Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture

speak from a position of collective identity, to forge an alliance with a community of others in defense of tastes which, as a

and reader is so flimsy, fanzine editors and writers remain more responsive than commercial producers to the desires and interests of their readership.

Her expertise over the program, the emotional investment she has made in the characters, justifies an increasingly critical stance toward the institutions producing and circulating those materials as does her ability to appeal to common experiences and understandings from a broader fan community.

Such a reductive model ascribes little or no agency to the reader while attributing tremendous power and authority to authorial discourse.

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.

lingering feminine/affective, rather than feminist, connotations.

For most fans, meaning-production is not a solitary and private process but rather a social and public one.

individual episodes are evaluated against an idealized conception of the series, according to their conformity with the hopes and expectations

media fans take pleasure in making intertextual connections across a broad range of media texts.