textual poachers television fans and participatory culture

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.Īddressing 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. 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. 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. Yet, as Textual Poachersargues, fans already have a 'life,' a complex subculture which draws its resources from commercial culture while also reworking them to serve alternative interests.

'Get a life' William Shatner told Star Trek fans. Editions for Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture: 0415905729 (Paperback published in 1992), 0415533295 (Paperback published in 20. One of the key works of fan studies that explored the cultural dimension involving fans production is Jenkins ( 1992) Textual poaching, a notion first introduced by Michel de Certeau in The.

Textual poachers television fans and participatory culture