A life course perspective on fandom

In this article we explore a life course perspective on fandom, with particular emphasis on fandom and adult development. While there is growing interest in issues of age and aging within fan studies and within media studies more broadly, there is a tendency in this literature to discuss aging and the life course atheoretically, ignoring a rich body of scholarship in gerontology, sociology, psychology and human development that examines how lives unfold over time. Our goal in this manuscript is to make explicit what is typically rendered implicit in fan studies by drawing directly on life course perspectives to enrich our understanding of long-term and later-life fandom, and to suggest ways that fan studies might more fully account for fandom over time. This article thus synthesizes two bodies of literature that rarely inform one another: fan studies and life course scholarship.