Symposium

Fan studies in Latin America: A call to arms

Adriana Amaral

Universidade Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil

Libertad Borda

Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Nadiezhda Camacho Quiroz

Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico

Clarice Greco

Universidade Paulista, São Paulo, Brazil

[0.1] Abstract—We introduce the particularities of fan studies in Latin American cultures, including previous studies from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, to encourage scholars to do their own work in the field and join the Fan Studies Network—Latin America.

[0.2] Keywords—Fan studies scholarship; Global South fans

Amaral, Adriana, Libertad Borda, Nadiezhda Camacho Quiroz, and Clarice Greco. 2024. "Fan Studies in Latin America: A Call to Arms." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 43. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2689.

1. Introduction

[1.1] In a double call to arms, we present the main benefits of a Fan Studies Network (FSN) branch in Latin America to not only academically empower our region but also share our contributions to fan and audience studies. The first call is for Latin American researchers to look to each other, to our distinctiveness and cultural products, and the second is for fan studies researchers from all around the globe to consider Latin America as a source of theoretical and empirical research relevant to fan studies in general.

[1.2] Scholars founded the FSN in 2012 to create a space for international academic dialogue among fan studies researchers. The network, which was concentrated mainly in the United Kingdom, has since branched out: in 2016, FSN—Australasia had its first meeting, and since 2017, researchers from the United States and Canada have organized international conferences through FSN—North America.

[1.3] Such initiatives inspired us to found a similar project in Latin America. On October 14, 2023, we put forth this debate at the Latin American Fan Studies Roundtable at the FSN—North America Conference. We have compiled the main discussion themes with the intention of documenting these talks and inviting other researchers to delve into the particularities of Latin America's fan cultures.

2. Audience research in Latin America

[2.1] Recent reconfigurations in the Latin American cultural and political spheres have led several intellectuals to think critically about the region's theoretical stance. Audience and pop culture studies follow broader concerns in Latin American communications and media studies, especially given the Global South's particularities and decolonial perspectives.

[2.2] The movement of discovery and revaluation of southern theories and epistemologies began in the 1970s as a critique of the coloniality of knowledge. It has since gained strength in humanities and social sciences debates associated with concepts such as "the colonial difference and the geopolitics of knowledge" (Mignolo 2002) and epistemic racism (Maldonado-Torres 2007). This call for different paradigms seeks to shed light on other perspectives and voices in a movement of theoretical, political, and cultural resistance to historically Eurocentric academia. Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007, 161) refers to this movement as the "decolonial turn" or the "post-colonial" perspective.

[2.3] In Latin America, theoretical schools on audiences and mass culture acquired their own specificities, leading to the origin of reception studies in the 1980s amid a theoretical-critical perspective on communication and mass culture in counterpoint to the functionalist, Frankfurtian analyses that prevailed at the time. Through a Gramscian perspective, scholars began to elaborate on the theory of reception in popular cultures, with bases in the mediation map (Martín-Barbero 1997) and cultural hybridization (García Canclini 2008). Reception studies are relevant to understanding audiences—and therefore fans—since reception is a political and cultural phenomenon with subjective and objective processes of a media nature, but that is also circumscribed in structural power relations. However, Maria Immacolatta Lopes, Michelle Prazeres, and Luis Mauro Sá Martino (2022) believe that the theories developed by Latin American researchers remain focused on a North–South dialogue instead of South–South connections.

[2.4] In fan studies, European or North American researchers do not focus, at least not significantly, on Latin American fandoms or their cultural products. It is therefore up to Latin American researchers ourselves to carry out and disseminate our studies. What happens, however, is a scattering of this research: little connection among Latin American scholars, coupled with the linguistic barrier (Spanish and Portuguese), weakens this research's circulation and international projection. Thus, the subalternity of Latin American studies is close to the meaning borrowed from Antonio Gramsci and described by Luciana Ballestrin (2013, 93) as "a disaggregated and episodic group, whose unification is always provisional or postponed, due to the constant suppression by dominant groups."

[2.5] Uniting work on audiences and fans is not uncommon at conferences in Latin America, such as those by the Latin American Association of Communications Researchers. In meetings organized by branches of the FSN (especially North America in more recent years), it is also common to find researchers from Latin America, though their appearances are isolated and irregular.

[2.6] Additionally, many studies carried out by Latin American researchers feature fandoms of foreign products, such as US series, doramas, K-pop, and major franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones. Even though these fandoms' practices have their specificities in Latin American countries, it is worth underlining the imbalance of power that affects the Global South since the circulation of media products, as Henry Jenkins (2004) points out about pop cosmopolitanism, involves power relations and economic and political strategies of multinational corporations. This relates to Jesús Martín-Barbero's question of "how much of a country is in their object" (quoted in Lopes, Prazeres, and Martino 2022, 75).

[2.7] The choice of objects and how we look at them therefore relate to the notion of the colonial turn by advocating for the incorporation of the fandom particularities throughout Latin America in relation to their political and geographic contexts and power relations. In establishing an FSN—Latin America branch, we ask scholars to give visibility to Latin American perspectives on the region's audience cultural practices with a particular focus on Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.

3. Brazil: Two decades of fan studies

[3.1] In Brazil, the first debate about fans emerged in the early 2000s with works by Adriana Amaral (2002), Simone Pereira de Sá (2002), and Tiago Monteiro (2007) and has been developing since then, especially with researchers collaborating on the two volumes of the TV fiction collection For a Theory of Fans of Brazilian TV Fiction. Other research groups are also dedicated to themes surrounding pop culture fans, such as the Analysis Group of Audiovisual Products; the Pop Culture, Communications, and Technology Group; and the Research Laboratory of Culture and Communication Technologies. These groups demonstrate the emergence and consolidation of the topic as relevant to communications in Brazil and Latin America as a whole. In 2017, the first Fan Studies Meeting in Brazil was held at the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos Campus São Leopoldo with the participation of scholars like Bruno Campanella (Federal Fluminense University, Brazil) and Paul Booth (DePaul University, United States).

[3.2] Research on fans in Brazil concentrates on the communications field and has grown significantly in the last two decades. For example, between 2000 and 2009, only five theses and dissertations on fans had been submitted in the country, but in the next decade (2010–2020), this number rose to fifty (Greco and Pontes 2023). Fans of series make up the largest research topic, though there are also studies on fans of films, music, video games, and telenovelas.

[3.3] In addition to theses and dissertations, Adriana Amaral and Giovana Santana Carlos (2016) and Sarah Moralejo da Costa (2018) presented overviews of fan studies themes at area conferences, pointing to a historicization of the field. Adriana Amaral, Bruna Mombach, and Stephanie Muller (2022) later observed the geographic topics of concentration in the south/southeast of Brazil and the growth of issues such as fan activism in literature reviews published in scientific journals.

[3.4] Among these main research objects, we highlight fans of foreign products from series like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Hobbit. The predominance of serial narratives is justified by the audiovisual landscape of recent years, with streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, and Globoplay releasing a significant number of new series. East and Southeast Asian pop culture has also gained relevance in audiovisual research with Japanese dramas and K-pop. We encourage researchers to explore more of the Brazilian pop universe together with the few existing works on telenovela fans, as well as celebrities such as Anitta and Pabllo Vittar and sports (especially football). More recently, there have been some efforts to consider fans of video games and politics.

[3.5] Fan research from Brazil also concerns the global advancement of academic efforts on social topics such as feminism, race, LGBTQIAPN+ representation, and intersectionality. The emergence of these debates signifies the diversifying perspectives on these fan communities, going beyond specific fandom practices to wider society. There remain gaps, however, regarding ethnic/racial issues, which are on the international rise in fan studies (Stanfill 2018). These are extremely relevant in Brazil, a mixed-race country with more than half of its population identifying as Black.

[3.6] Strong social inequality also informs cultural practices. Simone Pereira de Sá (2019) uses the term peripheral pop music network to qualify the musical styles produced, broadcasted, and consumed in Brazil's large urban peripheries, which are often considered inferior. The plurality of the country's regional cultures also demands analysis based on their specificities, such as work done by Thiago Soares (2012) on Pernambuco's brega music genre, by Lydia Barros (2015) on Pará's technobrega, and by Adriana Amaral and João Pedro Amaral (2011) on Rio Grande do Sul's rock music. In addition to regional cultural practices, Brazilians in general sustain creative practices that mark the specificities of certain fandoms, such as memes, fan fiction in Portuguese (gathered on platforms like Nyah! and Spirit Fanfics) and fan events. These form research gaps that offer a universe of possible fandom analyses.

[3.7] Another milestone in Brazilian fandom is Comic-Con, whose Brazilian edition has become the biggest pop culture event in the world. The Comic-Con Experience, which has taken place in São Paulo since 2014, is inspired by the San Diego Comic-Con but overtook it in attendance in 2019 at 280,000 attendees. Even with these marks, not much research has appeared on the subject.

[3.8] Many other cons are held every year in Brazil, like the International Comics Festival, PerifaCon (Favela Pop Culture Conference, a free event in São Paulo), and São Luis's Matsuri in Maranhão. These conferences are, as Benjamin Woo, Brian Johnson, and Bart Beaty (2020) point out, fruitful for understanding lifestyles under capitalism, the ways in which these events organize space and time, and systems of symbolic value inasmuch as they are integrated into the local economy and creative models of urban economic development.

4. An overview of fan studies in Argentina

[4.1] In 2016, the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires played venue to an event titled the Fandom, Alterities, Narrativities, Subalternity Conference, with many of the researchers' work made into the first compilation on Argentinian fandoms (Borda and Álvarez Gandolfi 2021). These conferences, as well as the increasing number of undergraduate and postgraduate publications on the topic, speak of a growing field of research.

[4.2] Much of this research about Argentinian fans was based on the idea presented by Libertad Borda (2015) that the fan phenomenon has become a pool of diverse resources (attitudes, expectations, practices, and relational modes between peers and with institutions) that increasingly contributes to the creation of individual or collective identities. The main objective of this enumeration was to highlight the lack of clear hierarchies among items: against any prescriptive or normalizing notion of fans, this hypothesis proposes that we cannot predict whether they will be "textual poachers" (Jenkins 1992), industry watchdogs, or anything between.

[4.3] Another central aspect is that although this pool of resources was initially sketched by fan actions, it is now available to the industry as well. Today, the process of audience fanification is another step in the marketing process, and the industry strategically selects and discards resources to guarantee control over the activity they encourage. Under the umbrella of this general approach, researchers have been able to address diverse aspects of the relation between industries and emergent fan activities.

[4.4] Regarding research gaps, while there is an important flow of studies on football fans in Argentina, there is only an incipient flow of exchange between fan and sports studies. There are nearly no studies on local music fandoms or entertainment television fans (e.g., reality TV and variety shows).

[4.5] Telenovelas have also been less studied in Argentina compared to other Latin American countries. Some exceptions are the work by Nora Mazziotti and that by Borda (2015), who investigates the first online fora on Latin American telenovelas at a time that could be considered the beginning of fandom, given that the previously short duration of each title on screen made it difficult to establish such ties. Another lacking approach to telenovela fans relates to age and generations, as started by Eugenia Silvera Basallo (2020), who follows the trajectory of women over fifty as viewers of the genre. This age-based angle allows effective investigation of the memories of a genre that has accompanied these women's lives, addressing processes of social and individual memory in domains such as daily consumption of cultural products. This turns these women into critical witnesses of the changes through which telenovelas have gone in recent decades.

[4.6] Another area of inquiry revolves around Argentinian Potterheads, that is, fans of Harry Potter, especially in sociology and anthropology (Cuestas 2014; Ibarrola 2023). These analyses demonstrate the connections between this fandom and their political participations based on concepts like Potterhead ethos (Aller 2021), which drives positions and practices and is closely linked to the feminist and LGBTQIAPN+ agenda.

[4.7] Research dearths aside, Argentinian otaku (fans of manga and anime) make up one of the most studied fandoms. Cosplay is a favorite angle for its aesthetic dimension (Torti Frugone 2018) and particularities in local practices (Romero Varela 2016). However, we highlight other approaches such as that of Federico Álvarez Gandolfi, who has worked on a topic rarely explored in fan studies: the impact of class within fandoms. Álvarez Gandolfi (2023) looks at the hostility with which some working-class otaku are met in contrast to the middle- and upper-class otaku who were the first to consume these products. In contrast, Gerardo Ariel Del Vigo (2018) focuses on the relationship between the consumption of manga and anime and the sexual-affective socialization of fans, particularly the practice of waifuism, or a particular bond between fans and characters met with ambivalent acceptance in the otaku community.

5. The study of fan cultures in Mexico

[5.1] In Mexico, research on fandoms and their cultural manifestations is scattered. On the one hand, they are linked to cultural artifacts and the practices that develop around their consumption, as with La Finisterra: Investigación Académica de Videojuegos e Industrias Creativas from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México's Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, whose main objects of study are video games, the experience of gamers, and the context of these practices. Other objects of study at this center are Japanese anime, comic books, and wrestling. Mexico is also home to the Network of Role-Playing Games Researchers, which has organized the International Colloquium on Role-Playing Games every year since 2016.

[5.2] On the other hand, some research on fan cultures and subcultures in Mexico centers on the consumption of cultural products from a certain country or region, as with the Circle of Studies on Japanese Subculture in Mexico at the National School of Anthropology and History and Kobe University, Japan. This group studies the subcultures within manga, J-pop, and other Japanese cultural products. Other Mexican efforts to bring together the study of fan communities' cultural practices are the First Meeting of Geek Studies, as organized by the students of the Master's Degree in Cultural Studies of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Baja California) in 2023, and the 5th International Roundtable on Communication and Youth: "Sociabilities, Diversities, and Resistances" from the Faculty of Anthropological Sciences of the Autonomous University of Yucatán. Both events discussed fan communities, identities, cultures, and practices.

[5.3] The main objects of these research centers, groups, and academic events are Japanese anime and manga; video games; and cosplay. This is not coincidental given that, as Nadiezhda Camacho Quiroz (2023) states, geek culture in Mexico has been expanding and consolidating since the 1960s with the arrival of the first Japanese anime on national television; the boom of US superhero comics and Japanese manga in the 1990s; the massification of Web 2.0; the organization of the first fan conventions throughout the country (Conque, La Mole); and the First Geek Pride March in Mexico City.

[5.4] Camacho Quiroz (2023) highlights that geek culture in Mexico is a living, heterogeneous, contingent, glocal, and transgenerational culture composed of a large community of fandoms, among which stand out the otaku, comics, and gaming fandoms. All these products and cultural manifestations are based on fantastic narratives and are mostly the result of information and communication technologies; all have transcended their original platform into other media, marking them as transmedia narratives (Jenkins 2009).

[5.5] Consolidating studies on the fan cultures of Mexico opens the possibility to understand a contemporary phenomenon that goes beyond entertainment culture, microniches, and even youth cultures, traversing every sphere of public and private life.

6. Final remarks

[6.1] We have presented some of the theoretical and thematic discussions of fan studies from Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Brazil has a previous history and greater volume of fan-based publications but shares specific objects and practices with Argentina (telenovelas and football) and Mexico (audiovisual and subcultural identities). Telenovelas are one of the main cultural products in Latin America, but while there are researchers and even research centers devoted to them, telenovela fans could be analyzed in depth and compared across Latin American countries. In turn, fan fiction in Spanish or Portuguese requires further exploration. Brazil has consistent Portuguese platforms such as Spirit Fanfics, Fanfics Brasil, and Fanfic Obsession. Spanish-language fic also have exclusive platforms such as Fanfic.es and Fanficslandia.

[6.2] In addition to the establishment of a fan research network focused on the experiences, practices, and challenges of Latin America fandom, we call for greater visibility of works produced in the Global South and invite collaboration with more Latin American researchers in this field. Our vision is inclusive to insiders as much as it is to non–Latin Americans who interact responsibly with different cultures and objects. FSN—Latin America is open to work and debate, and we encourage everyone interested in joining to contact us.

7. Acknowledgment

[7.1] This text was translated into English by Gianlluca Simi.

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