Core Response #4 by Marina Massidda

 2/22

Jenkins describes how negative stereotypes surrounding fan culture “...isolate potential fans from others who share common interests and reading practices and marginalize fan-related activities as outside the mainstream and beneath dignity”(472). He argues that fan activities détourn mass culture so as to make popular culture participatory, a product of their margin-informed meaning creation from dominant texts. However, it strikes me that the fan activities he describes, such as the creation of erotic fan-fiction, are decidedly outside the mainstream and certainly indifferent to a conventional standard of dignity.  Why legitimate fans by assigning them a place in dominant culture, when there is perhaps something more generative to examining their alterity? I also find his assignment of fan culture to marginalized groups a bit simplistic, especially with the category of “women.” While it fascinates me that women are behind much romantic fanfic, I’m interested in the specificities of fan demographics, even to the extent that they overlap with fan stereotypes. The truth is, much of fan culture is generated by subjects who are not only marginalized in an easily defined or palatable sense, but are sometimes neurodivergent, extremely online, and often exhibit an unorthodox relationship to fantasy usually expected to expire after childhood.  By dismissing these lived experiences entirely, doesn’t Jenkins risk perpetuating the notion that social marginality is inherently negative? 

With online subgroups, fan conventions, fanfic canons, etc. I get the impression that fans are not attempting to carve out a niche for themselves in the mainstream, but rather to diverge from it as they please. What if spectator culture does not have to be participatory in order to be legitimate? What do we make of mass cultural texts such as Star Trek actually enabling or inspiring the social secession of self-selecting groups?  What I find most interesting about the piece is his discussion of female-led erotic Star Trek fan fiction, which again, I see as markedly deviant and unconcerned with its absorption into the source text.  Female fandom I think is generally underexplored, and in that sense should be introduced broadly into public consciousness. Afterall, part of why I personally am not drawn to a lot of traditionally nerdy male fandoms and sci-fi genres is I tend to find them pretty sexless—aesthetically, narratively, emotionally, etc. I don’t mean in the literal sense, I mean that they’re devoid of the kind of libidinally charged beauty that might keep me interested in some speculative fantasy about outer space. Rather than focusing on redeeming fans and their admittedly extremely weird predilections and social disposition, I think it’s interesting to think about how fans can redeem the source texts. I can concede to Jenkins that he’s helped me see how fans can salvage these source franchises from being moralistic, commercial, heteronormative, colonialist, etc., in order to oust a much more honest, collective desire for deviance.