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The Madonna Fan Community: A Quasi-Matriarchal Network of Fan Clans

My first research project on Madonna's fan community took matriarchal studies, an anthropological area of research, and applied it to the fan community. I presented a video essay of the project at the Fan Studies North America conference in October 2020 (see below). 

ABSTRACT

Love her or hate her, Madonna is a megastar still going strong. Studies have looked at the controversial pop star from a multitude of ways but there is a lack of research into her fans. This paper intends to fill that gap in the prevailing literature by looking at the Madonna fan community. This community is dynamic, diverse and multicultural and extends across the globe. Based on interviews with self-identified fans, a clear picture of the nature of the Madonna fan community materialized and showed how it can be seen as a quasi-matriarchal world. Matriarchal or matricultural studies, a non-ideological area of research in anthropology, seems to be the only area of current research that exists separate and distinct from the dominant patriarchal order that explicates how women can exist at the center of life in a deep community structure. Positioning Madonna as the central mother figure in the larger community will reveal how that particular symbolic position is upheld and perpetuated through a network of fan clans that chain out their social reality to individual members and other clusters of fans.