Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (Introduction)

Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture
Henry Jenkins
Routledge, New York and London 1992

"Fans" have a much longer history, fitting more generally into longstanding debates about the popular consumption of fiction or audience response to popular entertainment....we are beginning to develop a more sophisticated understanding of ow these groups relate to the mass media and draw upon it as a resource in their everyday life. This subculture cuts across traditional geographic and generational boundaries and is defined through its particular styles of consumption and forms of cultural preference.

Media fandom = an amorphous but still identifiable grouping of enthusiasts of film and television

Textual Poachers identifies at least five distinct (thought interconnected) dimensions of this culture: its relationship to a particular mode of reception; its role in encouraging viewer activism; its function as an interpretive community; its particular traditions of cultural production; its status as an alternative social community.

Chapter 1: overview of the complex social and cultural status of the fan, challenging conventional stereotypes and outlining recent work in cultural studies which provides the theoretical background for this study.

Chapter 2: identifies characteristics of fandom's mode of reception, considering issues of textual proximity, rereading and the translation of program materials into resources for conversation and gossip.

Chapter 3: looks at the critical and interpretive practices of the fan community, including the processes of program selection, canon formation, evaluation, and interpretation as well as their relationship to gender specific reading styles

Chapter 4: traces the reception history of a particular program, Beauty and the Beast, suggesting the role played by generic expectations in shaping fan response and ways that fan interpretive conventions provide the basis for activism against the producer's actions

Chapter 5. 6, 7: examine two forms of cultural production within the fan community - specifically fan writing and video-making - describing the texts produced, their generic traditions, and the aesthetic criteria by which they are judged

Chapter 8: considers fandom's status as a new form of "community", one formed by relations of consumption and categories of taste, and discusses the role of folk music in creating a common identity for this geographically and socially dispersed group.

From the outset, an account of fan culture necessarily signals its problematic status, its inescapable relations to other forms of cultural production an bother social identities. Nobody functions entirely within the fan culture, nor does the fan culture maintain any claims to self-sufficiency. There is nothing timeless and unchanging about this culture; fandom originates in response to specific historical conditions (not only specific configurations of television programming, but also the development of feminism, the development of technologies, the atomisation and alienation of contemporary American culture etc.) and remains constantly in flux.

My task here is not to signal the fluidity of cultural communications but rather to make a case for fandom as having any degree of coherence and stability at all. Textual Poachers describes a social group struggling to define its own culture and to construct its own community within the context of what many observers have describes as a postmodern era; it documents a group insistent on making meaning from materials others have characterised as trivial and worthless.


**All content was directly quoted or paraphrased from Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers. Don't own any of these original and brilliant thoughts**