Fandom and a general audience (part 2)
I was teaching a seminar this week along with one of my senior colleagues whose course it is. At the end of his lecture on media theory (which was a whistle-stop tour from Adorno to Jenkins) he very briefly mentioned fan vids - it was a one sentence comment about Star Trek slash (although he didn't call it that). Unfortunately, he presented it in
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There's this expectation, created by the way most people consume social media (and the echo chamber of what media is celebrated), that fannish work will either be an accessible piece of light entertainment or a serious documentary/political piece. In fact, there's a certain amount of geek priviledge that bemoans the kind of communication in the vidding culture (among others) as unworthy fannish exploits. I recall an occasion where a fan film was posted on BoingBoing to much applaud as some guy had edited Gremlins into all kinds of mainstream movies. The post, celebrating this well-made spectacle, gave the following instruction: 'Dear Fandom: more this, less slash.' This goes back to my "I didn't make him for you" point - without the context people will assume all kinds of interesting fannish activity to be pointless and without merit. Include in that anything subversive or remotely norm-opposing (or in this case *gasp* women sharing fannish experience with each other) then dismissal can turn to outright derision. That there was actually a request for less slash took me by surprise not only because it was a non-sequitur but the idea that one form should be suppressed felt not only anti-speech but completely misguided: the existence of one form of fannish expression does not substantively affect the production of another. In this case the opposition was also inherently gendered - that all these women writing slash should be instead either playing video games or being quiet. I suppose it's the same kind of thinking that finds opposition to gay marriage despite the fact that what gay people do has little to no impact on the life of the opposer.
In some fan cultures this leads to a strict walling-off, imo, and there's numerous examples of that in fanfiction, vidding, anthro fandom etc. So yeah, I think it's geek privilege. Show me a fannish subculture that is welcomed into the zeitgeist and I'll show you a fannish culture largely dominated by straight middle-class white guys.
[hmm, that turned into more of a rant that I expected. Apologies.]
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“Show me a fannish subculture that is welcomed into the zeitgeist and I'll show you a fannish culture largely dominated by straight middle-class white guys.”
For me, this point of yours comes to the heart of things. There was a lot of work done by scholars in the 1980s looking at how some audience subgroups resist the dominant ideology expressed in different narratives as diverse as current affairs programmes, romance novels, and episodes of Hart to Hart. For instance, here is the abstract to John Fiske’s 1986 article:
This essay argues that the television audience is composed of a wide variety of groups or subcultures, and that in order to be popular a television program must be polysemic so that different subcultures can find in it different meanings that correspond to their differing social relations. The dominant ideology is structured into the text as into the social system, but the structure of both text and society allows space for resistance and negotiation. A close analysis of two scenes from Hart to Hart demonstrates the textual devices which bear the dominant ideology and those which offer opportunities for resistance to it. To understand the popularity of television with its diverse audiences, the critic must look for contradictions and openness in the television text, not unity and closure.
Personally (my research isn’t about this), I think Fiske overstates the freedom the different texts allow people to resist and negotiate the dominant ideology, and slash (fic and vids) is one way to break out of these confines, taking this “resistance and negotiation” to the next level, making it a practical art, and indeed an art form, rather than merely a mental exercise. However, they then to some degree become subversive artworks, and may disturb or threaten the readings given to the source work by the mainstream audience. Laughter and derision are tried and true defensive strategies in that regard. However, in the context of my class, it seemed more like they were laughing because slash came across as one of those silly things some people do.
What made it easy for me to explain to my class was the fact that the senior lecturer had already laid all the ground work for me, by talking about subversive readings of texts (as above), so it only took a couple of sentences for me to link up slash with this tradition, and suddenly it didn’t seem like some comically wasteful activity, but a cultural subgroup expressing itself artistically. When you say it that way, it sounds much more interesting than it does funny!
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