‘BEING A FANGIRL OF A SERIAL KILLER IS NOT OK’: Gatekeeping Reddit’s True Crime Community

Judith Fathallah

doi:10.1177/14614448221138768

‘BEING A FANGIRL OF A SERIAL KILLER IS NOT OK’: Gatekeeping Reddit’s True Crime Community

Judith Fathallah

Lancaster University

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)

492 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

All fandoms engage in gatekeeping. Whether or not we agree that contemporary media fandoms comprise something like ‘communities’, the ‘-dom’ suffix to the term ‘fan’ necessitates some conception of a group, and groups have boundaries. These boundaries are always in tension, and self-defined true crime fans are a tricky case. True crime is mainstream, an endlessly profitable and staple of the media landscape. However, true crime fans must negotiate and police a boundary that separates them from the posited figure of the Bad Fan. This article examines the Reddit subforums r/TrueCrime and r/SerialKillers, analysing posts that discuss and police the boundaries separating the right kind of interest in true crime from this posited Bad Fan. I argue that while true crime enthusiasts tend to present their gatekeeping work as an ethical practice, it is often more to do with maintaining gendered norms than it is about morality or propriety.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	5638-5657
Number of pages	20
Journal	New Media & Society
Volume	26
Issue number	10
Early online date	24 Nov 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221138768
Publication status	Published - Oct 2024

Bibliographical note

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Keywords

Dark fandom
fan community
fan studies
gender
othering
serial killers
true crime

Access to Document

10.1177/14614448221138768Licence: CC BY

Fathallah2022VoRFinal published version, 607 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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abstract = "All fandoms engage in gatekeeping. Whether or not we agree that contemporary media fandoms comprise something like {\textquoteleft}communities{\textquoteright}, the {\textquoteleft}-dom{\textquoteright} suffix to the term {\textquoteleft}fan{\textquoteright} necessitates some conception of a group, and groups have boundaries. These boundaries are always in tension, and self-defined true crime fans are a tricky case. True crime is mainstream, an endlessly profitable and staple of the media landscape. However, true crime fans must negotiate and police a boundary that separates them from the posited figure of the Bad Fan. This article examines the Reddit subforums r/TrueCrime and r/SerialKillers, analysing posts that discuss and police the boundaries separating the right kind of interest in true crime from this posited Bad Fan. I argue that while true crime enthusiasts tend to present their gatekeeping work as an ethical practice, it is often more to do with maintaining gendered norms than it is about morality or propriety.",

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‘BEING A FANGIRL OF A SERIAL KILLER IS NOT OK’: Gatekeeping Reddit’s True Crime Community

Abstract

Bibliographical note

UN SDGs

Keywords

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