ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 takes a closer look at how fans have been portrayed, conceptualised, stigmatised, celebrated and studied in the popular media as much as across a variety of different academic disciplines, which also investigates the historical origins and underlying ideological agendas behind some of the prevailing popular stereotypes, prejudices and misconceptions of fans in the popular and academic discourse. The chapter presents the reader a critical, comprehensive and truly interdisciplinary taxonomy of how fans have been conceptualised and studied across different academic disciplines. In so doing I also investigate to what extent those fan conceptualisations have not only been informed by, but in fact been the result of the traditional outsider-looking-in perspective on which previous studies have relied.
