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The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Edited by Lisa A.
Lewis. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 245 pp.

Article in Popular Music · May 1993

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The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media by Lisa A. Lewis
Holly Kruse

Popular Music, Vol. 12, No. 2. (May, 1993), pp. 205-206.

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 Reviews 205

Brazilian popular music. It is especially valuable given the lack of other available
material on the subject.

Martha Carvalho
Universidade Federal de Uberlzndia

The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Edited b y Lisa A. Lewis.
London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 245 pp.

Increasingly in recent years, cultural studies has turned away from the study of
media texts and towards analyses of media audiences. In popular music studies, a
fair amount of theorising about the nature of the audience has been done in the
past decade or so, and recent ethnographic accounts of local British music scenes
by Ruth Finnegan and Sarah Cohen have included observations of rocklpop
audiences. Yet as Lisa Lewis points out in her introduction to The Adoring Audience,
while fans are 'the most visible and identifiable of audiences' (p. I), this wave of
audience research in cultural studies has generally failed to problematise the par-
ticular issue of fandom.
Lewis acknowledges that both the academic community and the popular
media have stigmatised fandom; she asserts that the book's purpose is to recognise
fans as important cultural producers responding to difficult social conditions. The
book is divided into four parts: Defining Fandom; Fandom and Gender; Fans and
Industry; and Production by Fans. Though part I ultimately does not give us a clear
definition of fandom, Joli Jensen comes closest in her opening essay, which is one
of the collection's strongest. 'Fandom as Pathology' looks at the ways in which
fandom has overwhelmingly been defined for us in popular and academic accounts
as abnormal behaviour; fans are either pathological loners or hysterical crowd
members. But as Jensen explains, the obsession ascribed to fans seems equally
applicable to forms of scholarship, and she suggests that we recognise these com-
mon features in order to view fandom as other than pathological.
John Fiske's contribution, 'The Cultural Economy of Fandom', rests on the
familiar Fiskean assumption that audiences, and here fans in particular, expropri-
ate elements of popular culture in order to resist institutional power. Unfortunately
this analysis fails to acknowledge that fans are still ultimately implicated within the
economic structures of the dominant culture which tend to keep them in their
subordinate positions; and the questionable validity of some of Fiske's examples
weakens his argument.
In the final essay in part I, Lawrence Grossberg deals fairly specifically with
pop and rock fans in arguing for an understanding that fandom exists within a
particular consumerist 'sensibility', a particular relationship that binds together
cultural forms and their audiences and that, in the case of fandom, operates by
producing structures of pleasure. Grossberg's formulation of an affective sen-
sibility of fandom posits a more realistic notion of the politics of fandom than Fiske;
for Grossberg, affective investments create only the possibility of resistance to or
evasion of power. The argument works well, but the essay needs specific examples
to concretise Grossberg's rather abstract theoretical claims.
Part I1 investigates the relationship between gender and fandom, beginning
with two excerpts from Cheryl Cline's magazine Bitch: The Woman's Rock Newsletter
206 Reviews

with Bite. The second excerpt is the more compelling, and in it Cline confronts a
rock establishment which de-legitimates female rock fans by using the term
'groupie' as shorthand for women involved in rock. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth
Hess and Gloria Jacobs continue the critique of the discursive construction of
female popular music fans in their essay on Beatlemania, which places the
phenomenon of female Beatle fandom in the particular historical context of the
United States in the early 1960s. Citing sources of that era, including popular press
accounts of Beatlemania, advice handbooks' guidelines on the sexual behaviour of
teenage girls, social scientists' interpretations of fan behaviour, and the testimony
of female Beatle fans, the authors convincingly argue that Beatlemania, as 'the first
mass outburst of the sixties to feature women', allowed young women to escape
the asexual domestic role expected of them and express an active sexuality.
The other essays in this section, Stephan Hinerman's 'Fans, Fantasy and the
Figure of Elvis' and Lisa Lewis' 'Fan Stories on Film', contain interesting descrip-
tions but are theoretically problematic. Hinerman uses a LacanianJFreudian
psychoanalytic paradigm to examine fans' 'fantasies' about Elvis, and in doing so
reproduces the expertlfan dichotomy that the other essays in the book seem to
want to avoid. Lewis gives an interesting reading of film representations of fans,
though it is clearly not the only one possible and is hampered by her failure to note
the actual stars (or non-stars) who play the roles in these films (i.e. Robert DeNiro
as the fan and Jerry Lewis as the celebrity in King of Comedy).
Sue Brower's analysis of the relationship between the television industry and
a group of fans who call themselves Viewers for Quality Television constitutes part
I11 (along with a brief excerpt from a seminar that featured television executives).
Brower gives a comprehensive account of how this group organised and gained
input into the network decision-making process.
The collection closes with two examinations of texts produced by fans. Fred
and Judy Vermorel's compilation of fan letters written to stars like David Bowie
and Barry Manilow is both fascinating and disturbing; the letters which appear to
be written by the most deranged fans are also the most beautiful and poetic. The
final essay, Henry Jenkins' 'Filking and the Science Fiction Community', draws on
Fiske's theoretical assumptions and focuses on how science fiction fans produce
and share songs which draw on popular culture texts. Jenkins identifies this kind
of fandom as a specific Art World that promotes communal cultural production;
and he importantly notes that this ritual is a way in which fans appropriate media
texts and rework them as part of creating subcultural identities for themselves.
The Adoring Audience is an impressive attempt to bring together a variety of
works on fandom. While the collection is rather uneven and privileges white,
middle-class fandom as an object of study, it raises important questions about how
fandom has traditionally been theorised and discussed.

Holly Kruse
University of Louisville

England's Dreaming. By Jon Savage. London: Faber & Faber, 1991. 602 pp.

England's Dreaming, Sex Pistols and Punk Rock is unsure. Is it about punk or about the
Pistols? Is it about the Pistols or about Malcolm McLaren? Is it documentation or

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