Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

The cultural field 223
the legitimate concerns of the academic gaze. Against this way of thinking, I would
contend that what really matters is not the object of study, but how the object is
studied.
Many areas of everyday life could be said to illustrate de Certeau’s account of the
practice of consumption but perhaps none more so than the consumption practices of
fan cultures. Together with youth subcultures, fans are perhaps the most visible part of
the audience for popular texts and practices. In recent years fandom has come increasingly
under the critical gaze of cultural studies. Traditionally, fans have been treated in
one of two ways – ridiculed or pathologized. According to Joli Jenson (1992), ‘The literature
on fandom is haunted by images of deviance. The fan is consistently characterised
(referencing the term’s origins) as a potential fanatic. This means that fandom
is seen as excessive, bordering on deranged, behaviour’ (9). Jenson suggests two typical
types of fan pathology, ‘the obsessed individual’ (usually male) and ‘the hysterical
crowd’ (usually female). She contends that both figures result from a particular reading
and ‘unacknowledged critique of modernity’, in which fans are viewed ‘as a psychological
symptom of a presumed social dysfunction’ (ibid.). Fans are presented as
one of the dangerous ‘others’ of modern life. ‘We’ are sane and respectable; ‘they’ are
either obsessed or hysterical.
This is yet another discourse on other people. Fandom is what ‘other people’ do.
This can be seen clearly in the way in which fandom is assigned to the cultural activities
of popular audiences, whilst dominant groups are said to have cultural interests,
tastes and preferences. Moreover, as Jenson points out, this is a discourse that seeks to
secure and police distinctions between class cultures. This is supposedly confirmed by
the object(s) of admiration which mark off the tastes of dominant groups from those
of popular audiences, 54 but it is also supposedly sustained by the methods of appreciation
– popular audiences are said to display their pleasure to emotional excess,
whereas the audience for dominant culture is always able to maintain respectable
aesthetic distance and control. 55
Perhaps one of the most interesting accounts of a fan culture from within cultural
studies is Henry Jenkins’s (1992) Textual Poachers. In an ethnographic investigation
of a fan community (mostly, but not exclusively, white middle-class women), he
approaches fandom as ‘both . . . an academic (who has access to certain theories of
popular culture, certain bodies of critical and ethnographic literature) and as a fan
(who has access to the particular knowledge and traditions of that community)’ (5).
Fan reading is characterized by an intensity of intellectual and emotional involvement.
‘The text is drawn close not so that the fan can be possessed by it but rather so
that the fan may more fully possess it. Only by integrating media content back into
their everyday lives, only by close engagement with its meanings and materials, can
fans fully consume the fiction and make it an active resource’ (62). Arguing against textual
determinism (the text determines how it will be read and in so doing positions the
reader in a particular ideological discourse), he insists that ‘[t]he reader is drawn not
into the preconstituted world of the fiction but rather into a world she has created from
textual materials. Here, the reader’s pre-established values are at least as important as
those preferred by the narrative system’ (63).