Understanding Super-Fandom Communities in a Postcolonial Context
Nitish, Aishwarya S, Janani & Swaminathan
With media and fan studies mainly circling around white-centric notions of fandom and fan belongingness, we explore fan experiences in South India, with a focus on one of Tamil Nadu’s silver-screen superstars, ‘Thalapathy’ Vijay.
In popular opinion, a fan refers to “a person with ‘obsessive attachment’ for someone or something whose admiration borders on ‘threat’, ‘abnormality’, and/or ‘stupidity’” (Chaturvedi et. al, 2021, p. 2). In the very base definition of the phenomenon, the idea of the fan seems to imply some sort of stigma. Media studies theorists such as Jenkins in Textual Poachers and Jenson on Fandom as Pathology consider the idea of the fandom as pathological and deem them simply as obsessed individuals with child-like subjectivities or “a hysterical crowd without ‘an evolved ego’” (Chaturvedi et. al, 2021, p. 2). In their understanding, fandom therefore refers to “individual obsessions, privately elaborated, and public hysteria, mobilized by crowd contagion” (Chaturvedi, 2021, p. 2).
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
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