As I was reading Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, all I kept thinking was, Hooray! Here’s the subversion/resistance we tried to find in the romance novels but just couldn’t quite come up with. The other thing I thought of, more in the back of my mind, was, Why do I find fandom of the things Jenkins talks about (mostly sf, some action-adventure stuff) more legitimate than fandom of, say, Harry Potter? To elaborate a bit…
Much of this book celebrates fan culture, and one way it does so is to point out the subversiveness of that subculture. “Lorrah’s description blurs the boundaries between producers and consumers, spectators and participants, the commercial and the homecrafted . . . 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). While as Jenkins discusses later the fans don’t have the power of the producers of the shows to truly change what is made, the community they create gives them their own sort of power. They are no longer just consumers and spectators, they are directly engaging with the works and producing their own works that interact with the original. Not only that, but the engagement with the shows includes engagement with vast numbers of other people—creating a very real community that lauds, critiques, and reinterprets the media they consume. The discussions of the shows are not only intelligent and show true contemplation of the given representations (rather than the brainless consumption assumed of the “masses” watching TV), they are often put in terms of academic arguments.
I think it’s wonderfully ironic that academia (at least up until recently) considered TV not worth its time for deep examinations and thought that people were ridiculous to read into TV shows what the academy interprets in great novels. Not only does this type of engagement with TV demonstrate the fans’ sophistication with such styles of text examination, but the academy’s assertion that it is still of low taste and low culture simply proves the existence of hegemony: the elite can’t handle their sophisticated and intellectual practices being used for new, alternative purposes. The fans reappropriate the materials, the shows themselves, and at the same time they reappropriate the tools used by the bourgeoisie. (Even more interesting, actually, is “the institutionalization of a ‘feminine’ approach to texts that differs radically from the more ‘masculine’ style preferred by the academy” [89], relating to the emotional closeness of the fan reader to the text.) Again, fans cannot usually make the producers do what they want for the shows; but they are very noisy about their demands (a kind of power in itself) and are also taking close looks at and discussing crucial aspects of culture and hegemony portrayed in these shows, raising their awareness of the issues that tend to fade into the background otherwise.
So why is it that I’ve always really really wanted to go to an sf convention (general, or specifically Star Trek), but I think Harry Potter fan fiction is ridiculous? The first reason is probably because I’ve been a fan (in the more general, passive sense) of sf a lot longer than I’ve been a fan of Harry Potter. I started reading my mom’s Anne McCaffrey books at something like age ten, and was watching TNG whenever my parents did since I don’t know when. Don’t get me wrong, I love Harry Potter as much as anyone else at Pomona. We grew up with those kids. They just weren’t my first love. Another possibility is that I think of Harry Potter fans as generally a younger crowd (even if people of all ages do actually enjoy the series)–which means they haven’t had as much education, and they can’t write as well as I, as an intellectual elite, have come to expect from writers across the board. And yet I’ve never read any sf fan fiction either . . . and I consider things like dressing up for movies just as legitimate for either crowd. I’d probably want to go to a Harry Potter convention at some point too, if they ever had one. So I don’t really know what my snobbery is when it comes to Harry Potter fan fiction. But still it remains. . .