Fans by proxy: cross-cultural media fandom in Turkey

Abstract

A “fan” can be anyone, from a regular viewer of a TV show, to a fan fiction writer, a collector, or an obsessive consumer. “Fandom”, therefore, is a community of these myriad of fans with their myriad of ways to interact with the text and each other. This study investigates the cross-cultural media fandom in Turkey and how -within a global context- Turkish media fans interact with the global media products in a different cultural, social and linguistic spheres. To investigate this community, this study relies on semi-structured interviews conducted with cross-cultural media fans in Turkey, who are urban middle-class young adults. The findings of the interviews are analyzed in five main topics: the fans share a specific kind of aesthetic attachment to the object of their fandom, they practice code-switching, they form a community by a sense of belonging and digital socialization processes, they show resistance toward the mass consumerism and Turkish popular culture, and they reject fandoms in their vernacular culture. All these practices render this group of people a community of practice, and these practices and dispositions are investigated within the light of the findings of the interviews.