Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

“I wonder how much we are writing our own show?

reader’s meaning-production remains temporary and transient, made on the run, as the reader moves nomadically from place to place; the reader’s meanings originate in response to immediate concerns and are discarded when they are no longer useful.

slash does not, however, provide a politically stable or even consistently coherent response to these concerns.

Fans, as one longtime Trekker explained, “treat the program like silly putty,” stretching its boundaries to incorporate their concerns, remolding its characters to better suit their desires.

or her relationship to the fiction and reconstructing its meanings according to more immediate interests.

devaluation of “feminized” mass culture.

While Star Trek: The Next Generation makes occasional explicit references to program history, fans are capable of reading that history into a look, a raised eyebrow, the inflection

Readers are not always resistant; all resistant readings are not necessarily progressive readings; the “people” do not always recognize their conditions of alienation and subordination.

potentially conflicting interests of producers and consumers, writers and readers. It recognizes the power