Normalising Fan Parasociality within Pathologising Traces

The past decade has seen an influx of academic work on and popular usage of the term ‘parasocial’, but this work largely theorises fans rather than listens to them. This paper corrects that. Drawing on 16 focus groups with fans of Harry Styles, I explore fans’ understanding and appropriation of the once-forgotten academic term, parasocial. Fans, here, are quite aware of Styles’s star persona and the illusion of their intimacy. They use the concept of parasociality to manage, understand, and police both their own behaviour and that of other fans. The paper argues that the fans actual parasociality and their usage of the term exists as a multisocial, fandom-wide experience, and mimics well-explored concepts in fan studies, including performativity, playful engagement with “easter eggs”, the “fangirl as pathology”, and boundary policing. Their performance of parasociality positions the concept as a normal part of the fan persona to be explored further academically, and at the same time, their self-conscious and hyper-nuanced use of the term contradicts its very definition.