‘Playing with the Autoethnographical: Performing and Re-Presenting the Fan’s Voice’ (original) (raw)

Abstract

"This paper argues that autoethnography has the potential to articulate the subject-fan voice and unlock evocations of first-person, ‘insider’ experiences within the broader field of sports fandom. Due to its self-reflexive writing style, autoethnography can be used to frame and represent fandom as an affective and experientially ‘lived’ project of identity construction. More specifically, the fan’s individuated investments, intensities and shifting sense of self can be evocatively rendered and made accessible as affectively lived moments that, when reassembled, also reveal how fan practices are embedded and anchored in broader socio-cultural realities. Given that fandom is itself a performative process, my paper proposes that performative (auto)ethnography is also a useful means for exploring the fan experience and for articulating the fan voice. To provide this reflexive turn, I introduce the subject-fan through staged ‘first-person’ vignettes that seek to re-inject a less coherent and socially-constrained sense of subjecthood than is often constructed in autoethnographical accounts. Alternatively, as a performative writing and representational strategy, these vignettes blend, blur and elicit traces of a culturally bound and multifaceted ‘first-person’ fandom. In turn, such performative vignettes produce further reflexive layers from which the phenomena of fandom (and the role of autoethnography) can be understood and analysed."

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