This book is a practical and theoretical guide for anyone interested in researching popular media, popular culture, audiences, and fans. Unlike most books, Theoretical Perspectives does not talk about media texts or fan communities. Instead, it critically explores the workings of fan scholarship: research on popular media and fan culture done by scholars who are often fans themselves, showing and challenging how we have constructed certain ideas about what fans and fandom are, and how to study them/as a fan.

Analysing scholarship on two transmedia franchises (The Marvel Cinematic Universe and the BBC’s Sherlock) with the help of extensive international participant discussion, Theoretical Perspectives explores and unravels established, popular theoretical frameworks and value systems on taste and legitimacy, subversion, filtering and safe spaces, neoliberal capitalist realism, and fannish dispositions to offer new approaches for anyone who wants to create a better understanding of fans, fandom, and themselves.