The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom: Essays on the Intersection of Religion and Pop Culture (original) (raw)
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Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, Vol. 32, Nos 2-3, 2019, pp. 267-269.
This edited volume provides a fascinating overview into sacred and religious aspects of fan culture. Fan culture, or fandoms, often encompass communal and personal engagement with fictional works linked to fan- tasy or science fiction, and the volume highlights how this is manifested in various ways for fans. The book is comprised of ten essays, separated into: ‘Sacred Reading: Analyzing the Text’, which focuses on how fans decode and reinvent texts in sacred, or religious contexts; ‘Sacred Viewing: Watching the Text’, focusing on how encounters and viewed experiences with a text can affect fans; and ‘Sacred Play: Performing the Text’, looking at how fans adapt roles and themes taken from texts into their own lives. The book primarily aims to demonstrate the flexibility and changes in definitions that surround the ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘pop culture’ and the intersection between these two, seemingly separate, categories.
Carole M. Cusack and Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, Foreword: The Study of Fandom and Religion
Carole M. Cusack, Venetia Laura Delano Robertson and John W. Morehead (eds), The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom: Essays on the Intersection of Religion and Pop Culture, McFarland Publishing, 2019, pp. 1-13.
This project was originally conceived by John Morehead as an academic yet accessible anthology of papers that explore the sacred aspects of “fantastic” fandoms, those communities and personal engagements that celebrate texts of the fantasy and science fiction genres. When we, Carole Cusack and Venetia Robertson, were invited by John and McFarland to contribute to the volume and complete the project as the editors we were excited to see the breadth and depth of the contributions. The essays that have been selected for this volume represent innovative intellectual engagements with the relationship of religion to fandom. A considerable portion of the authors are early career researchers and, with the field being emergent and quickly evolving, the studies here are appositely fresh. While some of the fandoms and their media sources that feature in these pages have been subject to much academic assessment over the years, the following essays offers an insightful take on what these cultures can tell us about spirituality in the contemporary world.
Religion, 2016
Often fiction and religion have been seen as separate moments or genres, but recent encounters between the two fieldssuch as fiction-based religions or religious controversies with regard to works of fictionshow that a thorough discussion of the religious in the fictional and the fictional in the religious is important. It may be consequential for what we understand religion to be in the study of religions today. The fantasy genre, with its other worlds, magic and superhuman characters, is extremely successful in contemporary Western popular culture. This article discusses the genre of fantasy fiction and analyses how selected examples of contemporary fantasy fiction represent and mediate religion. It argues that fantasy fiction both reflects and forms religious interests and religious fascination in contemporary society, and, in combination with the related new virtual worlds of the supernatural, fantasy fiction, that it provides sites for exploration of religion. This article is not a study of new religious movements, or of locating and analysing classically religious practitioners who use fantasy fiction in religions. Rather, the author seeks to understand the current pervasive presence of religion in fantasy fiction, and to discuss its significance in contemporary Western societies, as well as its implications for the understanding of religion.
2013
During the last decade, scholars of religion have researched Star Wars-based Jediism, the Tolkien-inspired Elven community, and other religious movements inspired by popular fiction. This article raises two related questions about this new kind of religion: what should we call it?, and what differentiates it from conventional religion on the one hand, and from fandom on the other? Referring to Jean Baudrillard, Adam Possamai has suggested referring to new religions based on popular culture as ‘hyper-real religions’. I contend, however, that for Baudrillard, all religions are hyper-real in the sense that they ascribe reality to the socially constructed. I therefore offer fiction-based religion as a more accurate term. Fiction-based religions draw their main inspiration from fictional narratives (e.g. Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings) which do not claim to refer to the actual world, but create a fictional world of their own. As such, they can be contrasted with conventional (or ‘history’-based) religions whose core narratives (e.g. the Gospels) do claim to refer to the actual world and therefore fall under the narrative meta-genre of history, although they do not correspond with the actual world from a historian's perspective. Despite their fictional basis, fiction-based religions are genuine religions because the activity and beliefs of which they consist refer to supernatural entities which are claimed to exist in the actual world. As such, fiction-based religions can be contrasted with fandom which, as a form of play, creates a fictional play world rather than making assertions about the actual world. Fiction-based religion emerges when fictional narratives are used as authoritative texts for actual religious practice.
Fandom as a mode of second production: active audienceship of the rising shadow
Looking and visuality imply an audience. The aim of this paper is to open audience’s passive role as a communicative receiver for discussion. The paper will focus on the productive practices of a digital fandom network of science fiction and fantasy genre literature. It connects Walter Benjamin’s notions of the afterlife of texts and the translator’s task (1924, 1936) to fandom as a productive network (Fiske, 1992; Jenkins, 1992). The empirical analysis draws from an ethnographic study of a Finnish science fiction and fantasy literature fandom Rising Shadow digital network, www.risingshadow.net. The analysis illuminates how networked exchanges produce translation zones and loving closeness as a form of afterlife of genre texts facilitating learning, accumulation of expertise within fandom network, and even professional development that is linked to commercial publishing and fan production in media.
Intertextual Interactions: The Crafting of Fandom, Ownership and Authenticity
"Much can be made of the influence of new technologies in shaping spaces for fandom, and in shaping the nature of fandoms, leading to essays on the development of online fan communities and the changes wrought by web 2.0. However, the intertextuality of fan experience does not remain on the screen. Fan ‘craft’, such as the knitting patterns to replicate the Firefly/Serenity character Jayne’s hat, involves the use of older technology to reshape the fictional into the physical, leading to intense debates about copyright and authorship. Bringing a physical item across the boundary from the fictional realm in this manner disrupts the dissemination of cultural items as monetised commodity. This paper examines the ways in which new and old technologies are used by fans and producers alike to mould and shape an intertextual world, in which the boundaries between real and unreal, physical and immaterial, are increasingly blurred. Savvy producers are recognising the meta-textuality of self-reflexive fan culture: before the release of Iron Man 2 a corporate site went live for a subsidiary of the fictional Stark Industries and ‘recruiters’ for the firm attended San Diego ComicCon. However, this strategy disrupts the traditional advertising modes; the fictional corporation logo on a t-shirt does not necessarily directly link the uninitiated to a purchasable product such as a film or book. Memorabilia advertising aspects of a fictional world, such as promotional t-shirts for fictional businesses, are popular in cult fandom; encouraging the market for collectibles, and the display of insider knowledge, whilst preserving a distance from the corporate media who own the rights to the texts themselves. Drawing on Michael Saler’s analysis of the ‘literary prehistory of virtual reality’ this paper suggests that cult fandom uses the widest rage of technology available to its practitioners to establish and maintain a disenchantment/reenchantment dialectic. By embedding the physical manifestations of their favourite fictional world into their IRL existence, fans are not simply living the escapist fantasies of modern Walter Mitty’s. In fact, fan craft activity and independent purchasing reshapes the world to resemble their preferred fictional environment, whilst attempting to defy or reinterpret models of ownership and authority. "
Narrative and Belief, 2018
Often fiction and religion have been seen as separate moments or genres, but recent encounters between the two fieldssuch as fiction-based religions or religious controversies with regard to works of fictionshow that a thorough discussion of the religious in the fictional and the fictional in the religious is important. It may be consequential for what we understand religion to be in the study of religions today. The fantasy genre, with its other worlds, magic and superhuman characters, is extremely successful in contemporary Western popular culture. This article discusses the genre of fantasy fiction and analyses how selected examples of contemporary fantasy fiction represent and mediate religion. It argues that fantasy fiction both reflects and forms religious interests and religious fascination in contemporary society, and, in combination with the related new virtual worlds of the supernatural, fantasy fiction, that it provides sites for exploration of religion. This article is not a study of new religious movements, or of locating and analysing classically religious practitioners who use fantasy fiction in religions. Rather, the author seeks to understand the current pervasive presence of religion in fantasy fiction, and to discuss its significance in contemporary Western societies, as well as its implications for the understanding of religion. The author suggests that we should acknowledge, to a greater degree, the extent to which religion can be mixed with commerce, titillating entertainment, shared emotions, and everyday concerns. In addition, the author suggests that we should make more room for partial and shifting religious engagements in religion, and acknowledge a place, in the category of religion, for supernatural popular culture. The current fantasy popularity surge indicates not only a weakening of institutionalised religions, but also of the importance of belief and absolute truth claims in religion, and instead we see an increased visibility of 'the religious' and shifting and partial forms of religion in the West.
Fan (Fiction) Acting on Media and the Politics of Appropriation
Media and Communication, 2017
Fanfiction is the creative appropriation and transformation of existing popular media texts by fans who take stories, worlds and/or characters as starting points and create their own stories based on them. As a cultural field of practice, fanfiction questions prevalent concepts of individual authorship and proprietary of cultural goods. At the same time, fanfiction itself is challenged. Through processes of mediatization, fanfiction grew and became increasingly visible. Third parties, ranging from the media industry (e.g., film studios) and copyright holders to journalism and academia, are interested in fanfiction and are following its development. We regard fanfiction communities and fan acting as fields for experimentation and as discursive arenas which can help understand what appropriating, writing and publishing in a digital culture and the future of writing might look like. In this paper, we outline important debates on the legitimacy and nature of fanfiction and present preli...