ABSTRACT
A great deal of previous work on fandom takes Pierre Bourdieu's work on socio-cultural capital as its theoretical grounding. For Bourdieu, participation in culture is a matter of distinction and habitus: in demonstrating appreciation of those works to which our upbringing and social position inclines and equips us to interpret, we gain position in relation to other social agents, contrary to artistic ideologies of disinterest and self-sacrifice ([1979] 1986, [1992] 1996, 1993). For Bourdieu, even supposedly ‘pure pleasure’ is a matter of ‘playing the cultural game well, of playing on one's skill at playing, at cultivating a pleasure which “cultivates”‘ (Bourdieu 1986, p. 498). In his formulation, ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (p. 6). The double application of this insight, which allows a deconstruction of dominant culture's derogation of fandom in terms of devalued emotionalism (Jenson 1992), and an understanding of inter-fan struggle and bids for distinction over the capital of particular subcultures (Thornton 1995), has influenced a wide range of scholars: see Bacon-Smith (1992); Jenkins (1992); Thornton (1995); Baym (2000); Hills (2002; 2005); Williams (2010); and Milner (2011). Bourdieu's work is useful for many studies and certainly not antithetical to this one, but Michel Foucault's work on language and power is more suited to a study dealing with primarily with text and its workings.
