ABSTRACT
The Studies of media fandom grew out of a tradition of feminist audience studies that pushed back against the dismissal of women audiences and their tastes by male critics, especially those within the modernist tradition. Most fan research emerges out of humanistic and qualitative traditions of inquiry. It is unsurprising, then, that their accounts of who participates in fan communities are anecdotal and impressionistic. A handful of studies have provided more concrete, if provisional, data concerning the racial composition of fan communities. The evidence is limited, but it seems to corroborate the anecdotal impression that media fans are "largely" white. To the extent that these communities are constituted through language, they are also constituted through a mode of discourse that carries a racial subtext. The whiteness of fan communities is typically presented as a simple, unremarkable fact about media fandom.
