Carole M. Cusack and Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, Foreword: The Study of Fandom and Religion (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
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.
The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, 2017
This entry presents an overview of the development and current state of fan studies, exploring the "reverse image" of media effects. The field of fan studies offers the ultimate rebuttal of the traditional media effects-model, by stressing the independence, agency and power of media consumers vis-à-vis media producers. After providing a short historiography of the discipline, this entry dives deeper into three themes that have been central to discussions within fan studies since its early beginnings: fan fiction, fan communities, and places of fandom.
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.