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

Tutorial #4

A long overdue tutorial with the teacher saw me panic and cry on the inside.

I was initially excited to present all the primary research I've done. My focus group, the questionnaire and the convention. I was pretty progressive.

And then I realised I didn't have a proper question. I thought I did. But I don't. So pretty much I am screwed. I have 7 weeks to research, analyse and write up a 7000 report.

The good news is I found what I need to do within the next week and a half. Bad news is I have to do it within a week and a half. So I will definitely be just focussing on this for a while.

I was explaining to teacher everything I could about fandom and in the end I just wanted to show how crazy it can make people and what extents it makes people go to. This is all mumbo jumbo right now. A constant stream of consciousness. It was quite hard explaining fandom to a person who claims to have no obsessions in life.

So main focus from now on = HYPER REALITY. A theory/term developed by Jean Baudrillard in 1980s. Going beyond popular culture, the new level in which we reach that not only blurs the line between fantasy and reality but where fantasy nearly overtakes the aspects of real life.

Makings of a question:

To Infinity and Beyond!

Fandemonium and Hyperreality

The evolution of popular culture into the realms of fandom and the influence of cyber-community life on fans 

To what extent does "hardcore" fandom inflence the lives and identities of fans?

Hypothesis: That "hardcore" fandom significantly blurs the distinction between hyperreality and "real" reality

Chapter 1: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" (Star Wars)

The definition of fandom, the fans and the history of fandom studies. The move to cyber-fandom. Pop Culture evolution, birth of fandom. 

Chapter 2:

Living a life through fiction. Fandom Addiction. Beyond escapism. 

Chapter 3: 

Worlds within worlds: Baudrillard meets Joss Whedon. The theory of hyperreality and it's application to fandom today. 

Google: Fandom Addiction

People to e-mail and interview: http://fanstudies.wordpress.com/about/ and Adam Possamai

SUPANOVA2

Part 2: Warning! 30 minute video

SupaNova 17/06/2012

Probably one of the best experiences I've had so far. Please ignore shakiness and the obnoxious commentary. 

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