By Tanya
Erzen

Tanya Erzen is an
associate professor of comparative religious studies at Ohio State
University and visiting scholar at University of Washington.

A teenage fan of the Twilight series explains that she thinks Edward Cullen, the
brooding and gorgeous vampire hero, is controlling, creepy and even violent in
his relationship with Bella, an ordinary human high school girl with whom he is
passionately in love.  While the fan
criticizes Bella and Edward’s tumultuous relationship, she is simultaneously wearing
a button on her jacket with the text, “Edward can bust my headboard, bite my
pillow and bruise my body any day.”   This refers to the part of the story when Bella
awakes with her entire body black and blue after losing her virginity on her
honeymoon.   In the aftermath, there are
feathers from the pillow Edward has bitten drifting around the room, and the
bed is shattered into pieces. 

As I set out to write about Twilight fans in online
surveys, interviews and participant observation, one of the central questions
that arose was how to make sense of fan practices and the seeming
contradictions in the above scenario.  What
categories enable the sociological study of fandoms? 

What
is a fan?  Henry
Jenkins writes that one becomes a fan by translating your viewing or reading
into some type of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the
content of a book, film, sport or television show with friends, and by joining
a community of other fans who share common interests.  Fandoms are certainly not monolithic.  They’re constantly morphing and
adapting.  Fans are also nomadic and move
from one kind of allegiance to another. 
One way to think of fandoms is as a struggle over interpretation among
fans, texts and producers that is continually reformulated and contested.  

Fandoms
as subversive or normative? 
Scholars of fandoms have repeatedly asked whether fans are subversive or
merely reinforcing social norms about gender, sexuality, race and other
identities that are the status quo.   In Twilight, the cultural scripts about
gender, sexuality, relationships and romance are a
bewildering mix: Edward is both devastatingly romantic and a creepy stalker.
Bella is heroic and a quavering damsel in distress. The sex or lack thereof
harkens back to an era of gentlemanly chivalry, and it can kill you. The Cullen
vampires are a model family of Leave It
to Beaver vampires, yet they are simultaneously self-obsessed and
materialistic.  Fans both
reinforce and resist these broader cultural messages when they talk about the
books.  Twilight is compelling because
its contradictory strands present something for everyone.  Girls see them as empowering, anti-feminist,
a guilty pleasure and a site of belonging.   

Fandom
as Consumer Practice: Twilight fans imaginatively engage the
series by writing fan fiction (one of which became the bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey), organizing
Twilight literary symposia and creating giant corn mazes with the character’s
faces.  Many of these practices seem to
be situated outside of a commercial context. 
Or are they?   As fans use
multiple forms of media to display their commitment to the objects of their
fandoms, the distinction between producers and consumers is no longer
clear.  The
erosion of the differences between popular and high culture, the changing
relationship between physical and virtual spaces, the social interactions
occurring in them, and the ways identities arise out of consumption and
production mean that niche media has started to blend in to the
mainstream.  The Twilight
franchise, a multi-million dollar enterprise that capitalizes on the tweens,
teens and older women captivated by the series, is inseparable from these other
fan-driven forms of cultural production. 

Community
and Belonging:  Fans participate in virtual and actual communities whether members
are alone or part of a giant convention. 
Pins, shirts, vampire contact lenses and tattoos become an insignia of
affiliation that links them to a broader community with shared tastes.  Dancing at vampire
balls provides fans with a form of collective
effervescence, Emile Durkheim’s
concept of a communal, amplified reaction when a group of people experience
something together that elevates them from the ordinary and moves them
temporarily into a different space and time.   Here they momentarily
transcend ordinary lives in the company of others.   Often in these moments, aspects of
societal norms are transgressed, suspended, and overturned. 

The fandom community offers affiliation,
friends, recognition, and sometimes a way to make a living.  One girl who is agoraphobic and barely leaves
her house has thousands of friends through the Facebook fan page she runs.  These relationships blur the distinction
between online and offline.  One fan site
creator talked about meeting someone in person that she’s only known online.
“It’s like you get here and it’s like, ‘Oh, I haven’t seen you in—Oh, I’ve
never actually met you before!’ and, like, it just doesn’t feel that way
because you’ve talked so many times.” 

Self-Transformation:  How are identities performed online and in
person?  When a girl alters her
appearance with amber-colored vampire contact lenses or tattoos her body in
passages from the books, she is experimenting with her identity.   Twilight fans also
engage with the books and films in visceral ways that defies some logical
constraints, blurring the boundaries between real life and the
supernatural.  On
a tour of Forks, the setting for the series, the fans and town residents
engaged in an unspoken mutual agreement to allow the real and fantastical to briefly
merge.  Here they banter about whether
the impenetrable curtain of green forest conceals vampires and werewolves, and
if that the droning roar from the drag races at the track is really a pitched
battle between the wolves and vampires. 
In these interactions, fans temporarily transcend
the rigidity of social expectations for behavior and become someone more
extraordinary.

Social
Engagement:  
Scholars have defined some fandoms as participatory
cultures to describe how the social bonds and shared experiences of fandom
engage the fans with other civic and political issues, creating a trajectory
from popular media fandom to political engagement. Out of Harry Potter–fan
obsession emerged the Harry Potter Alliance, an organization with a mission to
draw on the values of Harry Potter to instigate social change via what they
call Dumbledore’s Army.  TwilightMoms, a
fan site for women fans, organizes conventions to benefit Alex’s lemonade
stand, a cancer charity.  However, the
idea of Twilight fans connecting and organizing around the themes for the books
for social justice has not materialized. 
Harry Potter fans champion an issue with parallels to the book, identify
with fictional characters, and surround themselves by like-minded readers.
Aside from the charity baseball games, though, the themes of the Twilight books
such as romantic love with a vampire, resist this kind of politically engaged
identification. 

Returning to the girl with the “bust my headboard” t-shirt,
how might concepts of community, identity-formation, participatory cultures and
consumption enable us to understand her desires and pleasures as a Twilight fan
or why she is wearing that shirt?