A Brief History of Media Fandom and Fan Studies Part II
I know - how can I call it brief if it takes up two posts?
Children and teens were other groups studied during this period, with David Buckingham “[taking] aim at the simplicity of discourse that reduced child and teen television viewers to blank slates” by arguing that children (and ordinary viewers) are just as apt to interpret media in their own way as critics (63). Justin Lewis posited “the process of viewing is always a potentially transformative event […] that can change the nature of what is being watched,” which was contrary to what was previously thought (64). Audience research became about not only textual analysis, but also seeing what happened to a program upon viewing; about studying the practice of watching as its own text. Seeing the audience as a culture, Ethnographic research using anthropologic techniques were employed to study the audience in their own environment, and researchers saw television and its audience as access points to understanding how society works in general.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s view of taste as a form of “cultural capitol,” John Fiske believed that “’Popular culture is not consumption, it is culture-the active process of generating and circulating meaning and pleasures within a social system” (65). Everything thought to be “lowbrow,” such as soap operas, cop shows and wrestling, now required examination. These cultural objects weren’t drivel, as originally thought-they were only coded as drivel in order to denigrate the viewers. As one of the first people to study fans of popular culture, Fiske argued that people like the women writing Star Trek slash fiction were waging “’semiotic guerilla warfare’” with media industries, seeing the fan of lowbrow culture as resistant to cultural mores (66).
Fiske was part of the first wave of researchers who would study fans and fandoms. As Star Trek and Star Wars fans were rebelling against the mainstream interpretation of their fan objects by holding conventions and making fan works, Henry Jenkins, Camille Bacon-Smith and Constance Penley began studying whether or not fans were completely lost in the system, or if they became transformative co-producers. They found that the fans, most of them women, were taking masculine narrative such as Star Trek and re-appropriating it through the act of writing fan fiction or making fan art. Through these actions fans were able to negotiate spaces for themselves in a power structure that would normally leave them disenfranchised. These early researchers into fan studies found that fans, as an audience, were “especially resistive, reflective and savvy critics, intent on repurposing narratives for their purpose” (69).
By picking up on de Certeau’s (1984) “distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the disempowered,” this first wave of fan studies saw mass media as “a site of power struggles” and fandom as the vanguard of the offensive (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 1-2). Instead of being seen as obsessive or socially inept, first wave fan studies championed fans, creating a vision of a band of brothers (and sisters) united to take media back from the powerful. This binary posited that fans were commonly seen as “Other” and Bourgeois culture distanced itself from such passionate consumption (Gray and Lotz 67). First wave fan studies was criticized because it never questioned or deconstructed this binary, and that while some fans would create resistant readings of media, the effects of the media would still be felt by the majority of the audience (70).
As fandom was becoming a subject of study, fandom itself was growing. Blockbusters of the early 1980s appealed to fans, and “media fandom grew and spread, not only because there were so many films to choose from” (Coppa 51). Harrison Ford was the fan icon of the day, and fans obsessively saw even his non-genre films during this time. While Jenkins and Fiske were championing fans as resistance fighters, fandom itself had exploded, with a vast proliferation of fan zines, including writings of what is known as the “crossover” - the combination of the universes of two fandoms to create a piece in which characters from both interacted with each other. However, this zine culture wasn’t to last, as fans began using a new technology to interact. Usenet, bulletin boards, and what would later become the Internet were used from their early days for fannish communication, as the “’written culture of the Net [became] much like an oral culture in the immediacy of communication’” (Hardy, qtd. in Coppa 53).
While labor intensive, Usenet groups became centralized, fandom-specific archives for fan fiction, but by the end of the 1980s software was written by fans that would format and store fan fiction in searchable databases. While early fandoms in the 1990s such as Quantum Leap and Highlander developed much like previous fandoms had-through zines, letters and conventions-the Internet would be fandom’s technology of the future. Coppa notes that “fans, as a group, were technologically ahead of the curve; many worked from VT 100 terminals at university computer labs or were early adopters of home computing equipment” (53). This core group still relied on highly educated, technically savvy women, much like those who originated media fandom with Star Trek.
As fandom moved online, it also moved out in the open. Slash fiction, which had previously been distributed under the table at conventions, could now be sought for by computer, and fans of the genre began to unite through early mailing lists and email. Fan studies noticed this mainstreaming, and saw that “public recognition and evaluation of the practice of being a fan had profoundly changed” (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 4). As the nineties progressed, narrowcasting began replacing broadcasting, and the fan was seen as a specialized, dedicated consumer. As long as their activities didn’t prevent capitalist exchange, fans became the center of media industries’ marketing strategies. Rather than deriding the fan, as had happened in the past, the fan object was ridiculed in the mainstream media; fans of The X-Files were seen as weird because they liked The X-Files, but god forbid someone call a Yankees fan weird, because sports fandoms weren’t texts open to mocking. As Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington write, “as cultural judgment has become increasingly detached from the state of being a fan, our attention shifts to the choice of fan object and its surrounding practices, and what they tell us about the fan him- or herself” (5).
This shift in attention from fan to fan object brought about a second wave of fan studies, with researchers turning to psychoanalysis as a tool to determine what the fan object says about the fan. This wave “moved beyond the incorporation/resistance paradigm […] which saw fans pinned into perennial battle against the power bloc, by finding a new conceptual leitmotif in the sociology of consumption developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,” much as Fiske had in the previous decade(6). Second wave fan studies used Bourdieu’s hierarchies of consumption to focus on the replication of social hierarchies within fan cultures, “as the choice of fan objects and practices of fan consumption are structured through our habitus as reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural, and economic capital” (6) To them, the answer as to why fandoms matter lies in how they see fandom and fan consumption as something embedded in existing hierarchies. This change from first to second-wave fan studies shows a shift from seeing fandom as defying social hierarchies to seeing fandom as upholding them. According to Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington, second wavy fan studies was “effective in demonstrating what fandom is not---a a priori space of cultural autonomy and resistance-it had little to say about the individual motivations, enjoyment, and pleasures of fans” (6).
In the late 1990s, media fandom found itself encountering other types of fandoms that were also proliferating thanks to the Internet. Comics, celebrity, music and anime cultures intersected in practices and behaviors, even though they had their own origins and histories. Comics fandom dates to the 1930s and, like media fandom, is seen as coming out of science fiction fandom. As Jenkins notes above, early uses of the word “fan” referred to theatergoers who were there to see the actors rather than the plays. Beatlemania is an early form of both celebrity and music fandom, and Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs place the musical or celebrity crushes of screaming teenage girls as an expression of young sexuality during the sexually repressed 1960s. Anime and manga have had their origins in Japanese popular culture, but the problem with Western fandom was always the troubles with access and language barriers. With the advent of scanners, digital video, and file sharing, anime found an audience within the already-formed fandoms of genre media (Coppa 56). Fan works began to explore concepts of gender and genre, using media’s science fiction conventions to explore “celebrity culture as a metaphor for gender identity and other performance of the self” (56).
At this same time, fandom was moving to blogging technology, such as that of LiveJournal.com (LJ). This changed fandom from the topical, as Usenet, ListServs newsgroups, and bulletin boards focused on a single fandom topic, to the personal, as people who blog end up mixing the fannish into their personal lives. The move to the blogosphere created a centralized place where one could indulge in multiple fandoms at once. The blogging software of LJ creates diary-like, dated entries that others can read and comment on. The user defines their friendslist, which comprises people with similar fannish interests who created their own entries for others to read. The ability to “friendslock” or f-lock the journal, which is to restrict who can view entries, allowing LJ to be both a public and a private space for fandom (Hellekson and Busse 12). You can have entries relating to multiple fandoms on your friendslist, which then makes the boundaries of fandoms very fluid.
Third wave fan studies built on the previous two waves, the biggest change being from the conceptual to the empirical. The first two generations of fan scholars focused on the interaction between members of a fan group or community, seeing fandom as either “interpretive community and support networks, or in terms of cultural hierarchization and discrimination through distinction (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 7). Older thoughts of fans as tightly knit organizations of participants no longer matched the self-description of contemporary fans.
Fandom is on the move again, using the Tumblr.com software to move from the text-based LJ to the image-based Tumblr blog. This changes fandom from a written to a visual culture, though most fan fiction is still published on journal-type software.
The rest is specific to my research project, so I don't think it would be very interesting. Just a bunch of scholars talking about authorship (though they do state that the BtVS comics are a secondary text, Joss is only doing them for the money, and nothing Scott Allie says matters, or at least that's how I interpreted it).
Children and teens were other groups studied during this period, with David Buckingham “[taking] aim at the simplicity of discourse that reduced child and teen television viewers to blank slates” by arguing that children (and ordinary viewers) are just as apt to interpret media in their own way as critics (63). Justin Lewis posited “the process of viewing is always a potentially transformative event […] that can change the nature of what is being watched,” which was contrary to what was previously thought (64). Audience research became about not only textual analysis, but also seeing what happened to a program upon viewing; about studying the practice of watching as its own text. Seeing the audience as a culture, Ethnographic research using anthropologic techniques were employed to study the audience in their own environment, and researchers saw television and its audience as access points to understanding how society works in general.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s view of taste as a form of “cultural capitol,” John Fiske believed that “’Popular culture is not consumption, it is culture-the active process of generating and circulating meaning and pleasures within a social system” (65). Everything thought to be “lowbrow,” such as soap operas, cop shows and wrestling, now required examination. These cultural objects weren’t drivel, as originally thought-they were only coded as drivel in order to denigrate the viewers. As one of the first people to study fans of popular culture, Fiske argued that people like the women writing Star Trek slash fiction were waging “’semiotic guerilla warfare’” with media industries, seeing the fan of lowbrow culture as resistant to cultural mores (66).
Fiske was part of the first wave of researchers who would study fans and fandoms. As Star Trek and Star Wars fans were rebelling against the mainstream interpretation of their fan objects by holding conventions and making fan works, Henry Jenkins, Camille Bacon-Smith and Constance Penley began studying whether or not fans were completely lost in the system, or if they became transformative co-producers. They found that the fans, most of them women, were taking masculine narrative such as Star Trek and re-appropriating it through the act of writing fan fiction or making fan art. Through these actions fans were able to negotiate spaces for themselves in a power structure that would normally leave them disenfranchised. These early researchers into fan studies found that fans, as an audience, were “especially resistive, reflective and savvy critics, intent on repurposing narratives for their purpose” (69).
By picking up on de Certeau’s (1984) “distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the disempowered,” this first wave of fan studies saw mass media as “a site of power struggles” and fandom as the vanguard of the offensive (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 1-2). Instead of being seen as obsessive or socially inept, first wave fan studies championed fans, creating a vision of a band of brothers (and sisters) united to take media back from the powerful. This binary posited that fans were commonly seen as “Other” and Bourgeois culture distanced itself from such passionate consumption (Gray and Lotz 67). First wave fan studies was criticized because it never questioned or deconstructed this binary, and that while some fans would create resistant readings of media, the effects of the media would still be felt by the majority of the audience (70).
As fandom was becoming a subject of study, fandom itself was growing. Blockbusters of the early 1980s appealed to fans, and “media fandom grew and spread, not only because there were so many films to choose from” (Coppa 51). Harrison Ford was the fan icon of the day, and fans obsessively saw even his non-genre films during this time. While Jenkins and Fiske were championing fans as resistance fighters, fandom itself had exploded, with a vast proliferation of fan zines, including writings of what is known as the “crossover” - the combination of the universes of two fandoms to create a piece in which characters from both interacted with each other. However, this zine culture wasn’t to last, as fans began using a new technology to interact. Usenet, bulletin boards, and what would later become the Internet were used from their early days for fannish communication, as the “’written culture of the Net [became] much like an oral culture in the immediacy of communication’” (Hardy, qtd. in Coppa 53).
While labor intensive, Usenet groups became centralized, fandom-specific archives for fan fiction, but by the end of the 1980s software was written by fans that would format and store fan fiction in searchable databases. While early fandoms in the 1990s such as Quantum Leap and Highlander developed much like previous fandoms had-through zines, letters and conventions-the Internet would be fandom’s technology of the future. Coppa notes that “fans, as a group, were technologically ahead of the curve; many worked from VT 100 terminals at university computer labs or were early adopters of home computing equipment” (53). This core group still relied on highly educated, technically savvy women, much like those who originated media fandom with Star Trek.
As fandom moved online, it also moved out in the open. Slash fiction, which had previously been distributed under the table at conventions, could now be sought for by computer, and fans of the genre began to unite through early mailing lists and email. Fan studies noticed this mainstreaming, and saw that “public recognition and evaluation of the practice of being a fan had profoundly changed” (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 4). As the nineties progressed, narrowcasting began replacing broadcasting, and the fan was seen as a specialized, dedicated consumer. As long as their activities didn’t prevent capitalist exchange, fans became the center of media industries’ marketing strategies. Rather than deriding the fan, as had happened in the past, the fan object was ridiculed in the mainstream media; fans of The X-Files were seen as weird because they liked The X-Files, but god forbid someone call a Yankees fan weird, because sports fandoms weren’t texts open to mocking. As Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington write, “as cultural judgment has become increasingly detached from the state of being a fan, our attention shifts to the choice of fan object and its surrounding practices, and what they tell us about the fan him- or herself” (5).
This shift in attention from fan to fan object brought about a second wave of fan studies, with researchers turning to psychoanalysis as a tool to determine what the fan object says about the fan. This wave “moved beyond the incorporation/resistance paradigm […] which saw fans pinned into perennial battle against the power bloc, by finding a new conceptual leitmotif in the sociology of consumption developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,” much as Fiske had in the previous decade(6). Second wave fan studies used Bourdieu’s hierarchies of consumption to focus on the replication of social hierarchies within fan cultures, “as the choice of fan objects and practices of fan consumption are structured through our habitus as reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural, and economic capital” (6) To them, the answer as to why fandoms matter lies in how they see fandom and fan consumption as something embedded in existing hierarchies. This change from first to second-wave fan studies shows a shift from seeing fandom as defying social hierarchies to seeing fandom as upholding them. According to Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington, second wavy fan studies was “effective in demonstrating what fandom is not---a a priori space of cultural autonomy and resistance-it had little to say about the individual motivations, enjoyment, and pleasures of fans” (6).
In the late 1990s, media fandom found itself encountering other types of fandoms that were also proliferating thanks to the Internet. Comics, celebrity, music and anime cultures intersected in practices and behaviors, even though they had their own origins and histories. Comics fandom dates to the 1930s and, like media fandom, is seen as coming out of science fiction fandom. As Jenkins notes above, early uses of the word “fan” referred to theatergoers who were there to see the actors rather than the plays. Beatlemania is an early form of both celebrity and music fandom, and Ehrenreich, Hess and Jacobs place the musical or celebrity crushes of screaming teenage girls as an expression of young sexuality during the sexually repressed 1960s. Anime and manga have had their origins in Japanese popular culture, but the problem with Western fandom was always the troubles with access and language barriers. With the advent of scanners, digital video, and file sharing, anime found an audience within the already-formed fandoms of genre media (Coppa 56). Fan works began to explore concepts of gender and genre, using media’s science fiction conventions to explore “celebrity culture as a metaphor for gender identity and other performance of the self” (56).
At this same time, fandom was moving to blogging technology, such as that of LiveJournal.com (LJ). This changed fandom from the topical, as Usenet, ListServs newsgroups, and bulletin boards focused on a single fandom topic, to the personal, as people who blog end up mixing the fannish into their personal lives. The move to the blogosphere created a centralized place where one could indulge in multiple fandoms at once. The blogging software of LJ creates diary-like, dated entries that others can read and comment on. The user defines their friendslist, which comprises people with similar fannish interests who created their own entries for others to read. The ability to “friendslock” or f-lock the journal, which is to restrict who can view entries, allowing LJ to be both a public and a private space for fandom (Hellekson and Busse 12). You can have entries relating to multiple fandoms on your friendslist, which then makes the boundaries of fandoms very fluid.
Third wave fan studies built on the previous two waves, the biggest change being from the conceptual to the empirical. The first two generations of fan scholars focused on the interaction between members of a fan group or community, seeing fandom as either “interpretive community and support networks, or in terms of cultural hierarchization and discrimination through distinction (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 7). Older thoughts of fans as tightly knit organizations of participants no longer matched the self-description of contemporary fans.
Fandom is on the move again, using the Tumblr.com software to move from the text-based LJ to the image-based Tumblr blog. This changes fandom from a written to a visual culture, though most fan fiction is still published on journal-type software.
The rest is specific to my research project, so I don't think it would be very interesting. Just a bunch of scholars talking about authorship (though they do state that the BtVS comics are a secondary text, Joss is only doing them for the money, and nothing Scott Allie says matters, or at least that's how I interpreted it).