Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication) [Paperback]

Henry Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 23, 1992 | ISBN-10: 0415905729 | ISBN-13: 978-0415905725

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Drawing on a rich theoretical background with sources ranging from feminist literary criticism to cultural anthropology, [Jenkins] applies and adapts Michel de Certeau's model of poaching, in which an audience appropriates a text for itself. Taking a stand against the stereotypical portrayal of fans as obsessive nerds who are out of touch with reality, he demonstrates that fans are pro-active constructiors of an alternative culture using elements poached and reworked from the popular media.
–Journal of Popular Culture

Drawing on a rich theoretical background with sources ranging from feminist literary criticism to cultural anthropology, [Jerkins] applies and adapts Michel de Certeau's model of poaching, in which an audience appropriates a text for itself. Taking a stand against the stereotypical portrayal of fans as obsessive nerds who are out of touch with reality, he demonstrates that fans are pro-active constructors of an alternative culture using elements poached and reworked from the popular media.
–Journal of Popular Culture

About the Author

Henry Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (July 23, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415905729
• ISBN-13: 978-0415905725
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #357,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Henry Jenkins is Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Analysis of the Culture of Television Fandom, October 11, 2004

By 

Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication) (Paperback)

Culture studies has been one of the most provocative and controversial areas of investigation in the social sciences during the last score years or so. Using the tools of postmodern analysis of texts, and the deconstruction of ideas, institutions, and forms scholars have reshaped our understanding of everything from the mundane to subjects acknowledged by all as critical to our modern society. In this important book Henry Jenkins turns his considerable analytic skills on the role of television fans in adopting and making their own several important series and movies. Jenkins, on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes both as a scholar and a fan fully immersed in the culture that produces conventions and a wide range of artistic products associated with television.

"Textual Poachers" emphasizes how fans of various television shows and movies have embraced the characters and "universe" of the shows and made them their own. In most cases they participate in the continuing saga of the characters of the story by fashioning their own narratives based on the series. Be far the most famous of these participatory series is "Star Trek," which was the first series to attract this type of fan following, and still the largest of all of them. It has spawned not only multi and varied clubs for those interested in the ideals of the series, but also inspired a range of creative responses in art, literature, costume, engineering, erotica, music, and drama. In so doing, those that are a part of the fan culture of the series emphasize the interplay of the crew "family" aboard the Star Ship Enterprise, the ideals of the United Federation of Planets, and the challenges of moving beyond the humdrum of existence on Earth to a more exciting and rewarding life within the broader cosmos. The ranges of responses are almost as broad as the number of people involved, and Henry Jackson makes clear that all of those responses are legitimate in the "universe" of fandom.

Jenkins writes at length about the responses of fans to several television programs beyond the famous "Star Trek" phenomenon. These include "Alien Nation" (1989-1990), "Dr. Who," (1963- ), "Magnum, P.I." (1980-1988); "The Man from Uncle" (1964-1968), "Remington Steele" (1982-1987), "Simon and Simon" (1981-1988), "Twin Peaks" (1990-1991), and others. But the series fans that Jenkins spends the most time analyzing are those attracted to "Beauty and the Beast" (1987-1990). The romance between Catherine (Linda Hamilton) and Vincent (Ron Perlman) captured the imagination of a larger number of viewers and they used that on-screen relationship as the cultural materials from which they created a vast array of "stories, songs, videos, and social interactions." It proved a powerful inspiration for enormously romantic depictions.

Henry Jenkins also draws attention to the fact that the vast majority of those a part of this fandom, are white, middle-class women seeking something more than they experience in their everyday lives. They seem drawn to television series with compelling characters interacting in a sophisticated manner. They emphasize relationships and tend to soft-pedal action and adventure in their formulations. At sum they seem to be creating through their efforts a place of refuge, acceptance, and intimacy for themselves and their co-participants. This is captured well in a song, "In My Weekend-Only World," written by T.J. Burnside Clapp to express her love of the fan conventions that she attends:

"In an hour of make-believe

In these warm convention halls

My mind is free to think

And feels so deeply

An intimacy never found

Inside their silent walls

In a year or more

Of what they call reality.

In my weekend-only world,

That they call make-believe,

Are those who share

The visions that I see.

In their real-time life

That they tell me is real,

The things they care about

Aren't real to me." (p. 277)

Henry Jenkins' study is a superb analysis that will change the perspective all who read it about the fan culture and its place in modern society. It is difficult not to emerge from reading this book without a sense of wonder about the talented individuals who are a part of this fan culture and how they seek to live their lives on their own terms, in the process creating for themselves idealized "universes" more like those they glimpsed in the television fictions that they embrace.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dining at the Television Buffet, December 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication) (Paperback)

Jenkins starts by dispelling the stereotype of the media fan as teenaged geek in Spock ears, and explores the very real and dynamic interactions between fans and their media. He has a clear understanding of the subject and a good relationship with the people whose culture he describes, as well as a readable and intelligent style of writing. The book is not only interesting but also fun to read.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resource for fan fiction authors and fans, October 27, 1999

By 

Tara OShea "Tara O'Shea" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication) (Paperback)

While dated, and slightly insular, this text is an excellent introduction to the sub-culture of fanzines and fan fiction. While many of the current generation of fans seem to believe fan fiction was born online around 1994, they should be surprised and hopefully pleased to discover the rich (off-line) history of the phenomenon, dating all the way back to the pulp magazines of the 1930s.