Coxinhas and Petralhas: the political fandom as a key analysis of the creative audience in social media

Abstract

Social media are appropriate spaces of communication for audiences for political expression, performance of identities and construction of interpretive communities. The phenomenon of the productive dynamics of the public on the Internet is traditionally studied in political communication by analytical keys such as digital activism, citizen journalism, deliberation, participation, conversation and grassroots. These scopes are insufficient to account for some particularities of this object. We offer the perspective of fan theory as an analytical tool that investigates the expression of political cultures on the internet. We argue that the action of political communication of the audience has a dimension of engagement that resembles the paradigm of fan activity, understood as a regime of audience participation in the construction of narratives that stress and are located on the margins of cultural products and dominant texts, reconfiguring them from particular sociability logics and practices. We employ qualitative methods to keep track of five pages on Facebook that produce content about politics and interview their managers. Among the main findings of this research is the formation of antagonistic interpretive references that are triggered by fan communities interpretive from defined ideological markings of left and right. In the end, we debated the findings and indicated ways for future research.