Textual poachers : television fans & participatory culture
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Textual poachers : television fans & participatory culture
（Studies in culture and communication）
Routledge, 1992
- : hb
- : pbk
- Other Title
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Textual poachers : television fans and participatory culture
Available at 24 libraries
Note
Size of pbk., ISBN:9780415905725: 23 cm
Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-328) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
"Get a life" William Shatner told Star Trek fans. Yet, as Textual Poachers argues, fans already have a "life," a complex subculture which draws its resources from commercial culture while also reworking them to serve alternative interests. Rejecting stereotypes of fans as cultural dupes, social misfits, and mindless consumers, Jenkins represents media fans as active producers and skilled manipulators of program meanings, as nomadic poachers constructing their own culture from borrowed materials, as an alternative social community defined through its cultural preferences and consumption practices.
Written from an insider's perspective and providing vivid examples from fan artifacts, Textual Poachers offers an ethnographic account of the media fan community, its interpretive strategies, its social institutions and cultural practices, and its troubled relationship to the mass media and consumer capitalism. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certau, Jenkins shows how fans of Star Trek, Blake's 7, The Professionals, Beauty and the Beast, Starsky and Hutch, Alien Nation, Twin Peaks, and other popular programs exploit these cultural materials as the basis for their stories, songs, videos, and social interatctions.
Addressing both academics and fans, Jenkins builds a powerful case for the richness of fan culture as a popular response to the mass media and as a challenge to the producers' attempts to regulate textual meanings. Textual Poachers guides readers through difficult questions about popular consumption, genre, gender, sexuality, and interpretation, documenting practices and processes which test and challenge basic assumptions of contemporary media theory.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. "Get a Life!": Fans, Poachers, Nomads
2. How Texts become Real
3. Fan Critics
4. "It's Not a Fairy Tale Anymore": Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast
5. Scribbling in the Margins: Fan Readers/Fan Writers
6. "Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk": Slash and the Fan-Writing Community
7. "Layers of Meaning": Fan Music Video and the Poetics of Poaching
8. "Strangers No More, We Sing": Filk Music, Folk Culture, and the Fan Community
Conclusion: "In My Weekend-Only World...": Reconsidering Fandom
Appendix: Fan Texts (Prepared by Meg Garrett)
Sources
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"