Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers

Exploring Participatory Culture

Henry Jenkins

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814743102
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Henry Jenkins at Authors@Google (video)

Henry Jenkins“s pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represent the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, media producers and advertisers, not to mention researchers and fans, take for granted the idea that the success of a media franchise depends on fan investments and participation.

Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers takes readers from Jenkins's progressive early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or stigmatize it, through to his more recent work, combating moral panic and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in Fan Studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the web, take up blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how consumer participation impacts mainstream media, and debate the public policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.

PART I

Inside Fandom

1

Excerpts from “Matt Hills Interviews Henry Jenkins”

The following conversation was recorded one evening at the “Consoleing Passions” conference in 2001 at the University of Bristol. A much longer version appeared online in Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media that same year.

In many ways, this conversation reflects the explosion of fan scholarship since Textual Poachers first appeared. The fact that the interview appeared in an online journal devoted entirely to cult media and its audiences would have seemed inconceivable at the time I first began studying fans. Matt Hills, my partner for this conversation, is one of the founding editors of Intensities and the author of Fan Cultures, a book that includes a painfully close reading of Textual Poachers. Matt had the uncanny ability to locate those passages that left me most hesitant or those where I compromised on my original wording in order to appease some colleague or mentor. It was as if he broke into my house and found the rough draft, zeroing in on every marked out passage. A bit frightened at how deep this guy got inside my head, I was determined, following ancient advice, to keep him close by my side. This conversation was the first we’d had since Fan Cultures had appeared in print and some of it has the feel of settling scores or clarifying the relationship between our two perspectives.

It is telling that we recorded it at “Consoleing Passions.” For most of my academic career, “Consoleing Passions,” a conference on gender and television studies, has been one of my intellectual homes. I presented a version of the chapter on slash fiction from Textual Poachers at the very first “Consoleing Passions” and have not missed one since. What I love about the conference is the openness participants have about their own investments in popular culture. Matt and I recorded this session in an empty room with no audience.

Matt Hills: [Let’s start with] a quote from Perverse Spectators, by Janet Staiger:

While most studies of fans emphasize the positive features of exchange and empowerment deriving from interests in often marginal objects of pleasure, I would point out that scholars may need to shift their presumptions even here—although not back to the days when fans were considered pathological spectators. Without going that far, I would argue that some fans and fan communities might benefit from more critical social theory…. Fandom… cannot be easily bifurcated into good and bad; the historian’s responsibility is adequate description and thoughtful evaluation.¹

This is a quote that really struck me. I suppose it speaks to what I’m trying to do in Fan Cultures. I find Staiger’s statement rather contradictory, but perhaps that’s also why I find it so compelling: she seems to argue that fandom can’t be divided up into the “good object” and the “bad object,” into “good” fan appropriation and “bad” fan complicity, but at the same time as challenging this moral dualism, there is an investment in the “critical” which seems to be completely about reinstating the authority to divide fandom into aspects to be applauded and aspects to be criticized. Can we, or should we, be “critical”? And if so, what fan practices and fan communities are we going to be critical of?

Henry Jenkins: This is a tricky space that I think we’re all struggling with right now. When I write—having come out of a certain generation of academics—I still feel an enormous pressure to someplace say, “Is this progressive or is this reactionary?” It’s probably both progressive and reactionary in some ways, both good and bad, but the need to declare yourself definitively at some point in the text is something that you have in the back of your mind when you write within a discipline like cultural studies, which was born out of political resistance at a particular historical moment and which has been shaped by Marxist discourse, which is itself a moral discourse as much as a political and economic one. One always has a fear of not being sufficiently political when you operate within cultural studies. It defined itself as a field around a category of “the political.”…

MH: But a highly moralized sense of “the political”; so to be “political” was inherently good, almost, whereas if something “lacked” politics… well, “apolitical” is always going to be an insult.

HJ: I think it was Lawrence Grossberg who said, “If writing about popular culture isn’t political then what good is it?” My answer is that there are plenty of things you can say about popular culture that aren’t motivated purely from a political or moralistic stance….

MH: Even though you accept that you are not just celebrating fandom, especially in Science Fiction Audiences, but also in Textual Poachers, if you look at textbook coverage of your work, you are constantly being accused of being too celebratory.

HJ: Well, you know, it’s because I don’t call fans “twits” and “anoraks” that for some people—

MH: —you must be being too celebratory!

HJ: I think we need to consider different generations of scholars within fandom, and moments within which those scholars are working. I think there are at least three moments of fan studies that get conflated together as if they are a unified body of theory. There is a body of work that began to stress active audiences and the use of ethnographic methods, derived in part from sociological methods, and I would put early John Tulloch, John Fiske, and Janice Radway in this body of work—they come from different places and so I don’t want to lump them together as representing one totally unified body of work.

But it was important for these writers to be outside what they were writing about, to be free of any direct implication in their subject matter. They begin to acknowledge that audiences have an active role, but their prose is very depersonalized; there’s often no acknowledgement of any affection they feel for the objects of study, or if there is, it’s a token gesture. And there’s sometimes an attempt to pull back from the fan community at the end of such writing and say, right, now we can arrive at the truth that the fans don’t yet recognize about their own political activity. I’ve taken Radway to task for the closing chapter of Reading the Romance for that kind of gesture.² That’s the first generation.

I see myself and others writing at the same time, Camille [Bacon-Smith] to some degree,³ as a second generation that comes to a discourse already formulated around these axes of active/passive, resistance/co-opted. We’re trying to find a way to alter that perception based on insider knowledge of what it is to be a fan, and struggling to find a language to articulate a different perspective that comes out of lived experience and situated knowledge. And it proves very difficult—there’s a lot of resistance because the first generation are the readers responding to our manuscripts, the editors deciding whether they get published or not, the faculty deciding whether we get hired. So you end up struggling to negotiate between what you want to say, and what it’s possible to say at a particular point in time, in order to get your work out at all. And there is a level of defensiveness there. When I was writing Poachers I was so frustrated by how badly fans had been written about. As a fan I felt implicated in that writing and I wanted to challenge it; there are passages in the book that are just out-and-out defenses of fandom, and others that are trying to pull back and describe, analyze, critique. By the time of Science Fiction Audiences (1995) the need to defend is no longer present. At that point you can write securely and you can then begin to look at fandom in a different way.

Now, I think all of that work paved the way for a whole generation of aca-fen, as I like to call them; that is, people who are both academics and fans, for whom those identities are not problematic to mix and combine, and who are able then to write in a more open way about their experience of fandom without the “obligation of defensiveness,” without the need to defend the community. Therefore they can take up things like contradictions within it, disputes within it, re-raise awkward subjects that we papered over in our earlier accounts, and now there’s a freedom to have real debate among ourselves about some of these core issues.

And so something like Intensities to my mind represents the establishment of a generation that is now arriving—that I think you represent very well—that has taken for granted for your entire academic career that it’s legitimate to write sympathetically about fans, and now can ask a different set of questions, including going back and batting us around a bit for the things we didn’t say. But you’ve got to recognize that these things weren’t said in a historical context, or rather there was a historical context that made it difficult to say certain things. As it was, Lingua Franca took Constance Penley and me to task for even saying that we were fans at all, and said we had to be lying, said that this was a typical example of academics slumming it and wanting to be “one of the people.” Well, it wasn’t slumming it; I’d lived my entire life as a fan. I could be accused of putting on airs by becoming an academic, but I scarcely could be accused of slumming it.

MH: Constance Penley is equally taken to task in a piece by Richard Burt that I cite in Fan Cultures.⁴ Burt accuses her work of displaying a particular fantasy, the fantasy of being able to “have it all,” which is that the academic-fan can somehow occupy, without tensions or power relations, the position of being their own object of study. That kind of critique still lingers in a particular way, and perhaps it still has some force too.

HJ: Your own focus on fans-as-intellectuals in Fan Cultures points to one way out of that problem, which is to recognize that a lot of fans carry a large amount of intellectual capital around with them. They are very good critics; they are very good theorists. Thomas McLaughlin’s notion of “vernacular theory,” which says theory production doesn’t just reside in the academy, it takes place in all these other sites, is a helpful way into that, although it still tends to hold onto an “academic” versus “vernacular” theory separation, whereas I would say that academic theory production is simply one subcultural or institutional practice among many.⁵ It doesn’t need to be separated out from those other kinds of theory; it has its own language, its own goals, its own systems of circulation, and fans are inevitably locked out of that. But many of them are trained academics, librarians, or teachers, many of them decided consciously not to become academics, having had some exposure to academic knowledge, and many of them are professionals in other sectors. To say that they don’t have intellectual capital is a bizarre statement. And I think your stuff talks really nicely about fans as critics or fans as intellectuals, and we need to pay more attention to that….

That was something that I tried to get at in an essay that I did with Shoshanna Green and Cynthia Jenkins, “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking” (see chapter 3 below). We tried to reproduce slash fans’ theorizing of their own practice, which met with some resistance with the academic reviewers of the manuscript. They couldn’t accept the idea that there was any legitimacy in seeing how fans actually theorize their own practice, even though we would take for granted the fact that an avant-garde artist’s manifesto is a way of at least partially understanding the work that they produce…. “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking” was a model of a dialogic text, and yes, I do have a piece in there because I was part of the fan community that I was drawing on, but I don’t label it as somehow distinct from the other fan voices there.

MH: I refer to that essay in Fan Cultures, and I think it’s very strong. For me, it’s one of the pieces that really starts to open up the question of “fan” versus “academic” knowledge.

HJ: It’s not auto-ethnography; in a sense it’s simply an outing, an exposure of myself in my normal fan activity, since I never wrote that piece with the intent of it seeing academic publication. It had existed in fandom as a part of my intervention in fan debates. The other two editors of the piece agreed that each of us should include passages of our own fan discourse, and I let them choose among the things I had written. So I gave up a certain degree of control over my own discourse in order for that to work out.

Now, that’s not without problems. One of the responses to that piece in fandom was that fans wanted me to adjudicate disputes between fans, because I introduce a lot of fan disputes in the piece but I don’t comment on them, and I don’t take sides. And almost all the fans wanted me to side with them over the other side, and they assumed that if I had presented a more authoritative version of the debate, and it wasn’t dialogic, then I would have sided with them! By being dialogic and open, then, somehow I was seen as giving too much space to the opposed view in the dispute….

As an academic you speak with a certain degree of authority. I can’t be a normal fan anymore, not because I’ve somehow distanced myself from fandom, but because I’ll walk in the room and the response is different. When passages of your book are used as signature lines on people’s emails, and when fan Web sites describe Henry Jenkins as “the guy who dignified fandom,” then these sorts of statements make it very hard for me to speak without it in some sense carrying a level of authority that I’m uncomfortable with. It’s not what I want the relationship to be between fans and academics, but because the press calls on me as a spokesman for the fan community week in, week out, my role gets communally reinscribed in journalistic practices, and because Textual Poachers has now been passed from generation to generation of fans, it’s one of the things you read when you want to be integrated into the fan community. They say, “You want to be a fan? Read this.” It’s become a sort of “how-to” book.

MH: So now it has become part of the “initiation process” that you actually describe in Textual Poachers!

HJ: That’s really tricky to know what to do with. There are T-shirts that have the cover of Textual Poachers on them which circulate in the fan economy, and the work of that artist, Jean Kluge, went up in value within the art hierarchy of fandom because it was associated with the book. She became a more valuable fan artist as a result of that. So you can’t go in and totally shed academic authority, which is so ironic to me; I’d been involved in the fan community for a long time, and I was just leaving graduate school when I wrote Textual Poachers. In the academic world I was truly puny; I was not yet a heavyweight by any stretch of the imagination, so that this book carried the authority it did was a little disarming.

I saw myself as an agent of dialogue. But it’s not just academics who police this dialogue. The fan community has an investment in academic authority on one level, and yet, as you suggest, other fans say, “Sod off, don’t bring this language into our space, you’re making too much of things that don’t matter,” and there’s a resistance, an anti-intellectualism in some fan circles that equally makes it hard to create that kind of dialogue. We all bring our own baggage to that conversation, which is to say that the identities of the fan-academic or the academic-fan are always problematic ones that have to be sorted through, even though I think there’s more freedom to shed that issue today.

MH: There’s no utopian solution to that problem; there are still cultural contexts that work to constrain and enable dialogue and fan-academic hybridity, with “constrain” being a key part of that process.

HJ: For example, we’re having this discussion at “Consoleing Passions,” and I would say that two-thirds of the papers at the conference were delivered by fans of the medium they were discussing. Many of them were actively involved with fan communities, and very few of them felt the need to overtly declare that allegiance because it was taken for granted in the tone of the language, the types of information they mobilized, and the way they dressed and embodied themselves…. What our generation did was dismantle some of that to create a comfort zone between fan and academic….

When I first starting saying at academics gatherings, “I’m a fan,” I felt a bit like Davy Crockett waltzing into the U.S. senate dressed in buckskin [laughs]—“I’m a real frontiersman.” There’s a sense in which I’m embodying this community that I’m writing about, but it’s nevertheless the case that it becomes a myth the minute you assert it in a particular space; it’s a mythic identity as well as a lived identity, and its shock value comes from the assertion of something that was unspeakable at a certain point in time.

MH: So at a certain moment authenticity and scandal interlock, and that’s a productive, tactical exercise?

HJ: Yes, and I think that Textual Poachers was written at a moment when those tw...