Sacralising Fandom? From the ‘loss hypothesis’ to fans’ media rituals

Abstract

Parallels and connections between media fandom and religion have continued to fascinate theorists, with recent work equating the two phenomena in a variety of ways (e.g. Mills 2013; Wilson 2013). This piece argues that the ‘fandom = religion’ formulation tends to hinge on a range of discursive constructs, both of the “fan experience” (since empirical audience study is rarely drawn on here), and of “contemporary society” assumed to be dis-enchanted, secularized and/or marked by “liquid modernity”. As a result, what I term the “loss hypothesis” tends to frame ‘fandom = religion’ via functionalist concepts of religion, whereby traditional religiosity, and a secularized loss of faith, are displaced and replaced by media fandoms. Arguing against this discursive construct, I suggest that one way out of functionalist narratives may be to focus on fans’ sacralising media rituals, drawing on the work of Nick Couldry (2002). However, whereas Couldry proceeds via an analogy with Durkheim’s approach to the sacred/profane boundary, I argue instead that fan communities can contest and defer the border between ‘media world’ and ‘ordinary world’, making their versions of the sacred/profane binary rather more fractal, plural and mobile than a classical sociology of religion or a neo-Durkheimian position might imply.