Fandom on display: intimate visualities and the politics of spectacle

Gerritsen, R. (2012)

Doctoral Thesis

Tamil movie fans typically manifest themselves in public space during movie releases and other special occasions. All over Tamil Nadu their fan club organizations put up billboards and posters, paint murals, and generate a plethora of images in different media. With this ‘fandom on display’ fans pursue aspirations of power that seem to go beyond the fan clubs’ cinematic roots. This ethnography explores these diverse ambitions by looking at the images that fans produce, disseminate and consume. Images, Roos Gerritsen argues, are crucial for fans in engaging with their star, but they also assist in putting forward their own personas and hence they underpin individual needs, personal career aspirations, and desires for power. A second important focus of this dissertation is organized around fan images in Tamil Nadu’s wider mediascape and public sphere. It concentrates on the role of urban space in the dissemination of political imaginations and aspirations that are embedded in neoliberal, global imaginaries of “world class”. The dissertation shows how such imaginations are slowly changing the ways in which fans use public spaces, watch films and engage in socio-political networks. In this last part of her dissertation, Gerritsen shows how public space and the images it contains become the canvas on which these clashing and shifting discourses are played out.

• Anthropology
• Cinema
• Fan clubs
• India
• Public culture
• Tamil Nadu
• Vernacular politics
• Visual anthropology

• All authors: Gerritsen, R.
• Supervisor: Spyer, P.E.
• Committee: Brosius, C.; Jain, K.; Keurs, P. ter
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University
• Date: 2012-11-08
• Court: LEI Universiteit Leiden