Fans and fandoms are ever more salient aspects of our everyday lives offline and linked to the Internet's growing influence also online, particularly on social media. While fans have generally been pathologized via mass media but also early academic representations especially prior to the founding of the interdisciplinary Fan Studies in the 1970s/1980s, which sought to actively counter negative fan representations and foreground fans' creative productivity, nowadays, even though many types of fans have been 'mainstreamed' and are generally accepted, specific fan types are still systematically discriminated against - even within Fan Studies - along the lines of socio-demographic variables. These marginalised fans are predominantly female, young, queer and non-white. Moreover, even though Fan Studies define fan identity as one of their focal concerns, linguistic research on fan identity, particularly regarding its narrative and interactive construction, has widely been neglected. However, as narrative interaction and specifically small stories (as propsed within the small story paradigm by Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2007/8) have been found to play a very important role in the construction of identity, the investigation of how fan identity is constructed via small stories and - given the centrality of collective fandoms for fans - specifically shared (group) stories can severely contribute to fan (identity) research. Thus, combining decidedly linguistic research on narrative fan identity construction and the inclusion of previously marginalised fan communities, this thesis focuses on the construction of fan identity of Taylor Swift fans (Swifties) - a predominantly female and young fandom that has been ridiculed by mass media and dominant discourses - via shared stories. More specifically this study analyses the construction of Swiftie fan identity via shared stories both online in nicknames on Tumblr and Twitter and face to face in the form of a positioning analysis investigating the interactions of a Zoom focus group made up of five German Swifties. This research finds that within Swiftie nicknames Swiftie fan identity is centrally constructed by means of variously highly condensed, combined and/or personalised references (to shared stories of the overarching Swiftie community). The focus group interactions then reveal various positioning practices that are strongly intertwined with (often) more elaborate shared stories, which are 'shared' by the Swiftie participants both with regards to experiences on the story level and their interactive co-construction on the level of interaction. Despite their diverging local manifestations both within the investigated Swiftie nicknames and focus group interactions shared stories are centrally utilised to construct and communicate Swiftie fan identity as a particularly collectively experienced and defined ingroup identity that confers belonging and further functions as a shield against outgroup discrimination. Further research should then enlarge the present investigative focus to include also other online platforms and fan communicative acts, supplementary and also offline implemented focus groups and field studies, more heterogenous participants with regard to often neglected socio-demographic variables (next to age and gender) as well as other (marginalised) fandoms outside of the Swiftie community.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-201024 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Rapp, Juliane |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för slaviska och baltiska språk, finska, nederländska och tyska |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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