1. Introduction
[1.1] Sports are some of the most globally popular forms of entertainment, and sports fans are among the most visible fan communities. Yet they have received comparatively little attention within fan studies, a field of study that has tended to focus on marginalized communities of readers and counterhegemonic practices of textual engagement. This limited attention ignores the significant overlaps between sports fandoms and other forms of fandom—they both involve deep affective investments, connections to like-minded communities, attendance at in-person gatherings, the collection and analysis of texts, acquisitions of memorabilia, and creative forms of expression.
[1.2] We can also identify some distinctive characteristics of sports fandoms. For instance, sports fans are particularly responsive to recent performance and can even speak as though they are part of their favorite team. For example, while a Los Angeles Dodgers fan might say "We won the 2024 World Series," fans of the boy band BTS wouldn't say "We had a great concert last night." Sports fandoms may originate from connections that extend beyond mere enjoyment; many affiliations with teams or players are borne out of geographic location, national identity, affiliation with an academic institution, or family inheritance across generations. The multimillion-dollar corporations and organizations that govern sports also have distinctive characteristics that shape the cultural meanings of sports. Sports fandom's novelties, along with its connections to fandom broadly conceived, make it an especially rich site for exploring specific expressions of audience engagement and expanding our understanding of fandom more generally.
[1.3] In this special issue, scholars use the tools and analytical frameworks of fan studies to examine sports fandoms in all their complexity. Indeed, sports fandoms are as diverse as fandom more broadly, and we use this special issue to explore both unconventional sports fan objects and underexamined sports fan expressions. As an example of the former, this issue has articles that explore fandom of dance teams, figure skating, and a backup National Football League (NFL) quarterback. With respect to the latter, authors examine fan articulations that include real person fiction of National Hockey League (NHL) players, the propagation of Formula One (F1) conspiracy theories, and fan outrage following an arena's name change from the Staples Center to Crypto.com Arena. Analyzing such a diverse set of underexplored topics and expressions necessitates diverse methodologies, including autoethnography, historical analysis, discourse analysis, and choreographic analysis.
[1.4] This focus on marginalized sports fandoms challenges the dominant portrayal of sports fans as white, straight, and cis male, reminding us that sports devotion is far more diverse than mainstream representations suggest. Examining fandom from the margins also provides a critical theoretical intervention. When sports fandom is understood from the center outward, hegemonic assumptions about who fans are and how they engage with sports often go unquestioned. By shifting our focus to the boundaries, we uncover insights that complicate and expand our understanding of sports fandom as a whole. With this approach, this issue demonstrates that the intersections of sport, media, and fandom continue to evolve in unexpected and dynamic ways.
2. Articles
[2.1] The issue has been organized into two parts: unexamined ways of engaging with mainstream sports and fandoms of underexamined sports. The first has pieces focused on four sports leagues that are popular in the United States—the NFL, the NHL, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and Major League Baseball (MLB). The second explores fandoms of the globally popular F1 racing, university dance teams, and the increasingly popular Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and National Women's Soccer League (NWSL).
[2.2] Laura Nyhart Broman starts the issue with "Fandom, Speculation, and Capitalist Space-Time at the Crypto.Com Arena," which explores reactions to the name change of the Los Angeles Lakers' home arena from the Staples Center to Crypto.com Arena. By analyzing posts on Reddit, Broman explores the contestation of the shift's meanings between Lakers fans and cryptocurrency proponents, with the former nostalgically memorializing a time in Lakers history and the latter celebrating a new financial future.
[2.3] Júlia Zen Dariva and Natália Brauns Cazelgrandi Ferreira focus on hockey RPF (real person fiction) on the Archive of Our Own in "'What a Bust': Character Selection and the Possibilities of Failure in Hockey RPF." Using slash fiction about retired NHL athlete Nolan Patrick, they explore how RPF contests hegemonic narratives about player success and reconceives the possibility of queer sporting failure.
[2.4] Seth S. Tannenbaum contextualizes the disproportionately low Black fandom at MLB games by turning to the past in "The Historical Marginalization of Black Fans at Major League Baseball Games." Tannenbaum's history reveals that while there have been consistent barriers that marginalized Black fans, those restrictions also shift over time.
[2.5] Brendan O'Hallarn, in "The Legend of Taylor Heinicke: An Autoethnography of Unexpected, Passionate Fandom," takes an autoethnographic approach examining fandom of a backup journeyman NFL quarterback. O'Hallarn interrogates how fandom's unexpected manifestations can complicate ethical and cultural concerns about challenging fan objects like the NFL.
[2.6] Natalie Le Clue examines a moment of outrage from fans of F1 racing in "Controversy, Social Media, and Formula One: Examining #VoidLap58." Le Clue applies the framework of toxic fan practices to the social media conversation that emerged following a controversial race in 2021, particularly focusing on the harmful role of conspiracy theories within fan discourses.
[2.7] Sammy Roth brings fan studies to the world of university dance teams in an article titled "Institutionally Appointed Fan-Athletes: The Hegemonic Performativity, Commodification, and Consumption of Scholastic Dance Teams." Roth's investigation uses methods from dance studies to analyze the commodification and racialization of dance teams as institutionally appointed fan-athletes, including pointing to both the potential harms and benefits of such positioning.
[2.8] The final article, from Cameron Michels and Deepa Sivarajan, looks at friendship and fandom in "'Pass It to Your Girlfriend!': A Collaborative Autoethnography of a Friendship Through Women's Sports Fandom." Exploring their own social bond in relation to fandoms of professional women's soccer and basketball, Michels and Sivarajan use their personal experiences as evidence for a new articulation of how alienation and marginalization play a role in shaping fan experiences.
3. Symposium
[3.1] The four Symposium pieces continue the theme of reflecting on understudied sports fan expressions from a fan studies perspective.
[3.2] Dafna Kaufman's "Everyone Watches Women's Sports" focuses on the popularization of a T-shirt displaying that phrase. She argues that the shirt's message expounds a tension in which the argument for visibility minimizes the complex history of the marginalization of women's sports.
[3.3] Tom Z. Bradstreet explicates a feeling common to contemporary sports fans in "The Implicated Supporter: Complicity and Resistance in Contemporary Football Fandom," which is the notion that fans are implicated in the ethically murky waters of highly commodified mainstream entertainment sports.
[3.4] Alexander Kupfer, in "Detroit Wants Ty Tyson: National and Regional Fandom and the 1934 NBC World Series Radio Broadcast," interrogates how national and regional fan identification shaped a movement to have a beloved local broadcaster call the MLB championship series.
[3.5] Finally, Emry Sottile explores figure skating performances based on the anime Yuri on Ice in "Fanception on Ice!!!: Cycles of Choreographic Adaptation and Fandom in Figure Skating." This piece explores the fannish translation of narrative, emotion, and queer potential and how they can take on new meaning when moving from anime to live skating performances.
4. Book reviews
[4.1] Tess Tianzi Chen reviews Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia edited by James Welker, published by University of Hawaii Press in 2022. Chen feels the book is a good overview of queer popular culture in Asia.
[4.2] Allison McCracken reviews A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood by Diana W. Anselmo, published by University of California Press in 2023. McCracken decides that the book is a major accomplishment, an invaluable resource, and accessibly written.
5. Multimedia
[5.1] Laís Limonta Gonçalves and Gabriela Lopes Gomes explore the Cetaphil Super Bowl 2024 advertisement, appealing to fathers who are fans of football and daughters who are fans of Taylor Swift.
[5.2] Chloe Bond presents a poster illustrating a discussion of how Taylor Swift's fans construct their own vocabulary of "monstrous femininity."
6. Acknowledgments
[6.1] The following people worked on TWC No. 45 in an editorial capacity: Poe Johnson and Mel Stanfill (editors); Tanya Zuk and Taylore Nicole Woodhouse (assistant editors); Jennifer Duggan, Adrienne Raw, and Khaliah Reed (Symposium); and Melanie E. S. Kohnen and Brienne Adams (Review).
[6.2] The following people worked on TWC No. 45 in a production capacity: Jillian Kovach (production editor); Robin F., Beth Friedman, Jillian Kovach, M. Lisa, LizL, Christine Mains, and A. Smith (copyeditors); Claire P. Baker, M. Lisa, Christine Mains, Rebecca Sentance, and Latina Vidolova (layout); and Emily Cohen, Karalyn, Jillian Kovach, Courtney Lazore, Christine Mains, Ember Phoenix, Aileen Sheedy, and Latina Vidolova (proofreaders).
[6.3] TWC thanks the board of the Organization for Transformative Works. OTW provides financial support to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.
[6.4] TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 45: Evan Brody, Branden Buehler, Viktor Chagas, Courtney Cox, Olivia Johnston Riley, Damion Sturm, and Natalie Tacuri.