Positioning Fans

Amanda Howell's article The X-Files, X-Philes and X-Philia: Internet fandom as a site of convergence highlights the power struggles inherent to the relationship between fans and producers. Fans are often positioned as the 'powerless elite': possessing superior knowledge and interpretation of their chosen text, yet impotent and unable to actually exert any sort of influence. The story of the X-Philes (avid fans of the TV series The X-Files) includes a long and convoluted relationship with their particular big bad: Twentieth Century Fox. Fox itself was slow to utilize the internet as a convergent platform for the show, and in the absence of an official site, thousands of unofficial fan sites cropped up. These sites often involved 'textual poaching', as coined by Henry Jenkins as the fan practice of appropriating textual elements for their own cultural purposes. The results of this poaching (movies, sound bytes, fan fiction, slash etc) was not welcomed by Fox, despite the fact, as one fan pointed out, that it really worked for their benefit:

Since the inception of The X-Files and its original meager ratings, fans of the show began demonstrating their support through creative expressions here on the WWW... A vast majority of these WWW sites were created by personal Web authors such as myself. We don't want money, we don't want notoriety - we simply wish to express ourselves and our belief in the show... In essence, 20th Century Fox TV couldn't have paid for a better advertising scheme than the free one the X-Philers were bringing to the Web.

As you can imagine, fans were sent polite requests to 'cease and desist', followed by not-so-nice letters and law suits.

However, X-Philes do consider themselves to have a much more respectful 'relationship' with the show's creator, Chris Carter. It is part of X-Philes folk lore that during the shows early seasons, the creator and writers of the show used to chat with fans on the internet after the airing of episodes. Indeed, the writers even wrote one fan into the series as an homage, and a small group of recurring characters (The Lone Gunmen) were generally accepted to be characters that directly represented the avid fans (like a Mary-Sue).

So how do fans reposition themselves from being a 'powerless elite'? Jenkins' concept of textual appropriation positions fans as a valid constituent of media audiences. Jenkins’ principle assertion is the ongoing evolution of media consumption from merely a spectator culture to a participatory culture, with the introduction of new media technology greatly advancing this process. Fans, once the passive, powerless ‘peasants’ of media culture, can now be ‘proprietors’, using new media tools to participate in activities and create their own texts. These empowered consumer/producers can transform and extend the original textual experience into rich and detailed cultural productions and social interactions.

Jenkins describes fan cultures as complex and diverse subcultural communities that are constructed as institutions of theory, analysis and re-creation. Specific fan activities such as ‘zines’ (fan magazines), fan fiction, ‘slash’ (secondary textual constructions of homoerotic affairs between an original text’s protagonists), fan music video and fan message boards, are intensified and enhanced through computer mediated communication. Whilst prejudices and misconceived stereotypes often leveled at fans, who operate from an area of “cultural marginality” and “social weakness”, Jenkins positions fandom as a firmly justifiable and defensible perspective surrounding mass media.

An interesting examination of a specific X-Philes community is from the article “An electronic community of female fans of The X-Files,” by S. R. Wakefield, from the Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol.29, 2001, no.3, pp. 130-138. This article examines a specific online community created by fans of ‘Scully’, the main female X-Files character, named the Order of the Blessed Saint Scully the Enigmatic. Particular attention is paid to the (often simultaneous) camaraderie and tension present in the group, the emergence of hierarchies, and the development of specific language and jargon, and how the fans poach and manipulate the original text. One of the most interesting features of this particular community is their repositioning of Scully. She is explicitly cast in different roles depending on the nature of the discussion (as saint, as sexpot, as the everywoman), and the fans create relational positions for themselves accordingly (as nun, as gazer, as sister).

So, after all that, how can fans reposition themselves? Textual poaching is proffered as a legitimat practice of cultural value, yet obviously the actual producers aren't always happy about it. One potential solution is proposed by Steve Silberman in his article 'The War Against Fandom":

The most sane compromise I've seen is Chris Fusco and Peter Duke's notion of "Fan Asset" sites: archives of authorized downloadable files for use by fans to build their own sites, within approved guidelines. Fusco, one of the creators of the official X-Files site, tells me he hopes to launch the first such site for X-philes on the Fourth of July.

(Umm, that article was written in 2000, and I couldn't find any such site. But still, it's a good idea.)