Fan Studies: From Consumers to Active Producers

Fandoms: From Passive Consumers to Active Producers

Question 4: Fandoms (Henry Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu...)

To appropriately answer this question, one must deal with the definition of 'fan'. The term is an abbreviation of 'fanatic' and comes from the Latin word 'fanaticus', which has religious connotations and refers to devotees. It has negative connotations in society. Henry Jenkins, an American media scholar and lecturer of the second half of the 20th century, deals with different phenomena related to the fan in his book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992). He rejects fan stereotypes such as the comic, nerdy fan, the psychotic fan, and the eroticized fan. Moreover, he expresses the fan as a defensible position within mass culture, in which they are otherwise seen as a scandalous category, whose interests are alien to a 'normal' cultural experience and out of sync with reality, treated as the 'other'.

The notion of good taste, developed by Pierre Bourdieu, helps Jenkins analyze how the fan is socially seen and why. Moving on, Jenkins also mentions Michel de Certeau in his work. Like him, he poses an alternative conception of fans as readers who appropriate popular texts (or other media forms in Jenkin's time) to serve different interests. The readers or spectators transfer the experience of consuming culture into a rich and complex participatory culture. What's more, nowadays, fandom is seen as a series of organized efforts to influence programming decisions. In other words, fascination, adoration, and also frustration is what motivates fans' active engagement in media. They struggle with narratives that don't satisfy them, and they articulate unrealized possibilities within the original. Through this process, they cease to be a mere audience, but active participants. The hierarchy is broken down and there is no distinction between producers and consumers. Fandom becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, culture, and communities.

In summary, fans build a community and become producers, taking an active role to reclaim media for their own purposes, but who also struggle actively against authoritarian, 'legitimate' producers.