1. Introduction
[1.1] When I began writing my dissertation, I analyzed Brazilian transnational/transcultural fandoms. My first step was to do a literature review on national research about fandoms, adding to and updating previous work by Giovana Santana Carlos (2015) and Sarah Moralejo da Costa (2018). As I did so, I noticed some patterns that I think define how fan cultures are studied, such as focusing on digital activities and referencing more foreign scholars than our fellow Brazilian colleagues.
[1.2] Along the way, I also encountered Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto's (2013) work on transculture fandom, which helped me understand the importance of considering every aspect of the subject's context while analyzing them—which, because of the patterns mentioned before, and as shown in the video, is not exactly the case in Brazilian studies.
[1.3] I chose this discussion to present the field of Brazilian fan studies, which has been growing and consolidating itself, to the international arena, and to provide evidence regarding the importance of acknowledging social, political, economic, and historical factors when studying fandoms, a task that must be initiated at the time the topic is chosen and continued to the end of the project. The responses I got from the panel session were enriching, leading me to conclude that the difficulties I encountered may not be exclusive to Brazil, as I had initially suspected, but rather are endemic to many countries outside the Anglophone/Eastern European worlds.