posted instruc.
52 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
b . I d monized 'good' fandom while still representing Jackson
less o v1ous Y e bl' , ·r e' and
f n within specific ideological limits thereby ena ing pos1 iv
, a s f e' fan readings even while continuing to cater for, and reproduce, a
neg a
iv 'deology of 'irrational' emotivist fandom. (2007b, 475) common-sense 1 '
It is possible that fans who participate in one way and are then portrayed in
·1 n ther might sympathetically read such a documentary as an excuse
qui ea o . h I Hills' work reminds us that
to defend their own participation. Nevert e ess, . .
I f f ndom often both operate within the
remit of social stereo-
;yo;~~y:~t oun~ick
the stereotypes by helping us to find points of id~nti:ica
tion w'ith
the subject. In other words, while films about extreme an _om
I 1 d to other and dismiss it as a socially inappropnate almost a ways en ) d. · of the 1. ·1 see for instance Kirstyn Gorton's (2009, 37 1scuss1on
ac 1v1 Y - , ' edies dramas and
Stephen King film Misery (Reiner 1990) - many com , d.
documentaries about fandom contain moments when we, as an au ience,
are at least asked to acknowledge that the fans portrayed are more than
their role and just like us.
s
I
I
I
J 3
Beyond the text
Starting points
• . In what vvays have. academics traditionallyunderstood fandom?
• •' How rnigtitwe ynderstandhow fans milke meaningful use of rnedia texts?
• y\lhy has. itbe~_nuse/ul to 9onceptuaJize fans as textual poachers?
All that The Waverly {cinema} produced was a minor amount
of ballyhoo {in readiness to screen
The Rocky Horror Picture
Show]: a few balloons, and the practice of playing the soundtrack
recording in the auditorium a few minutes before the film came
on. The remaining impetus came from a few isolated individuals who met and became friends in the process of starting a cult,
which quickly spread to other theatres and cities . ... There is first
of all an
estabhshed speech by Piro who welcomes 'virgins' (i.e.
;newcomers) to the cult, introduces out-of-town guest performers
( . and offers a few local rules and guidelines /'We don't call Brad
'. an "asshole" every time he appears;. After this the assembled
stumed performers /usually more than a dozen) dance the 'Time Warp' to the soundtrack before the lights dim.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 1980, 78-9
,'far in this book I have held off describing media products and franchises
lf texts, though this is the dominant metaphor used in media studies
}iltural studies. The idea of the text (and also the canon) came to these -
54 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
disciplines from a long tradition of biblical and then literary scholarship. As a notion, textuality operates to fix its object of study, bounding and locating a definitive portion of content in each media product. It also introduces the
ideas of
meaning, reading, interpretation and literacy (the cultivated ability to
read). American film writer Jonathan Rosenbaum's report on the early history
of audience responses to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman 1975),
however, exposes a kind of 'living textuality' where fans have turned their
viewing practice into a lively, ritual activity. The film became the focus of their 'cult' in a way that its makers never anticipated. Its fans practiced it in a way that included their own performance and participation. Reporting all
this, Rosenbaum also notes that other audiences behaved in very different
ways when watching the same film. This chapter takes a historical approach and examines how media scholars have understood the ways that audiences
interpret their texts. How might we productively conceive fans' relationships
with the many texts that fascinate them? What follows will review the literature to trace an early trajectory in audience research from the idea that
fans passively absorb their texts right through to recent advances in the field.
Looking at the history of theory is rather like travelling back in a time machine:
many of the ideas in this chapter are not in tune with the current discussions in
fan research, but there are still lessons to be learned from their perspectives
and limitations.
Early history of audience research
Qualitative research takes language and meaning as its concern. This
section provides a whistle-stop tour of qualitative research on audiences. To make rather a gross
-but often accurate -generalization, we might say that
European scholars have tended towards more pessimistic and economy-driven
approaches, while scholars working in America have taken a more liberal and celebratory stance. The history of audience research reflects an oscillation
between the two approaches. One of the earliest approaches to textual meaning, at least in the social
sciences, was contributed in Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver's
1948 book A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Shannon-Weaver
model suggested that meaning was conveyed
from the maker of the message
through the message itself
to the receiver, rather like a relay baton. This
model, which broadly emerged from the application of probability theory to
wartime telecommunications, introduced the notion of coding and decoding.
BEYOND THE TEXT 55
It understood the text purely as a delivery system for the message, and
pos1t1oned the receiver as a kind of end point in the relay of meaning. On
the surface the Shannon-Weaver rnodel might sound like common sense but its elegant simplicity hides a number of problems. One is that it gives
n~
agency to the receivers and sees them as passive, absorbent receptacles for
the message. If the message is unclear to the receiver, the model suggests
that
its maker has failed in his/her duty to clearly convey the content. In a
sense, the Shannon-Weaver model therefore lends itself to unilateralism
because the responses of listeners who reinterpret the text based on
thei;
different cultural background are merely seen as a pretext for clarifying the
message. The schema therefore offers a model of communication that
forgets the politics of reception. For that reason, later researchers used the
term 'hypodermic model' to question way that ideas like those by Shannon and Weaver presupposed that the receiver would naturally just
absorb the
message. Textual determinism is the idea that the text determines its
own meaning and can therefore automatically influence its readers. If the Shannon-Weaver model makes textual determinism into a central premise, it
rs al_so_true that the idea has underwritten whole fields of theory that articulate
anx1et1es about the social 'dangers' of particular media texts from horror films
to video games. On the other side of the Atlantic, a few years before Shannon and
Weaver's research was published, in an essay called
On the Fetish-Character
in Music and the Regression of Listening,
Theodor Adorno (1938/2001)
began crystallizing his concerns about fandom and the perceived dangers of
the popular music. Adorno was a central member of the Frankfurt School
a group of research intellectuals initially based at the Institute for
Sociai
Research in t_he University of Frankfurt am Main who developed a series
of 1nterd1sc1pl1nary, neo-Marxist ideas suggesting that mass culture was a
means of controlling the public. He worked at a time when fascist political
movements were co-opting strategies from art and swaying public opinion
through propaganda. As a Marxist scholar, Adorno saw the culture industries
as
a_n. ancillary form of social control: a way to keep the masses distracted
.'n tnv,al_pursuits. His specific concerns about popular music also developed
out of hrs personal interest in the revolutionary potential of 'serious' musical
composition. As such, he combined a Marxist position with a distinct brand
f cultural elitism (being, in effect, a snob on behalf of the people). His
nceptual toolkit was also Freudian: referencing the idea that individuals
rbour innate instinctual drives that are channelled or repressed by society.
thermore, Adamo's writing strategy was polemic. Polemicists are
ay1sts who forward controversial ideas, often by abdicating objectivity in 56 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
favour of reasoned persuasion. Adorno's work cannot therefore be dismissed as lacking objectivity because it questions that stance by declaring its bias
frorn the start. When Marxists discuss the economics of material goods,
they usually distinguish each cornrnodity's use value and exchange value. Use value is the product's worth as a basic utility, whereas exchange value is
its market price (determined by factors such as rarity and demand). Use value
and exchange value cannot be fully separated (Hills 2002a, 33-4). Ordinary logic cannot fully capture a contradictory reality- one of exchange value
and
use value -so, for Adorno, an oscillating, dialectic approach is needed to
move between opposing viewpoints. Adorno tends to associate commodity culture with social control. He
argues that a small army of business agents, songwriters and performers create music that is both relatively standardized and emotionally appealing. Its intoxicating sounds and melodies lull listeners into a passive state of
distraction. Fans are therefore, he argues, the manipulated end product of this
process. In this schema they fit into the totality of a much broader argument
about the power relations of commercial culture; to focus on them alone, as
I do here, is therefore somewhat problematic. In On the Fetish Character.
Adorno differentiates between two broad types of fan:
Whenever they attempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers and 'activate' themselves, they succumb to pseudo-activity.
Types rise up from the mass of the retarded who differentiate themselves by pseudo-activity and nevertheless make the regression more strikingly
visible. They are, first, the enthusiasts who write fan letters to radio stations and orchestras and, at well-managed jazz festivals, produce their
own enthusiasm as an advertisement for the wares they consume. They
call themselves jitterbugs, as if they simultaneously wanted to affirm and mock their loss of individuality, their transformation into beetles whirring
around in fascination ... The opposite type appears to be the eager person
who leaves the factory and 'occupies' himself with music in the quiet of
his bedroom. He is shy and inhibited, perhaps has had no luck with girls,
and wants in any case to preserve his own special sphere. He seeks this
as a radio ham. At twenty, he is still at the stage of a boy scout working on complicated knots to please his parents. (Adorno 1938/2001, 52-3)
Adamo's discussion of fans here closely matches more recent definitions of
enthusiasts (Abercrombie & Longhurst 1998, 132). Although the fans that
Adorno mentions here enjoy pastimes rather than follow celebrities, his depic
tion is clearly designed to other them. Adamo's rhetoric attacks any trace of
decency or nobility evident in their public image by articulating stereotypes
BEYOND THE TEXT 57
similar to those discussed in the last chapter. Pointedly deploying a stereotype later exposed by Henry Jenkins -that fans devote their lives to the cultivation
of worthless knowledge
-he adds mention on the same page of 'the listening
expert who can identify every band and immerses himself in the history of
jazz as if it were a Holy Writ' (54). Media commentators such as Adorno have
often used fandom to critique modern life, when they could have studied fan
behaviour instead (Cavicchi 1998, 8). However, Adorno did not advocate con
ducting field research with fans: 'if someone tried to "verify" the fetish char
acter of music by investigating the reactions of listeners with interviews and
questionnaires, he might meet with unexpected puzzles ... (because] every
answer that one receives conforms in advance to the surface of that music
business which is being attacked by the theory being "verified"' (1938/2001,
45). In other words, according to Adorno fans are so steeped in the rhetoric
of the industry that they will say nothing meaningful about the value of their
objects; they are consumerist 'temple slaves' of the music industry (39).
Nevertheless, Adorno sees fans as epitomizing the tendency of recorded
popular music to turn people into 'regressive' listeners, in effect drugging
and distracting them with sounds that are easy to hear and will never shake
them out of their political sleepwalking. The Frankfurt school leader was
therefore largely pessimistic in his stress on popular culture's tendency to
become a form of social control (by naturalizing the social order) rather than
on its potential to encourage social change, either as a repository of rebellious
tactics, laboratory-type play space or temporary utopia (Hills 2002a, 31). When
Adorno complained that consumption reduced creative culture to sentimental
mass-marketed clutter, he had no conception of the dialogic, folk reworking
of cultural material (Jenkins 1992, 51).
According to Matt Hills, 'The work of Theodor Adorno is regularly criticized
and dispensed with in academic and academic-fan accounts of fan culture'
(2002a, 31 ). For a long time, Adorno became a kind of tackling dummy in
media studies because his arguments could provoke students who believed
in the 'soul' of commercial music. Critics have dismissed the Frankfurt school
leader's seemingly arrogant and elitist conception of the 'passive' mass
audience (31). Rather than simply rejecting him as a curmudgeon elistist who used Marx and Freud as alibis to attack the fannish masses and their agency,
it is worth returning to his work to salvage what insights it offers. All too
often Adamo's work has been selectively read in ways that have missed its
useful points (31). Although his dismissive attack on fandom exploited the
lowest stereotypes, to an extent his broader argument about the industrial
production of culture remains relevant: in various ways media producers do
wield considerable power and constantly encourage us to collude with their
agenda. Fans, particularly as a collective, can be power brokers who engage 58 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
in more than 'pseudo-activity' to please media business. The inspirations
behind their interests are nevertheless arguably social and industrial, even as
they are championed through natural and personal experience. In some ways, although mass culture critics on both sides of the Atlantic,
notably Dwight Macdonald (1957) in the United States of America and Richard
Haggart (1957) in Britain, held quite similar views to Adorno, his relentless
pessimism about popular music was not entirely borne out by the way that
musical shifts reflected social turmoil key moments of the post-war period. In different ways, rock'n'roll, late 1960s rock and 1970s punk were all infused by
an air of counter-cultural rebellion. As we saw in the introduction, other forms
of media culture shifted too. At the start of the 1970s a new wave of American researchers offered a
more optimistic perspective on media consumption. For example in 1972, in
their chapter in The Sociology of the Mass Communications, Dennis McOuail,
Jay Blumler and J.
R. Brown posed four main needs that the media gratify:
diversion (easing our worries by looking at the problems of others), personal
relationships (developing imaginary relationships with celebrities). personal
identity and growth (learning from others in the same predicament) and
surveillance (using the media to gather information about the world). Work
like this became known as uses and gratifications theory, an American trend
in audience analysis that inspired further research- such as that by Elihu Katz,
Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch (1973)
-which argued that broadcast
televison squarely met audience needs. Uses and gratifications research was an advance on previous ideas because it analysed actual media audiences.
Empirical research in media or cultural studies means field analysis conducted
by actually talking to producers or consumers. Researchers like Blumler and Katz escaped from the 'mass audience' paradigm, allowing their readers to
begin to see the activity and individuality of ordinary viewers. No longer the
passive dupes of the mass culture critique, audience members were now
understood as ordinary people who chose to turn on their TV sets, had needs
and could change channels. From that perspective, fans who consumed
media products were simply getting their own needs met Although uses and gratifications appeared a 'common sense' theory,
rather like the Shannon-Weaver model, its self-contained facade hid a
multitude of problems. The theory prompted criticism on several scores for
being too simplistic. First, uses and gratifications posits an audience that is
harmonious and never in conflict with broadcasting networks. Yet audiences
have sometimes complained that television shows are not meeting their
needs and expectations. Second, by artificially bounding an isolated viewer
and a media message, the theory socially isolated and decontextualized mass
communication. Key aspects of the text were ignored, including its content,
BEYOND THE TEXT 59
changing popularity and multiple interpretations. The theory ignored social interactions in the viewer's life and could not explain the frequency of his or
her media use. A third problem was that it posited human needs as innate
universal and transhistorical, when in reality they are different in
differen;
places, societies, philosophies and eras. Contemporary theories occasionally
reproduce this thinking: evolutionary psychologists, for example, sometimes
say that humans are 'hardwired' to reproduce and parlay their genes into the
next generation. However, feminists and queer theorists have questioned the
basis of such theories, exposing reproductivism as a political construct (see,
for instance, Edelman 2004). Humanity got on fine without television until its
widespread adoption in the 1950s. If there are any innate human needs, it
is therefore doubtful that television meets them. Indeed, it could be argued
that the 'needs' met by the media are circular, a product of its own marketing
and rhetoric. The broadness of these categories of need posited by uses and
gratifications is also problematic because it means that media researchers
can escape the necessity of creating empirical questions open to refutation
by audience comments. Finally, the uses and gratifications idea is open to
charges of conservatism insofar that it overplays the freedom of audience and
forgets the media corporations can function as political interest groups. In that respect it has supported the status quo by becoming another mouthpiece for
the ideological supposition that the media does not require any improvement
because audiences always get what they most need. Despite later efforts
to resurrect it (see Ruggiero 2000), because of the simplistic way that uses
and gratifications theory understands the sociological context of the media
audience, it has been widely challenged in media and cultural studies. In a
sense, the theory's academic reception acts as a cautionary tale reminding
us not to posit universal human needs. Whether they are the need to grieve
for a dead star or to express a religious impulse, such needs can be perceived
as social constructions.
In Britain, a separate tradition of research emerged from the writings of
Richard Haggart and Raymond Williams and took shape at the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCS). Members of the
Birmingham School, as it was called, were widely known for their broadly
Marxist interpretations of subcultures as spectacular examples of working
class youth resistance. In 1973 the BCCS's long-term leader, Stuart Hall,
contributed a theory of media communication that considerably opened up
the field (reprinted in Hall 1980).
An
ideology is a set of ideas circulating in society that can be challenged
and operates to uphold inequalities between different groups of people.
Othering, for instance, is an ideological process because it locates 'them'
as inferior to
'us'. The notion of ideology was popularized by Karl Marx. 60 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
Acknowledging Marxism's relatively unfashionable status, recent writers in cultural studies have tended to jettison the word 'ideology' and still keep the idea. When they talk about the 'cultural work' of media texts, they usually
mean the way that those texts attempt to persuade us to adopt a particular
ideological position. Stuart Hall was interested in the ideological role of the
media. In effect, Hall combined an interest in the politically persuasive nature
of texts with an advance on the Shannon-Weaver model of communication. He saw texts as carriers of dominant ideologies that were encoded by their makers and decoded by audiences. However, unlike Shannon and Weaver,
Hall suggested that particular audiences could read the text
against its grain.
Even though authors may not consciously adopt the dominant ideology, they
are prioritized in Hall's model as instruments of it In relation to this ideology supposedly expressed in the text, Hall presented three types of audience
reading:
preferred readings (in which the dominant ideology was uncritically
accepted), oppositional readings (in which the audience challenged the
ideology conveyed by the text) and
negotiated readings (compromised
interpretations that ended up being somewhere between the preferred and
oppositional versions). By positing potentially rebellious viewers, the encoding-decoding idea
broke audience research out of the reductive trap of
textual determinism:
the idea that texts determine their meanings regardless of who reads them.
Nevertheless, one of the problems of Hall's idea was that it presented a kind of theoretical estimate that was untested on real audiences. To address
this David Morley constructed a series of focus groups that examined the news magazine TV show
Nationwide. Focus group research means asking a
small, temporarily-assembled group of people about their opinions, concerns
or habits. In his study of the
Nationwide audience, Morley (1980) showed
screenings of the programme to various focus groups that represented
constituencies of British society. His results confirmed that certain sections
of society, such as university arts students and trades unionists did not follow
the preferred reading but made negotiated or oppositional readings instead.
Morley's confirmation of Hall's ideas, however, came a little too soon, as
other researchers challenged the artificial nature of the audiences that Morley
constructed. Many of his research subjects (the people being researched) had never seen
Nationwide before he exposed them to the show in the
screening room. There was another issue too, in that the preferred reading
was an analytical construct made by the researcher, not something that could automatically be read from the surface of the text To address these issues
a new generation of reception scholars ventured out to meet real audience
members and aimed to understand how they used the text.
BEYOND THE TEXT 61
Ethnography is the deep study of human cultures in the places where
they happen. Often equipped with a theoretical background that prioritized
feminism, the next generation of reception scholars met media audience
members in their own homes and took notes of how they consumed their
favourite texts. Researchers such as Joke Hermes (1993), who examined the
consumption of women's magazines and soaps, were intrigued to discover
that ordinary people had things to say about their interests. Sometimes,
however, the researchers noted a sense of personal disappointment that
media consumers were not pursuing their practices with a more resistant
or oppositional frame of mind. Their academic responses were, in a sense,
evidence of how far off the mark cultural studies had begun to drift.
The most famous of this new generation of reception studies was Janice
Radway's book
Reading the Romance. Originally published in 1984, Radway's
work was empathetic to her research subjects. Her book had such a good reputation that Helen Wood reported 20 years later,
'Reading the Romance
continues to sell as many copies now as it did in its first year of publication'
12004, 147). Radway began to shift attention from how people were
reading
texts to what they were doing with them, although in fact she looked at both
elements. She examined how women in a small American used romance novels to enhance their daily lives. Romance fans, she concluded, created
their own spaces and short breaks from family life by reading short chapters
from paperback novels.
It is interesting to compare audience ethnographies like Radway's to
work going on in other research fields, because by this point cultural studies
was on a very different track. Film studies, for instance, had tended to focus on authorial intent (the director as auteur) and remain mired in textual
determinism (by analysing the symbolic structure of cinematic texts). Film
scholars who came in the wake of discussions in the journal
Screen and Laura
Mulvey's (1975) seminal article on the male gaze, tended to see their medium
as embodying gendered ideologies. A
subject position is a role offered by
the text that acts to restrictively orientate and position the individual reader.
Film texts were seen as offering their viewers particular subject positions
within given ideological or psychoanalytic parameters. In other words, feature
film characterizations were understood as stitching audiences into them and
into their seats. There was no understanding that fans might read films in 'aberrant' ways and make interpretations that suited them. Instead, film
audiences were viewed as manipulated by the text: guided and constrained by what each film visually and audibly presented. Academic understandings
of the text had been highly politicized, but theories of its reception contained little room for contested readings or unexpected uses. 62 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
Partly because fans were so prominent as dedicated members of the media
audience, scholars who were part of the second generation of reception
studies sometimes became interested in conducting audience ethnographies
of fan cultures. Telefantasy is a broad genre of TV programming that spans
from sci-fi and fantasy to horror. Two women in particular came to prominence at this point for discussing telefantasy fandom, both looking at
Star Trek. The
first was Camille Bacon-Smith who, in her book
Enter.prizing Women (19911,
examined how female fans used their interests to create communities and pursue practices. Although Bacon-Smith positioned herself as an outsider, her
ethnographic research contested many stereotypes and still offers a valuable portrait of a media fan community in the pre-internet era. It contains sections
on dressing up, fanzine writing, and even on the 'Welcommittee': a team of
female fans dedicated to instructing newcomers (1991, 82). For Bacon-Smith,
fans make their media text meaningful partly by rewriting it: 'Accordingly the
group produces narratives vigorously and activates them in a wide variety of uses. I have observed that community members use fictional narratives to
discuss personal, real-life situations' (303). The second important researcher at this point was Constance Penley. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, her
research on
Star Trek erotica created by fans explored how they used the
series to play with gender relationships (see Penley 1991, 1992 and 1997). By drawing attention to the way that the text was creatively used as a resource by fan audiences, Bacon-Smith and Penley both, in effect, established a
foundation for what was to follow.
From Fiske to Jenkins
At this point it is useful to separate two different terms. Mass culture
broadly refers to products in the media market place designed to satisfy the
widest possible audience, but which seem to deserve little cultural merit. Popular culture, on the other hand, tends to be seen as the fraction of
commercial culture that the audience takes to their hearts, usually because it
contains aspects that resonate with their own world or attitude. Both terms have complex histories and trajectories (see, for example, Storey 2009, 5-6
and 21-2). Alongside, but somewhat separate to, the ferment of second
generation reception studies, John Fiske emerged as a prolific writer and prominent media scholar. His reputation was consolidated by two key books:
Reading the Popular (1989) and Understanding Popular Culture (1989). Unlike
the approach of many of the second generation reception scholars, Fiske
tended to take a more theoretical and interpretive perspective, often using his own interpretations of the media as a starting point. Semiotics is the study
BEYOND THE TEXT 63
of signs. Fiske described the audience's approach to meaning as cruising the
'semiotic supermarket', a metaphor that suggested that audiences mixed and
matched items from what was available in the text. Fiske began to champion
the agency of individual audience members to remake media products in their
own image. In chapter 5a of
Reading the Popular, he looked specifically at
Madonna fans and argued that they had agency in choosing to adopt similar
styles to their heroine. As part of his philosophy, he proposed a very specific interpretation of the term 'popular culture'. In Fiske's eyes, mass culture could
only become popular culture when it was appropriated by ordinary people. He described that appropriation as a process of
excorporation. In order
words, if ordinary people use the signs and meanings of cultural products in ways unintended by media producers, then those people participate in
popular culture. On the other hand, if the audience members accept the
signs and meanings offered by the industry, then they participate only in
mass culture. When a popular cultural phenomenon happens, it is not long
before the culture industries co-opt the impulse by making their own version
of it once again; Fiske describes this process of absorption of the impulse
as
incorporation. This leads him to explain the relationship between mass
culture and popular culture as
circular and dialectical; each kind of cultural
activity mutually inspires the other. A good example of this was the trend
for people to wear ripped jeans. In their original formulation, jeans were
designed to be hardwearing garments fit for use in manual labour. They later
became a universal uniform. When fashionable people began to wear older,
fraying pairs of jeans, others took up the style and ripped denim became
a spontaneous street trend. With their teams of market researchers and
scouts, jeans manufacturers were soon aware of the change. They began
to sell jeans that were already frayed, ripped and distressed. The wheel of cultural innovation had turned full circle between industrial and everyday
production: mass culture had become popular culture, which in turn had
again become mass culture.
In Fiske's model, fans are celebrated because they do things of their
own accord that are tangential to the media's place for them. He describes
them as an 'active audience'. Fiske went further than this too however and
' ' ' posited that some texts lay themselves more open to audience appropriation
than others. He called these producerly texts. Equally, some audiences
can be more seen as more 'active' or 'producerly' than others. Fiske's work
leads to a model of the consumer
as a producer - the rather awkward term
'prosumer' has sometimes been used for this. He emphasized the capacity
of audience to redeem texts that had been marginalized or discarded by the media industry. 64 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
Academics like Fiske theoretically relocated fandom by reducing its
connection to consumerism and talking about fan productivity (Hills 2002a, 30). Inspired by a departmental visit by John Fiske, Henry Jenkins, who was
then at the graduate school in the University of Iowa, began to formulate
his own ideas on fandom. One of the things that marked Jenkins out
from other scholars at this time was his history as a fan and his personal
willingness, despite criticism, to speak as an 'insider' about fandom. Cultural studies orthodoxy had previously encouraged researchers to disengage from
their fandom and maintain sufficient emotional distance in order to treat
their subject matter critically. Fiske bucked the trend by talking about his own fandom as a resistant stance
within the culture offered by capitalism.
Jenkins took this further by positioning his personal identity as part of a fan collective and speaking from within the fan community. His 1988 essay
Star
Trek: Rerun, Reread, Rewritten,
contained residual traces of existing thinking
that stereotyped fans, but used those stereotypes (of fans as undisciplined
children and trash scavengers) in a supportive mode:
The fan constitutes a scandalous category in contemporary American culture, one that calls into question the logic by which others order their
aesthetic experiences, one that provokes an excessive response from
those committed to the interests of textual poachers. Fans appear to be
frighteningly 'out of control', undisciplined and unrepentant, rogue readers. Rejecting 'aesthetic distance', fans passionately embrace favoured texts
and attempt to integrate media representation within their own social experience. Like cultural scavengers, fans reclaim works that others regard
as 'worthless' trash, finding them a source of popular capital. Like rebellious
children, fans refuse to read by the rules imposed by their schoolmasters.
For the fan, reading becomes a kind of play, responsive only to its own
loosely structured rules and generating its own kinds of pleasure. (Jenkins
1988 in Jenkins 2006, 39)
This early formulation foreshadowed his later writing and began to show the way that Jenkins' research was marked by a tendency to adopt a politically
utopian conception of fandom
-expressed here as the return of the socially
repressed
-in effect a kind of queering of mass culture:
Fandom is a vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups (women, the
young, gays, and so on) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within
dominant representations; fandom is a way of appropriating media texts
and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests, a way of
transforming mass culture into popular culture ... For these fans,
Star Trek
BEYOND THE TEXT 65
is not simply something that can be reread; it is something that can and
rnust be rewritten to make it more responsive to their needs, to make it
a better producer of personal meanings and pleasures. (Jenkins 1988 in
Jenkins 2006, 40)
Fan studies was already beginning to turn a corner when Jenkins wrote, as
Penley and Bacon-Smith were writing too (Jenkins 2006, 31. It was Jenkins'
1992 book
Textual Poachers that fully heralded a new era in fan studies.
Textual Poachers intelligently countered the negative stereotypes of media
fandorn by supplying ethnographic evidence about the creativity of fans who
watched shows like
Star Trek and Beauty and the Beast. Jenkins described,
for example, how television fans made a music video that combined footage of Crockett and Tubbs
-the main characters from the television series Miami
Vice
(1984-9) -with an audio track by the sentimental soft rock band Air
Supply: 'Unlike the program's linkage of consumption and male potency, the
video focuses on issues of intimacy and trust, the pressures that push the
two men apart and the feelings that draw them back together' (1992, 235).
Jenkins' book was in some ways an extension of the Fiskean approach.
While Radway had recognized that women used romance paperbacks to momentarily escape their daily lives, Jenkins argued that researchers needed
to think about
how fans were using media texts and what new meanings
they were creating (Jenkins 1992, 60). He demonstrated that fans are not just
audiences but active participants in media culture: 'Fandom does not prove
that all audiences are active; it does, however, prove that not all audiences are passive' (287). Textual poaching countered the claim that fans were 'dupes',
but it also masked and distorted specific aspects of the phenomenon, focused
on fan frustrations, encouraged heavily politicized academic readings of fanfic
and pitted consumers and producers against each other (Jenkins 2006, 37). Fiske's distrust of 'bourgeois' culture was used as a point of departure in
the book too, as Jenkins argued that fan objects and identifications were
different to those prescribed by educational traditions and the established
cultural hierarchies (Jenkins 1992, 18).
A foundational element that Fiske contributed to Jenkin's work was his
conception of popular culture. In the Fiskean schema popular culture is the product of audiences who appropriate, transform and 'redeem' the fruits of
commercial mass production for a their own purposes. Prefiguring a central
concept in his later research, Jenkins explained in
Textual Poachers, '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' (46). This approach countered much of the history
of critical theory to suggest that fans were able to question and rework the 66 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
ideologies that dominated the mass culture. Jenkins explained, 'My goal, then, is neither to see fans as totally outside the mainstream nor as emblematic of
all popular reading' (54).
Changing the mainstream
Jenkins' work formed a crossroads between various positions. Supposedly
embodying traditions that stretched back to the era before modern capitalist
social relations,
folk culture is the non-commercial (or at least cottage}
activity of the ordinary people. It references pastimes like bee keeping and country dancing. The Fiskean version of popular culture places it as a contemporary form of folk culture in which raw materials from media
franchises are recontextualized and practiced in unsanctioned ways. As
Jenkins put it later, in this research tradition popular culture is what happens
when mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture (2008, 140). In Textual
Poachers he qualifies this by saying, 'fan culture is not "pure" or "authentic"
folk culture, but it is vitally connected to [a history of appropriation and] folk culture traditions' (Jenkins 1992, 272). This folk cultural reading of fandom became quite common in the 1990s. For example, Heather Joseph-Witham's
Star Trek, Fans and Costume Art (1997) was released as part of the University
Press of Mississippi's Folk Art and Artists series. For Jenkins, 'Unlike classical ethnographers, my project is already concerned
with a subculture that exists in the "borderlands" between mass culture and
everyday life and that constructs its own identity and artifacts from resources borrowed from already circulating texts' (1992, 3). When fandom is defined
through this borrowing and it is labelled a 'folk' activity, perhaps we should be suspicious of the way that it frames fandom as a populist activity: quaint,
outside modernity and of the people. The danger here is that the very process
of championing fans could itself again be othering them. Within the politicized tradition of cultural studies, Jenkins combined an
ethnographic approach from second generation scholars with a conception
of the popular and active audience from Fiske's work.
To these he added
the self-appointed role of insider champion to the fan community. Textual
Poachers was also charged with the central metaphor carried in its title,
which came from the rather literary philosophical writing of the French thinker Michel de Certeau. De Certeau's book The Practice of
Everyday Life had
been translated into English in 1986 and featured a series of discussions on
the way that ordinary people escaped the guidelines and boundaries set by modern planners. In one chapter de Certeau pondered the border between life and death. In another he talked about how people walked their own paths
r
BEYOND THE TEXT 67
through the city, taking shortcuts and ignoring those created for them. In a
third he portrayed readers as poets and poachers; people pursuing their own interests and understandings tangentially to the intentions of the author, but
nevertheless remaining on the terrain of his or her text. Michel de Certeau
therefore characterized reading as an impertinent 'raid' on the literary 'preserve'
that took away only those things that seem useful or pleasurable to the reader.
This was the exact theory that Jenkins needed to talk about fandom. The poaching metaphor offered a reminder that fans and producers both, to a
different extent, have power over the social construction of meaning and their interests can sometimes conflict with no easy victory in sight. However, De
Certeau hypothesized isolated readers who were separated from the practice
of writing; Jenkins (1992, 45) realized that fans operated communally and could
make their own fanzines, novels, art or music. Unlike de Certeau, he believed
he should not just theorize readers' activities but also documentthern.
The notion of fans as poachers emerged in a particular way. By the time
Jenkins wrote Textual Poachers an array of satellite channels and home video
technologies helped to make the media audience's nomadic tendencies more
apparent. In Jenkins'
account, fan readers were both drifters and poachers,
always moving across and between texts, delightedly creating new intertextual
connections and juxapositions. In this environment, audience members can
meander between progressive and reactionary ways of thinking in the same
conversation (35-7). Their appropriation is not set by adherence to textual
values, but is instead limited by them. To explain this, Jenkins drew on the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's work on 'heteroglossia' (multi-vocality} to
emphasize that if any cultural agent wants to specify a term's meaning in
a particular context, they must struggle against existing conditions. Bakhtin suggested that words were already charged with the taint of the former
context in which they were used. Speakers necessarily borrowed what they
said and only began to really inhabit their words once they infused them with their own intentions and accents (see 224). In an example of such poaching,
fan novel writer Jane Land called her work 'an attempt to rescue one of Star
Trek's female characters [like Christine Chapel] from an artificially imposed
case of foolishness' (Jenkins 2006, 47). Countering the notion that fans were manipulated cultural dupes, Jenkins'
work saw them as model poachers who recycled media culture because
they
had to: they were inevitably torn between fascination and frustration with
texts that the media industry offered (1992, 23). Three years later Jenkins elaborated:
Resistant reading is an important survival skill in a hostile atmosphere
where most of us can do little to alter the social conditions and where 68 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
many of the important stories that matter to us can't be told on network
television. It is, however, no substitute for other forms of media criticism
and activism. (Jenkins 1995b/2006, 112)
In 2008 Henry Jenkins restated the position: 'Fandom, after all, is born out
of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fas cinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it' (258) What
is interesting here is Jenkins' conception of agency. On one hand fans seem
to be tree agents, gleefully transforming commercial culture to suit their own
ends. On the other, it appears that they are forced to develop this skill because
of the inability of media producers to meet their needs: 'Fans are not unique in their status as textual poachers, yet they have developed poaching to an
art form' (Jenkins 1992, 27). This conception of fans as the artful dodgers of media culture offers them at least an active and intelligent role. However,
as Jenkins (34) has said himself, fan readings do not
have to be resistant or
made in the absence of other contextual conditions.
Textual Poachers emerged from the philosophical stance that Jenkins, in
later years, came to recognize as 'critical utopian' in orientation: 'As a utopian,
I want to identify possibilities within our culture that might lead to a better,
more just society' (2008, 258). He has argued that 'critical pessimists', like
the famous radical political historian Noam Chomsky, focus on obstacles to achieving a more democratic society. This is unfortunate because 'the way
they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them' (258). When Jenkins wrote
Textual
Poachers,
his utopian ideals posited fandom as a seemingly criminal (but in
fact rightful) challenge to the domination of the media industries.' He later wrote, 'Undaunted by the barking dogs, the "no trespassing" signs, and the
threats of prosecution, the tans have already poached those texts from under
proprietors' noses' (Jenkins 2006, 60). In Jenkins' writing, fans have it their way. One described his/her media
text as being treated like 'silly putty' by peers: its boundaries stretched to accommodate a range of desires (Jenkins 1992, 156). By emphasizing this
the textual poaching idea positions the fan community as a utopian space that represents the return of the repressed: 'an alternative sphere of cultural
experience that restores the excitement and freedom that must be repressed
to function in ordinary lite' (Jenkins 2006, 42).
Textual Poachers therefore
marked a new era in which reception studies merged with fandom research
to create
fan studies. In the introduction to his 2006 compilation volume
Fans, Bloggers, Gamers, Jenkins suggested that in less than two decades
the field of tan studies had included three generations of scholars: active
BEYOND THE TEXT 69
audience ethnographers who operated as outside critics (second generation
reception studies). critical insiders (who were criticized for being fans) and new
researchers who were comfortable with declaring their status as
both fans and
academics. He put his Textual Poachers era work in the middle category (12).
At the time of its release the book had a mixed reception.
Textual Poachers was
critically assessed by some reviewers through the very stereotypes of fandom
that it sought to dispel. In one news story Jenkins was later called 'perhaps
the most prominent scholar in the country devoted to examining pastimes often deemed profoundly frivolous' (188). Yet the dignity and respect with
which
Textual Poachers treated fandom meant that Jenkins in effect gathered
his own tans. In 2001 he explained to Matt Hills, 'now I get people quoting
my words as it they were biblical and as it they had this enormous authority
and certainty behind them, as it things that I tentatively put forward were
well-established and proven once and for all' (quoted in Jenkins 2006, 35). While the idea of poaching was useful in shifting perceptions of fandom
away from the stereotypes of passivity and manipulation evident in earlier
approaches like those of Thedor Adorno, it was, at the same time, arguably something of an
interpretive imposition on fan culture. As early as 1988
Jenkins noted that tans did not see themselves as poachers: 'the fans often
cast themselves not as poachers but as loyalists, rescuing essential elements
of the primary text "misused" by those who maintain copyright control over
program materials' (Jenkins 1998 in Jenkins 2006, 41). In
Textual Poachers
he suggested that the idea of 'misreading' preserves the traditional hierarchy,
suggesting that objective scholars, not fans, are in the right place to decide
what constitutes the appropriate meaning of the text (1992, 33). The poaching idea got some way beyond that, but not all the way since its conception
of criminality tied it back to issues of authorial intent. Fans saw themselves
as 'rescuing' characters or shows that were mishandled by studios, keeping programmes like
Star Trek 'alive' - in the sense of being living cultures - in the
face of studio or network indifference or incompetence (55). To the idea that
the 'official' reading is essentially an analytical construct, we might also add
that fans themselves can police those who 'poach' the established meanings
of their texts.' After quoting Jenkins' claim to have accented the positive in
Textual Poachers, Matt Hills explained, 'Jenkins's work therefore needs to
be viewed not simply as an example of academic-fan hybridity, but also as a
rhetorical tailoring of fandom in order to act upon particular institutional spaces
and agendas' (2002a, 10). Some writers questioned Jenkins for using the fan
community to further his own political agenda but of course many studies
legitimately do exactly that. He stood accused of projecting the values of the
academic community on to fandom, of rationalizing fans, of making fans out
to be academics in miniature (10). To this list I would add that his work took 70 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
attention away from some of the usual practices associated with fandom -
collecting and autograph hunting, for instance -and focused on a different
set of activities in order to interpret fandom as a kind of counter-culture;
something partial, alternative, pleasure-seeking and rebellious.
In Textual Poachers, Jenkins noted that previous accounts of fandom
had been sensationalistic and fostered misunderstandings, and that those
misconceptions had consequences (1992, 7). In effect, his book gave
fan_dom
a publicity make-over by revealing the startling creativity of fans as ordinary people, but it failed to fully develop the idea that they might be something more than aberrant consumers. De Certeau saw consumption w1th1n a frame
of appropriation whereby consumers had no 'proper' space of
their_ own. The
problem with his approach was that media consumers had, hrstoncally, also
literally been or become official producers. In the 1990s, fan stud
res got cau_ght
up in an unhelpful binary that opposed relatively powerless poachers against
powerful producers (Hills 201Gb, 61). Yet fandom is a training ground
for
those developing professional skills. Role-playing games offer peo_ple _ethical
laboratories, spaces of play for discovering themselves and recons1der1ng the
culture around them.' Because the industry needs fans as producers,
in some
cases their play is a prototypical form of work and their activities are eventually
absorbed when they personally become professionalized (Hills 2002a, 40).
One way out of the fan/producer dilemma is to consider the
career_ paths of
fans into the media industry (Hills 201 Ob, 57). A good example of
thrs relates
to Britain's most popular sci-fi telefantasy show, Doctor Who, which started
in 1963. In to the 1980s and 1990s, a generation of Who fans moved
into
professional journalism and TV production (10). Afte_r the show was rev_;ved by
BBC Wales in 2005, fan 'poachers' became ,ts off1c1al producers, or textual
game-keepers'. In the production team for the new Doctor Who:
Executive producer Russell
T. Davies and producer Phil! Collinson were
card-carrying fans; the actor playing the tenth Doctor was a fan;
writers
such as Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Gareth Roberts and Rob Shearman were all fans; even Radio Times writer Nick Griffiths had grown
up as a Doctor Who fan. (56)
As Matt Hills has noted, seeing fans either as duped, rebellious or some where in between still locates them primarily in relation to the demands of
the industry. Perhaps there is more to fandom than media industry agenda. Perhaps, too, then, if we are to understand the full scope of fandom our
theoretical approaches should begin to include conceptions that
allow_ fans to
be indifferent, or even better to give them opportunities to collude with their
favourite texts.
BEYOND THE TEXT 71
Resistant readers
Textual Poachers resonated with existing concerns in cultural studies and
looked out among the media audience for signs of resistant reading. With
Jenkins at the centre of the debate, it led to an avalanche of fan studies
that examined fandom as a place of resistant reading and cultural production
where ordinary people struggled against constraints placed on their creative
expression by the culture industry. This section will explore some of that work
in more detail. One view of media producers is that they see the most active fans as
a nuisance and aim to constrain and crack down on them for infringing on
their textual properties. Current copyright law has no clause for creative expression from the audience. Amateur producers have often been seen as
copyright abusers without an additional case to make, so no civil liberties
unions have stepped in to protect them (Jenkins 2008, 197). Because fans
have never really been able to challenge the legal power of the studio system,
there is no body of case law concerning the legitimacy of fan fiction. What usually happens is that fans back down when studios challenge them. Small
Websites, for instance, have been sent cease and desist letters by media companies when they were interpreted as infringing copyright. If similar
fan productivity
-things like making online video parodies and t-shirts -is
rarely in direct competition with producers, it can still shape how people think
about a franchise. Sometimes producers challenge fans over what are, in
effect, ideological judgements. In the early 1980s, for instance, Lucasfilms
was generally perceived as cracking down on Star Wars fanzines in ways
that propagated its particular notion of the 'family values' portrayed in the original films (Brooker 2002, 165). Jim Ward, the vice-president of marketing
explained:
We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that's not in the spirit of
what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the
way it is. (Murray 2004, 11)
Sometimes media producers can be hostile to fans' attempts to steer their
work. Rather disingenuously, Doctor Who producer Russell
T. Davies argued
that 'once a script has been made and transmitted, I honestly believe it belongs equally to those who watch it ... I've got no more authority over the text
than you!' As Hills explains, however, Davies does have authority in designat ing particular 'facts' as 'official' and endorsing particular information (201 Ob,
63-4). When the most dedicated 'Whovarians' became critical of his version 72 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
of the show, the Doctor Who producer described them as 'mosquitoes' and 'not real fandom' because they had a tendency to dissect and complain about
the series. He also called more dedicated
Who fans 'ming-mongs', a term
that dates back to a 1987 Victoria Wood sketch which lampooned
Doctor
Who
fans for their 'technobabble'. Who writer Steven Moffat attempted to
rescue the term by saying 'It's only us ming-mongs that care' about leaked
storylines (212-3). In reality, corporations often want audiences to 'look but not touch' their
intellectual properties (Jenkins 2008, 142). Professional media producers
and their parent corporations therefore have a necessarily mixed view of
fandom and can simultaneously pursue conflicting policies within the same organization. Studios cannot fully recognize fan creativity as they want to
say that all creativity resides in the franchise property (142). They therefore oscillate between collaborating with fans and prohibiting their activities (Hills
201 Ob, 68). Whether fans and producers share common ground or disagree
can depend on which discourse is being used; there is no simple collaboration or antipathy between them (79). The issue also depends on the particular
type or genre of fan creativity in contention. According to Brooker (2002,
175), Lucasfilm's approach to fan films, for example, seemed more generous
than to fan writing. Fans therefore occupy a 'powerless duality': sometimes cared for by programme's producers and sometimes positioned as a threat or
annoyance by them (Hills 2010b, 214). In this context, fan communities have
evolved strategies to outwit online censorship from the 'official' guardians of
their texts (see Brooker 2002, 124). Fans can sometimes feel concerned they are being manipulated by
production processes and conventions into serving as fodder for the desires
of media producers. In such situations, media fans may organize themselves
directly in opposition to commerce. Jimmy Buffett has grossed around
$50 million a year from his fans. As Mihelich and Papineau discovered, 'A segment of Buffett fans
offer an explicit critique of Buffett commercialism
and, by extension, capitalism and consumption' (2005, 179). Similar fannish
'rebellion' can either be prompted as a critique of exploitation or as a way to
ameliorate the worst excesses of commerce. For instance, Cavicchi (1998,
63) found that some rock fan practices - like ticket trading and romanticizing
celebrities as 'outside of the industry' - effectively
reduced the impact of
the industrial
on what they did (63). Harrington and Bielby reported that in
daytime soap fandom, 'Ambivalence also results from viewers' convictions
that they are manipulated by the soap format' (1995, 91). It is interesting here to compare fans to a different group of media consumers: 'culture jammers'
want to opt out of media consumption, challenge its ideology and promote a
negative stance on popular culture. In contrast, rather than simply confronting
BEYOND THE TEXT 73
or dismissing media producers (see Jenkins 2006, 150), fans are generally
more interested in pursuing emotions, creating dialogues and collaborating to
release unrealized potentials. Nevertheless there have been occasions when
they have staged backlashes again shows which seem too exploitative.'
Beyond unadulterated resistance to commercial exploitation there are a
number of other reasons why devotees can organize themselves into resistant
or protesting groupings. Fans can be resistant when shows are cancelled
or when the established tenets of their particular narrative or character are
ignored. Hills calls this a 'textual conservationist' stance (2002a, 28).
Starman
fans collectively organized and lobbied network executives to keep the 1986-7
show on the air when ABC cancelled it before the end of its first season, but
they found themselves powerless to alter its fate (Jenkins 1992, 29). Such
lobby groups have often approached studios and TV channels requesting
them to keep their favourite shows in production and on the air. Recycling Francesco Alberoni's (1960/2007) term from star studies, John Tulloch has
consequently described fans as a
powerless elite that hovers 'between the
power of the industry that makes the show, [and] the general public on whose "votes" its future depends' (1995, 144).
In the formulation of fan culture that emerged in the wake of
Textual
Poachers,
fans were seen as rebels. Fandom was thought of as essentially
different from - and frequently opposed to - 'official' media production.
And it was resistant 'poaching' that provided the key metaphor for this fan/
producer difference. Fans were creative but relatively powerless; producers
had power over 'official' media texts (Hills 201 Ob, 56). Indeed, producers
could strategically use or ignore the voice of the fan community as a way to
maintain their interests (Jenkins 1992, 29). For Brooker, fans 'are faced with
a situation where someone else still owns the story, is pitching for a wider
audience than their dedicated group, cares not at all for their interpretation of
the sage, and will attempt to shut down their sites forcibly if they contradict
his version of the characters and plot' (2002, xvi). This results in what he calls
'an unhappy conflict' (xvi) in which fans celebrate George Lucas's creative
contribution and decry his uncharitable approach to the myth that he created
for them. The problem connects to censorship. Writing fan fiction has offered
marginalized social groups - especially women - a tool for social criticism (see Derecho 2006, 26). While some fan communities have banded together to
protect their right to express themselves in writing, others have crusaded to
prevent the censorship of the texts that they love.
Harry Potter fans organized
themselves against Christian censors by creating the group Muggles for Harry
Potter. They were joined by publishers, book sellers, librarians, teachers,
writers, civil libertarians and consumers (Jenkins 2008, 204). Their plight
suggests that those who love the text sometimes have organized themselves 74 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
to fend off both commercial and moral censorship challenges that come from
opposite directions. A problem with seeing fans as rebels is that they also form a significant
section of marketplace to which media texts are promoted, a fact that can
make them both courted and contested. To see fans as collectively ranked
against the strength of the media corporations would be to both selectively
and romantically perceive their orientation. Fandom contains 'a dialectic of
value' insofar that it tends to oscillate between resisting and intensifying commodification, between religiosity and reflexivity, between private
attachments and communal interpretations and between community and hierarchical social structures (Hills 2002a, 182). This means that fans can be
seen as conflicted too. Those who tried to find key information in advance of
the airing of shows like Survivor, for example, demonstrate that producers
and consumers do not always have the same interests; on one level the fans are allies, on another they can be enemies (Jenkins 2008, 58). Will Brooker
(2002, 77) has noted that instead of assenting to the
'official' status of Lucas
creations, fans treat George Lucas with a mixture of admiration and scorn. Some
-like Chris Albrecht who runs an official Star Wars film competition at
AtomFilms
-have become double agents encouraging fan production from
within the corporate machine (Jenkins 2008, 143). The presence of fans in the professional hierarchy of media organizations has helped change corporate
perceptions of fan activity. At one extreme, some cultural producers take a charitable approach to fan
creativity. Will Wright, who created The Sims game in 2000, did not assert
copyright over an unofficial Website called 'The Mall of the Sims'. Instead he
just let it happen and even courted the fans, by saying, 'We are competing
with other properties for these creative individuals'. This is significant as The
Sims became one of the most successful games franchises ever (171). Other
producers have aimed to bring fan creativity under their wing, as Lucasfilm
did with Star Wars (Jenkins 1992, 30-1). After the media controversy over
Warner's quashing of Harry Potter fan creativity, the corporation decided to
collaborate with and deputize fans (Jenkins 2008, 196). Aided by shifts in
digital technology, media producers are therefore increasingly recognizing
that fan cultures represent an alternative rather than oppositional community
(Mihelich
& Papineau 2005, 184).
Much of the writing on resistant fan cultures has come frorn organized
fandom for film and television narratives. While there is evidence that the management of living stars and the estates of dead ones have also tried to
quash fan creativity, much less has been written about creative antagonisms
between fans of individual celebrities and their idols.
5 In popular music, the
reappropriation of star sounds and images is just as vigorous (see, for instance,
BEYOND THE TEXT 75
Marcus 1999). but only fans who participate in particular music genres and
discourses
-notably punk and indie -concern themselves with the role of the
industry. Rock fans see a person rather than a marketed commodity and can
become irritated but relatively indifferent to the strictures of industry:
In fact, fans' general stance toward the music business could be better
characterized as a kind of indifference or disregard . they saw the
business as incidental to their connection with Springsteen. For one
thing, many fans saw Springsteen as existing outside the business and
its routine production of pop stars ... On the whole, Springsteen fans
do not sit around and wait for what the record company is going to do
next or scheme to come up with ways to subvert its intentions. They see
Columbia Records as rather a bothersome nuisance, simply part of the
way the music world works. What's important to fans is Bruce's music, not how one gets it. (Cavicchi 1998, 61-3)
Since Cavicchi wrote this passage, however, times and distribution technolo
gies have changed significantly. In the early days, the rnass wave of illegal
downloading and 'leaking' of material from new albums on line suggested that
fans were infuriating the music industry and depleting one of its key revenue
streams. From that perspective, rather than 'poaching' established mean
ings, fans were poaching the whole text (as intellectual property). However,
the designation of music fans as pirates rnay be confusing a new practice
with a much older identity. Lucy Bennett's recent work on REM fans, for
example, shows that at least one subset of one fan community has resisted
the temptation of hearing leaked material, not so much as a means to finan
cially support their band, but instead as a way to nostalgically evoke the thrill
of virginal listening (see Bennett 2011). In the wake of new albums being
immediately redistributed for free, companies such as Web Sheriff now share
one or two promotional tracks per ne,w album with bloggers as a kind of free
sample. The success of this approach suggests that online music fans are
rarely pirates determined to sabotage the industry. They are simply scouting
for more songs to hear from artists that they love: 'The only thing most fans
are guilty of', according to music industry lawyer John Giancobbi (in Lewis
2011 ), 'is over-exuberance'.
Meaning and identificantion
Chapter 9 will deal with the more recent incarnations of Henry Jenkins'
research, in particular his efforts to understand the fan community as a 76 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
power-broking entity in its own right. One of the central issues with Jenkins' research has remained his critical silence over celebrity. Researchers
sympathetic to fandom were pleased that
Textual Poachers changed the image
of fandom from servile devotion to resourceful appropriation. Cultural studies
writers did not want a return to the dismissive Adornoesque conceptions that sometimes still circulate in the mainstream media. Neither did they desire to return to the days when their work was either out of touch with fans or out of
alignment with the political direction of the field. No writer that I know of has mentioned that Jenkins so rarely deals with celebrity, yet for many- perhaps most - media fans an interest in the life or work of a famous person is at
the generative heart of their fandom. Indeed, Jenkins has rarely examined celebrity figures, except for when he has talked about himself as a public
academic. In
Fans, Bloggers, Gamers, in particular, readers learn something
about the followers who supported
Textual Poachers, and its author's public
role as 'Professor Jenkins'. Support for celebrity icons is associated with
issues of power, distance, intimacy and fantasy which position fans not just
as readers who collectively organize themselves, but as individuals who identify and follow stars.
To end this chapter, what follows will consider some
work across the humanities that addresses
how people identify with famous
figures. In the first chapter, a simplistic distinction was made between an interest
in genre or narrative and an interest in
celebrity, whether a 'real person'
or simply a fictional character. This distinction is not, of course, definitive: narratives operate to foreground particular figures of identification, and
celebrities prompt ongoing media coverage that places them at the centre of narratives about their lives.
Doctor Who provides a good example of the first
process. Viewers seek affinity in characters in terms of parallels with how the
character thinks (see Bradford 2010, 169). According to Mary Kowal:
The real hooks to the show, though I didn't realize it [at] the time, were the Doctor's companions. For the most part, they were ordinary people,
not just super-gifted or bizarre aliens. Discounting the odd robotic dog, a
companion could be someone like me. You understand the allure, don't
you?
I don't think there's a single teen who gets through high school
without feeling like a misfit at some point .... (2010, 165)
If the media offers us figures for identification, one way it does so is by using
particular character types. At the deepest level it could be argued thatthese are
archetypes or reflections of the human condition. Sometimes, for example, in
film noir, such figures become the foundation of an entire genre. Researchers have confused
industrial conventions that imply identification - whether
BEYOND THE TEXT 77
through character types or genre conventions -with the actual ways that audi
ences have identified. In their 1978 article 'Rock and Sexuality', for example,
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie argued that pop stars fitted various types
of sexual personae (see Frith
& McRobbie 1978 in Frith & Goodwin 1990).
Frith and McRobbie distinguished 'teenyboppers' (heart throbs, teen angels
and boyband members) from 'cock rockers' (graphically thrusting, macho
rock singers). Their work was soon criticized for conflating the image of the
artists with identifications made by different audiences. In a sense, music research paralleled the textual determinism in film studies, where the notion
of subject-positioning offered spectators little or no agency - it suggested
that the text itself automatically positioned audiences and happened to them (Jenkins 1992, 62). Essentialism is the idea that the essence or meaning of
an object is located within the object itself. A key problem with essentialism is that it forgets the role of external attribution in the creation of meaning. Ideas suggesting that a text's adherence to generic conventions or its content
are what creates its meaning are problematic because they are essentialist.
They forget that the same text - or here the same celebrity image - can be
read in very different ways in different contexts.
A further development came when researchers began to realize that the
same character type or icon could be read in different ways by different
fractions
of the audience. In an interesting 1988 study, for instance, music researcher
Alan Wells showed that male and female students regularly perceived images of the same stars in very different ways. Wells showed his class some slides
of the cover of
Rolling Stone magazines featuring artists like Madonna and
Cyndi Lauper. He asked each of his students to choose words from a pool
that he left on the blackboard. Madonna was controversial at the time for
the way that she combined a sexually alluring 'pop tart' image with a sense of savvy, independent womanhood. Wells discovered that male and female
students used different words for the same picture of her, and the result was
repeated with several other artists. Although Wells' use of students was a
convenient but limited methodology, by indicating that audience members
of different genders sometimes think differently about the same stars his
findings resonate with common sense. This is also borne out in the gendering
of audiences and fan mail. Sophie Aldred, who played Ace, a companion to
Sylvester McCoy's eighth incarnation of
Doctor Who, once said, 'I started
getting letters from young girls who were so relieved to see a realistic, strong
female character on British TV' (Aldred 2010, 71).
To generalize about how
the sexes differently understand and receive media culture is questionable
from some perspectives, not least because it marginalizes the possibility of
shared interpretations. In effect it essentializes the production of meaning to
each sex, leaving little room for the myriad of other factors in reception -from 78 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
place and era to morality, politics and personality -that can frame the way
individual fans might identify. The trend towards segmenting the audience and claiming a different
identification motive in each segment perhaps reached its height with Cathy Schwichtenberg's edited volume, The Madonna Connection (1993).
Schwichtenberg's book understood Madonna's popularity as a combination
of her ability to speak to discrete (sub)cultural constituencies, including black
audiences and gay men. In effect, for Schwichtenberg, aspects of social identity
-race, gender, age, sexual orientation -were prime indicators of
differences in reception. At first sight, Schwichtenberg's willingness to
differentiate different elements of the audience seems like a useful act of
discrimination. Yet it also homogenizes each of these social groupings and
forgets that they may be internally divided. Some reviewers questioned The
Madonna Connection's compartmentalized understanding of Madonna's
audience and suggested that Schwichtenberg had forgotten the gravitational
pull of stardom. Was it that Madonna spoke to various constituencies, or
was it that her celebrity created a stake that attracted the attention of a wide
public? Against the idea that audience segments defined around existing social
identities would necessarily create different readings, a minority of researchers
in the 1980s began to focus on the notion of shared perceptions. They contended
that a star's images were interpreted in ways shared by large numbers of audience members, but not necessarily determined by the identities of those
audience members. A perception, then, is simply a common interpretation of a celebrity. Even if perceptions originate with specific fractions of the audience,
there is no sense in which audience members of a specific social identity can
'own' them. Perceptions can float around as discursive resources, open to
appropriation by a wide variety of audience members for a variety of reasons. Richard Dyer's discussion of Judy Garland in his 1986 book Heavenly Bodies
describes one such perception, that Garland was a camp performer. Camp
means taking delight in artificiality and frivolity (see Sontag 2001). Although
camp identities and performance styles are sometimes associated with gay men, they are not inherently camp since it is really a perceived and performative
style of behaviour. For Dyer, Judy Garland was perceived as camp for several reasons. She had struggled to fit into marriage and family life, and in that sense
she was a survivor. Garland also had a sense of 'unintentional' campness about
her, a certain gawkiness. The idea of unintentional campness is interesting,
as it reminds us that performances can be unintentional and are interpreted in
the mind of their beholder. The problem with the approaches discussed so far in this section is that
they assume that people who share the same social identities will inevitably
BEYOND THE TEXT 79
make the same readings. This opens up the issue of how to theorize fan
reading practices in a meaningful way without making such generalizations.
Sue Wise (1984/1990) offered a different example that connected her
experiences as a fan to her perception of Elvis Presley. Wise began her
account autobiographically, describing her childhood as a fan of Elvis and
explaining that she lost her fandom when her friends in university rejected the
icon for his aggressively seductive behaviour. They saw Elvis as a chauvinistic
seducer bent on conquering women. However, when the star died in 1977
Wise reconsidered her childhood interest and returned to the pages of
he;
Elvis fan magazines. She discovered that Elvis enthusiasts who wrote stories
in the magazines made two readings of the star. One affirmed that he was
a 'butch God' whose hallmark was his sexual prowess. The other positioned
him more as a 'teddy bear': a benign and affectionate sort of person that
anyone might like as friend. Wise's fellow students had seen Elvis as a 'butch
God' but as a child she had seen him as a 'teddy bear'. What was interesting
about these two perceptions, however, was that they were not restricted to
any particular gender or other social grouping. Sometimes adult female fans revelled in the 'butch God' reading, rather than seeing it as marginalizing their
interests. Instead of being fixed to particular groups, the two interpretations
functioned as social resources, vehicles that fans could use for different
reasons at their own convenience.
The idea that stars, in effect, offer up potential discursive resources to their
fan bases begins to both suggest that interpretations of their images are tied neither to particular identity constituencies in the audience (say, gay
men),
nor that the analysis of meaning must be limited to questions of a preferred
or 'poached' reading. The question then arises: how can we conceptualize
the context of these particular interpretations? In literary studies, work on
interpretive communities by Stanley Fish (1980) and others provided an
answer: when people
-here fans and media consumers -build up their
interpretations in the act of reading, ,they do so in the context of being part
of communities of readers. This model suggests that the individual activity
of reading enacts shared concerns. Tony Bennett and Janet Wollacott drew
on the approach in their study Bond and Beyond (1987). For Bennett and
Wollacott, sections of the James Bond audience viewed their object through
two different prisms. Reading is never a neutral act, but as Peter Rabinowitz has suggested is 'reading as' (as in 'reading as romance' or 'reading as
horror'). Genres set expectations that help to guide our reading practices and
the questions we bring to the text (see Jenkins 1992, 133). Each reading
formation represented a whole constituency who came to the text with a
different set of genre expectations prompted by a particular 'diet' of media
consumption. On one hand, those audience members who liked to read 80 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
romance novels understood James Bond primarily as a romance hero. On the
other, those who read novels about Cold War espionage understood Bond as a glamorous British spy. While genre is based on a set of conventions shared by the audience and producers alike, the notion of reading formation locates
any expectations firmly in the minds of audience members and suggests that they
guide interpretations, even for products that are ambiguous in
relation to genre categories. The result is that our personal journeys of media
consumption frame readings which then translate into communities that
share similar interpretations of the texts. The problem with notions of interpretive community and reading formation
is that they take us back to the idea that fans are isolated, at least save for their
personal histories of media consumption. What they forget is that fans often
form communities
-whether online or offline -which share interpretations
through discursive means. Consequently, rather than thinking about each reader's understandings being
set by such things as his/her social identity, the
text itself (as in hypodermic models, semiotics or auteurism), previous texts (as in reading formations), or shared understandings or the reader's social identity, it may be valuable to consider ways that wider forms of discussion help to guide our understandings of meaning. Discourses are widely shared
and socially legitimated ways of talking about specific things. To pay attention
to them means to look at the history of discussion. Academic research is itself
.
a discourse with very specific rules of engagement that specify who can say
things and what can be said. The exact approach or focus of a discourse may change over time, but its focus on managing its object does not. For example, although this chapter has shown the history of a number of disciplines
-like
film studies, cultural studies and media research
-they have all been relevant
to the social process of understanding fans as an audience. Researchers who
study reception have paid much attention in recent years to the way that discourses can give us the cognitive resources to organize our understandings
of what we see in the media. These discourses can relate to social identity
(gender, age or class, for example) or be about particular media forms, genres
or texts (as in 'the popular discourse on sci-fi'), but they can also be about
viewing itself (such as the discourse on the morality of watching violence on-screen). If discourses help to structure how fans perceive and understand
their objects, then issues of
literacy become relevant. Media literacy is
the idea that as citizens, viewers can be equipped with particular discursive resources to help them understand the media and use those understandings
in a socially responsible way. Attention to media literacy means thinking about
what discourses readers are schooled in and how having or not having them might determine interpretations of the viewing experience. Henry Jenkins has argued, 'As we move into the classroom, teachers can play a vital role in
BEYOND THE TEXT 81
helping students to become more conscious about assumptions shaping their
simulations' (2006, 214). Fans can also be considered as having high levels
of literacy for their own media forms, communal qualifications that strongly
shape how they understand the nuanced complexities of their texts. Paul Booth's (2012) recent work on the way that horror fans make video trailers
for the
Saw franchise is interesting here. High levels of 'cineliteracy' amongst
horror fans can act to normalize their interpretation of what outsiders see as a
sadistic and transgressive 'torture porn', yet the sheer excess of their object
challenges fans to creatively re-imagine it.
Attention to discourses and notions of literacy remind us that the world
of experience informing each of our interpretations is both complex and
changing. In the actuality of history, the nature of the medium, text, audience
and reading continually changes as technology, news, experience and other informational resources grow and shift around each of us. The most radical,
but perhaps most astute ideas about sense-making therefore dissolve the text
into the constant process of reinterpretation that each new reading brings. In
some understandings, the notion of an original (perhaps intentional) meaning
of the text then disappears. Hence, 'There is, in fact, no "book" other than
these ever-different repetitions [of reading]' (Spivak in Derrida 1976, xiii. How
can we theorize a series of reiterations that create different meanings each
time? Drawing on another idea from literary studies by Gerard Gennette 11997), Jonathan Gray (2010) has drawn attention beyond the traditional
boundaries of media textuality. Paratexts are items which are beyond the
edges of the text and yet still connected to its interpretation. Genette views
thern as extras inside each published work such as the title, author's name
and preface, whereas Gray extends the idea to talk about media products
and their trailers, reviews and other secondary materials. A good example of
this is the 'lurid' cassette cases of the video nasty era that pre-sold horror
films to those who wanted to rent or buy them: your interpretation of a film might differ quite radically depending on whether you
only saw its cassette
case,
only watched the film or (as was usual) watched the film straight after
seeing its cover. Paratexts 'hype' the products to which they refer, sometimes
changing their meanings quite radically. Knowing this opens up another
interesting issue: each member of the audience may have seen a different
set of paratexts. Aware of this problem, Cornel Sandvoss has argued that the issue of fan interpretation should be considered not in terms of
polysemy
the text's openness to different readings -but instead through what he calls
neutrosemy: 'the far reaching elimination of meaning inherent in fan texts'
(2005b, 824). He adds that, 'Different meanings in fan texts are not reflexive
of readers' engagements with textual blanks as Iser conceptualized thern, but, instead
of fans' ability to define boundaries' (832; emphasis mine). In other 82 UNDERSTANDING FANDOM
words, unless we can instil an essential core of meaning or social relevance in
a text, its resonance may relate to its inability to definitively signify anything,
and attention should therefore be shifted more radically from the text to a field
account of its readers. If we focus on the way that readers actually make meaning, new issues
emerge and draw us back towards some of the fandom research previously
presented in the chapter. Kurt Lancaster's 12001) work is relevant here. Lancaster examined the constellation of texts, products and paratexts
that surrounded the series Babylon 5 and argued that they allowed fans
to 'immerse' themselves in a world of role-playing where meanings and
identities were forged and expressed in a mutual process of performance. In Lancaster's study, fans are textual performers rather than textual poachers.
They are not pursuing creative activities or interpretations that are at odds with the text, but instead actively using it as a social resource in a variety
of different ways. Lancaster's work is useful in escaping both the passive
view of readership offered by the mass culture critique and the text-reader model inherent in much of the cultural studies tradition. It encompasses
the possibility that audience members might draw on the text for emotional self-expression, but his work has no strong model of the individual subject
and why he/she connects so enthusiastically with Babylon 5 in particular
(see Hills 2002a, 41-2). For Lancaster the fan's relation to the world of the
text inherently involves social performance (Sandvoss 2005a, 45). This
raises the possibility that there might be fans who make meanings but do not
perform them socially in the spectacular ways that capture the attention of
fan studies researchers. After discussing fans listening to a CD, for instance, Daniel Cavicchi explained that 'any discussion of the interpretation of music
must include what happens when a listener hears a piece of music, in the
case of fans, it must also include what that hearing makes happen' (1998,
126; emphasis mine). If performance is one answer to the question of how
meanings that get made are used in a social setting, then another is that
fans may create and draw on specific meanings of the text in order simply
to help them enjoy it more or to cope with difficult situations in their lives.
Laura Vroomen (2004, 243), for example, described Kate Bush fandom as
a way of coping with everyday life. Finally, in relation to this it must be said
that theory is a way of coping too. Researchers are intertextual readers
who use their existing stock of theory and creative imagination to advance
their understandings of why fans make meaning.
To an extent, for better or
worse, it is always our interpretation of their interpretation, even when we
count ourselves among them. It is evident from this chapter that meanings are social and yet (re)made
inside the heads of fans as participants in media cultures. Many of the theories
BEYOND THE TEXT 83
discussed are not completely incompatible; meanings may be inspired from multiple nodes in the network or constellation of elements that surround the
reader. What all of these theories are limited by is the guiding metaphor of
textuality itself and the way that it prioritizes meaning-making as a cultural
activity. Fandom is a meaningful experience, but that does not mean that we
must locate it only in relation to its objects and texts. The notion of textual
poaching attempted to relate the process of meaning-making to the wider
power relations of fandom, while staying on an agenda of concerns set by the
idea of textuality. There may be milage, however, in jettisoning the academic
hunt for understanding semiotic meaning in favour of seeing other, equally
important, dimensions of fandom.
