Playing with the autoethnographical: Performing and re-presenting the fan's voice

© 2014 SAGE Publications. My article plays with notions of performativity and representation to repudiate assumptions of one-dimensional fandom. In particular, due to its self-reflexive writing style, I argue that autoethnography can articulate and show the subject-fan voice through evocations of first-person, insider experiences. Therefore, staged vignettes are deployed to represent the fan as an assemblage of investments, intensities, and energies that anchor within but fluidly move through broader socio-cultural realities. Illuminating the materialization and salience of affect, these stagings intentionally convey varying levels of invigoration to refute common misperceptions of fandom as singular in its focus, experience, or intensity. Moreover, underpinning these renditions is a degree of playfulness, crafting autoethnography to explore both the subject and fandom as an enacted series of performances. Ultimately, as a performative writing and representational strategy, the vignettes aim to blend, blur, and elicit traces of a culturally bound and multifaceted first-person fandom.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1532708614565454