Textual Poachers

Textual poaching is a term popularized by scholar of fandom Henry Jenkins and used to articulate the processes by which dedicated fans respond to popular media. In this formulation, fans are not simply passive consumers of popular texts but “become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” (Jenkins 1992, 24). Fans, often constructed as mere dupes of the official culture industry, are in fact savvy, subversive readers operating outside of the cultural industry's paradigms—especially since they are not only readers. Jenkins emphasizes fans as producers of new cultural material: fans “poach” their favored texts to create a variety of new analytical and creative works. These works include message board and blog posts, self-published zines, fanfiction, art, films, “filk” songs, and fan “vids”—clips from televison shows or films set to music.

[Page 1446]In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes popular readers in terms of poaching: “Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (1984, 174). This articulation of reading practices forms the theoretical basis for Jenkins's discussion of fandom; he argues that de Certeau's theories enable us to discuss the ways in which those outside the realm of official cultural institutions partcipate in interpretation and production of meaning. Jenkins provides a workable description of the process of fannish acivity; he also argues that “speaking as a fan is a defensible position within the debates surrounding mass culture” (Jenkins 1992, 23)—a position taken up by later fan scholars, or “aca-fans”—and that fannish readings of media texts are both worthwhile in and of themselves and useful to academic critics of those media texts. Of particular interest is that fans, unlike de Certeau's isolated nomadic readers, operate within a community context: the fandom. Fans do not simply create new works from their spoils but also circulate those works; these fan productions inspire other fan productions, in turn.

Of all the forms of textual poaching engaged in by fans, fanfiction has received the most attention, likely because it is nearly identical to long-recognized practices within the literary world. Fanfiction uses other creators' characters and settings—specific characters and settings, from a particular preexisting work, that the reader is expected to recognize as such—to tell a new story. This, of course, is a well-attested practice within published literature, even after the advent of modern copyright law; recent examples include Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Gregory Maguire's Wicked, and Geraldine Brooks's Pulitzer Prize–winning March. The only practical difference between fanfiction and these literary works is that fanfiction circulates unofficially. This is often due to legal restrictions—most of the fanfiction in circulation is for in-copyright texts, and therefore fans stay on the right side of the law by not publishing their work for profit. Historically, this was not always the case; David Brewer, discussing the development of copyright law in the eighteenth century, describes the competing discourses of the “economy of scar-city”—basically, that circulation of an author's characters outside of that author's text would diminish their value—and the “economy of abundance”—that circulation would in fact increase value. Both of these discourses are still in evidence today.

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