A brief review of fan studies in Brazil

Academic Commentary
Title:	A brief review of fan studies in Brazil
Commentator:	Aianne Amado
Date(s):	March 15, 2021
Medium:	Online
Fandom:	fannish/fandom culture
External Links:	A brief review of fan studies in Brazil on TWC
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A brief review of fan studies in Brazil is a 2021 academic article by Aianne Amado, published in Transformative Works and Cultures no. 32: Fan Studies Pedagogies.

The bulk of the article consists of an embedded video, 3 minutes and 48 seconds in length, which is the titular "brief review of fan studies in Brazil"; there is also an introduction and bibliography.

Excerpts

I chose this discussion to present the field of Brazilian fan studies, which has been growing and consolidating itself, to the international arena, and to provide evidence regarding the importance of acknowledging social, political, economic, and historical factors when studying fandoms, a task that must be initiated at the time the topic is chosen and continued to the end of the project. The responses I got from the panel session were enriching, leading me to conclude that the difficulties I encountered may not be exclusive to Brazil, as I had initially suspected, but rather are endemic to many countries outside the Anglophone/Eastern European worlds.

We consider Adriana Amaral's dissertation, publicized in 2002 about U2's fans from Porto Alegre, to be the first Brazilian research about fans. In that same year there were two papers, one about fanzines and the other about fanfictions, in Intercom, Brazil's biggest congress in the Communication field. Ever since that, the numbers kept growing. All three studies talk about fandoms from valuing the internet and its benefits, and their main citations are from international authors. That may be because the digital communication field was the first and usually the only one to welcome fans as a scientific subject in Brazil. Those are some of the patterns that are still true to this day.

However, by citing more international authors than our national colleagues, we are failing to create theories that actually reflect our singularities, such as culture, economics, and politics.

Language can also be a limiting factor. First, almost none of the newer and more diverse studies such as the ones discussing racism and feminism in fandoms are translated to Portuguese; and second, it makes it harder for us to have our work valued abroad. For example, throughout the 33 volumes of the Transformative Works and Cultures journal, I could only find two papers from Brazilian authors.