Week 8: Fandom Flashcards
Texts and meaning
What is a text?
Texts acquire meanings through use
Theodore Adorno:
Prized cultural texts are disintegrated through overconsumption
Sacred artifacts cultural goods
Occurs via irrelevant consumption and romanticisation
Michel de Certeau
“Every reading modifies its object… The reader takes neither the position of the author nor an author’s position. He invents in the text something different from what they intended. He detaches them from their (lost or accessory) origin. He combines their fragments and creates something unknown.”
Cult fiction
Jenkins:
A text’s limitation may encourage collective forms of creativity – in contrast to “complete” works
Fans do not totally fall within the mainstream
Fans do not represent popular reading
How do bystanders become fans?
John Ellis:
Broadcasting constructs the spectator (us)
The spectator absorbs TV’s “continuous variety”
This absorption, however, is incomplete: we are still separate from and not totally absorbed into the narrative
This incomplete absorption defines us as bystanders
TV fans, therefore, are an impossibility
How do bystanders become fans?
Ann Gray:
Women watch different shows with varying degrees of interest
Watching with family at night vs female friends in daytime
Stuart Hall:
“We are all, in our heads, several different audiences at once, and can be constituted as such by different programs.”
How do bystanders become fans?
Regularly watching a TV series vs watching as a fan a TV series
Convenience vs committed viewing
Beauty and the Beast: “ALONE –WITHOUT DISTRACTIONS OF ANY KIND”
Behaviours: in-jokes, dialogue, plotlines, seeing one’s world according to a text’s worldview, analysis, anticipation of future storylines, buying fanzines, seeking secondary information about the text
Terminology: “addicted”, “infected”, “seduced”
How do bystanders become fans?
Pierre Bourdieu:
“bourgeois aesthetics” values “detachment, disinterestedness, indifference”
Distrusts strong feelings
Fears loss of rational control (associated with popular)
popular characterised by “desire to enter the game, identifying with the characters joys and sufferings, worrying about their fate, espousing their hopes and ideals, living their lives”
How do bystanders become fans?
Brecht: critical distance as an ideal
Certeau: supported critical distance
How we read popular culture with critical distance:
We distance ourselves from the text
We read the text intellectually, rather than emotionally or with vested interest in the narrative
We deny ourselves immediate gratification in favour of contemplative distance
Mass culture and gender binaries
Mary Ann Doanne Male : female Distance (empowers male) : proximity to the text/body (dominates female) Fandom associated with femininity: lacking critical distance, unable to resist the text, being mastered by the text, submitting to the text, submitting to textual authority
Authority in distance: kinda like academics
Critical distance
Problematic, because:
Limits reader: reader is limited by ideology, textual features determine readers responses, viewers must accept the text’s narrative
Poachers of texts do not observe from a distance: they:
Trespass
Grab
Hold onto the property of others
Internalise meanings and remake borrowed terms
Limits readers by keeping hands off texts
Agency of readers
Reading texts “against the grain”
Fans distance themselves from the text when they examine the text
Creates a fan who becomes a fan because of a text’s limitations (“the film so was bad, it was good”)
Fans who examine texts simultaneously:
Create critical distance
Engage emotionally with text’s narrative
behind-the-scenes information can influence whether we eventually become fans of a text
Agency of readers
Fans of ‘Star Trek’ adopt the “double viewing” strategy:
Characters of Star Trek are seen as ‘real’ and ‘constructed’
Understanding that a text is constructed helps us create new constructions.
Rereading
Roland Barthes: rereading:
Rereading is only performed by children, old people and professors
All reading is rereading due to its intertextual nature
Rereading renders the book anew:
we no longer read in with the awareness of before and after
Rereading acquires a mythic quality
“no longer consumption, but play”
Relationship with broadcasting and technology: cheaper technologies has made rereading more affordable and possible.
The neofan.
Rereading
Syndication: selling reruns and showing repeated shows/films revenue without additional expenses
Broadcasting does not sell programmes to viewers
Broadcasting sells viewers to advertisers
Social production of meaning
Allyson Dyar: observed that fan culture focuses on the text, rather than social interactions among fans
Fan gossip – relationship to understandings of female gossip:
Deborah Jones: gossip is “a way of talking between women in their roles as women, intimate in style, personal and domestic in topic and setting, a female cultural event which springs from and perpetuates the restrictions of the female role, but also gives the comfort of validation”
House-talk
Scandal
Bitching
Chatting
Social production of meaning
Gossip:
Makes the abstract concrete
Makes the political personal
Provides distance and a manner in which women may speak of their roles and subordination, unpoliced (eg: of friend who met his gf at a rally)
