Fan Culture Study

Since Henry Jenkins'study of"Star Trek"fandom in the later 1980s, which is widely accepted as the beginning of fan culture study, fan culture researchers have been focusing their academic magnifier on those active fans in our media life. During the last twenty years, scholars in the domains of media political economists, sociologists, psychologists and cultural anthropologists have been focusing on the various aspects of fans, such as economic activities, social classes, psychological needs and the systems of fans communities within their own theoretical boundaries. However, their overweighting of the theoretical discourses construction and the limits put by the dualisms of both morality and subject-object put fan culture study in a dilemma of uncertainty.Based the historical and cross-domain conclusion of television fan culture study, the author of this study selected Trekkie and"Bing Mi"(fans of drama"Shi Bing Tu Ji"), two typical fan communities in China and United States, as the objects and made a qualitative study by the methodology of text analysis on the aspects of fan's subjectivity, media text interpretation, fan text reconstruction and the mechanism of cultural capital in fan community.The approaches of this study include Bourdieu's sociology and the relevant theoretical thoughts of media culture, such as John Fiske's cultural capital theories, psychoanalysis and media political economy.