Fan protest stories are powerful illustrations of the way that fans may be motivated to act as agents of social change by their deep investment in media content worlds. In this issue, scholars explore how fans use the stories they love to rally support for causes that are important to them. This work demonstrates that fan activism can be an effective model for social advocacy, even as it may face some of the same critiques that other forms of civic participation often do-including the perception that these activities are too “soft” or “unserious.”
For example, when a television series is threatened with cancellation, fans respond strongly, whether through organized boycotts on college campuses or letter-writing campaigns to the network. The same pattern held true during the civil rights movement, with Black sports fans turning their devotion to their favorite teams into nonviolent protests that pushed professional sports leagues to desegregate stadium seating. The boycotts ultimately changed the makeup of sports franchises in major Southern cities that wanted to appear modern while attempting to hide their racist roots.
Scholars exploring fan activism use a variety of frames, from the traditional to the intersectional, as they examine the ways that fans engage in and mobilize their social action. Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova explore the power of fan activism to inspire new activists, while Tom Phillips delves into the failed attempt by Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma) to motivate his fans to write letters to Southwest Airlines over the filmmaker’s removal from a flight for being deemed “too fat to fly.” These examples illustrate some of the core debates in this cluster: the tension between resistance and participation as competing models, the value of affective engagement and embodied experience, and the way that the shape of a content world can influence its ability to generate social change.