Core Post: Not Poaching

“Fan Writing as Textual Poaching” concretized some of the dissatisfactions I’ve had with Jenkins-esque appraisals of fandom as a socially and politically empowering phenomenon. I’m particularly struck by the in-aptness of the metaphor itself – how it’s constituted along the very scotomas that mar much of Jenkins’ work.  de Certau’s poacher is a concrete historical figure, as Jenkins points out, peasant farmers who resist economic subordination through acts of theft reconfigured as a moral right. Economic structures thus lie at the very heart of this metaphor, making it doubly troubling to note the absence of economic analysis in Jenkins’ article (and his work as a whole?). There is something perverse in positing a comparison between the actions taken by farmers as a response to economic disparity, and the profit-generating production of fan communities. As Andrejevic points out, it has long been the case that producers take an active interest in the nature of fan discourse, lurking on forums and setting up websites so as to harvest the fruits of fan labor. Is it really poaching when one’s actions generate even more wealth for the proprietor? 

To make matters worse, the terms in which Jenkins considers questions of resistance towards the end of the essay are troubling. “Nobody regards these fan activities as a magical cure for the social ills of post-industrial capitalism,” he remarks, a comment whose snideness of tone I can’t quite shake – compounded by a sentence that follows shortly, claiming that fan activities “restore a much-needed excitement to the struggle against subordination” (491). As if protest were in need of more excitement! Jenkins is right to note that fan production does not equate to anti-capitalist resistance; but he seems to suggest also that fanhood is nonetheless subversive, even if this subversion is not in economic terms. Jenkins locates the resistant potential of fan activity in the social uses to which they put texts, to the forms of social interaction that fandoms create. Given the primacy of reading practices to these activities – in particular, to the readerly practices which embed the “fan writing” that is Jenkins’ main concern in this essay – it is disheartening to note the deep essentialisms with which Jenkins casts supposedly gendered forms of reading. When Jenkins makes claims such as this – “Women, confronting a traditionally masculine space opera, choose to read it instead as a type of women’s fiction” (482) – he invokes troublesome notions of gendered reading practices which call for greater skepticism and inquiry than he affords them. This is to say, I am skeptical of and troubled by many of the assumptions Jenkins deploys in his discussions about a supposedly gendered differentiation in reading practices.