Dyssynchronas and the Conflictual Core of Fandom

Yang, Ziyi and Cronin, James and Higgins, Leighanne (2025) Dyssynchronas and the Conflictual Core of Fandom. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Scholarship in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) has largely emphasised the synchronising force of communitas in marketplace cultures, documenting the positively valenced, unifying outcomes of collective consumption. Rooted in Turnerian thinking, marketplace cultures tend to be most closely associated with a suspension of everyday structures, the levelling of hierarchies, and intensified feelings of solidarity around shared ideals. Yet consumption communities are also sites of exclusion, rivalry, and toxicity – nowhere more visible than in celebrity fandoms where members compete for proximity to and recognition by the idol. Based on a three-year ‘aca-fan’s’ ethnography of K-Pop artist Jessica Jung’s fandom community of ‘Goldenstars’ – including interviews, observations, and netnographic material – I introduce the concept ‘dyssynchronas’ as the obverse to communitas. Through dyssynchronas I explore the de-synchronising and destabilising activities and experiences of marketplace cultures. The aca-fan journey is replete with instances of inter-fandom strife, pettiness, and one-upmanship that are contradictory to communitas, suggesting conflict is crucial to ingroup social functioning and status. Drawing upon important instances in the data, I conceptualise dyssynchronas as the inter-competitive, fractious, and dysfunctional character of fandom, characterised by three main features: jealousy, vengeance, and justification. These features incur certain behaviours in the fan community that are antagonistic to and countervail communitas, ranging from the assignment of blame within the community to the rationalisation of aggressive behaviours. The conceptualisation of dyssynchronas offers a more critical perspective on human interaction within marketplace cultures, acknowledging and dissecting the complexities and conflicts that coexist within communal consumption environments. This thesis clarifies how Dyssynchronas contrasts with and extends Turner’s communitas along three dimensions: (1) Temporality. Rather than fleeting moments of unity, Dyssynchronas is ongoing and pervasive; (2) Structure. Instead of hierarchy removal, Dyssynchronas entails continuous hierarchy-making and surveillance; (3) Valence. Instead of always being positive, Dyssynchronas found out negativity such as jealousy and vengeance play within the fandom. This thesis explain how irreconcilable tensions between individuality and communality within shared consumption-related environments can manifest in truculent, agonistic, and onanistic types of ‘acting-out’ that fetishise fragmentation and disharmony rather than relationality and co-operation. These negative – or ‘toxic’ – effects reflect an entire category of consumer behavior that contradicts and complicates the assumed primacy of harmonious social experience in shared consumption interests.