Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer

Front Cover
mediastudies.press, Nov 5, 2023 - Social Science - 256 pages
Killer Fandom is the first long-form treatment of serial killer fandom. Fan studies have mostly ignored this most moralized form of fandom, as a stigmatized Bad Other in implicit tension with the field’s successful campaign to recuperate the broader fan category. Yet serial killer fandom, as Judith May Fathallah shows in the book, can be usefully studied with many of the field’s leading analytic frameworks. After tracing the pre-digital history of fans, mediated celebrity, and killers, Fathallah examines contemporary fandom through the lens of textual poaching, affective community, subcultural capital, and play. With close readings of fan posts, comments, and mashups on Tumblr, TikTok, and YouTube, alongside documentaries, podcasts, and a thriving “murderabilia” industry, Killer Fandom argues that this fan culture is, in many ways, hard to distinguish from more “mainstream” fandoms. Fan creations around Aileen Wuornos, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Richard Ramirez, among others, demonstrate a complex and shifting stance toward their objects—marked by parodic humor and irony in many cases. Killer Fandom ultimately questions—given our crime-and violence-saturated media culture—whether it makes sense to set Dahmer and Wuornos “fans” apart from the rest of us.
 

Contents

Introduction
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1 Fanlike Engagement Before Fan Studies
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Figure 1 Celebratory banner at Florida State University Public Domain image by Donn Dughi
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2 Textual Poaching to Discursive Formations
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Table 1 Serial Killer Fanfic from AO3
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Figure 2 Wattpad story header by richiesshadesofgrey
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Table 7 Serial Killer Fan Accounts from TikTok
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Table 2 Serial Killer Fanfic from Wattpad
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Figure 3 Ramirez fanart nightst4lkerxx 2021a
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Figure 4 Dahmer fanart datingdahmerblog 2017a
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Figure 5 Jeffrey Dahmer identification card datingdahmerblog 2017c
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Table 3 Serial Killer Fanvids from YouTube Bundy
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Table 4 Serial Killer Fanvids from YouTube Ramirez
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Table 5 Serial Killer Fanvids from YouTube Dahmer
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Table 6 Serial Killer Fanvids from YouTube Wuornos
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3 Affect Bonding Boundaries
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5 Serial Killer Fandom as Digital Play
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Figure 8 Is this a total stranger?
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Figure 9 Hi Im Ted
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References
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Acknowledgments
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About the author (2023)

Judith May Fathallah is a Research and Outreach Associate at Lancaster University and a Research Fellow at Coventry University in the UK. She is author of Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts (2017) and Emo: How Fans Studied a Subculture (2020).

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