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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“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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