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The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom

Melissa A. Click, Suzanne Scott

Always-on fandom, Waiting and Bingeing

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ALWAYS-ON FANDOM,
WAITING AND BINGEING
Psychoanalysis as an Engagement
with Fans’ “Infra-Ordinary”
Experiences
Matt Hills

In this chapter, I want to consider how psychoanalysis can illuminate the ordinary, everyday
experiences of being a fan today, e.g. checking-in online to keep up with fannish news and
fan friends, waiting for anticipated new television episodes, seasons or films to be released,
and becoming immersed in fictional worlds via “binge-watching” or re-viewing. Although
psychoanalysis dates to the nineteenth-century writings of Sigmund Freud, recent cultural
critics using this kind of approach have tended to favour a “psychosocial” variant (Woodward
2015) which pays attention to social contexts and factors as well as matters of the psyche. In
this instance, I will use “psychoanalytic” and “psychosocial” interchangeably, though it should
be noted that there has been intense debate on the exact differences between these two terms
(Hollway and Jefferson 2013). Considering the psychosocial ramifications of 24/7 “always-on”
and readily accessible fandom, I will argue that othering and aggression between different fan
communities/groups has become more central in the digital age (Booth 2016: 104). While
scholarship may rightly critique the gender (and other cultural) politics of fans’ antagonisms,
psychoanalysis offers a way of understanding the underlying psychosocial processes at play
here. By contrast, I will analyze fans’ seemingly unproductive waiting for beloved media texts
as a more harmonious version of community building, before concluding with an examina-
tion of binge-watching as a possible containment of anxiety that also displays “hyperconsum-
erism” (Hassler-Forest 2016: 41).

The “Little Madnesses” of Contemporary Fandom: Feels and Fights

Some of the founding figures of what has become known as “fan studies” were suspicious
of psychoanalysis, assuming that it would problematically speak for audiences in ways they
couldn’t voice themselves (Fiske 1990: 90), or that it might unhelpfully pathologize fans while
making unsupportable generalizations about an alleged fan “psyche” (Duffett 2013: 121).Thus,
Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992) made no use of psychoanalysis, and as a theoretical

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framework psychoanalysis has remained somewhat marginal in analyses of media fandom

(Hills 2012: 105). However, there are many versions of psychoanalysis, and some have proven
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to be extremely useful when theorising fans’ meaning-making practices within everyday life
(Hills 2002; Sandvoss 2005).
In particular, the work of psychoanalyst, Donald Woods Winnicott, has been drawn on to
think respectfully and positively about fandom’s “little madnesses” (Harrington and Bielby
2013). For Winnicott, such practices are not at all pathological. Rather, they are acts of playful,
cultural creativity that form part of what is valued “under the headings of religion and art
and also the little madnesses which are legitimate at the moment, according to the prevailing
cultural pattern” (Winnicott 1988: 107). Whether understood via discourses of art, religion or
fandom (Otter Bickerdike 2016), these are “people’s most intensely felt enthusiasms, emotional
investments and attachments within the sphere of culture” (Kuhn 2013: 1). Such cultural expe-
riences matter to people precisely because they are “maximally intense” (Winnicott 1991: 135).
Psychoanalysis, in its Winnicottian and object–relations guise (Whitehouse-Hart 2014: 13),
has thus offered a way of taking seriously the emotional intensities of fandom without pathol-
ogizing them or, indeed, explaining them away as if they are the side effects of something else,
e.g. identification, resistance, familiarity or pleasures of genre (Harrington and Bielby 1995:
122–130). Object-relations psychoanalysis is especially interested in the ways in which peo-
ple’s “inner” and “outer” worlds inter-relate, i.e. how our internal sense of self and external
social realities converge or diverge. Fandom’s affective relations of love, hate and ambivalence –
frequently dramatically performed via social media – offer one window on these psychosocial
processes, undoubtedly being culturally “legitimate at the moment” if one thinks about main-
stream media texts as targeting fans, as depicting fans and even as incorporating performances
of fandom into their production teams (Scott 2013; Click and Brock 2016).
Louisa Stein has rightly described much contemporary fandom as a kind of “feels culture”:

Millennial fans often tout emotional response – or what is known in millennial cul-
ture as “feels” – as a driving force behind their creative authorship communities.What
I refer to here as feels culture thrives on the public celebration of emotion previously
considered the realm of the private. In feels culture, emotions remain intimate but
are no longer necessarily private; rather, they build a sense of an intimate collective,
one that is bound together precisely by the processes of shared emotional authorship.
(Stein 2015: 156)

And if fandom incessantly mediates public and private in this way, then its emotional expres-
sions necessarily articulate internal and external worlds, moving back and forth between felt
self-identity and communally shared constructions of fan identity. Kath Woodward has argued
that not all cultural experiences lend themselves effectively to psychosocial analysis – some
are far more clearly socially/sociologically structured – but those that do tend to offer “an
experience that can be personal and collective. ‘Being in the zone’ is … an excellent illustra-
tion of the possibilities of … relationality, which lends itself particularly well to a psychosocial
approach” (2015: 86–87).
Fandom’s intensities, and its affective relations to media texts, other fans and other fans’ cre-
ated texts, are all very much personal and collective in this sense. Indeed, as Antoine Hennion
has similarly argued about what I would view as types of intense music fandom, the attentive
theorist “must ‘de-sociologise’ the music lover for her to talk about her pleasure,” (2015: 269)
or risk gathering empirical data in which common sense categories and received wisdoms are
merely reproduced, rather than (self- and culturally) transformative performances of passion

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being properly comprehended (Hennion 2015: 268, 291). Although Hennion’s approach to
music lovers’ passion for their cultural objects is not strictly psychosocial, it is nevertheless
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especially concerned with the interplay of inner and outer realities. Simon Clarke relatedly
cautions that the psychoanalytic researcher should

try to avoid using “why” questions. Hollway and Jefferson note that this may seem
counter-intuitive, as people’s own explanations of their actions are useful in under-
standing them. The problem with a “why” question, however, is that you often get a
sociological or clichéd answer.
(Clarke 2008: 121)

This may seem to re-activate John Fiske’s concerns that “psychoanalytic … theories … allow
the theorist a privileged insight into the experiences of their subjects that is not available to
the subjects themselves” (1990: 90). However, this is less about imposing theory-driven inter-
pretations that are (discursively) unavailable to audiences, and more about seeking to evade
self-reinforcing hermeneutic circles whereby available discourses are replayed simply because
they are culturally dominant – e.g. for those wishing to critique certain kinds of fan practice,
fandom equals “entitlement” (Halskov 2015: 174).
If psychoanalysis can zero in on the intense experiences of fandom that move between pri-
vate and public, individual and communal, as well as between an internal sense of self and the
external world, then it can also help to illuminate the processes of fandom. In the anniversary
edition of Textual Poachers, published in 2013, Henry Jenkins argued that we still need

a much more dynamic account of ... audience response as evolving [over time] …
The net made it much easier to study the fluctuations in fan response than before.
But, there are still relatively few accounts that deal with the process of fan reception.
(2013: xli)

However, the net didn’t only make it easier to study “fluctuations in fan response,” as if it were
granting researchers a greater level of access to reception arcs which would have happened
in the same way without the web’s facilitation. Web 2.0 also intensified and reconfigured fan
responses, as fans could instantaneously access fellow fans’ views, potentially watching a TV
episode alongside reading other fans’ live-tweeting, or following fans’ GIFs on their Tumblr
dash. This reconstituted experiences of fandom as “always-on;” fans could access other fans’
readings, debates and paratextual creativity whenever they wished (and sometimes against
their wishes thanks to Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines), in real time.This has dramatically
shifted the presence of fandom for the community, occasionally making it difficult to avoid fan
discussions and spoilers online, but also creating a newfound sense of reading-with or co-decoding.
Fandom thus becomes a co-present audience for one’s own textual responses, and a seeming
horizon against which one’s own reactions can be measured. This is certainly more than an
“imagined community,” as it is integrated into fans’ everyday lives. “Hype” used to refer to
industrial promotion, but now the term is starting to be used with reference to fan audiences’
word of mouth, textualized via social media:

The Stranger Things hype is the thing that is really pissing me off, more than anything
actually featured in the show itself. To the point where I felt compelled to write
this piece so at least there could be ONE dissenting voice out there to balance the
(suspiciously universal) adoration for the show. … [I]t would be awfully naive to

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think that the show wasn’t deliberately designed to capitalize on both nostalgia and
generational social media reminiscence in the first place.
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(O’Conghaile 2016)

Psychosocial study can thus illuminate the extraordinary ordinariness of processes of 24/7
fandom, as fans perform dissent to individuate their responses against a projected mass of
(allegedly mistaken) celebrants, or perform their fan intensity to win other fans’ approval. Fan-
dom becomes both intimately personalized and other-directed at the same time, resulting in
an intensified and performative “authenticity-as-excess,” (Fishzon 2013: 186) which though it
has a longer cultural history, becomes especially marked via social media.
Fandom is doubled or multiplied here, itself split into internal and external “objects” rather
than existing as a way of mediating the self ’s inner and outer worlds. That is to say, fandom is
both felt within the self and encountered, projected or imagined as a (communal/massified)
audience for one’s own affective relationships with specific media texts. As such, fandom can
be compliant – a way of fitting in with prevailing cultural moods and trends – as well as stren-
uously resistant, not necessarily of mainstream media, but of other fans’ voices.
Because fandom has become not only an internal object (a highly valued and intensely
personally felt self-experience) but also an external cultural object incessantly mediated back
to the self, sections of fandom can behave in highly antagonistic ways.Vitriol and hatred can
be directed at an externalized fan “other” when this (persecutory) figure is felt to impinge on
the “inner fan”, or rather the “inner fan-child.”  Thus, a subsection of male fans of Ghostbusters,
who had grown up loving the films and animated series, were strongly opposed to the 2016
“reboot” featuring a female lead cast, alleging that this pop-cultural development had ruined
their childhoods (Lynch 2016). Such intensity seems, on the face of it, nonsensical and melo-
dramatically overblown, yet it is also of a piece with “excess-as-authenticity” or “feels culture,”
where intense emotionality is, discursively and culturally, valued as possessing at least a claim to
(fannish) authority. Such Ghostbusters’ fans appear to be behaving irrationally, unreasonably and
in a highly reactionary way, just as fans of the pop band One Direction issuing death threats
against a magazine’s editors would likewise seem to be highly and problematically irrational
(Jones 2016). But each performance of embattled, fighting fandom contains a sense of the
other who is felt to be attacking one’s beloved, internalized fan object – attacking, that is, the
good, internal object of fandom introjected within the self. These imaginary but psychically
felt attacks meet with such exaggerated and aggressive counter-attacks because they threaten
to destabilize the “ontological security” or sense of self-continuity that can be attained via
fandom (Williams 2015).
The resulting fan behaviors of some male Ghostbusters’ fans, or indeed some female One
Directioners, are what a Freudian might dub a “psychopathology of everyday life” (Freud
2002). This doesn’t mean that fandom per se is somehow an unhealthy activity, but rather
that its culturally and historically specific split into internal and external objects can lead
to unhelpful patterns of (attacking) behavior on the part of fans who feel that their (inte-
riorized) fan object has come under threat. “Entitlement” has indeed become one of the
terms used to code and understand such fan practices, when fans fail to perform a culturally
appropriate acceptance of changes to their fan object, or fail to recognize the authority of
producers to make textual changes in line with their legal ownership of intellectual property.
Yet “entitlement” actually works anti-psychoanalytically: it is a pathologizing, individualiz-
ing discourse of pop psychology that seeks to fix this taint within particular fan selves, i.e.
some fans have just got things “wrong” and should behave properly. By contrast, re-opening
the case of presumed fan “entitlement” psychosocially means noting that this is a relational

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p­ roduct of lived experiences of (childhood or adolescent) fandom and social media technol-
ogies that facilitate
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being in the mind of the other in more accessible ways at all hours of the day …
enabling an ongoing defence against loss. The availability, ease, and convenience of
this extension of ourselves into online … space has become the very nature of our
contemporary relational lives.
(Balick 2014: 118)

For Aaron Balick, social media involve a “dialectic of subject and object, omnipotence and
limit,” reflecting early developmental tensions (2014: 112). Although this generalization seems
to pathologize social media tout court by rendering them regressive (Hills 2014: 186), Balick is
right to emphasize how social media does not merely allow researchers – or fans – to access a
pre-existent reality, but instead transforms peoples’ relations to each other as producers, and to
fandom itself which becomes a 24/7 chorus of affect.
Psychoanalysis can also help us to think about fandom as unproductive, and as a way of
“doing nothing.” I will address this in the next section, as well as examining the significance
of binge-watching as an ordinary aspect of fan practices.

Fan Non-Producers and Hyper-Consumers: Waiting and Bingeing

Fan studies has tended to stress fandom’s “textual productivity” and (para)textual creativity,
frequently focusing on fan fiction (fanfic) to pay off these arguments about, and valorizations
of, fandom. But fanfic is only one mode of fan specialization – it is far from coincident or
coterminous with wider notions of fandom. Not everyone who would say that they’re a fan
writes or reads fanfic, despite the volume of fanworks archived at archiveofourown.org and
fanfiction.net. Other aspects of fan practice are less clearly articulated with productivity, such
as what Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren term, in The Secret World of Doing Nothing, practices of
the “infra-ordinary” (2010: 4). Ehn and Löfgren mean everyday activities that are presumed to
be so unproductive and so unremarkable that they call for no real analysis, e.g. daydreaming
or waiting. Yet it could be argued that much of the imaginative density and distinctiveness
of media fandom relate precisely to such infra-ordinary (non-)events rather than to textual
productivity. Fan studies may have sometimes pursued an agenda focused too strongly on the
external world of analyzable fan-created texts, but by doing so it has notably neglected the
internal worlds of fans’ “semiotic productivity” (Fiske 1992: 37).
Given the interest of psychoanalysis in the “infra-ordinary” – free association within ther-
apy, for instance, is supposed to enable the person undergoing analysis to say whatever comes
into their mind, however banal or meaningless it may be felt to be – it might also complicate
fan studies’ productivist emphasis. Even fans’ playfulness tends to become analyzable within fan
studies on the basis of what it produces, whether GIF fic, parody or pastiche (Booth 2015). But
viewing fandom psychoanalytically can permit the study of just how frequently fans spend
their time ostensibly “doing nothing.”
Owain Gwynne calls the time fans spend waiting for a specific film release or TV premiere
“fan-made time,” suggesting that its experiential meaningfulness “is created by fans. … They
transform a process that generally passes without much interest for the average viewer into
part of a much larger experience with the text” (2014: 79, 80). For Gwynne, this phenomeno-
logical phase within fandom allows fans to assume a degree of power over how their awaited
text is projected and worried over: “During this time … producers … have no power over the

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way films are being imagined by fans on the forums” (Gwynne 2014: 80). But fans are bound
by the schedule set by the media producer, placing them in the “subordination of having to
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wait” (Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 68).

However, “the liminality of waiting … makes it a special kind of doing nothing. In-between
events can make people feel stuck, but such events can also generate new possibilities” (Ehn
and Löfgren 2010: 78). The art of “doing nothing” is to turn this into a series of “interesting
everyday microdramas” (Ehn and Löfgren 2010: 205), as when fans react to rumours, gener-
ate speculation about casting and narrative, or gather information from filming or industry
sources such as agents’ websites. How fans occupy themselves during the “hiatus” between
series or franchise entries has become the stuff of contemporary fandom, especially in the
case of the BBC TV series Sherlock whose four seasons to date “contain just three 90-minute
episodes each, and each hiatus [typically] lasts two years. That’s a long time for fans to build
communities based on their mutual longing” (Maloney 2014).
By occupying the temporal gap of such a “hiatus,” fandom certainly takes on a kind of
in-between quality but, as Maloney notes, this subjection to producers’ scheduling can also
work to build community. Jonathan Crary has reflected on

the act of waiting as something essential to the experience of being together, to the
tentative possibility of community… Mixed in with … annoyances and frustrations
is the … tacit acceptance of time shared in common. The suspended, unproductive
time of waiting, of taking turns, is inseparable from any form of cooperation or
mutuality.
(2013: 123–124)

Waiting, unlike the counter-attacking of fans who feel that an external fan “other” is attacking
their internalized fan object, allows internal and external images of fandom to become aligned
in positive experiences of communal fandom. Fans are filling in time together, cooperating
in sustaining their fan-cultural ontological security, and reassuring one another that this wait-
ing can be endured without diminishing their fandom. Any and all paratextual information
can also be collated within fan networks, and via fan news sites such as Sherlockology. Fan
communities are not just constructed out of “mutual longing” here, but rather through the
coalescing of internal feelings of fan commitment and external images of dedicated fandom.
Rather than an inability to “let go” being pathologized as somehow narcissistic, or as a fan-
tasized and omnipotent defense against loss (Balick 2014: 118), fans’ infra-ordinary waiting
games are part of the healthy creativity that Winnicott thought about as “little madnesses.”
Such “fan-made time” testifies to the timelessness of fans’ attachments, i.e. that they continue
no matter what, as acts of faith, hope and imagination that can carry ontological security for
individual fans as well as being reinforced by other fans’ recognition of shared experience. As
Ehn and Löfgren observe, from an “emotional perspective, waiting conceals something more
dramatic than just doing nothing” (2010: 66), even if it may not always resonate with fan stud-
ies’ typically productivist stance.
Another aspect of infra-ordinary fandom is what’s been termed “binge-watching”. Lisa
Glebatis Perks argues that the term is sufficiently pathologizing that it should be replaced
by “media marathoning” instead (2015: ix). Perks and Mareike Jenner agree, though, that
binge-watching (or media marathoning) blurs the line between fans and non-fans. Perks
argues that the “immersiveness of marathoning can … be a gateway to fandom, but marathon-
ing does not predetermine fan identification or behaviors. Marathoners temporarily adopt fan
practices” (2015: 8). And Jenner relatedly stresses how “the practice of binge-watching, though

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rooted in fandom, is not exclusive to fan practices. … VOD encourages fan-like behaviour in
non-fans” (2015: 12). Despite this potential destabilization of fan distinction, marathoning is
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said to have a significant emotional impact by Perks, on the basis of her surveys, journals and
interviews:

The marathoning practice marks the intersection of lived and fictive space, but
the fictive world holds greater power in marathoning than in other media engage-
ment patterns. … Although [Victor] Nell [1988] crafts an image of a delicate sim-
ulated experience … media marathoning creates a more stable and solid [fictional]
world … The marathon version of Nell’s delicate house would be an entire world
made of narrative brick and reader mortar to create a stronghold in which readers
blissfully play.
(Perks 2015: 8)

As might be expected, marathoning enables a more intense experience of the fictional world,
as well as better supporting the “textual productivity” of analysis that has been linked to
fandom (Jenner 2015: 2–3). Yet, rather than viewing this immersion in a fictional world as a
temporary adoption of “fan-like” activity, we might instead argue that this is a variant of main-
streamed fandom, and one that is potentially cyclical – moving on from one binge-watched
text to another and then becoming immersed in that – instead of being oriented around a
singular fan object (Hills 2005: 819).
Joanne Whitehouse-Hart’s Psychosocial Explorations of Film and Television Viewing: Ordinary
Audience argues that intensely focused watching amounts to a specific kind of object-relation:
“In passionate object relating, the experience of getting ‘hooked’ or ‘lost’… is compelling and
the subject is changed by the experience, providing scope for creative thought and living”
(2014: 86). Such object-relating is clearly normalized by the contemporary media industry,
but as Whitehouse-Hart notes, it is also possible for audiences to generate their own idiosyn-
cratic binge-watching which conjures up an object of all-consuming interest to fill in a sense
of otherwise threateningly empty social and personally felt time (Whitehouse-Hart 2014: 86).
Rather than cyclical fandom or mainstreamed/gateway fandom being viewed only as a pos-
itive cultural development that facilitates more immersive and “maximally intense” fictional
worlds, it can also form part of a “personalized user-flow … designed to … manage anxiety”
(Whitehouse-Hart 2014: 81), a finding based on one of Whitehouse-Hart’s case studies.
However, each of these possibilities leaves the “media marathoning” fan in a position of
“hyperconsumerism” where “one is struck by the overwhelming reproduction of an intense
market logic” (Hassler-Forest 2016: 41). Mainstreamed fans will tend to cycle through the
binge-watching of whatever new shows are especially of-the-moment and buzzworthy, while
fans displaying a “passionate” style of object-relating, or a containment of anxiety, will tend to
re-watch and re-consume the same media texts over time, remaining “hooked” on particular
intellectual properties and thus behaving as loyal consumers in a different way.
To conclude, in this discussion of fandom and psychoanalysis, I have sought to demon-
strate that such an approach can illuminate the internal and external worlds of fandom. This
is true not just for experiences of fandom, where fans’ personally felt and “maximally intense”
affective relations can move from private to public spaces via social media, but also for fan-
dom itself which has split into external and internal objects via contemporary, digital norms
of co-­decoding. Fandom is thus confronted as an object external to the self as well as inter-
nalized as part of self-identity, and object-relations psychoanalysis is well placed to explore
these psychosocial processes. Instead of falling back on established discourses of pathologizing

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“­entitlement,” we might start to consider how sections of fandom come to feel that their
­internalized “good” fan object is threatened by an externalized fan-“other”, which needs, emo-
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tionally, to be (counter-)attacked. By understanding such processes psychosocially, we can per-

haps avoid becoming caught up in cycles of aggression, instead viewing such attacks as ways in
which fans seek to shore up their own internal object-worlds. And rather than only empha-
sizing the textual productivity of fans, we can additionally consider how the “doing nothing”
of unproductive waiting masks a blending of fans’ internal and external worlds – one that pro-
duces experiences of fan togetherness and community rather than conflict. Lastly, we might also
address the immersion of “bingeing” not as a dangerous loss of self-control, but as a particular
kind of hyper-consumerist and passionate object-relating, which can block out anxiety and/
or enable self-transformative creativity, as well as leading to cycles of on-trend consumption.
In an argument against the use of psychoanalysis in fan studies, Mark Duffett reminds us
that “fandom is a sociocultural phenomenon mediating between wider elements that are
only connected indirectly to the depths of the mind. These elements, whether discourses,
practices, or social identities, frequently make connections between the private and public, the
individual and collective” (2013: 121). However, this is exactly why a psychosocial approach
can be so useful, as it focuses on how fandom is experienced as a bridging of people’s internal
(psychical) and external (social) worlds, as well as itself having become split into internal and
external objects in the era of Web 2.0. As we consume media via processes of co-decoding,
then, fandom becomes not merely a part of self-identity and attained ontological security; at
the same time, other people’s fandom is increasingly confronted as an external object which
can threaten one’s own internalized, lived fan identity.

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