The Birth of Crisis Fandom: Patchwork Body/Politics in Post-Pandemic American Digital Culture 66 views

The December 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk both inspired hundreds of fanfictions. The fanfiction written about both assassinations is indicative of how fannish practices and logics have become instinctual parts of post-pandemic American political and digital culture, creating a fannish orientation to political violence and crises across the media ecosystem. Drawing on fan studies, political theory, and a critical technocultural discourse analysis of 90 Thompson and Kirk assassination fanfictions, this thesis theorizes “crisis fandom”: the fannish entanglement with and transformation of the experience and mediatization of crisis, instability, or uncertainty. Whether reading fanfiction about an assassination or a New York Times article about an alleged assassin, engaging and merely existing in the contemporary political media ecosystem requires citizens to entangle with fannish affects. When crisis fandom is viewed as media practice, rather than identity or community, we can understand crisis fandom as a media practice that citizens use to make sense of political uncertainty and their own epistemological and ontological insecurity. Crisis fandom helps us understand the feelings and affects that go into and create our media and our publics in times in crisis, change, and violence.

MA (Master of Arts)

Fan studies; Real person fanfiction; Crisis; Body politic; Political culture

English

2026-04-29