Abigail De Kosnik

"Fiske, Feminism, Folk Culture, Fandom: From a Defense of Television Viewing to an Aesthetics of the Digital Literary"

John Fiske's seminal work Television Culture (1987) is largely a defense of television fandom. Avid TV viewers, Fiske argues throughout TC, are not passive receivers of mass cultural production (as Theodor Adorno claimed); instead, fans actively make meanings from the shows they watch, meanings which are often resistant to, or aberrant from, the intended or "preferred" (to use Stuart Hall's term) meanings of the shows' producers.

Fiske defends the discourses of TV fans by borrowing theories and concepts from feminism and folk studies. He analyzes the polysemic nature of fan interpretations using psychoanalytic theories of "the feminine as decentered," the multiplicity of feminine social roles, and what Elaine Showalter calls "the wild zone" of women's culture, where women's textual readings escape patriarchy's ideological control. Fiske also analyzes fan discourse as akin to women's gossip, which he valorizes as oral culture, often serving as "a language of the oppressed" and as "social cement."

Similarly, Fiske compares fans' meaning-making work to folk culture, which is not only oral but unstandardized, outside of established social institutions, and characterized by informal transmission, making no differentiations between transmitters and receivers of culture.

This paper continues Fiske's project of legitimizing three types of culture often labeled as "low" -- fan culture, women's culture, and folk culture. I apply Fiske's methods of analyzing fan speech to two contemporary genres of fan writing: fan fiction and fan commentary. I argue that fan fiction and fan commentary, which are now published to mass audiences on the Web, can be regarded as digital literature. Although many cultural critics dismiss both fan fiction and fan commentary as ephemeral or trivial, I claim that these genres have yielded many more masterworks of electronic literature than the hypertext lit genre that was much heralded in academic circles in the 1990s. Fan fiction (on sites such as LiveJournal, Fanfiction.net, and Dreamwidth) is the vanguard of experimental Internet fiction; fan commentary (on sites such as Television Without Pity, as well as numerous show-specific websites) leads the way in innovating new forms of online non-fiction.

I propose a set of aesthetic categories for fan writing, expanding on Fiske's uses of feminist and folk culture theories, which can serve as a basis for assessing and appreciating fan fiction and fan commentary as literary achievements. These aesthetic categories include: the extent to which fan texts dialogue with source texts, and realize the latent potential for multiplicity of meanings in the source texts; the "weaving" together of producers' preferred meanings with fan-generated resistant and aberrant meanings in fans' writing; the similarities between fans' literary output, women's gossip, and folklore.

Fiske employed concepts found in feminist and folk studies to establish that fans who thought and spoke about television texts were not passive and unintelligent, but active and complex cultural interpreters. He succeeded in elevating fan speech to the rank of socially valuable discourse. Building on his work, I argue that exemplars of fan writing are worthy of the status of literary art.