New Book: Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer

`AVAILABLE IN FOUR FORMATS`

_online_{(free) |}_PDF_{(free) |}_ePub_{(free) |}_paperback_($20)

`& SEVEN PLATFORMS`

_{mediastudies.press}_|_OAPEN_|_{Project MUSE}_|_{Internet Archive}_|_{Google Books}_|_{Apple Books}_|_Amazon

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.

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).

`AVAILABLE IN FOUR FORMATS`

_online_{(free) |}_PDF_{(free) |}_ePub_{(free) |}_paperback_($20)

`& SEVEN PLATFORMS`

_{mediastudies.press}_|_OAPEN_|_{Project MUSE}_|_{Internet Archive}_|_{Google Books}_|_{Apple Books}_|_Amazon

^{_{Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer}}^{_{is published by}}^{_{mediastudies.press}}^{_{in the Media Manifold series}}

^{_{mediastudies.press}}^{_{| 414 W. Broad St., Bethlehem, PA 18018, USA}}

^{_{Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 (}}^{_{CC by-nc 4.0}}^₎

^{_{Cover image: drow_easy | Copy-editing & proofing: Emily Alexander}}

^{_{mediastudies.press acknowledges with gratitude the support of Lancaster University Library (Pilot University OA Fund 2023-2024 - Books)}}

^{_{Media Manifold}}^{_{series - issn (}}^_online^{_{) 2832-6202 | issn (}}^_print^{_{) 2832-6199}}

^{_{isbn 978-1-951399-36-8 (print) | isbn 978-1-951399-23-8 (pdf)}}

^{_{isbn 978-1-951399-25-2 (epub) | isbn 978-1-951399-24-5 (html)}}

^_doi^{_{10.32376/3f8575cb.c2702120}}

^{_{Edition 1 published in November 2023}}