Jonathan Gray

"What About Hate? Expanding Notions of the Active Audience"

A key part of John Fiske’s legacy is as a champion of pleasure or jouissance, that key quality that was seen to domesticate and tame mass culture, allowing audiences to shape it into popular culture. In his interest in audience “activity,” Fiske turned his and media and cultural studies’ attention to audiences enjoying wrestling or quiz shows, appreciating Madonna or tabloids, and “making do” with and repurposing malls, jeans, and beaches. In doing so, he and others of his generation opened up considerable space for fan studies and even for discerning academics to admit the occasional fandom without needing to write confessionals and renunciations thereafter, and he called upon us to do more than simply wag a disapproving, well-manicured finger at popular tastes.

But if Fiske championed jouissance and plaisir, what about déplaisir? What about displeasure and hate? A quick tour through the Internet confirms that while many people enjoy and take pleasure in the media, we can often find as many whose activity comes at the level of disavowal, distaste, displeasure, and dissatisfaction. Thus, for instance, if a film or television show is an open text that beckons for us to research how its audiences make sense of it, those audiences will likely include many who actively dislike the text too, who create significant meaning in doing so, and who may even experience pleasure in such anti-fandom. Some websites walk a thin line between love and hate of a text, while others indulge criticism, whether playful or very serious. If Bourdieu taught us anything, it is to be suspicious of such judgments of taste, but anti-fandom cannot be dismissed as class snobbery alone. A whole world of meaning exists in dislike, and vast swathes of audiences are anti-fans, at least at some points in time, and of certain texts. And thus it is just as important for us to ask what this other form of audience activity means.

This paper will work from the assumption that Fiske’s intervention in media, audience, and textual studies was vital and profound, but it will then try to account for those who dislike texts, genres, or entire media. The past twenty years of fan studies have told us a great deal about audience pleasure and its relationships to textuality, the culture industries, and everyday life, but I will also argue that it is time for media and cultural studies to add a critical understanding of hate, dislike, distaste, and anti-fandom. The paper will be conceptual in basis, but will also draw upon examples from past audience research projects.