Ethics in Fandom

What is a Fandom? 

Positively, fandom means community, and it is the relationships between fans that generate and sustain these communities. Being a fan and belonging to a fandom is to support the arts by which spectators and listeners engage, and share that with other people. This becomes complicated because it not only shows devotion but also plays an important role in reinforcing social practices, both good and bad. In other words, a fandom’s attachment condone’s behaviour, messages and habits of those they support. It goes beyond saying they like a musician’s song, or an actor’s performance; often fandom stretches beyond someone’s craft towards who they are as a person and how they use their platform. Being a fan involves paying close attention to the object of fandom and comparatively less attention to other people. Thus, an influenced perception of not only the person they support but of their own, because of that person, becomes increasingly flawed. The age-old question of separating the art from the artist is one everyone grapples with at one point or another. So while being part of a fandom positively brings community and friendship a lot of the time, it cannot be ignored that there is power among the group to adopt immoral points of view and ignore the ethics behind admiring immoral artists. This is not to say that every immoral artist should be cut off from fan support, nor is it condoning bad habits. However, it is clear that fans hold power and they enable artists’ actions and habits through fan support. 

Fan-Artist Relationships and Collective Identity and Problematics

Despite fans and celebrities’ typical distance from each other, fandom is inherently social. Collective identity and community-based dynamics stem from sharing fan interests in an artist. This shared interest and identity are not only related to an artist or group affiliation, but are rooted in social meaning. Whether by the artist or maintained by the group, being a fan carries social baggage. Despite fandom existing along a spectrum of engagement, interacting with an artist’s music and platform creates a parasocial relationship by which fans receive emotional acknowledgement and attachment. By sharing stories from their daily lives, celebrities create a sense of authenticity and relatability, which fosters a personal connection with their followers.

On social media, this feeling of closeness to celebrities is enhanced beyond feeling connected; it can be attributed to a perception of intimacy. When celebrities engage online with fans, it opens a door for reciprocity, although rarely do these interactions become anything more than a comment or repost. However, engaging with other fans online fosters comfort for this parasocial relationship, especially if the social aspects of fandom are deemed much more important than the emotional aspects of the individual’s fanship. 

The Fangirl Phenomenon

While within a fandom, communities of fans often feel part of ‘safe spaces’ among people who share similar interests and passions. For example, fans have said that there is something about Taylor [Swift’s] fandom that is inherently welcoming, friendly and positive, which Swifties are associated to be. However, fangirls have not always been received in such a manner. Fifteen years ago, British (and Irish) phenomenon One Direction took fangirls to a whole new level: “Fans – or Directioners, as we were quickly named – were a huge, sprawling community.” From fanfiction, to posters, to owning every CD—or vinyl as is more popular now—fangirls were deemed obsessive. The condemnation of fangirls is a historically recurring and widespread phenomenon. Now, however, fangirls and fandoms have become an integral part of an artist or celebrity’s platform. From starting trends, like making friendship bracelets, to befriending a fellow fan, people are brought together through live sports and live concerts. 

Sports Fans and Fangirls 

Similar to artist fandom, sports fans foster a seemingly more competitive parasocial relationship with the team or player, as well as among the community of fans they find themselves in. Belonging to a group in sports, although an integral part of many people’s identity, also raises concerns about toxic behaviour and inter-fandom toxicity. Although more binary in sports, competition among fandoms can have negative consequences even in the music industry, pitting two artists against each other due to fandom rivalry. Like in sports, these behaviours emerge due to disrupted and destabilized collective beliefs, where fans engage in fierce competition to uphold their dominance against other teams or artist fandoms. This is just one example of the concerns regarding idolizing celebrities regardless of their social domain. 

Fangirls, Gender and Music

Women and girls are inherently shamed for being a fan, especially in pop music; it is therefore inauthentic, vacuous and feminine in contrast to more “serious” genres of music. Despite being a fan of a team or an artist like any other fan, women and girls are not allowed the same status of just being a fan; rather, they are characterized as a “hysterical fangirl” who is driven by hormones and is emotionally out of control. Despite this, fangirls have always been an integral part of any fandom; it is expected they only like the object of their devotion because they are immature, apolitical, or they desire the (male) pop star. Thus, despite showing devotion or likeness to an artist like any other fan, fangirls are condemned to an association of feeling shame for liking a particular artist, group, or music. The pervasiveness of this systemic devaluation of femininity is evident as shame is also used within fandoms to maintain a good/bad fangirl binary.

For example, Beatlemania was a global British boy-band phenomenon that took adoration to unseen levels of devotion. Because they generated such large amounts of fans, waiting to see them arrive or pack into the venue to get as close to the band as possible, fandom started to be represented in excess and is therefore seen as negative. Despite fans being fans regardless of their gender, female fans cannot escape scrutiny, and it is inherently tied to sexuality and misogyny. In fandoms, the fundamentals are largely the same: people looking for community and identity and developing taste and sexuality; however, this collective development is rooted in dominant heteronormative norms of female sexuality, both internal and external. It is here that shame becomes a crucial tool in controlling women in a social sphere, yet again. 

Cancel Culture and Supporting Immoral Artists

Cancel culture has become a radical, quick-to-judge phenomenon that dismisses artists for an immoral view or act. Is it moral to listen to someone’s music if they were cancelled online? Can it be condoned to support them financially despite not supporting them as a person? In a way, separating an artist from their work does not make it entirely bad to engage with the work. However, it is nearly impossible to remove an author from their work like a musician from their music. Although streaming a song is not the same as listening to an artist perform it live, it provides a sense of distancing from an artist as a real person and therefore leaves a distance from the immoral for fans to overlook. While this is not right nor is it wrong, honoring an artist can serve to condone their immoral behavior. By this they mean that it sends the message that this is behavior that ought to be tolerated even if it is not approved of. There is a fine line between what is tolerated and “cancelled” in total. If the things that make an artist “cancelled” can be overlooked for the sake of their work, there must be an ethical approach to dismissing the question of morals. As such, there are more ethical approaches to this decision: prioritize our fitting emotional reaction to their artistic talent over our fitting emotional reaction to their immoral behavior. Although complex, supporting an artist’s work and supporting an artist are not synonymous. While there is no one moral way to disable, or “cancel,” immoral artists, it is ultimately up to a fan’s decision to determine what is ethical or not and where they draw the line. A fan’s emotional connection to an artist or their work can determine what gets overlooked versus what is a dealbreaker. Fans and fandoms ultimately decide what makes an artist unethical. The issue, however, is doing so without falling into the swarm of internet “cancel culture,” which is quick to hold judgment without weighing the costs of deeming someone and their entire work as unethical. What this entails for fandoms, then, is that fans must look at themselves and one another, weighing their own morals inwardly before outwardly judging first.