Alternate Realities, Alternate Identities: Class and Gender at Play in Early Twentieth-Century Fan Communities

A “fandom” is a community of fans; the word was first used in print in 1903.  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fandoms were often organized within clubs, or communicated through magazines or letters.  Subcultures of fandoms were active almost a century before Star Trek.  My presentation discusses the emergence and growth of several fandoms in Germany, Britain and the United States after 1900.  I will examine the differences that both gender and culture made in fans’ reception and reworking of popular culture in the case of three fandoms: those organized around the Sherlock Holmes series, The Wizard of Oz, and the German-language Westerns written by Karl May. 
Members of these groups often engaged intensively and playfully with their favorite texts: writing parodies and pastiches, or simply socializing regularly with like-minded aficionados.  Early fandoms thus grew up at the intersection of Victorian hobbyist groups with 19^th century mass media forms.  Members wrote songs about their characters/series; created homemade fan arts and crafts; visited sites or locations linked to their “canon” texts; crafted costumes for role play; finished incomplete fragments left behind by the original text author; wrote their own fanfiction, which spun off from the “canon” text, along with pastiches, satires, program guides, and commentaries; and of course met regularly at fan gatherings.   In their performances and productions fans took bits of the original texts or historical periods (characters, settings, costumes, favorite scenes) and reworked, reshaped, and remade them to suit their own preferences and purposes.
Like many other pastimes, fandoms tended to be sex-segregated.  My study of these three fandoms will offer a gendered analysis of fans' activities and organizations during this period.  I’m also interested in how fandom cultures both reflected and challenged contemporary notions of race and class.