Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (3 hours of skimming)

Part I

• Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness
• Within the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not proprietors, a recognition which must contextualise our celebration of strategies of popular resistance
• All resistant readings are not necessarily progressive readings.
• Fans do not simply consume preproduced stories; they manufacture their own fanzine stories and novels art prints, songs, videos, performances etc.
• Jean Lorrah (1984), fan writer: "The fandom...is friends and letters and crafts and fanzines and trivia and costumes and artwork and filksongs and buttons and film clips and conventions - something for everybody who has in common the inspiration of a television show, which grew far beyond its TV and film incarnation to become a living part of world culture"      Lorrah's description blurs the boundaries between producers and consumers, spectators and participants, the commercial and the homecrafted, to construct an image of fandom as a cultural and social network that spans the globe. Fandom here becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community. 

Part II

• Here I focus on the 3 central aspects of fans' characteristic mode of reception

1. Ways fans draw texts close to the realm of their lived experience
2. The role played by rereading within fan culture
3. Process by which program information gets inserted into ongoing social interactions

• Scopophilia: The love of watching or looking. (**Originally in a sexual or pornographic nature but was used in cinema psychoanalysis in the 1970s**)

Part III

• While common sense might suggest that fans become fans because of their fascination with particular texts or performers, the reverse is often true
• Barbara Fennison, fan writer, describes process: "While I enjoyed fandom, and writing fan stories about TV shows, it was a case of finding that I like fans and wanting to join in their activities; the TV viewing itself was more like homework...How many other fans enjoy the processes of fandom more than, or at least as much as, the supposedly central attraction of the shows and movies themselves? Probably more than myself alone."