This originally appeared in SFRA Review No. 287 (Winter 2009) as part of the “101″ series, which seeks to provide a broad contextual overview to various fields of interest to SF scholars. The complete issue is available for download here.

The recent explosion on the Internet of fanlike activity has given fans and fan studies a higher profile. When journalists and media studies scholars speak about fans engaging on the Internet, high school students spending their time on FanFiction.net, or fans of soap operas gathering at an online forum to discuss their favorite plotlines, they are engaging in fan studies, even if they don’t seem to know it. Web 2.0—that is, an interactive, networked Web, not a static, read-only Web—lends itself well to visible fan participation, and thanks to an explosion of copyright-ignoring, music-downloading, remix-happy Gen N–ers, interactivity of fans within and outside communities has generated a lot of journalism and scholarship. Fan studies as a field is still scrambling to catch up. It’s done relevant work on fan-created works and fan communities over the years that is being ignored by current scholars, and those in other fields who tangentially run across fans seem unaware that an entire body of scholarship already exists to study fans and fan artifacts. In a parallel activity, women-dominated, old-style active fans and their contributions are now in the process of being erased by studies of (male) online fandom, although recuperative work is underway to write histories of these fans and preserve their artworks.

To define fan is a fraught activity, but generally, a fan is taken to be someone who engages within a subculture organized around a specific object of study, be it Star Trek, science fiction literature, Sherlock Holmes, anime, comics, gaming, or sports. Fans engage in a range of activities related to their passion: they write derivative literature called fan fiction, they create artworks, they write what’s known as meta (analyses of fandom itself, or analysis of analysis), they play role-playing games, they blog, they make fan vids, and they organize and attend conventions. Not least, they create and pass along a culture, with its attendant rules of behavior and acceptability. Although the study of, say, avid coin collectors may fit the definition of fan, most of the work done in fan studies has focused on media fans and the derivative artworks they create. The two earliest active media fandoms were Star Trek and Man from U.N.C.L.E., thereby cementing fan studies as at least tangentially related to SF, and marking the fan base as primarily comprising women.

Because studies of fan-created artifacts or of fans themselves range so widely, fan studies is a truly interdisciplinary field. The disciplines of English and communication study and interpret fan artifacts, their creation, and the rhetorical strategies they use to make meaning; ethnography analyzes the fan subculture; media, film, and television studies assess the integration of media into fan practice and artworks; psychology studies fans’ pleasure and motivation; and law analyzes the underlying problems related to the derivative nature of the artworks, including concerns related to copyright, parody, and fair use. But fan studies can be usefully divided into two major approaches: study of fans themselves and fan culture, and study of the artifacts fans create.

Foundational fan studies

Important early fan studies texts date from the 1980s into the early 1990s, before the Internet changed the face of the fan world. Constance Penley’s relevant work, published in 1991 and 1992, focuses on feminism and the integration of technology into fan culture. Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (1992) reports on fan practice in a study discussing her ethnographic fieldwork, conducted within a Star Trek fan community. Joanna Russ discusses her uneasy relationship with slash (homoerotic fan fiction) in her 1985 essay, “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love.” A work well known outside the field of fan studies is Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984), which analyzes a subculture of women romance readers. Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diane Veith’s 1986 “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” like Russ’s essay, attempts to understand why straight women write gay porn—a topic of particular fascination in early fan studies scholarship that deals with fan fiction. The valuable essays collected in Lisa A. Lewis’s edited volume, The Adoring Audience (1992), focus on fans and fandom and range widely in topic.

But the single most important early text contributing to the field now known as fan studies is Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Partcipatory Culture (1992). In this crucial work, Jenkins, himself a fan as well as an academic, engages with fans and explicates fan culture as a response to mass media. Fans, he argues, are not passive consumers. Rather, they are active creators. He uses De Certeau’s notion of textual poaching to inform fans’ cultural production: “Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media” (23). Jenkins thus places fans in opposition to TPTB (The Powers That Be), the owners of the copyrighted text being poached—or, fan studies scholars would argue, being repurposed to fulfill particular cultural needs.

So useful is Jenkins’s study, and so resonant is it with fan experience, that most fan studies scholarship takes Jenkins’s thesis as read. Many published studies apply Jenkins’s theory to a particular fan experience, or they explicate fan practice by studying its inflection. Jenkins has since broadened his research base to participatory culture more generally in two books published in 2006, Convergence Culture and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. His Weblog (http://www.henryjenkins.org/) is a must-read for media scholars, and he remains friendly to fans.

Post-Internet fan studies

As people flock to the Internet and begin contributing content, they become part of a large, geographically dispersed, international community of people doing exactly the same thing. Fan culture used to be transmitted orally and in person. They would share activities like attending conventions, laboriously using VCRs to make fan vids, or publishing zines. Fan culture is still transmitted that way, although sophisticated editing software is used to create fan vids, and zines are likely to have a CD component along with the hard copy. But it’s far more likely that a crew of like-minded people will get together informally, perhaps through a shared blogosphere, bulletin board, or Yahoo! group, many with no understanding that they are engaging in a culture with a relatively long history, or that their behavior may offend or upset people in other fan communities. To that we can add the number of people who would not describe their engagement as within the old-guard fan realm (and I put in parentheses the names of scholars who have written about these topics): posters at Television Without Pity (Marc Andrejevic); contributors to the original producer-run Buffy the Vampire Slayer bulletin board, the Bronze (Stephanie Tuszynski); and aficianados of Lost spoilers (Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell). Further, the experiences of non-American fans may not parallel those abroad. It also doesn’t do to privilege the Internet too much: many fans don’t have access and thus engage differently with their passion. Nor do fans abandon one technological tool when another comes along: listservs and Yahoo! Groups are still sites for fan interaction, even as the blogosphere—particularly LiveJournal, which is the de facto site for fan-specific blogs—has become active. Some fans are even still on Usenet.

Scholarship was slow to follow along as fans took to the Internet. Fan scholarship assumed the existence of physical fan artifacts—artwork, vids created on VCRs, hard-copy fanzines. What about blogs repurposed as fanfic archives, wikis that gather media source facts, Photoshopped manipulations, file-sharing sites to disseminate TV shows, or that relatively new form of fan artwork, avatar icons? Scholarship on these very topics has lagged behind, although work dealing with these topics can be found in books dedicated not to fan studies but to Web 2.0 and collaborative learning. Research not on fans specifically but on collaborative communities provides valuable insight into fan behavior. Two recent examples: Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’s Wikinomics (rev. ed., 2008) has sections on collaboration and peering that mesh well with fan studies; and Lawrence Lessig’s 2008 volume Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy touches on the problems of megacorporations constraining the activities of fans, even as they attempt to appropriate their work—without compensation, of course.

The volume I coedited with Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland 2006), has fan-specific essays that run the gamut from close readings of fan fiction to analyses of machinima to a study of reader as author/collaborator, and one reason it’s a valuable book is that it was among the first to talk about online fan activities and attempt to explicate them. Its introduction provides a literature review and an overview of fan studies, and its bibliography is available online (http://karenhellekson.com/theorize/fanfic-bib.html).

Even as topics in fan studies became more acceptable to write and publish about, copyright concerns blocked scholars from pursuing their interests. Publishers dislike publishing screen captures or dialogue lifted from a TV show or film without explicit permission from the copyright holder, even though such illustrative content, particularly in the context of a scholarly article, falls within fair use. Meanwhile, similar copyright concerns have kept one important fan activity, vidding, long under wraps: vid creators, fearing cease-and-desist letters from copyright holders, often hid their artworks under eyes-only Web sites and password protection, further lowering the artworks’ profile. The advent of vid-sharing sites like YouTube and Imeem has made it easier to watch and disseminate fan vids, although such vids may be blocked by copyright holders, particularly copyright holders of the music, as opposed to the images. An interview published on November 12, 2007, in New York Magazine profiling talented vidder Luminosity notes that the artist’s real name can’t be used, for fear that she will be sued by the copyright holders (http://nymag.com/movies/features/videos/40622/). This respectful article did much to raise the profile of fan vids and vidders. The fear of being sued because one is creating scholarship or transformative artworks can have a chilling effect on creativity, and it also means that important works analyzing our culture might not get written, because book and journal publishers will decline to consider them.

Several projects are underway to recuperate and legitimize fan-created artworks and clear the field to permit forms of criticism—be they creative artworks or scholarly essays—to be created without fear of reprisal. These activities are particularly important because the fan activities being elided tend to be those created by and for women. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed petitions with the U.S. copyright office to permit exemptions for bypassing copyright protection; one suggested exemption is for vidders who rip copyrighted material for fair-use remixes (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/12/remixers-unlockers-jailbreakers-oh-my). The fan advocacy group Organization for Transformative Works (OTW; http://transformativeworks.org/), which I am a member of, is sponsoring two important historical recuperation projects. One is the Open Doors project (http://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/), which seeks to preserve fan works, including hard-copy slash zines. And along with MIT’s Project New Media Literacies, OTW sponsored a video series about vids and vidding, including titles like “Why We Vid” and “What Is Vidding?” (http://www.henryjenkins.org/2008/12/fanvidding.html). In addition, OTW sponsors Transformative Works and Cultures (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/), which I coedit with Kristina Busse, an online-only peer-reviewed fan studies journal that, under its reading of fair use, permits screen captures and embedded video as forms of quotation.

In the field of fan studies, one thing is clear: copyright owners’ hold on their properties is loosening as new forms of technology permit ripping, copying, and remixing, and their frantic attempts to regain their grip are forcing us all to rethink our relationship to popular cultural texts. Cohesive groups of self-identified fans have been analyzing and assessing their relationship to media since at least the 1960s, and their insights have much to offer those interested in the culture wars more generally.

Suggested reading

Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage, 1998.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Jenkins, Henry. Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. http://www.henryjenkins.org/.

———. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

———. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

———. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Lewis, Lisa A., ed. The Adoring Audience. London: Routledge, 1992.

Porter, David. Internet Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse, eds. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

Organization for Transformative Works. http://transformativeworks.org/.

Sanders, Joseph L., ed. Science Fiction Fandom. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Citation

Hellekson, Karen. Fan studies 101. SFRA Review 287 (Winter 2009): 5–7.

[0.0] SFRA 2008 was in Lawrence, Kansas, this year, and I was head of the academic programming. Sadly, I was kept so busy that I only managed to attend paper sessions and roundtables that I was on, but I enjoyed meeting all the people I’d corresponded with. My paper, entitled “SF Fan Wikis: Source, Reference, World,” was really the only fan-oriented paper at SFRA, although one of SFRA’s recent goals is to respond better to the needs of scholars in nonprint media. Meanwhile, here is a short recap of the high points of my talk.

1. Wikis and fans

[1.1] “SF Fan Wikis” discussed fans as one subset of the communities comprising Web 2.0—that is, an interactive web focused on participation and communities, as Tapcott and Williams note in their definition of the old Web versus Web 2.0 in Wikinomics (2008 rev. ed.). It’s important to realize that the reason fan studies is becoming such a hot topic is that interactivity on the Web is now far more mainstream, and is thus attracting more attention, particularly in terms of copyright violation. Much of the scholarly work done on fans is applicable to other groups who are now congregating online, and even if the sense of the word fan doesn’t quite fit my understanding of what they do, it’s clear that they’re engaging in ways that I’d describe as fannish.

[1.2] Much has been written on fans who publish fanfic in zines or on the Internet, and about fans who blog, particularly in the LiveJournal blogsphere. However, less work has been done on fans who engage with their source material via wikis. Wiki collaborative software permits group authorship, usually of a site that organizes factual information. Wikis are useful because they shield users from code but result in a nice product, and it’s easy to cross-reference and hotlink. In addition, wiki software tracks changes, so it’s possible to negotiate edits. Wikipedia is the most famous example of a repository of factual information, and it resonantes beyond its genre: encyclopedias, with its attendant rules about documentation, disinterested author stance, and lack of bias. So ubiquitous is Wikipedia that the look of a wiki immediately implies factual information, which makes parody sites, such as the Fandom Wank Wiki, all the more amusing by the mere juxtaposition of form and content.

[1.3] The essence of the wiki is facts by consensus. This is discussed in Wikinomics (and the authors explain why this actually works), but it was more famously emphasized by Stephen Colbert, whose notions of truthiness (“knowledge ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual explanation, or facts”) and Wikiality (“together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”) emphasize the slippery nature of truth and the danger of agreeing on something when perhaps it has no basis in fact.

2. How fans use wikis

[2.1] I had hoped to find examples of fans using wikis to create fiction. I envisioned a fabulous shared world, with many authors contributing to a sprawling story that was meant to be read not vertically but horizontally, with hyperlinks taking you from one place to another in a meandering version of a choose your own adventure story, but without explicit cues to jump to a new page. However, I only found a single example of this: P/Virt. Even more disappointingly, the wiki was set up by a hopeful soul in December 2007 and then not populated. One of the people who attended my talk suggested that this might be because there isn’t sole authorship, so people aren’t credited for their work but subsumed into a collective, and thus they are less likely to contribute. To this I’ll add the fact that there aren’t too many hyperlinked stories anyway, so hyperlinking and horizontalness in storytelling may just not appeal.

[2.2] Far more common are fan wikis used to organize factual information. Good examples are the Battlestar Wiki, which gathers together information from both versions of the show; the Stargate Wiki, for which I volunteered under my fan name; and Memory Alpha, the best-known fan wiki in Star Trek fandom. (For those wondering whether an alpha implies a beta, yes: there is also a Memory Beta for licensed Star Trek products, such as games, novels, and comics.)

[2.3] Although the flattening of authority is a mark of wikis, with all contributors treated more or less equally in that all have posting and updating privileges unless they get themselves banned or unless the page is locked, status can still be conferred on posters by contributing excellent articles and usefully updating existing ones, with this information all tracked through the wiki software. Fans whose pages are rarely reverted are reliable posters. Fan wikis will never officially have true authority; only a producer associated with the program will have that. (Some TV shows are now setting up wikis for fans to contribute to; one particularly interesting one, because of the confusing lack of parallelism between truth and fiction, is dedicated to The Tudors.) However, for fan wikis, authority is generated by faithfulness to canon, thus permitting the main criterion for judging the content. A wiki contributor’s depth of canonical knowledge through close readings of the source text will be rewarded.

3. How do wikis fit into fan culture?

[3.1] I have identified three important ways that wikis fit into fan culture. First, of course, is the sheer usefulness of providing canonical information in an easy-to-navigate way. Fanfic writers will use wikis to fact check details of their story, from spellings to the color of someone’s eyes. Second is the privileged place accorded by the community to those who collect factual information about a source text: it’s useful information, and the community will reward it, primarily by visiting the wiki and increasing the hit count, but secondarily by linking to the wiki from their home page or crediting it in a story’s header. And third, providing this information better permits meta (thinking about thinking) to be generated by the community, so it provides a factual base for interpretation, although fan wiki entries themselves rarely engage in interpretation.

[3.2] Wikis have at their core the idea of fact. However, of all the fan wikis I looked at, Memory Alpha is the most interesting because it took this idea of fact and took it one step further, into the realm, I submit, of the creative:

[3.3] Memory Alpha’s primary point of view is that of a character inside the fictional Star Trek universe—an archivist at Memory Alpha, the Federation library planet.

Star Trek universe articles should be written as if the described person, object, or event actually existed or occurred, exactly like in a normal encyclopedia, but with an omniscient writer. Think of Memory Alpha as an encyclopedia that exists in the Star Trek universe. [source]

[3.4] Contributors are thus invited into a future world, one looking back on the events of the Star Trek universe as though they really happened, taking on the point of view of a disinterested observer examining long-dead people and events and reporting on them. By taking this stance, Memory Alpha becomes a far-flung fictive text meant to be read not as a story but as a collection of facts that, taken together, create a world. Maybe instead of seeking fiction in wiki through creation of something wholly new, like in the P/Virt universe, we ought to seek fiction in all wikis through the creation of a set of bits of information presented factually, and as we sort through them, the mental construction of the world by contributors and by readers becomes the creative act.

What follows is a summary of the papers I heard at the 2007 SFRA meeting in Kansas City. I’ll blog separately about my own paper; and about my thoughts about reimaging and repurposing old texts, and whether or not doing that is worth our time.

This entry is cross-posted at LJ here.

July 5, 2007: Plenary Session: The Importance of Robert A. Heinlein (Goonan, Gunn, Pohl, Steele)

The distinguished authors briefly spoke before inviting discussion. The importance of Robert A. Heinlein (RAH) reached consensus: as Pohl put it, RAH was important because Heinlein put together all the elements of other SF (Smith’s far-flung space opera; Weinbaum’s alien aliens; van Vogt’s alien POV) and made all these astounding things seem normal. Steele noted that RAH was one of the four greats (along with Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke), and he was to SF what Hemingway was to 20th-century American literature: after Hemingway, you couldn’t read or write the same way any more, and with RAH, itw as the same way.

RAH was also important because his work, particularly his juveniles, provided a broad entry into SF and made it broadly appealing. He was important (as Gunn noted) in publishing because he pioneered the SF best-seller as a genre; he opened the market in the previously impenetrable-to-SF slicks; and he broadened teh market for juveniles.

Discussion touched on RAH’s libertarian political beliefs; his juveniles as sophisticated, adult SF (but without sex); his career’s rough division into early, middle, and late stages, with the middle stage being his best work; and his problems writing women characters. Discussion also indicated anecdotally that RAH juveniles no longer serve as an entry text into SF for today’s adolescents, because his work strikes adolescents as less relevant.

July 6, 2007: Fighting Futures (Sharp, Yaszek)

Patrick Sharp, in “Monsters from Darwin’s Id,” talked about gender and Darwinism in 1950s SF films, concluding that Darwinism was applied by the films’ creators to argue that the evolution of the use of technology would permit humanity to survive. The threat of the atomic bomb, these films argue, can be defused by rational, science-based society. Women contribute via male selection and do not themselves upset the patriarchal order. Savagery is implicit in a matriarchal structure (as in giant ants); if a woman is in charge, then things are in dire straits indeed.

Lisa Yaszek, in a paper about adapting Golden Age SF written texts to the screen, discussed Judith Merril’s Shadows of the Hearth, which was turned into a film called Atomic Attack, in terms of the change in the role, from word to film, of the female protagonist. The text version focused on the female protagonist’s being thrust into a position of power because of her rationality and her ability to get things done. In the film version, the heroine was subsumed to the civil defense hero, and the heroine ends up going back into the kitchen. Yaszek noted we still judge SF storytelling by the criteria established during the cold war, and that the films created at the time were often helped out (stock footage, or financial support) by the U.S. government in exchange for positive portrayals of the military and the government.

July 6, 2007: New Critical Perspectives on SFTV (Maus, Stannish, Doran, Spirko)

Derek Maus, in “Megaparodies of Fan Culture in the Revived Doctor Who Television Series,” discussed the text’s parody and play with fan culture, where fandom is both warned of the dangers, and celebrated. The Series 2 episode “Love and Monsters” was closely analyzed. Maus also noted that the series used alternative media (Martha Jones’s blog), which connected to the fan base; and also noted that the new show comments directly on current events, further parodying today’s world. He concludes that DW is telling us to pay better attention to what’s important around us: the world is so much darker, madder, and better.

Steven M. Stannish discussed “Orientalism, Egyptomania, and ‘The Pyramids of Mars,’” the latter a 1975 Fourth Doctor adventure. He used Said and other Orientalist theory to argue that the stereotypes presented are comfortable to the viewer by presenting Egyptians and Middle Easterners as a reflection of anxiety. The script and language (including bogus hieroglyphics), as well as the use of modern-day Arabic (subtitled in English) presented as ancient Egyptian create an atmosphere that doesn’t attempt to be realistic, but that this kind of stereotype was comfortable to the viewership, creating a kind of coded shorthand; yet the show was aware of this and likely manipulating these symbols directly.

Christine M. Doran, in “Farscape: The Domestic in Danger,” used criticism on domestic theory to inform a discussion of the character of John Crichton, arguing that Crichton sought to defuse threats to the domestic by turning the alien into a friend, who may then be brought into the family. Farscape is interesting because the one who must change (Aeryn) is female, and a male figure becomes the domesticating force, an interesting gender reversal. The theme of the show is, “Will John humanize the aliens?”

Robert Spirko, in “Cylons vs. Cybermen,” talked about a posthuman world without humans. Media SF is often technophobic; it fears the loss of the human body. Yet Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica present compelling images of the rise of the machine and of new views of humanity. Spirko linked this to the Singularity: the desire to transcend the human body, which may end up going horribly awry, with transcendence resulting in inhumanity.

July 6, 2007: The Golden Age of SFTV Is Now (Rodrigo, Hellekson, Jacobsen)

This mini-panel featured brief sketches of ideas by the three presenters, followed by longer discussion with input from the audience. Shelley Rodrigo discussed technofetishism in techology-based procedural shows like CSI and Bones, which she argues are a kind of revamped SF that ultimately argues that rationality and science will answer all questions and catch the guilty. Karen Hellekson discussed the repurposing and intermixing of the old and the new in such TV shows as Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica (both recently revived) and Life on Mars (set in the past), concluding that the old texts are being tweaked to appeal to a new audience in terms of gender, race, class, and genre expectations. Craig Jacobsen talked about a kind of chimerism of narrative, with a huge number of densely interweaving texts (a trilogy of movies, a trilogy prequel, novel tie-ins, fan fiction, novelizations, DVD commentary, rereleases, etc.) creating a large, unruly whole that problematizes the whole notion of the text or what is available to study—or appropriate to study (what is canonical?).

July 7, 2007: Giant Fallout (Goodridge, De Los Santos, Rockwood)

Kelly L. Goodridge, in “Pacificism and Paranoia in The Day The Earth Stood Still, discussed this important cold war–era film in terms of increasing anxiety. A peaceful alien comes, yet no one will listen to him, and in fact, they seek to destroy him. The film depicts a kind of top-down paranoia, with the fear coming from above: the military. The message, however, is that unity is necessary for humanity’s long-term existence, and that individuals can make a difference in the world.

Oscar De Los Santos, in “Extra Large: Exploring Giant Creature Cinema,” linked films that feature giant creatures (lizards, ants, spiders, etc.) to the anxiety of the bomb and to war. He linked the cold war to the war on terror; the giant creatures mirror the political climate. The cratures embody the anxiety (war, nuclear bomb, epidemic), and the people around it reflect the criticism the film makes (apathy? indifference? agency?). Discussions of The Host (2007), a Korean film inspired by the SARS epidemic, and Transformers, an American film that reassuringly glorifies the military, show that the formula is still active.

Bruce Rockford, in “Heinlein’s Starship Troopers,” discussed both the text version and the film version and overtly linked the hivelike unity of the miltary with the very bugs they are fighting. Citizenship is granted via military service, interestingly linking these two concepts. Rockford noted that the old 1950s films now resonate in a new political climate. Starship Troopers is interesting because the struggle is all; the war is never really won. It results in a stratified society engaged in endless war.