Fan

Fan, short for "fanatic" or "fancier", is a term used to refer to enthusiasts or admirers of a person, performance, phenomenon or object, especially within science fiction and other genre circles. Two plural forms for the word exist: fans and fen.

The derivative, fandom, denotes at once the performance towards which fans find enthusiasm, the relationship between the audience members and the performer, or performance, as well as the activity generated by this audience in the pursuit of its hobby, and the realm of global fannish interactions in and of itself.

Fandom and Gender

The word fan is often inflected according to gender as fangirl or fanboy (these usages being more common in media-related fandoms). Although fans are themselves mocked by the mundane (non-fans), this inflection may carry a more pejorative quality by assigning sex-linked (and youth-linked) characteristics derived from stereotypes. But it can also be a mode of self-identification on the part of the fan per-self. Traditional, text-oriented fandom once used the term "femmefan" to designate a female fan, but the term is archaic, having gone out of date during the simultaneous rise of second-wave feminism and influx of female fans into fandom.

Sexism in Fandom

Since the phenomenon of gendering carries into fandom, as it does into all aspects of a society informed by the division of labour into hierarchical sex classes, there is sexism in fandom.

In the first place, the performances for which fans are united in common admiration are themselves the product of such societies, and thus fannish relationships to those performances must perforce reckon their sexism.

Some manifestations of this sexism include the sexual objectification of female characters, the suppression of women's input, sexual harassment, and the marginalisation of female fen.

The Mary Sue phenomenon is also linked to sexism in fandom.