The Case Study of Sherlock Holmes (2009) - Scholarly Commons ...

they designed their continuum, were not able to see how professional petty producers
would become. The term itself is actually appalling in terms of Sherlock Holmes
fandom, as Holmes fans have been contributing scholarly analysis on their subject since
the beginning of the 20 th century. Thankfully, it is the multi-dimensional nature of the
Holmes franchise that allows me to cover every aspect of fandom, therefore
encouraging the idea that fandom is a continuum built on degrees and variation.
Degrees of saturation
Sandvoss (2005) believes that even “the notion of a continuum implies a difference of
degree, rather than kind, between different audience groups” (p. 30). This “notion” is
supported by Bailey (2005), who finds that the varying degrees of audiences reflect
media saturation: “If all audience members are saturated – to use Gergen‟s term – by
experiences with media, there are differing degrees and inflections to this saturation” (p.
48-49). Bailey (2005) believes that it is the audience‟s interaction with the media that
cultivates varying degrees and that the relationship between product and viewer should
be a scholar‟s true focus, not the interactions between fans and their fan communities.
Gray et al. (2007) similarly find Abercrombie and Longhurst‟s continuum (1998) to be
only a starting point from which scholars may begin exploring fandom‟s diversity and
stages of fan cultivation:
From a contemporary perspective, the first and the second wave of fan studies
. . . focused primarily on what we now recognise (in line with Abercrombie and
Longhurst‟s [1998] typology of fan audiences) to be only one, and possibly the
smallest subset of fan groups on a wide spectrum spanning from regular,
emotionally uninvolved audience members to petty producers. The immediate, if
sometimes implicit intervention of recent work on fan audiences . . . has thus
been to change the goalposts of inquiry and to broaden our analytic scope to a
wide range of different audiences reflecting fandom‟s growing cultural currency.
With this empirical shift, the field of fan studies has become increasingly diverse
in conceptual, theoretical, and methodological terms, and has broadened the
scope of its inquiry on both ends of the spectrum between self and society. (p. 8)
Bourdieu’s economistic approach
“Bourdieu supposes that cultural life can be modelled by taking an „economistic‟
approach” (Hills, 2002, p. 47). Bourdieu‟s economistic theory suggests fandoms are
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