Harrison:
Textual Poachers (1992) treats
Star Trek as only one part
of a much larger media fandom environment. Do you read
Star Trek
as a baseline for other kinds of media fandoms?
Jenkins:
That's a complicated question. On the one hand, the media fandom that
I talk about in Textual Poachers grew out of Star Trek
fandom, to a large degree. Historically, it was one of the first places
where women got actively involved with the science fiction fan community
and began to take on the task of publishing zines (1),
which had been predominantly male activities since the 1920s. Star
Trek fandom, and its heavy female participation, set the model
for subsequent developments in media fandoms. Star Trek conventions
set the model for subsequent fan cons. Star Trek zines set
the model for subsequent fanzines. And, the Star Trek letter-writing
campaign set the model for subsequent fan activism. Many fans came
into fandom via Star Trek, but not all fans do, not anymore.
Each new fannish show has produced new waves of fans. Beauty and
the Beast has fans who are not necessarily connected to Star
Trek or someone might come in as a fan of The Professionals
or X-Files without coming through Star Trek. So, "Media
Fandom" came out of Star Trek in a very real sense. On
the other hand, Star Trek is not the only model for media fandoms.
Historically, one could look at female fans of movie stars as establishing
a very different kind of relationship to the media or soap opera fandom
has been another important space for women or Chad Dell is doing interesting
work on women wrestling fans in the 1950s. One of the ambiguities
I struggled with in writing Textual Poachers is that I knew
people would take it as a book on fans as a broadly constituted social
category and I wanted it to be a book about a particular fan
community, with an understanding that, of course, its concepts could
be broadened and used to talk about other kinds of fandom, but they
would have to be tested against field work. They have to be examined
in relation to the specifics of individual fan communities, not taken
as a theory that can be generalized to account for all fan behavoir.
Harrison:
So Textual Poachers would not account for fan behavoir, but
would provide a vocabulary for talking about how fans, not only in
this context, but in various contexts, might function or might think
of their own activities?
Jenkins:
Part of what troubles me is that Textual Poachers is still
read as a book about Star Trek fandom without recognizing that
it's about a group of women who have constituted their own community
by nomadically pulling together a range of texts that are important
to them. One crucial text is Star Trek, but they are not a
Star Trek fan community. They are not "Trekkies"
or "Trekkers." They are a part of media fandom. On the other
hand, Star Trek fandom is much larger than this one community.
A recent Harris Poll tells us that something like 53% of the American
public defines themselves as Star Trek "fans." Now,
that statistic has to include a tremendous range of different relations
to the television program, not all of these "fans" are tied
to the group in Textual Poachers. Some people read Poachers
as saying that most Star Trek fans are women. I wouldn't say
that at all. Most of the Star Trek fans who write zines and
are part of the subculture I described in the book are women. But
there are many other ways of relating to Star Trek that that
book doesn't begin to talk about.
Harrison:
Part of the problem may be using the word, "fan" as this
kind of catch-all term for all kinds of activities by all kinds of
people who function in different social contexts and have different
relations to texts.
Jenkins:
Absolutely. You know, it's used broadly and I think the Harris Poll
must include people who watch the show occasionally, who, for example,
say they once bought a Star Trek novel. Of course, the Star
Trek novels are almost all on the New York Times bestseller list
the week or two after they come out. So, that's a large public.
Harrison:
Yeah, somebody's buying these things, and some of the people buying
these things must not be fans in the sense of the kind of ethnographic
look you want to take at them.
Jenkins:
Sure. The work that I've been doing with John Tulloch talks about
at least three different Star Trek fan communities and I could
have talked about many more. A male MIT student who is logged onto
the net and talking about the technology and nitpicking about the
various scientific flaws in the series has a totally different relationship
to the text than the women who are writing fanzines or the Gaylaxians
who are a gay-lesbian-bisexual organization lobbying for the inclusion
of a queer character on the show. Their politics are different. Their
interpretive strategies are different and their modes of engagement
with the text are different. Going beyond that book, we might include
the Klingon organizations, which have gotten some visibility lately.
That's a very different point of entry for understanding Star Trek.
Even if we take committed fans as a model, then that's still describing
a range of reading practices and different values and there are constant
sources of tension between those different communities. Some of the
computer nets refer to the women who write slash as FUBS ("fat
ugly bitches.") (2)
That term suggests real antagonism within Star Trek fan culture.
The same group often leveled homophobic blasts at the notion of including
a queer character, so the Gaylaxians also had fights with the male
computer net culture. On the other hand, when I did interviews for
that book, there were people who I could've interviewed who would've
belonged to all three groups. They were women at MIT who were lesbians
and belonged to the Gaylaxians, who read the series in technological
terms, and who wrote and read slash stories, so we can't see them
as totally separate groups either. Star Trek fandom is a fairly
complex cultural space.
Harrison:
One of the questions that would then arise is "Can these different
kinds of communities who have these different relationships continue
to exist side by side, or are the aims of one going to eliminate the
need for the other or the possibility of another existing and functioning
in the same space or around the same text?" And, as you say,
if there are people who can negotiate their positions in multiple
groups, the situation becomes even more complicated.
Jenkins:
It does. There are neither simply opposed readings nor are there interconnected
readings, but there are a range of possible identities or subject
positions vis-a-vis Star Trek. To use academic language, people
can float between and people choose to move within those groups. And
they may maintain separate and discrete identities in relation to
these multiple interpretive communities. I discovered several women
whom I met one place early on in my research for Poachers who I then
encountered again when I did the Gaylaxian chapter. When I interviewed
them for Poachers, I had no idea whether they were queer because
in that space, they were not out and they weren't functioning as queer
readers and they were involved fully in a romantic reading of the
text that would seem to depend on heterosexual assumptions and then,
as Gaylaxians, they were reading, within a very queer political space,
in terms of queer politics and fantasies. All of us in our heads are
many different audiences, and fans can, in fact, belong to many different
social groups.
Harrison:
This drives home the point that the idea of shifting subject positions,
combined with each individual wanting to see him or herself as a coherent
subject, is not simply theoretically important...
Jenkins:
These shifting subject positions are lived in people's experiences
-- fandom really illustrates this in a phenomenal way both by having
people flip between texts within a single fandom and flip between
fandoms in regard to the same text. I see both kinds of behavoir on
a fairly routine basis. For these fans, that theoretical problem is
lived out.
Harrison:
I suggested that Star Trek is an essential textual location
from which to discover or locate fandom. And in a sense it seems to
be, in that you can fix certain things in this kind of a study. You
can say, 'Okay, we're going to look at the different subject positions
which line up around Star Trek or here's a type of fan, let's
look at the different texts around which this type of fan tends to
circulate."
Jenkins:
And between the two books that I've written on science fiction audiences,
one looks at a fan community which pulls in many texts and the other
takes the position that Star Trek is an important text which
generates many communities. I'm trying, in my own work, to go back
and forth between these two notions of the nomadic. Unfortunately,
Textual Poachers, as I said, continually gets read as a book
about Star Trek fans and one of the hesitancies I had about
writing the new book was, "Am I going to reinforce that?".
After all, I began by writing "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten"
which was about Star Trek specifically and now I'm back talking
about Trek again. To read Poachers that way totally
forecloses this understanding of nomadic reading I'm talking about.
When I do radio interviews for example, which I do fairly often, I'm
told before I go on the air, "We only want you to talk about
Star Trek because Star Trek is something our audiences
will recognize and know." And then, I get on the program and
they say, "Well, why is it that it's only a show like Star
Trek that has generated this kind of fan response?" and then
what do I say without breaking the agreement? There are thirty, forty,
fifty shows I know of that generate this kind of fannish engagement
in one way or another. It isn't just Star Trek. To define it
as just Star Trek is to put all the power back into the text
again and not in the audience to construct their own relationships.
In the same way, within the academy, it's easier to talk about Star
Trek fans than to talk about any other group. The point of reference
is so much easier to explain. If I wanted to give a talk about Blake's
7 fandom, which at its peak was tremendously active, I would have
to spend most of my time giving background on the show rather than
talking about the reading practices. I feel constrained by the fact
that fans read a broader range of programs than academics do. Star
Trek is a central text -- from the point of view of the academy
-- but not necessarily from the point of view of any one fan. Academics
seem to be compelled to see Star Trek as this powerful text
that has created some "unique" audience phenomenon rather
than understanding it as one text that has had a lot of resonance
with fans and that fans, for a variety of reasons, have chosen to
engage with it -- as one text among many.
Harrison:
That actually was my follow-up portion of this question -- whether
you have to cater to the mainstream popularity of these originating
texts -- and it seems to me very clear that in fact, you do. You can
get something published on Star Trek or Twin Peaks rather
than Blake's 7.
Jenkins:
It's absolutely the case and I think that's a real problem. On the
other hand, Star Trek is such a rich example! I do believe
that, early on, Gene Roddenberry had a conception of a polysemic audience
and that shaped his conception of Star Trek. His main selling
point to the networks was that science fiction was a kind of "grab
bag genre" that attracted many different kinds of audiences.
Harrison:
But what Roddenberry was never willing to do was let the fans, or
fan desire, invade the text.
Jenkins:
Well, it invades the text in at least two ways, or three ways actually,
but none of them are very significant, it seems to me. It invades
the text of Star Trek in terms of winking jokes like "Please,
Captain, not in front of the Klingons" at the end of Star
Trek III, a joke many people read as a nod to slash. Or the passage
in the novelization of Star Trek: the Motion Picture where
they talk about rumors that Kirk and Spock might be lovers. Those
sorts of throwaway gestures are usually there precisely to dismiss
the fans' desires. Secondly, he literally incorporated fans as extras
in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There's one boardroom scene
where a number of individual longtime fans are incorporated into the
text and get to see themselves on the screen. Again, that doesn't
strike me as a significant response to the fan community, except in
a kind of individual payback level. It didn't give fans any power.
It just let them dress up in costumes and parade in front of the camera
and say to their friends, "look, that's me in Star Trek."
That's not what fans want, by and large.
Harrison:
Yes, which is why the word, "desire," isn't used to talk
about that.
Jenkins:
The closest was the introduction of the character, Geordi. The name
Geordi came from a handicapped fan who had emotionally moved Roddenberry,
so Roddenberry had decided that he wanted a handicapped person as
part of the mix. He named Geordi after a specific fan. Again, this
is a mixture of personalization and some responsiveness to fan desire,
some addition to the utopian vision of the series, but not in a direct
way. The desires that fans expressed were often politically difficult
ones for Roddenberry, who pretends to be a great liberal, but who
in fact was a relatively conservative force in the production of the
show. He never was really willing to give fans space in the text,
to play out the sorts of stories, or the sort of politics that fan
communities were committed to.
Harrison:
Let's move on. Your approach is frankly ethnographic. You are in some
sense the classic participant-observer in terms of the way you set
yourself up as both fan and academic.
Jenkins (laying
back on the couch): I'll do this couch thing.
Harrison:
That's very nice. Yes, confess to me here. Confess. You'll feel much
better when this is over. How do you reconcile this traditional way
of doing business with what you've said is one of the purposes of
your work, that is to reorient the academic project of sub-cultural
theorization and description?
Jenkins:
I think I disagree with the premise of your question. I think if you
want to talk about traditional participant-observer approaches, Camille
Bacon-Smith's book, Enterprising Women, follows that model
much more closely than mine does, because the traditional participant-observer
in ethnography, as its been practiced over a hundred years or more,
is someone who comes in from the outside and seeks to be integrated
into the community, and who sees, but neither touches nor is touched
by, the community. They're a participant but in a relatively trivial
way. As Bacon-Smith frames her book, she describes her own migration
as "The Ethnographer" into the tribal culture of the exotic
where she gradually gets integrated, step-by-step, into the heart
of the community. She learns the secret rituals, she learns to get
along with her mentors and the village leaders, and finally, she finds
the "heart of darkness" at the center of fandom, which for
Bacon-Smith is hurt/comfort but, at the same time, as she participates
within and writes about fandom, she preserves this status of the outside
observer, the objective and impersonal Ethnographer. My work comes
out of a newer tradition of ethnography that has emerged from feminist
and queer ethnographic practice. In fact, identity politics has strongly
influenced the process of ethnography, where the person who is writing
writes from a position of proximity or closeness, writes from a position
of their own lived subjectivity. I wrote Textual Poachers only
after being part of a fan community for fifteen years. There's no
suggestion there that I'm coming into fandom from the outside and
I'm observing this so I can bring it to the outside, nor do I preserve
a clear separation between my authority as an ethnographer and the
authority of the community I'm writing about. The practice of writing
the book involved sending out copies of the manuscript to large numbers
of fans, getting their feedback and they wrote extensive feedback
and then rewriting in accordance to it. Sitting in the fans' living
rooms and listening to them critique my work and trying to be responsive
to it. Now, I think we can't delude ourselves. Of course, I wrote
it. Of course, my name's on it. Of course, my career is being shaped
by the reputation it builds, and of course, I'm staking out a position
here, but it's a position that's engaged with a community and involved
them in rewriting the construction of their own image. I think that
differs from traditional participant observation in terms of the ways
that we break down the authority structure of ethnography and the
desire to neither touch nor be touched by the experience of the field.
And it's tied to the notion of situated knowledge, the idea that we
can only know from a social space. For me, in writing this book, my
knowledge comes from being a fan, which to me is a real, lived identity.
There is no insurmountable break between the academic and the fan
here. I was a fan, I am still a fan. Being an academic is one way
of being a fan for me.
Harrison:
This is actually two points. One is the way in which work like this
starts to blur the distinction between academic and fan creates another
problem in that even if you say, "I'm a fan and an academic,"
people who read your work can preserve the distinction for themselves.
They can say, "Okay, he can say all that, but I'm still an academic
and I don't have to acknowledge my own investment in the texts I work
with." The second thing is that while I totally agree that you
write from a position of someone who is, in fact, a fan, who has lived
that position, on the other hand, you haven't. You can't have lived
the same position as many of your subjects -- especially, say, the
female Beauty and the Beast group. Do you feel like that makes you
more of an ethnographer in those sorts of circumstances?
Jenkins:
Probably -- that is the case. Boy, those are two complicated questions.
Let me take the first one and you may have to remind me of the second
if I get carried away here. Rhetorically, what I tried to do when
writing the book was to gradually shift the center of gravity from
addressing academics to addressing fans. The most theoretically dense
chapters are at the beginning of the work and as the academic becomes
more accommodated to the fans' points of reference, the book's rhetoric
becomes more governed by fan references and fan discourse and fan
examples. So, the last chapter cites many more shows than the earlier
chapters. The fan video chapter pulls much more heavily into fan knowledge
and further away from the space of academic competence, so that my
goal was for the academic readers to become more integrated into the
fan community as they moved through the book. Now, what happens when
people read it -- and my primary basis of evidence is the reviews
of the book -- is that they pull back from that proximity as they
read the book. Many of them are not seeing the connection to their
own lives and in fact, what happens is that all of those stereotypes
about fans that I talk about early on in the book get mapped onto
me as the writer of the book. I am variously described as nerdy, as
preoccupied with trivia, as taking it all too seriously, as forgetting
that it's only a television show, as being humorless in relation to
details, as being overly exacting in my focus on particulars. All
of these stereotypes come even in positive reviews. I've yet to read
a review of the book that did not feel compelled to signal to the
reader, "Jenkins is a fan and I'm not." The author's "objectivity"
is in question because he is a fan, but I am not, since I'm writing
this review and I have to mark that space away from it. I think that
the academics' relationship to fandom is so vexed still that people
are not willing to take on that space, and I'm not sure what one could
do to challenge it more fully, because the history of academia in
media studies has been the desire to squash or deny our own relationship
to the fan. We had to justify ourselves in the academy by saying,
"Look! We're not just fans or movie buffs. We're serious academics."
And we did just that and it seems to me that the price for admission
to the academy was two-fold. First, we had to prove that popular works
were authored. If we were going to be taken seriously alongside music
or literature or drama, we had to create the author and the ability
to have auteur theory on the one hand and the art cinema on the other
allowed us admission and allowed us to talk about media from an intellectual
position that was totally removed from the affective space of the
fan. Fan/buff discourse had governed writing about film up until that
point and shaped the best writing, I think, with people like Parker
Tyler, Robert Warshow, and Gilbert Seldes. We had to move away from
all of that and adopt a dryer, more impersonal, more theoretical language
for writing about popular culture, and that was the second price we
paid for admission into the academy.
Harrison:
That totally misses what it is that's important about studying film
or television. It's that these texts move people and that seems to
me one of the only reasons to try to understand them. It completely
escapes me what, at least in this moment, is the importance of retreating
back to a structuralist position or an auteurist position or anything
like that. What good will that do, other than maintaining academic
credibility, which is obviously always going to be a concern. But,
I don't know if there's space for that or not.
Jenkins:
I would say that the defining characteristic of popular culture is
its emotional intensity, its ability to make us proximate to it, to
be close to it, to be involved with it. If we pull back to a traditional
academic distance, we can't understand it at all. We can't acknowledge
the degree that we're linked to the mechanisms of pleasure and desire
which constitute the text. I was told when I started as a graduate
student that I should only write about texts that I hated because
it's only when you hate a text that you get sufficient distance from
it to be able to talk about its ideological structures "accurately"
and "objectively." That sick linkage of hate and objectivity,
I bet, governs a lot of writing in our field, still.
Harrison:
That's amazing. That's it! Isn't hate one of the most invested relationships
you can possibly have with a text? You'd think that indifference would
be the most "objective" relationship you could have with
a text.
Jenkins:
What does it mean that many people in our field spend their lives
writing about things they hate rather than about things they love,
other than this need for us to continually reaffirm the validity of
our discipline. Stating that you write as a fan throws all of that
into crisis. The other side of the policed divide is that the need
for admission into the academy meant high theory. It meant we had
to define ourselves, as structuralism was coming in, as just as theoretically
rigorous as any other field, announcing our rigor by the ability to
use academic jargon and complex theoretical formulations. That also
pulled us away from being a fan because it meant our work on popular
culture could not be read by popular audiences. It's not part of popular
debates about media and the price tag for that today is that Neil
Postman can be talked about in TV Guide and we can't. How many people
at this conference or in the Society for Cinema Studies can get access
to the mass-circulated publications? We're not choosing to engage
with that audience. We're losing the larger battle in our political
struggles over popular culture by refusing to talk to the popular,
by refusing to be accessible, and what's important about the move
towards the fan-academic has been the willingness to write to communities
that are not within the academy, that are in the general public that
will read such books. Textual Poachers has been read by, and
been important to, large numbers of people who are not tied to the
academy and who, you know, are interested in and committed to popular
culture. Fans were circulating fliers for the book through the underground
fan networks so that they got large numbers of mail orders for this
book from places where all they have access to is the local B. Daltons.
I've gotten phone calls from high school students who've read this
book and really wanted to talk about what it meant to them and I'm
very moved by that because I've succeeded, on one level, in breaking
down some of those barriers. Now, I don't mean to be self-congradulatory
about it. The title itself, Textual Poachers, puts some people
at a distance; my dependence on De Certeau is problematic for large
numbers of popular readers who don't understand these obtuse formulations.
I didn't totally succeed and I think the struggle for authenticity
and authorization in the academy shaped Textual Poachers as
much as any other book, but it has pointed out to me the need for
us to rethink the relationship between the fan world and the academic
community. It's a question central to our attempts to change the politics
of the popular and to understand what popular culture is.
Harrison:
Are you still invested in the poaching metaphor as a way of describing
and/or valorizing fan activity? This has a lot to do with the audiences
you can speak to or the audiences that you want to speak to and how
you go about explaining these kinds of relationships.
Jenkins:
The poaching metaphor is tremendously convenient because it had resonance
within the academy, particularly within a leftist academy that wants
to identify things as guerilla semiotics, underground, subversive,
resistant, and so forth, and because once it was fully understood,
it had resonance in the fan community which also wanted to see itself
in those terms and who could link the metaphor, "poaching,"
to Robin Hood. Almost all of these women who were part of media fandom
read Robin Hood or were interested in Robin Hood growing up. It's
one of the texts that have in common, so that, that sense of stealing
from the rich and giving to the poor, of being a poacher on the king's
domain, had tremendous power for them. It was an image they were comfortable
with by and large. Now, some fans were critical of it and said, "that
poaching metaphor implies we hurt the text, that we take from the
owners something that belongs to them." They said, "The
text already belongs to us; we're not taking anything other than our
own fantasies, so therefore, we're not stealing anything at all. We're
simply constructing our own space and our own culture and our own
life that happens to exist alongside a commercial text and doesn't
do it damage." They're a little uncomfortable with the aggressive
conflictual nature of the metaphor since they felt it gave too much
power to the media producers, and there is, of course, a segment of
fandom that values its closeness with the producers and their interests.
The other criticism I've heard, and I think it's perhaps a valid one,
is that poaching is a masculinalized metaphor. That is, it's a military
metaphor and that's a problematic issue I've been spending a lot of
time trying to rethink. It's a problem if we see struggle and specifically
aggressive struggle as a masculine domain, but these women, in fact,
in their Robin Hood fantasies, had already constructed that guerilla
metaphor as potentially open for women. Aggression or taking over
territory or asserting power is feminine from their point of view,
and so they did not seem particularly uncomfortable with that masculinalized
notion of it. They see themselves as powerful women and they are comfortable
talking about power. By and large, only academic feminists posed that
challenge to me, and I want to think through the implications of their
suggestion that women can't be tacticians, women can't be guerrillas.
Certainly if we look in the real world, hell, they've always been.
You know, the history of poaching has always included women going
back to the early peasant uprisings that E.P. Thompson talks about,
which is what I always thought about when thinking about the poaching
metaphor.
Harrison:
That just re-emphasizes the point that you're speaking to very different
audiences with the book. The interpreting audiences for the book itself
are just not thinking in the same ways.
Jenkins:
But the power of poaching as a metaphor was that it spoke to, said
what needed to be said, to both groups in a term that could be shared
with both groups but meant something different in the two spaces.
Now, where the book has problems is with words like "hetroglossia"
which I used to talk about fan music videos. That's a word that the
fan community can't get a purchase on, that they haven't known what
to do with, and just shrug it off as "academic bullshit."
But, poaching as a term has been important to them and has been picked
up by computer groups, for instance, to talk about their relation
to the computer corporations. It's getting a wider space as the book
has become better known. Poaching seems to be a word that many groups
can share, meaning slightly different things, and so I probably wouldn't
repudiate the term. If I did it today, I might not have a title that
had "textual" in it, because the textual part is also a
kind of academic marker that makes fans and other general public people
say "well, that's not for us." It keeps getting garbled
into "textile" or "textural." What negotiates
them into the book is the cover art, right? Jean Kluge's beautiful
cover which everyone, both academic and fans, loves, attracts them
to the book. She's very user friendly from the fans' point of view.
They recognize Kluge as an important fan artist and they're drawn
to the book by that and they're willing to say, "all right, it
may be called Textual Poachers but it is also clearly tied
to our fan community and our fan aesthetics." So, it gives mixed
signals and to some degree as I wrote it, I was very painfully aware
of the fact that I'm writing as a fan to academics and as an academic
to fans, that I'm trying to create some dialogue across those spaces
and that's structurally built into the book, even into the design
of the book, in ways that many not be fully visible to someone who's
simply on the academic side of that divide.
Harrison:
That's very interesting because it makes "book" itself a
different kind of commodity than it normally is in academic circles.
A lot of people don't buy books simply because they look cool. Well,
they do buy books because they look cool, but they don't say that
they're doing it because of that.
Jenkins:
Yes, that's right. That cover art has now been turned into a T-shirt
design in fandom. The fans are buying the cover art, not Textual
Poachers, on their shirt, but it clearly marks textual poaching
in the fans' space. You know, where that is a statement of identification
with the textual poaching metaphor to a large degree.
Harrison:
But doesn't that in a sense preserve the divide between fans and academics?
Because academics aren't wearing the t-shirts. Additionally, even
if you do manage to speak to some academics in the ways that you want
to, aren't you preaching to the choir? These are people who are already
on the road to, if not already in, a place where they acknowledge
this very complicated shifting fan-academic relation within themselves
and in relation to the texts that they write about and think about.
Jenkins:
Perhaps and that's a potential problem, but it's also important to
build a community. It's also important to gain some solidarity and
understanding among ourselves -- as fan-academics -- before we tackle
some larger space. What's interesting is that so far, the logical
next move, which is to bring this discussion back to the academic
convention circuit, is being resisted. I have proposed panels to several
conventions on the question of academics-as-fans and vice-versa and
they have been rejected with no explanation. I don't think they want
to talk about that in the academic space yet. I think people are really
threatened by breaking that divide down because its' been so central
to the institutionalization of media studies. At a time of economic
retrenchment, when film studies is under attack, people don't necessarily
want to take the next step I'm pushing them towards, which is to say,
all right, let's be up front about the fact that we are emotionally
committed, we're fans, we're part of fannish politics, and let's break
down those barriers. Because to break down those barriers is to acknowledge
a potential trivialization of your field at a moment when the credibility
of your discipline is again under fire. I understand the resistance.
I think the resistance is wrong. I see the fan-academic as a public
intellectual who moves back to the popular or participates in popular
debates works in the grass roots with communities of people, talks
about what we've learned as academics and share it with a broader
public. At the same time, I don't just want to learn about fans, I
want to learn from fans. I want to learn as a fan. Those relationships
are very complex. So far most of the work on fannishness, most of
the academic discussion of fans, has been learning about fans, maybe
as a fan (in the case of Constance Penley and myself and many of the
younger graduate students who are doing that work or are learning
as fans about fandom.) What I want to see next is learning from fans
certain modes of writing, certain modes of criticism, certain modes
of interpretation that may liberate us as academics in our relation
to popular culture and allow us to be better at what we do. I think
that fandom's got a hell of a lot to teach us about the media and
about media studies and we haven't really listened yet.
Harrison:
Are we poaching the fans then?
Jenkins:
Sure! But I would say we are poaching them, we're not appropriating
them or co-opting them. I'm not talking about a fan chic that's like
the lesbian chic that people have been talking about at this conference,
but I am talking about the notion that maybe something like slash
provides a model for criticism that allows for thinking through the
characters from the inside out, having the playful ability to rethink
or write around the ending, etc. To think about revising and rewriting
the text as part of the process of ideological criticism, for example,
is a strategy I've seen more and more within the academy. It isn't
just coming from fandom, but I think there's moment now in which what
the academy wants to do, particularly in queer studies, and what fans
have been doing, are coming together. I would say that Alex Doty or
Eve Sedgwick or Cathy Griggers are slashers. They are writing academic
slash in the ways in which they're reading the text and constructing
these relationships that other readers are reluctant to see. They're
pulling them to the surface and writing them out and envisioning,
as Cathy Griggers does in her piece on Thelma and Louise, other
scenes that might have been there but were not. Many of us can learn
how to do that as a more creative, playful, pleasurable, proximate,
and yes, powerful way of engaging with the text.
Harrison:
What I find intriguing about the whole relationship is that on the
one hand we, the academics, are supposed to be "objective"
and look at the text in these very stilted ways, and on the other
hand, if you do make the kind of investment that seems required in
other fields then suddenly you're accused of being invested in a text
that isn't worthy of that kind of scrutiny. The charge that gets leveled
at me all the time is that these texts can't bear the weight of what
I want them to talk about, that they aren't sufficient to let me talk
about all the things that I think are important, all the affective
dimensions that I don't have any other text to use to talk about.
Now maybe that's just because of who I am as a person, or whatever,
but the texts which have any kind of resonance for me are precisely
the popular texts. It isn't that they completely jibe with my experience
in the world, but in their very inadequacy, I negotiate my relation
to affect. I say, "Gosh, this text doesn't look right,"
and an understanding of that gap lies precisely in understanding the
details of how the entire setup works together and creates a social
world. And yet I'm told that it can't stand up to this kind of --
tension.
Jenkins:
And you get told that by people in television studies and film studies,
not just people outside. It's really telling that we've got this anxiety
about our status as a discipline which means that on the one hand,
we're demanding to be taken seriously because we can talk about authors
or ideology or poststructuralist theory, too. On the other hand, we're
caving in to an anxiety that our object of study isn't worthy of serious
study, that when we actually engage with the object of study, we suddenly
fear that it's too trivial, that it isn't worth talking about after
all, that we can't take it seriously on its own terms. That's anxiety
number one. Anxiety number two that I hear is that we still, despite
all the theory about textuality and intertextuality and all of that,
get anxious if the meaning isn't found in the text. We don't allow
ourselves to be readers in the sense that we talk about our ethnographic
subjects as readers. We don't allow ourselves the freedom to appropriate,
speculate, engage with the text beyond what's there, you know, what
can be found, nailed down in textual terms. We don't even allow ourselves
to imagine a mode of criticism that is more speculative and fanciful,
which allows you, as you said, to deal with the incompleteness of
the text and to think through it and to use it as a starting point
for thinking about other issues or thinking about our identities or
our politics, as fans frequently have, and to work through the text
in a new way. We don't allow ourselves the creative freedom that the
fans allow themselves in the ways in which we engage with texts and
I think that's painfully sad.
Harrison:
This gets back to the question of ethnography. How was your thinking
about your position in relation to media fandom changed since the
writing of Textual Poachers? For example, in your paper last
year at Console-ing Passions, you came out as bisexual. Does this
alter the position from which you can speak as a commentator on fan
groups and what does such a positioning of yourself and your own subjectivity
do to say, your reading of the Beauty and the Beast group you
relied on in Textual Poachers?
Jenkins:
Part of the argument I would make throughout the book is that fantasy
is not as anchored as we would like to think. The fantasy, the sexual
fantasies, the romantic fantasies that fans construct, either as straight
women envisioning Kirk and Spock as lovers or as lesbian women envisioning
Catherine and Vincent as lovers, are more fluid than our simple categories
for talking about sexuality would allow us to get at. On one level,
my new openness about my bisexuality doesn't change anything. As a
participant in the community it may complicate my own personal identity,
my sense of myself, but I'm not sure that it changes anything that
I say specifically in the Beauty and the Beast chapter, other
than the fact that if I were to write it today I might feel more compelled
to dig in further to those experiences of the lesbian and bisexual
women in fandom. But I'm not sure that I would in any case, because
my interest is more in terms of how the community as a whole forms
collective fantasies, than on the personal identifications and goals
of individual fans. I think that's one way we might differentiate
my approach from Camille Bacon-Smith's, say.
Harrison:
It's ultimately a question, and this goes back to what we were saying
about ethnography before, about how you, as a man, in the first place,
on this very biological essentialist level, fit yourself into this
predominantly female fan community. How far can you be a participant
in that community and does a change in your centrality or marginality
as a social actor alter how you can participate?
Jenkins:
I think this is an important question. In some senses, I am marginal
in fandom, in some senses there are barriers set up. some senses,
and this is difficult to talk about, I am more powerless in fandom
than I am in the general society. Fandom is a female constructed space;
the power within fandom is held by women and it acts as a countervailing
pressure on some of the power that I bring in from the outside as
a male academic. If I sit in a room full of women as a male, my subjectivity
is in question at that point in a way that it isn't if I sit in the
room full of academics as a male. That room full of women can challenge
me and ascribe to me, "well, you're just a man; you don't understand
this" and confront me and they collectively have a source of
power in relation to me that is very important -- very important to
them and very important to me. Yes, as an academic and as a man, I
am in a privileged position in the larger culture, but I would also
say that a social space takes up its norms of interpretation and values
of interaction based on the dominant members of that group. Fandom
is predominantly female. It is a female-centered space -- but not
a female-only space. Its mode of interpretation comes out of female,
feminist, and feminine experiences, however socially constructed all
of that may be. So, when I move into that space, if I'm going to be
accepted as a participant, I have to participate on the level of discourse
that space has set up and I have worked through that as a male fan
in a predominantly female fandom for fifteen years. I've learned to
read according to their interpretive norms. I've learned to participate
in the discussion on their terms. I've given up certain privileges
I might enjoy elsewhere in order to participate. Now, that's somewhat
utopian and I'm not trying to say I've been totally successful in
that, but I think there's a way in which it exerts countervailing
pressure on my participation and insofar as the women that I've talked
to in the study are concerned, the most important fact was not my
gender, but the fact that I declared myself to be a fan, that I was
part of the group. That was the most important defining characteristic.
I did get a few letters when I sent out the chapter on slash from
women who did not know me and they said that they were suspicious
when they saw they were written by a man, but when they were through
reading them, they felt that I had gotten it right, that I had understood
and communicated what slash meant to them, and I consider that a high
compliment.
Harrison:
Maybe one of the things that feminist academics are looking for in
Textual Poachers and I think that I'm looking for this too,
is a sense not of the end result, the conclusions that you come to
and the readings that you give, but of how that process of confrontation
happens, how the women say, in the Beauty and the Beast group
come up to you and say, "Henry, you're just not getting it because
you're a man." What did you think before that point, how does
the evolution happen? How do you get to a later point?
Jenkins:
If I wrote that book today, that process would be much more important.
I do acknowledge the process in multiple places in the book; I do
spell out the methodology and the sending out of manuscripts at the
beginning. Because I was getting conflicting responses from the community,
I do specifically stop in the Beauty and the Beast chapter and lay
out what the criticisms were, what the conflicts were and why I was
doing what I was doing. I don't do enough of that. There's an anxiety
I have as an ethnographer about to what degree I should listen to
the community and represent what they're saying and to what degree
I should be examining my own subjectivity. I've seen certain ethnographers
who, in the reflexive ethnographic tradition, swamp the community,
become so obsessed with their own methodological anxieties and subjective
positions that the autobiographical overwhelms the social, the cultural.
I did not want to do that, and I thought that was particularly important
not to do as a male ethnographer writing about a predominantly female
fan community, to let my male problems swamp the experience of these
women. But in not doing that, I left myself open to the charge of
making it seem too transparent, of making it seem too easy and natural.
Frankly, when I was writing, I didn't know how to talk about it. I
didn't know what language to discuss it with. People kept saying,
"situate yourself, situate yourself." How exactly do I situate
myself as a white male in relation to a predominantly feminine culture?
Everything I say would seem self-serving, rationalizing, it would
only make things worse if I actually tried to. The risk I'm taking
right now in this interview is that whatever I say can be potentially
read as self-serving and self-congratulatory in some ways as a male
talking about my relationship to this community and I think in some
ways that would be even more false to the kinds of relationships I've
established there.
Harrison:
One of the things that I like best about what Constance Penley (1992)
has done is that statement she makes at the end of the article in
Cultural Studies, during the question and answer period. She
says that her work on Star Trek and psychoanalysis are both
really important to her and that the important thing about the Star
Trek work is that it's meant she can't think psychoanalysis in
the same way that she did before and psychoanalysis means she thinks
Star Trek differently. So, you get this constant sense of interplay
that isn't always foregrounded in her work -- I don't want to say
that she's predominantly focusing on process, but that kind of situatedness
is useful to see. It's not in the sense of "Oh, my subjectivity
is in crisis; what am I going to do now?" but the sense that
one's thinking does change and that it's precisely the process of
"Here I am in a situation which is challenging the academic precepts
that I came into it with."
Jenkins:
Maybe this is the point to pull back to the questions of my bisexuality
in relation to fandom, which I only started to answer. On one level,
it doesn't matter in fandom. On another level, it matters a lot. What
I should say is that fandom and writing about fandom have allowed
me to come out as bi -- that it is part of my experience of thinking
through fandom that has allowed me to finally conceptualize my sexuality
in those terms after twenty years of struggling with who I am and
what my sexuality is and how do I relate to the world, of hiding from
a lot of my queer feelings and my queer desires and my queer fantasies
and pretending they didn't exist or masquerading as fully straight
and passing myself off. It was when I confronted slash, when I read
slash and found out that I really was getting turned on by this, that
this wasn't just a simple academic object of study, and as I began
to rethink fantasy in relation to slash and what it meant to have
erotic fantasies and how one relates to one's erotic fantasies that
I began to move from a theoretical and abstract proposition -- that
everyone is basically bisexual but culture shapes our sense of our
sexuality into narrower terms, that for social and cultural reasons
we are constructed in certain ways but that there's an underlying
amorphous perversity that allows us to be more fluid in our object
choices. I could talk that intellectual game till I was blue and the
face, but never come out and say, "I am bisexual," never
pull back to the personal and say "I am a bisexual. That means
me." Moving to talking about the Gaylaxians pulled me into contact
with a community of queers more intimately than I had been up to that
point. For them, it was a question of this word, "queer,"
which I had to think through, because I am living in a long-term,
monogamous, heterosexual relationship. Did I have the right to speak
of myself as queer? What does that word mean? Does that include me?
Is it one of those words like "nigger" that you can say
if you're black and if you're white, its' an exercise of power against
that community? I felt empowered to speak as queer and about queerness
as I became implicated in my own fantasies in relation to the texts
of slash. The first time I ever came out to anyone other than my wife
was in a room full of two hundred or so fans at the Gaylaxicon where
I said publicly for the first time that I am a bisexual and I am proud
of who I am. It was at that point that I felt the community of support
that allowed me to say who I was. Since then, I've moved towards being
acting Director of Gay and Lesbian Studies at MIT, to talking about
it here. My involvement in fandom provoked me to think about my sexuality
in a different way and subsequently it shaped every other piece of
criticism that I have written. I am not only a fan when I write about
fans; in that same way, I'm not just queer when I write about the
Gaylaxians. I am queer when I write about Dennis the Menace and permissive
parenting and all of those subjectivities, as queer, fan, parent,
etc., shape how I write, how I respond, how I do my business as an
academic. But, for all the reasons we've talked about so far, it's
hard in the academy to pull back to that level of personal confession,
to focus on yourself and your growth rather than on a subcultural
community or a text, and I am struggling with whether my personal
growth should even be that important or interesting to readers.
Harrison:
Do you feel that you foreground that kind of complexity in the writing
that you do?
Jenkins:
In various ways, to various degrees. When I write about WWF Wrestling,
for example, I do talk a great deal about the homoerotics of the relation
between the men and the degree to which it plays and flirts with Eve
Sedgwick's (1985, 1990) notion of the continuum between homosocial
and homoerotic desire. It is a queer reading of WWF Wrestling in the
midst of an essay that is, at that very moment, also talking about
my relation to my son, which is, of course, a marker of my lived heterosexual
experiences. They both exist side-by-side there. Still, I struggle
with how autobiographical I want my writing to become. I want to acknowledge
my pleasures, my social situatedness. I do know from a very concrete
social space, but I don't want to essay to just become about me, because
frankly, the lifestyle of a male academic isn't that compelling or
interesting to anyone other than male academics. Maybe I am resisting
too much examining my own pleasure, even as I am challenging others
to look more closely at their own, but it seems to me that there is
a thin line here between proximate epistemology and sheer narcissism
that is hard to negotiate much of the time and that a lot of confessional
criticism crosses too far, in my opinion.
Harrison:
One criticism leveled at your work is that it constructs fandom as
a kind of utopic space. Do you agree with this criticism or see it
as justified? Do fans themselves construct fandom as utopic?
Jenkins:
The conclusion of Textual Poachers, where I talk about utopianism,
was intended to represent what is very hard to talk about but is very
real -- the material way that fandom is a utopian space. I
see utopianism not as escapism but as a very political thing. Utopianism
is, by its nature, a critique of, an alternative to, the established
order. To think of a world that is different allows you to recognize
why the world is not the way you would like it to be. It poses a question,
but it also forces us to envision an alternative space and what it
would look like. It isn't sufficient within utopian discourse to be
merely critical. You have to propose another world. You have to propose
another kind of space and try to create the social structures that
allow it to exist. In that sense, I think fandom is utopian -- and
the academy is not. We don't challenge ourselves to imagine an alternative
reality and in many ways, we are often terrified to acknowledge our
own successes. Academics have such a hard time understanding the concept
of utopia because the academy isn't a very utopian place as a rule.
Now, there's another sense in which the criticism of utopianism in
Poachers gets raised which is very different: it's said that
I'm only affirming the positive side of fandom. Even fans come to
me and say, "look, you don't talk about things like the feuds
disrupting fandom. You don't talk about some of the tensions and rivalries
there. You don't talk about the fact that this is a predominantly
white space. You don't talk about the class issues that are involved."I
think those are valid criticisms, but the moment in which I wrote
the book, the dominant academic discourse on fandom was predominantly
negative. The negative stereotypes were so strongly in place that
I did not feel comfortable attacking fans. I did not think it was
my task to go out there and find this group, expose them to the public
view so that I could berate them for what was wrong with their culture.
Raising the negative in that space would have been destructive to
them, destructive to the creation of a dialogue that makes us rethink
what fandom is. So, yes, I soft-pedaled. I chose to tell a story that
accented the positive rather than the negative, but I think it was
tactically necessary at that point and I stand behind that. I also
respected the wishes of the community not to talk about certain things.
If I had violated that trust, I would have lost the respect of the
community. I would have committed an abuse of my ethnographic authority,
by pulling back to the academic and abusing the group I was working
with. I felt they had a say in their self-representation and if they
asked me not to talk about certain dimensions of their culture in
a public space, I respected them in the same way I would respect some
of the questions about closeting or not closeting in the queer community
when we're writing about it. It would not have been appropriate and
I didn't do it.
Harrison:
Do you have a sense of how you would go about starting to think those
issues, at a moment when it might be more appropriate? Can you envision
a moment at which you would be able to explore confrontational issues
of race or sexuality?
Jenkins:
It's something I'm still struggling with, to be honest. I think if
I did it I would do it in cooperation with the fan community. I would
do it by including in the public space some of the internal debates
that fans themselves have around these questions. I would explore
it in the context of fans struggling with these issues. These are
not just academic radicals coming to say, "look at those people.
They're so naive that they don't think through this side of slash
and they don't think through homophobia and they don't think through
the racism of their own practices." These are concerns that fans
have too, though they articulate them in different ways, and it might
be refreshing to find alternative terms to think through these debates.
I have tried to address this in a new essay I have coming out on slash,
homophobia, and queerness, and I will be eager to see what people
think of the results. The article, which pulls together many fans,
straight and queer, talking about their pleasures in slash, has been
controversial among fans, since there is inevitably a question of
who's voice gets heard, who's voice gets accessed, and because it
touches on a lot of hot topics in slash fandom; but I think it was
an important risk to take, because I get tired of listening to academics
who assume that the fans themselves never take up these questions
or have nothing of relevance to say about them.
Harrison:
This brings up the whole question of the interface between fans and
texts. It's not just the fans that are important, but also the texts
that they're responding to or reacting to or remaking, reworking.
Fandoms, all kinds of media fandoms, aren't odd aberrant spaces. They
have their connections to other kinds of social spaces.
Jenkins:
On the one hand, I think that people have exaggerated the gap between
audience studies and textual analysis. I don't see a potential conflict
between the two. For example, in my section on ten ways to rewrite
a television show, I continually show how structures like hurt-comfort
are in the text and are then explored and rewritten by fans in more
elaborate ways. That section moves back and forth between textual
structures and fannish reading practices. In my own work, I've actually
written more about texts than I have written about audiences, but
those things are thought of as so separate that there are people who
read my work on audiences and other people who read my work on texts.
They're not being connected and that's troubling to me.
The texts of Star Trek have not exactly been ignored. If you
look at the bibliography, there is a lot more work out there on Star
Trek as a text than there has been on Star Trek audiences,
it's just that in the last few years that work on the audience has
started to come together. And textual analysis has been shaped by
implicit assumptions about the audience, often very critical or negative
assumptions about the audience. Robert Jewett and John Lawrence's
(1977) work on the "monomyth" of Star Trek talks
about fans as inarticulate, or unable to explain their relationship
with the text; the critic has to step in and justify it -- to its
fans. Textual critics often begin from the assumption that textual
analysis can explain why Star Trek is popular and then proceed
to choose episodes that are looked down upon by the audience. The
ignorance about the audience has shaped textual criticism and one
of the problems in a lot of purely textual analysis is that they do
not own up to the assumptions about the audience they are making,
nor are they testing those assumptions against anything other than
introspection or theoretical citation or the text itself.
I think the time is right to merge the political economy of institutions,
audience research and textual analysis in various complex ways, and
I don't think we can understand fandom without understanding all three.
It's not that I chose to write about fans instead of the text, or
that I ignore the text. I had to understand fans, and the text became
secondary to the task of understanding fans at the time I was writing
Textual Poachers. The Beauty and the Beast chapter talks
about the text a fair amount, because there the text was central to
understanding the fans. There I have all three: The properties of
the texts that enabled fan interpretation, the production decisions
that alienated the fans, and an analysis of the fans' responses. That
comes closer to the model of what I'd like to see criticism doing.
I think I also achieved that synthesis in my discussion of the Gaylaxians
in Science Fiction Audiences (Jenkins 1995).
Harrison:
It's only now that we seem to be in a moment where we could conceivably
start to think these things together. There does seem to be both an
academic and a theoretical climate where that would be possible --
a climate of vocabulary as well, of words that we could use.
Jenkins:
I think that the time is right to break down those barriers. I'm excited
by an ideological critic such as Jackie Byars and a political economist
such as Eileen Meehan (1994-1995) collaborating on the Lifetime Network:
when a political economist can collaborate with an audience researcher
then we will really have a breakthrough. Both sides have been historically
suspicious of each other's theoretical paradigms, the top-down versus
bottom-up models of the audience. From my point of view, you cannot
understand fans unless you recognize the issues of media ownership
and media access. You cannot understand why fandom is necessary as
a social practice unless you recognize that most of us are excluded
from any access to the modes of production and unable to tell the
stories that matter to us through television as a media. We are stuck,
as audience members, in a system that doesn't allow us to tell our
own stories and that won't tell the stories we want most to see told,
and therefore, the predominant materials we have to construct our
narratives are imperfect media materials. We have to use materials
that don't belong to us. We have to poach; we have to work in relation
to a field that is defined as someone else's intellectual property.
If we lived in a climate where culture belongs to the people, where
everyone had access to the dominant myths and could tell them freely
as an oral culture once told the stories of Robin Hood or Br'er Rabbit
or Coyote or whatever, then what fans do wouldn't seem strange at
all. What fans do is a continuation of the oral folklore tradition
in a society which has now put fences around intellectual property,
which is now policing the boundaries. I think the possibility of talking
about political economy and audiences together is tremendously important
and it might mute the allegedly utopian or optimistic thrust of Textual
Poachers. Poaching has to be understood as a survival mechanism
within a space where fans don't own and don't control the telling
of the story that matters to us.
Harrison:
And yet we still do need to walk that fine line between love and hate,
between a utopian configuration of the text itself and a constantly
critical stance. We do need to acknowledge that there is a double
movement of rejecting the text and at the same time embracing it intensely.
I'm not quite sure we have the vocabulary to talk about that yet.
Jenkins:
It's very hard, but it's what fans do. For me, fandom comes out of
a fascination and a frustration and those two are interlocking. Fascination
with the material and the desire to engage with it, to feel creative
about it, and a frustration that it still isn't telling the stories
we want to hear. It is not telling the narratives that matter to us.
It's not speaking to our experience so we have to continue to struggle
with it and rework it. If the fascination wasn't there, we'd just
walk away. If the frustration wasn't there and we were fully satisfied,
we'd walk away. It's only when there's a tension and we move back
and forth, struggling with the text, that the kinds of productive
work fans do becomes possible. The same is true for us as academics.
Harrison:
That's precisely what academics need to learn to do. We need to understand
how the frustration works, but also how the fascination works. Sometimes
I despair that that's simply not going to be possible, or that it's
going to be so resisted as a named central project for us to undertake
that it's never going to take hold, that one or the other is always
going to win: "This is a good text" or "This is a bad
text."
Jenkins: At
the moment, as long as we're in the business of labeling this text
as progressive and that text as reactionary, then we're going to be
stuck in that either/or mode. Whenever we say, "yes, there are
these progressive moments in the text, but they don't count because
they have been co-opted and contained by the reactionary pressures,"
then we've lost the battle. We always act as if everything was resolved,
one way or another, by the end and so the process of how we got there,
the progressive moments that incite our fantasies and our desires
and our creative imagination and our passions disappear when we start
to write. If we could talk about ideology as multivocal, we could
talk about the fact that all popular culture is not "either/or"
but "always and/but also" and that both progressive and
reactionary elements exist simultaneously in any popular text that
incites our imagination. If we could talk about the fact that all
popular texts are both strongly progressive and potentially reactionary
at the same time and that audiences are often both in their heads
at once and that we are trying to sort it out, if we as critics could
struggle to move away from some easy answer to the more complex question
of how all that works and how we, as fans, as academics, get pleasure
from it. If we could identify those progressive potentials and then
rework them, show what the text could have said but didn't, show how
its possibilities might be fully realized but weren't. If we could
talk about the mixture of fascination and frustration that we as academics
share with ourselves as fans. If.
Notes
This interview was conducted by Taylor Harrison at
the Console-ing Passions: Television, Video, and Feminist Studies
Conference April 24, 1994, in Tuscon, AZ.
1. Usually, these are fan-written, -produced, and
-distributed magazines made on shoestring budgets by a few people.
Often, especially in relation to Star Trek, they are heavily
associated with conventions and reading/viewing groups.
2. "Slash" refers to fan fiction that
depicts sexual relationships between Kirk and Spock (K/S), as in
Star Trek, or between other, usually homosexual, combinations,
such as Starsky and Hutch (S/H).
References
Bacon-Smith, Camille. 1992. Enterprising Women:
Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia:
U of Pennsylvania P.
Byars, Jackie and Eileen R. Meehan. 1994-1995. "Once
in a Lifetime: Constructing 'The Working Woman' through Cable Narrowcasting."
Camera Obscura 33/34: 13-41.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday
Life. Berkeley: U of California P.
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