Fandom: From Geek
Culture to the
Mainstream
CHIN2348. Week 4.
Premise
Genre
Storytelling
Audiences
Fandoms
Recap
• Economic
• Organic
• Cultural Participatory Culture
• Global
• Technological
1947
“The culture industry, in other words, still
presents itself as a constellation of economic,
cultural, and technological forces that are
actively involved in the shaping of consumers’
demands and recreational activities, but the
outcome of this process is far from guaranteed.
[…] In fact, the serial character of mass cultural
production ensures the industry’s continued
attention to shifting consumer tastes and
demands, even though the primary use-value of
cultural commodities – that of entertainment –
remains unchanged.’ (BRINKER 2022: 33-34)
カツベン！ / 【王牌辯士】 /Talking the Pictures
[Link]
Détourment (1950s)
1980s
[Link]
• Jaroslav Švelch. (2018). Gaming the Iron Curtain.
Players’ Histories
(1960s – present) • High Score (Netflix 2020): MIT students who made
Missile Command harder.
Profit-driven analogue
media piracy
• Taking China as an example, the distribution and
consumption of pirated audioviusal products spread
rapidly in urban public spaces after the country opened
up to global economics in the late 1970s.
• Analogue media content that would otherwise be
blocked by censors permeated the media life of urban
audiences, who were craving for the experience of
global screen cultures.
• Audioviusal piracy even impacted the aspiring domestic
creative industries and provided significant sources of
inspiration for those who would become auteurs of the
contemporary Chinese cinema.
“On the one hand, the physical places of fandom, such as sport stadia, the
venues of fan conventions, or a living room decorated with fan memorabilia,
constitute sites of appropriation of popular culture as well as sites of interaction
between and among fans. On the other hand, such places often amount to the
crudest display of commercialism, commodification and a society based on an
economy of signs, simulation and spectacle. …the cultural implication of fandom
as audiences develop a sense of place and home, and consequently, identities
and communities in fan consumption” (Sandvoss 2005: 53).
The “D-Generation”
“These new forms of image making and imagination, conditioned by the unruly structure
of piracy, have fashioned an alternative mode of organizing social experience and
enabled the creation of a seemingly impossible public sphere in China—one that is
radically different from the official, hegemonic public. Although this pirate cultural system
does not really challenge the fundamental political economy of domestic or global media
capital—after all, piracy is just another side (albeit the underground side) of the same
market economy—piracy’s sociopolitical function as an alternative horizon of public
experience may still gain its own momentum. And this alternative public sphere may not
be unique to China at all. Instead, it may point to a radical new meaning of “public” born
of a global cultural movement marked by a profound transformation of cultural
representation and reception in the digital age, from multiplexes to BitTorrent, from
global Hollywood to YouTube, from CNN to WikiLeaks . . . ” (Li 2012: 561)
Sam Voutas (2017) Gaoming Liu (2005)
The Spread of Informal Media Economy
Nollywood – A national cinema of
pirates
Fandom/Fan Studies
“Fandom” as Practice
Fandom
“[A]n institution of theory and criticism, a semistructured
space where competing interpretations and evaluations of
common texts are proposed, debated, and negotiated and
where readers speculate about the nature of the mass media
and their own relationship to it” (Jenkins 1992: 86).
Poaching, Ripping,
Roaming
• Translation
• Creative works: writing, vidding, crafting, archiving,
podcasting, and playing
• Fan Conventions: Cos-play, performance, purchasing and
trading, panels
• Fan activism
• Forensic fandom
“In the name of the Doctor and the Tardis and the Holy
Companion. Amen.” (Link)
“In his seminal Textual Poachers, for example, Jenkins (1992: 1) asserts
that media fans are “largely female, largely white, [and] largely middle
class”—indeed, that is one of the very first things he tells us about fans.
However, it is difficult for the reader to evaluate this assertion, as
intuitively correct as it may seem: How were the variables defined? What
does “largely” mean—a preponderance, simple majority, or
supermajority? Is there variance among fandoms, such that some
communities are whiter than others? While I believe in the depth and
richness of qualitative methods, they are unable to answer the basically
quantitative question, how white is fandom? with satisfactory precision.”
(Woo 2018: 246)
Evans (2024). Fan Translations Beyond the Global North
Networking Time
• Do you consider yourself a fan of something?
• Are you aware of the existence of your fandom?
• What do you do in and for your fandom?
• What are the differences between your experience of fandom and the
one described by Henry Jenkin?
Fans/Geeks in Media
[Link]
The multiple fan sites on Chinese social media (Yin 2020, 480)
Fan (audiovisual) translation
Fan AVT - “a form of service to the fan community: it
availability versus copyright (Dwyer allows texts to be consumed in languages other than the
2017) ones they were created in before an official translation is
produced and distributed, or as an alternative to it”
(Evans 2019: 178).
amateurism versus professionalism
(Orrego-Carmona 2020)
innovation versus exploitation
(Zwischenberger 2022)
ethics versus affect (Pérez-
González 2014; 2020)
Rocío Baños & Jorge Díaz-Cintas (2023) Exploring new forms of audiovisual translation in the age of digital media: cybersubtitling and cyberdubbing, The
Translator, DOI: 10.1080/13556509.2023.2274119
Informal translation, started from 4,000 USD and 100 hours per episode (Dwyer 2017)
[Link]
[Link]
Fansubbing
[Link]
[Link]
[Link]
“The translated foreign content found widespread consumption among
the Chinese audience, and the impact of these products should not be
underestimated. However, the mainstreaming of local cultural products
soon left little space for such foreign content to captivate local fans.”
(Zhang 2024: 422)
人人影視 /YYETs (2005-2021)
[Link]
• the history of cinematic pirates in
the post-reform China (since 1978)
and
• their complex legacy entangled
deeply with the Cultural Cold War
• the growth of Chinese filmmakers
and creative industries
• new challenges posed by digital
economy to the unsolved issue of
copyright protection
[Link]
Tulsa King (2022)
Content Transportation
in videos
Hanna Ardent (2012)
Podcasts
Listeners of Podcast (eMarketer 2024) Content Preferences (Huang 2024: 73)
Preview
