Designing Fan-Created Doctor Who Merchandise: Forms of Capital and Unlicensed Design Adventures in Capitalist Realism

Abstract

Strands of fan studies and design research have shared a Bourdieusian focus and can be brought into dialogue. However, prior work on unlicensed fan-created merchandise has emphasised how ‘fan cultural capital’ underpins the distinctiveness of fan-made merch. The author argues that multiple forms of cultural capital act to constitute the ‘authenticity’ of unofficial fan-created designs, including digital cultural capital, attention capital and corporate cultural capital.

The author considers two Doctor Who fan-designers who bring together professionalised fandom and high levels of fan cultural capital, focusing on how their fan-created merchandise relates to Doctor Who branding. Clayton Hickman imagines improved practices of brand management, going beyond fan-perceived inauthenticities of official products. Contexts of capitalist realism and omnipresent branding aren’t challenged, but it is implied that the fan’s eye for detail can do better than industry professionals lacking fan sensibilities. And Andrew-Mark Thompson creates ‘fake’ paratexts – adverts for non-existent products – which are more oppositional in relation to Doctor Who’s commercial exploitation, despite displaying an affection for official merchandise. While Hickman modernises Doctor Who’s older paratexts, Thompson projects current Who back into recreations of vintage paratexts. One limit of Bourdieusian approaches to fan-design remains their awkwardness in relation to designers’ aesthetic projects.