Fan Culture, Social Power, and Virginia Woolf's Feminist Vision

The Evolution of Fandom and Participatory Culture

The term ‘fan’ is an abbreviation of the word fanatic, which comes from the Latin word ‘fanaticus’. This term originally carried religious connotations, referring to devotees and having secular faith, but it quickly assumed negative connotations in society.

Henry Jenkins, an American media scholar and lecturer of the second half of the 20^th century, addresses different phenomena related to the fan in his book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. He rejects common fan stereotypes such as the comic, nerdy, psychotic, and eroticized fan. Moreover, he expresses the fan as a defensible position within mass culture, challenging the view of fans as a scandalous category whose interests are alien to a normal cultural experience and out of sync with reality, often treated as the ‘other’.

Taste, Class, and Fan Identity

The notion of good taste, developed by Pierre Bourdieu, helps Jenkins analyze how fans are socially perceived and why. Bourdieu argues that good taste, appropriate conduct, and aesthetic merit are not universal or natural; rather, they are acquired and reflect the interests of dominant classes. Our choices are shaped by experience as members of cultural groups, institutions, and social exchanges. This perpetuates class identities and social distinctions, promoting stereotypes and prejudices. Ultimately, this hierarchy breaks down when fans transform from mere consumers to producers and manipulators of meanings.

From Consumers to Producers: De Certeau's Influence

Jenkins also mentions Michel De Certeau in his work. Like De Certeau, Jenkins posits an alternative conception of fans as readers who appropriate popular texts, or other media forms of Jenkins’s time, to serve different interests. The readers or spectators transfer the experience of consuming culture into a rich and complex participatory culture.

Strategies, Tactics, and Legal Battles

Following De Certeau’s perspective, people are not just passive consumers, but ‘users’ who can be very creative and active in their forms of consumption and behavior. De Certeau distinguishes between strategies and tactics. Producers employ strategies, as they hold control and power, utilizing a ‘scriptural economy’ that restrains the multiplicity of voices and the circulation of other meanings. Conversely, through tactics—a form of resistance—consumers or users try to change the limits imposed by producers and conquer their power through poaching or appropriation. However, they cannot fully overcome these limits, as seen in examples like the Harry Potter ‘wars,’ where Warner Bros. fought against young fanfiction authors, or Lucasfilm’s actions against the proliferation of erotic content involving their copyrighted characters. These legal boundaries and lawsuits have opened the discussion that property rights over fiction should not determine how viewers understand it. This ongoing debate must be addressed between consumers and producers, and it now centers around the terms of participation.

Fandom as Produsage: A New Paradigm

Furthermore, today, fandom is seen as a series of organized efforts to influence programming decisions. Fascination, adoration, and even frustration motivate fans’ engagement in media. They struggle with narratives that do not satisfy them and articulate unrealized possibilities within the original. Through this process, they cease to be mere audience members, becoming active participants. Axel Bruns’ term ‘produsage,’ which unites production and usage, accurately defines this previously mentioned process. The hierarchy is broken down, and there is no distinction between producers and consumers. Fandom becomes a participatory culture that transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, culture, and communities.

Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas: A Feminist Critique

Virginia Woolf’s essay of 1939, entitled Three Guineas, was not received with much emphasis within cultural studies, where the Leavises called it nasty, dangerous, and preposterous. In Three Guineas, Woolf imagines she is replying to a letter sent to her by a successful and respectable barrister who is asking how the daughters of educated men might help to prevent war. Specifically, she discusses the general question of how these daughters might help to prevent war within the context of three imaginary requests seeking support and money for different causes. Woolf practices feminist cultural criticism by offering three responses:

1. A reply to an honorable treasurer’s letter asking for money to rebuild a women’s college.
2. A reply to a letter asking for a subscription to a society to help the daughters of educated men to obtain employment in the professions.
3. A reply to a letter asking that the daughters of educated men should sign a manifesto pledging themselves to protect culture and intellectual liberty; and join that society which is in need of funds.

Virginia Woolf gives a Guinea to each cause, but only under specific conditions. It is important to highlight that Three Guineas was written on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, when fascism was perceived as a threat to world peace.

The First Guinea: Challenging Patriarchy and Patriotism

In the First Guinea, Woolf’s reply enables her to mount a powerful cultural critique of exclusion and systematic subordination. Many men argued that upper-class women should not have the right to earn a living, since working was not dignified and only another kind of slavery. She replies that ‘to depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than depend upon a father,’ bringing out what she saw as the basic patriarchy of British life. This patriarchy she discusses is related to patriotism, including the idea that men claim to fight for a love of freedom and are driven by the pride they feel for their country. This question enables her to imagine what patriotism might mean to the daughters of educated men. Moreover, she raises the question of national identity, where she states that she has no country since it has made women dependent and treated them as slaves.

Sexual Difference: A Cultural Construct

For Woolf, sexual difference is not something laid down by ‘nature’ but a product of how the sexes experience the world through culture and the possibilities available to them. Her identity as a woman is very much a product of cultural differences constructed by a society historically dominated by men. She recognizes that the men and women of her class are divided by differing perceptions.

The Second Guinea: Women's Education and Representation

In the Second Guinea, she summarized the struggles in which upper-class women were involved to win the very restricted right to study. She also showed interest in what we now call representation, making clear that men have represented them as intellectually inferior and better suited for domestic duties than for learning. This historical perspective is something that she tries to offer in relation to everything she discusses, whether education or entry into the professions, including the church.

Gender as a Social Construction

Virginia Woolf claims that the differentiation in terms of gender is a social construction and not a natural outcome of innate differences. This socially constructed difference is observed very clearly even through signifying practices—that is, how in a given context, things are made to mean, which are culturally influenced, such as dress, which was, and is, used to express the social position of each gender.

The Third Guinea: Women's Influence and Fighting Fascism

Woolf is not only demanding equality, but she goes a step beyond by rhetorically asking women if it is worth aspiring to the same world that was dominated by men. For this reason, she recognizes that unless women participate in culture, education, and professions, they can never hope to have any influence over society. Also, one of her strongest arguments is that the only way women can help to prevent war is if men allow women this full participation.

In the Third Guinea, she replies to the barrister who is asking the daughters of educated men to sign a manifesto pledging themselves to protect culture and intellectual liberty. Here, she points out that women of her class had already contributed to male intellectual liberty for centuries, because all the money that could have been spent on the education of women had already been spent on men. She says that feminists must fight against the Fascist State.