Fandom: Identities & Communities in a Mediated World

edited by Johnathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C.Lee Harrington
afterword by Henry Jenkins
New York University Press, 2007

"Most people are fans of something. If not, they are bound to now someone who is...fandom matters because it matters to those who are fans. However beyond this, the contributions fan studies have made varied in the course of what we, in retrospect, can summarise as three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades."

First wave: power, inequality, discrimination

• de Certeau's theory (1984)
• John Fiske - fans are "associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race"
• Bi-polar struggle between hegemonic culture industries and fans
• FANS IN MAINSTREAM
• Era of broadcasting changed to narrowcasting (niche marketing, target marketing; dissemination of information to narrow audience, no general public. Includes television and radio. Aiming media messages at specific segments of the public defined by the values, preferences o demographic attitudes)
• Deregulation of media markets and reflected rise of new technologies, the fan as a specialised yet dedicated consumer has become centrepiece of media industries' marketing strategies. Rather than ridicule, fan audiences are now wooed and championed by cultural industries. 
• Mainstream appreciation of being a fan
• Changing representation of fans in mass media
• Became more than mere act of being a fan of something, it was a collaborative strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities
• Fan studies: negative protrayal/imagery/stereotype of fans by authorities, media and other non-fans. Low on social/cultural hierarchy
• Tactics of fan audiences in their evasion of dominant ideologies
• Camille Bacon-Smith, Henry Jenkins, Roberta Pearson, Constance Penly, John Tulloch

Second wave:

• Leitmotif in the sociology of consumption by PIERRE BOURDEIU
• Replication of social, cultural hierarchies within fan - and subcultures, as the choice of fan objects and fan practices of fan consumption are structured through out habitus as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural and economic capital
• Interpretive communities of fandom (as well as individual acts of fan consumption) embedded in the existing economical, social and cultural status quo. 
• Gender, the taste hierarchies among fans themselves are described as the continuation of wider social inequalities. 
• Conceptual shift of fan studies to fans seen as not a counterforce to existing social hierarchies and structures but, in sharp contrast, as agents of maintaining social and cultural systems of classification and this existing hierarchies
• Bourdieuvian perspective to unmask false notion of popular culture as a realm of emancipation

• 1&2 wave = focus of particular audience groups: fan communities, subcultures, interaction between members of such group either as interpretive and support networks, on in terms of cultural hierarchization and discrimination through distinction. Focus primarily on only one, possible the smallest subset of fan groups on wide spectrum spanning regular, emotionally uninvolved audience member to petty producers. 

3rd wave:

• Increasingly diverse in conceptual, theoretical and methodological terms. 
• Fans = common mode of consumption
• Cyberfandom (online) is the shift/migration to the internet for fans and fandom. Specialised sites for specific fandoms, congregational sites for multiple fandoms in one (Television Without Pity; TWoP), accessible via Blackberries, iPods/iPhones, PUPs, laptops and cell phones
• Off the web: celebrity, television and film gossip magazines, entertainment programs on television for people who want latest news and updates (cable, radio, satellite channels)
• Chnging communication technologies and media texts contribute to and reflect increasing entrenchment of fan consumption in structure of our everyday life
• MICRO = fan, intrapersonal, pleasures & motivations, relationship between fans and fan objects
• MACRO = readings, tastes and practices are tied to wider social structures yet extends the conceptual focus beyond questioning of the hegemony and class to the dearching social, cultural and economic transformations of our time. (dialect between global and local; rise of spectacle and performance in fan consumption)
• Fan patterns, behaviour, types of consumption and interaction are becoming more integrated/integral in every day life in modern societies (global phenomenon)
• Sybiosis: cultural practice and perspective of being a fan + industrial modernity at large
• Fan studies = key mechanisms through which we interact with the mediated world at the heart of our social, political and cultural realities and identities. 

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."

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**

The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (an incomplete summarisation and analysis)

Edited by Lisa A. Lewis 
Routledge 1992

"Historical propensity to treat media audiences as passive & controlled, its tendency to privilege aesthetic superiority in programming, its reluctance to support consumerism, its belief in media industry manipulation. The popular press, as well, has stigmatised fandom by emphasising danger, abnormality and silliness. And the public deny their own fandom, carry on secret lives as fans rick the stigma that comes from being a fan."

"Perhaps only a fan can appreciate the depth feeling, the gratifications, the importance for coping with everyday life that fandom represents."

PART I: Defining fandom

Fandom as Pathology: The consequences of characterisation by Jolie Jensen

• There are two types of fans: obsessed loner and the hysterical crowd
• Obsessed loner = intense fantasy relationship with celebrity figures -> stalking, threatening, killing
• Hysterical crowd = drugs, violence, alcohol, sexual and racial imagery associated (young hysterical fans)
• The fan is defined as a response to the star system. This means that passivity is ascribed to the fan he or she is seen as being enthralled /brought into existence by the modern celebrity system via mass media. 
• "Erotomania" or the "Othello Syndrom" is an increasingly narcissistic society or maybe the fantasy life we see on television
• Caughey = media addicted age, celebrities function as role models for fan who engage in 'artificial social relation'
• Schickel = compares deranged fans and serial killers to 'us' ("normal" fans)
• Fandom as psychological compensation - psychological version of the mass
• Society critique = Fandom, especially 'excessive' fandom, is defined as a form of psychological compensation, an attempt to make up for all that modern life lacks. 
• Para-social interaction = surrogate relationship - inadequately imitates normal relationships

The Cultural Economy of the Fandom by John Fiske

• Fandom is typically associated with cultural forms that dominate value system denigrates: music, novels, comics, celebrities
• Fans fiercely discriminate against what makes a (true) fan and what falls in that fandom
• D'Acci (1988): 'Cagney and Lacey' Fans -> Use show = higher self esteem, confidence to stand up for self, adult woman took inspiration to risk starting own business
• This popular discrimination involves the selection of texts that offer fans opportunities to make meanings of their social identities an social experiences that are self interested and functional
• Cultural tastes as practices are produced by social rather than individual differences, and so textual discrimination and social discrimination are part of the same cultural process within and between fans just as much as between fans and other popular audiences
• Fans make their culture out of the commercial commodities of cultural industries
• Fandom is a heightened form of popular culture in industrial societies that the fan is an 'excessive reader' who differs from the 'ordinary' one in degree that than kind

PART II: Fandom & Gender

Something More than Love: Fan stories on film by Lisa A. Lewis

This is a list of films that portray the extremes of fandom and fans:

• Hollywood or bust
• The Fan
• Comeback to the Five and Dime Jimmie Dean, Jimmie Dean
• I Wanna Hold Your Hand
• King of Comedy
• Heartbreak Hotel

PART III: Fans and industry

Fans as Tastemakers: Viewers of Quality Television by Sue Brower

Fans dictating the course and popularity of a show and how it relates. 

• Role for a play incirculating social and aesthetic opinions in our culture
• Television series develops a following among people who both discover and create in Dick Hebdige's terms, a 'symbolic fit' between certain expressive materials and their lives (199, 11). 
• By their activity in relation to the cultural form, they refine and enhance its social image while, as fans, claiming it as symbolic of their identity

List of books to track down and borrow

State library most likely:

• Theorizing Fandom: Subculture and Identity by Cheryl Drake Harris
• Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins
• The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media by Lisa A. Lewis
• Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith