In reading "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten," Henry Jenkins' essay on fan communities and their relationship to "textual poaching," I find myself torn in opposing intellectual directions. In one regard, Jenkins' configuration of fandom as "a vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations" still has some purchase as a textual strategy (472). Essentially, Jenkins argues that fans of science fiction shows and major franchises carve out their own space within this textual ecosystem, reading films and series against the grain and reproducing their own meanings. In Jenkins' understanding of fan communities, this results not in academic criticism but in fan fiction and other content that signifies how the original text "can and must be rewritten in order to make it more responsive to their needs" (472). Fandom is thus a political act; rather than participating in hegemony, it resists and challenges such an idea, opening up space for wide range of textual readings.
In another regard, I find myself questioning the extent to which "fandom" can be generalized in this manner. Though Jenkins himself acknowledges that the article does not "represent the last word on Star Trek" fans (or fans in general), I find that its skew towards binaries and general claims to be somewhat limiting (472). Later in the piece, Jenkins contrasts Star Trek fan fiction with the Lucasfilm empire's rigid control of its central texts, citing an editorial by C.A. Siebert that "asserts the rights of fanzine writers to consciously revise the character of the original texts" (475). Fans are thus in a permanent and continual state of tension with corporations. But is this something that can be extrapolated to fans in general -- or is this specific to the fans that Jenkins centers his analysis on, the women and marginalized communities who form the foundation of fan writing (476)? What about the fans who exclude those groups, the fans who seem, in the contemporary moment, to still resist the inclusion of other groups in their spaces through intense gatekeeping practices? Is fandom still not a predominantly male practice in popular culture that reproduces exclusionary spaces? Is Jenkins' essay really reclaiming fandom as a practice -- or merely the potential for subversive practices within fan activity?
What I'm getting at in some ways is the necessary of questioning the extent to which Jenkins' essay, published in 1988, remains relevant in 2023, both in terms of our current culture's understanding of fandom and popular culture's broader relationship with fan-centric texts. Writing at a time in which fans were exclusively "characterized as 'kooks' obsessed with trivia, celebrities, and collectibles," some unholy combination of "repetitive compulsion, infantile regression, commodity fetishism, nostalgic complacency, and future shock" (470), Jenkins' analysis serves as a much-needed corrective to a universal narrative. But what does fandom mean in a post-Gamergate moment? What does it mean after The Last Jedi? How do we understand and comprehend a world in which the relationship between fans and corporations has changed, with the balance of power shifting in major ways? What does it mean to be a fan in an era where comic book movies represent the dominant cultural force? What does it mean to "reclaim works that others regard as worthless and trash" (471) at a time when fans, who have now amassed significant cultural cachet and power, insist that their beloved objects (some of the most popular money-makers in the world) be read as high art? I leave this questions as something of a pointed provocation for further consideration.
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