.S. daytime soap opera genre in the context of shifts during the past decade in the demographics of the U.S. population and changes in the practices and tastes of television audiences.

Life course transitions and the future of fandom

We explore the future of media fandom through integrating insights from gerontology, human development, fan studies, and marketing. Given population aging and the dismantling of the normative 20th-century life course, along with rapid changes in the extent to which our lives are mediated, fandom is undergoing significant modification. We focus on how new findings on emotional maturation over the life course and scholarly identification of self-narrativization as a resource for 21st-century aging suggest ways that fandom may change over time.

Global Television Distribution Implications of TV “Traveling” for Viewers, Fans, and Texts

This article focuses on the sale and purchase of TV programs and formats at international trade fairs and its implications for our understanding of global television audiences, fans, and texts. Through analytic engagement with the core concept of flow, the authors explore three related issues: (a) how viewers and fans are positioned in distribution practices, (b) the ease through which various televisual elements travel through the distribution process, and (c) the limitations of a conceptual reliance on“traveling”discourses to our understanding of global TV trade.

The ars moriendi of US serial television: Towards a good textual death

While a growing body of scholarship explores narrative beginnings, much less is known about narrative endings or narrative ‘deaths’. In this article I draw on media studies as well as gerontological and thanatological literature to explore the endings of US serial television, focusing on the criteria required for a ‘good textual death’. Situated in the notion that cultural objects have a biography or a life span much as individuals do, I ultimately explore the implications of a thanatology of media studies.

Elected executions in the US print news media

In the USA, 125 (11.6%) of the inmates executed between 1977 and 2006 elected to halt legal petitions, thereby hastening their own executions. Prior research on defense attorneys suggests that the news may play a pivotal role in the dynamic of elected executions (EEs). This study examines print news media coverage of 52 EEs occurring in six US states between 1979 and 2006. Thematic content analysis examined 749 Associated Press articles, identifying the frames journalists evoke when discussing EEs. When normalizing EEs, journalists commonly frame stories in terms of inmate choice; when problematizing EEs, they tend to question inmates’ competency. Coverage is most intense when states have their first EE or during the execution of a famous inmate. Findings suggest that the alternation between these two frames (choice and competency) is consistent with competing legal notions of fairness: honoring defendants’ wishes vs. maintaining the integrity of the legal process. Moreover, findings suggest that current news frames help render EEs palatable, upholding the larger cultural idealization of capital punishment as ‘clean.’

Global TV 2010: Update of the World Market for Television

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Age, aging and mega-serials in Tamil Nadu

ABSTRACT This qualitative, exploratory study examines issues of age and aging surrounding mega-serial (daily soap opera) production in Tamil Nadu, India. This study is timely for demographic reasons (a rapidly aging Indian population) and for the centrality of mega-serials to India’s entertainment landscape, coupled with the genre’s long history of engaging global audiences with real-world social issues. Two data sources are utilized: focus groups with 16 mega-serial viewers and interviews with 25 members of the Tamil mega-serial industry. Situated in scholarship on gerontology/age studies and media/culture industry studies, analysis yields two broad themes related to (a) representations of age/aging and elder-oriented storylines in contemporary Tamil mega-serials and (b) recent industry changes that may forestall mega-serials’ potential to center age and aging as core narrative elements. Overall, evidence points to an industry and audience(s) in considerable transition.