'Fanfic
is Good for Two Things - Greasing Engines and Killing Brain Cells'
(smartania.com)
Introduction
As a type of fan activity that relies on
and derives meaning from other fan activities, specifically that of
fan writing, ‘hack fiction’ represents a new complexity in the field
of fan creativity. Rather than employing the television show as its
primary material, hackers isolate the secondary text, the fan
fiction, and invert the more common trend of fan activity by
prioritising and situating this as the primary text through which
all meaning within the community is produced. Henry Jenkins has
referred to fan creativity as a form of ‘poaching’ in which the fan
attempts to gain authorship over the text by ‘continuously
re-evaluating his or her relationship to the fiction and
reconstructing its meanings according to more immediate interests’
(Jenkins, 1992: 35).
Instead of poaching
the television show, appropriating and extracting various meanings,
whether implicit or explicit, from its structure, hackers
essentially poach the poachers, stalking members of the fan fiction
community across cyberspace and penetrating their works by literally
imposing their voices upon the text. Hackers are not merely critics
of fan fiction; they go one step further. To criticise is to
maintain a distance from and a respect of the boundary of the
writer’s universe; hacking allows them the opportunity to actively
and directly disrupt that world. Hackers seek out ‘bad’ fan fiction,
fan writings which, for the hacker, do not meet a satisfactory
standard of writing and ‘hack’ the stories, inserting their own
mocking comments into the body of the original text. Labelling such
stories as ‘suckfic’, they parody the writings of a number of
(usually unwitting) fan writers and it is this ethic of parody which
forms the basis of the hacking community.
While fan fiction depends upon an intensive knowledge of the
show in order to competently communicate meaning, hack fiction
relies not only upon a knowledge of the show, but also upon an
almost theoretical, scholarly awareness of the codes and conventions
operating within fan fiction itself. This knowledge becomes the
unifying factor within the hacker community, allowing the group to
develop a sort of anti fan-fic meta-text.
The hacker creates a social atmosphere based on a potent dislike of
‘suckfic’ writing, and this environment becomes the foundation for
every type of active exchange within the community. Competence of
expression is of vital importance within the community, building
upon a pre-accepted notion of its members as inhabiting a somewhat
elevated position within fandom discourse in general.
Fan fiction writing
operates as a means of fan activity which allows the individual to
explore his or her own interpretations of the object of that
activity, in this case the television series, and also other
narrative forms such as films or comic books, or on public
personalities of whom the individual is a follower. Television fan
fiction usually involves some of the characters of a television
series, but frequently rejects the plots that have already been
developed within the diegesis of that series, replacing them with
alternative creations which correspond with the fans’ desired
outcomes or preferred readings of the texts. In this essay I explore
a subset of the fan fiction internet community, ‘hackers’, who pride
themselves on violating fan fiction writings. I specifically
concentrate on those who are active at
www.smartania.com
within the ‘Mystery Suckfic Theatre 3000’, a hacking base which
concentrates largely on fan fictions from The X-Files and
Japanese Anime fandoms and one in which I, after some difficulty and
several ‘flames’,
established myself on the boards under a pseudonym and managed to
conduct some virtual ethnographic research in order to acquire an
understanding of the underlying motivations behind what hackers do,
why they derive pleasure from their activities and to place them
within the wider context of fan activity. I will examine the notion
of ‘distinction’ within fan communities, demonstrating that hacking
functions to distinguish between ‘legitimate’ fan writers and
‘illegitimate’ fan writers and acts to establish hierarchies within
fan communities. I discuss ‘hacking’ as a weapon against other fans’
incompetence as writers, serving as a means of regulating and
manipulating fan writing activity on the net, and actively
marginalizing certain fan writings which, according to them, do not
have the right to claim authorial ownership over the text. I draw on
concepts of distinction, cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984), poaching
(Jenkins, 1992) and bricolage to analyse the complex relationship
between hackers and other fan fiction writers. And I explore the
contradictory nature of the hacking community as one which both
exploits and undermines certain fan activities while also inherently
relying upon them for the production and persistence of meaning
within the community.
How to ‘write’
correctly
Hack fiction is a culmination of
two processes: the process of writing fan fiction; and the process
of deconstructing that fan fiction in such a way that the voice of
that author is suppressed and marginalized in fan writing
subculture. Hackers punish
the incompetence of other fans because they pose a threat to what it
means to be intelligent ‘readers’ of a text. The ability to poach
the television show, to extract meaning from its farthest expanses,
to essentially ‘read between the lines’ becomes the empowering
mechanism for the reader of any text, and particularly that of the
televisual text because, as Michel de Certeau asserts, “the
television viewer cannot write anything on the screen of his set…he
has been dislodged from the product…he becomes the pure receiver”
(2003: 109). It is this resistance to becoming the ‘pure receiver’,
to being rendered silent by the production process, a muted observer
who automatically accepts and assimilates all proposed meanings
within the text, that mobilises the fan to poach. As Jenkins notes:
Fans recognise that their relationship
to the text remains a tentative one, that their pleasures often
exist on the margins of the original text and in the face of the
producer’s own efforts to regulate its meanings (Jenkins: 1992: 24).
In the view of the
hacker, however, bad fan writing reflects badly upon fan culture at
large by disrupting the potential of the fan to become the author of
the product. It functions only to serve the insecurities of the
fan-consumer by exemplifying the frustrations of fan culture: the
inability of the fan writer to properly exercise their authorial
control over the show and to unjustly represent the wider, more
competent fan writing community. One hackfic writer told me:
<<It’s also a lot harder to find decent
stuff (fan fiction) these days due to the sheer mass of it about.
Most of it (is) written by people who aren't really that interested
in gaining any skills as writers (I so hate calling them that.). It
all comes down to the writer at the end of the day. I remember
reading fics that made me feel sad, made me laugh, and left me in
awe of the writers talent …Now? After wading through 30 matrix fics
about Neo boning Agent Smith or Morpheus all I feel is the burn of
bile at the back of my throat.>> (5.1.03)
For hackfiction writers, knowing how to
read a show ‘correctly’ functions as a prerequisite to knowing how
to write the show ‘correctly’, and acts as a biased predetermination
of one’s competence of expression and communication in their
membership of the community. As Jenkins notes, ‘an individual’s
socialisation into fandom often requires learning “the right way” to
read as a fan’ (Jenkins, 1992: 89). It also works to reinforce
exactly what ‘good’ writing should inspire in the reader of fan
fiction. As one hackfic writer said:
<< I'm sat
here hacking a Blairfic when I have work by friends who are genuine
writers sat here on my computer waiting to be read. Work filled with
real emotions, real angst and fear and love and wrongness, and most
importantly its really well written and genuinely entertaining and
moving. I could be reading that instead of this lifeless,
meaningless dreck, but no. Bleh. >> (PKTechboy)
To be able to produce a legitimate
reading or interpretation of the text parallels the right of the
member to make claims about textual meaning in the show and, by
extension, in the writings of other fans, and also inherently
disallows certain readings of the show. The meanings produced
within the community then act as a lens through which initiated
members may judge subsequent readings of the texts, framing the ways
in which they interpret other fan activity. As Jenkins notes:
Fans … are responsive to the somewhat
more subtle demands placed upon them as members of
fandom-expectations about what narrative are ‘appropriate’ for
fannish interest, what interpretations are ‘legitimate’ and so
forth. Fan-produced works respond to the perceived tastes of their
desired audience and reflect the community’s generic traditions…
(Jenkins, 1992: 88).
Creating
Distinctions and Hierarchies
A particularly popular approach within
the hacking community is to attack the fan fiction writer’s failings
in making sense of the television show of which they are a fan. This
functions to disempower that writer’s claims to being a fan of the
show, whilst simultaneously elevating the hacker’s ability to make
claims about their own fan status. It also serves to explicitly
disrupt the flow of the voice of author, separating it from the
universe they have created and framing it as a degenerate and flawed
work. In one hackfic, the hacker notes,
< It
would be nice if you would at least (have) followed the plot of the
f**king show when doing a post episode story.> (Nerbie)
While in another
the writer plays the role of the fan fiction author:
"Dear Fox,
guess what? In eight months, you are going to be a father. I am
pregnant!!{{HAHA You're screwed up the ass for palimony, you little
b**ch!}} Love, Dana." She saved the document as babymulder.doc…and
printed it out. She smiled at the note.{{It was a bemused smile. She
wondered how she, such a bright, smart woman, known for the almost
baroque style of writing in her field journals could have written
such a bland and yet gloating POS}} (‘Discovery Of Love’ by Erin M.
Blair. Hacked by PKTechboy)
The use of a tactic such as this to
criticise the fanfic writer operates on two levels: that of play and
humour,
unintended by the original author and discontinuous with their work;
but also, and more importantly, that of distinction. It works to
promote the hacker as a better writer of the show and also as a
better reader, and thus fan, of the show. Devotion to and an
intensive knowledge of the show are important prerequisites for
determining the nature of the true fan. If these are not
demonstrated, then the fan’s right to claim such an identity is
stripped of them. Hackers deploy a kind of postmodern ideal of
knowledge as purely functional, using their knowledge in favour of
and against others. As in the above example, lax characterisation
and inconsistency of expression become a measure of the incompetence
of the writer as fan. They expose the individual for what they are,
a deviant, in the eyes of the hacker. By imposing themselves onto
and disrupting the work of the fan, hackers actively enforce their
jurisdiction over the planes of certain fan activities. Hackers
re-map the boundaries of fan creativity, incorporating certain
‘legitimate’ materials into an idea of ‘normative’ fan writing
culture, while excluding and alienating others. They essentially lay
claim to certain notions of ‘authentic’ fan territories, while
simultaneously disowning others.
What hackers do through poaching other
fan writings, then, is similar to Bourdieu’s idea of taste in class
distinctions, that is, the ‘propensity and capacity to appropriate…a
given class of objects or practices (which) is the generative
formula of lifestyle, a unitary set of distinctive preferences (Bourdieu,
1984: 173). Bourdieu noted that taste is never ‘pure’; rather it is
always embedded in social meaning. He argues that tastes are
the practical affirmation of an
inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be
justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of
other tastes…The most intolerable thing for those who regard
themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the
sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be
separated (1984: 56-57)
The hacker subscribes to the existence
of certain implicit means, a set of appropriate criteria, through
which ‘tasteful’ negotiations of the individual’s relationship with
the product, the televisual text, may be made. They believe that
hackers, as a community, are the possessors of a legitimate culture
of fan writing, and that this bestows upon them the right to
de-legitimise writing that does not conform to their particular
standards of taste, rendering it ‘distasteful’. The hacker
demarcates certain efforts by the fan community to make meaning from
the text as authentic and legitimate, in turn seeking to naturalise
and normalise these textual deconstructions, while actively
marginalizing other ‘tasteless’ readings. Essentially hackers are a
community of presumably well-educated fans with greater intellectual
and creative cultural capital (Bourdieu: 1984) or, to be more
specific, greater ‘subcultural capital’
(Thornton: 1995). Thornton argues that subcultural capital operates
both on the level of distinction and of cultural capital, noting
that it ‘is embodied in the form of being “in the know”, using (but
not over-using) current slang and (putting) a premium on the ‘second
nature’ of their knowledge’ (1995: 11-12). Hackers bestow such a
privileged a priori status upon themselves through the
‘insider’ knowledge they mobilise against other fan writers in order
to justify the ‘suckfic’ writer’s deficiencies as both fans and
writers, and simultaneously to elevate the hacker’s role within the
sphere of fan activity. In their use of exclusive, ‘hip’ humour and
slang as both a weapon against other fans and as maintainers of
their own identity, hackers reinforce their superiority and
legitimacy as fans vis-à-vis explicit displays of (sub)cultural
capital through knowledge and promote distinctions between fan
subcultures based upon cultural capital.
This relegation of the fan fiction
writer’s status to that of ‘suckfic’ author also serves the purpose
of imposing a hierarchical structure on the conduct of fan writing
at large based on notions of distinction. Hackers distinguish
between fan subcultures according to, as Macdonald notes, levels and
hierarchies of knowledge and access to ‘inside’ information (1998:
136). Hackers construct a hierarchy based on competencies of
creative expression within fan literature and, through this, lay
claim to knowledge and abilities which justify their prestigious
status within fan communities. The social role of the hacker is not
only to ‘violate’ the work of other authors, it is also to establish
and normalise a certain code of conduct for fan writers. By
explicitly commenting upon other writers’ taste and fan knowledge,
hackers impose a certain mastery over both the original text (the
television series) and other fan’s interpretations of that text,
thereby enforcing a code of hierarchy based on the fan’s (sub)cultural
capital. Hills notes that fans can be seen to construct hierarchies
by “competing over fan knowledge (and) access to the object of
fandom” (2002: 46). Hackers determine their privileged position
within this hierarchy by establishing an elitist environment based
on direct violation of the most fundamental signifier of the fan’s
status: their knowledge and interpretation of the object of that
fandom. Hacking grants a privileged status within the hierarchy to
those ‘authentic’ writers who can demonstrate their legitimacy as
fans of the show.
Playing the Bricoleur
This is not to imply, however, that
hackers insist on a singular way of writing fan fiction. The fact
that they believe that there is a ‘correct’ way to read and ‘write’
the show does not mean that there is no original way to write fan
fiction. Rather, they insist on the ability to emphasise the
author’s voice in the writings in order to fully communicate the
meaning which they have drawn from the text of the television show
to other readers and writers of fan fiction. This is subsumed into
the wider ideology of the hacking community as a means of
maintaining the constancy of the bricolage effect of fan writings.
If fan writers can continue to ‘poach’ the text so that they gain a
certain ‘authorial’ status over the text and essentially make the
text submissive to the re-workings of their discretion and the
imposition of their meanings, then the activity of fan writing
assumes a bricolage effect, a challenge to the dominant culture,
perceived and embodied within the original text of the show. Fan
writers engage in a game of appropriation and re-appropriation of
the text, forming their own style which, though not entirely
subversive of the original text, does empower and prioritise the
fan-author voice rather than that of the original ‘author’ of the
show. Fan writing activities become the fan’s symbolic “gestures and
signs of refusal” (Muggleton: 2003: 200) to the mainstream culture
of the commodified show in which the fan’s role is to ‘read’ but not
to ‘write’. For the hacker, however, the bricolage effect of fan
writings can only be maintained through the production and
perpetuation of new and original styles of writing and ways of
interpreting the original text as a means of empowering the
otherwise ‘silent’ voice of the fan. For the hacker, the existence
of ‘bad’ fan writing, that which does not provide insight or
inspiration and which does not prioritise the position of the fan
writer as ‘author’ counteracts the purpose of fan writing. Hackers
then uphold the ‘virtues’ of the fan fiction community by literally
filtering the ‘bad’ from the ‘good’, the ‘legitimate’ from the
‘illegitimate’, through ‘hacking’ and negating the voice of the fan
that fails to achieve these objectives.
Hackers also claim that they are making
‘bad’ fan fiction more accessible to the fan fiction audience
through the imposition of their voices over that of the original
writer. Smartania.com defines hackfic as follows:
<<When a member of Smartania takes the
above (fan or ‘suck’ fic) and gives it the Mystery Science Theatre
3000 treatment, thus making it a little more tolerable.>>
While they are violating fan fiction
that deviates from the wider fannish ideologies of conducting
‘proper’ readings of the text, they are also simultaneously acting
as subconscious monitors of this deviance, enforcing a code of
resistance to the possibility of fan fiction failing to achieve its
fan-empowerment objectives. This operates as an attempt to
de-popularise and discourage similar appropriations of the text. Yet
for hackers the ‘correct way’ to read the show does not constrain
the fan fiction writing community at all; fan fiction for them is
justifiable as long as it competently represents the author’s voice
and adds a new textual meaning to the show itself. Hackers do not
hate fan fiction; they merely oppose sub-standard representations of
it. Many of them have written fiction themselves. Asked this
question of whether they like fan fiction, one hacker told me,
<<I've come across some really
well-written fanfic. And hell, I've written the odd fanfic myself
and it gave me the practice and got me back into writing my own
original stuff after I hadn't done it for years. So I can't really
knock it at all. But there is SO MUCH CRAP out there that it's
become near-impossible to wade through it to find any good stuff.>>
(EPK75)
It would therefore be incorrect to
assume that the majority of hackers reject the idea of fan fiction
itself; if anything they support it. In fact the hacker serves to
rejuvenate fan fiction writing as a subcultural movement by
constantly re-fetishising the original text of the television show,
ensuring that it always remains a mystical, meaning-laden object for
competent writers of the fan fiction community. They promote the
notion that the fan writer’s voice should be empowered within their
writing and, by extension, within the commodified object, the
television show, itself. The text can be ‘rewritten’ in multiple,
novel ways as long as the voice of the fan acts as a foundation for
its writing. The fan writer must find original ways of performing
within the constraints of fan fiction writing. In his discussion of
‘ways of operating’ and ‘instructions for use’, de Certeau says that
the person must:
create for himself a space in which he
can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the
language. Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to
live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a
degree of plurality and creativity (de Certeau, 2003: 108).
Fan fiction, for the hacker, is
concerned with exactly this: with ways of establishing a ‘degree of
plurality and creativity’ within an environment which impresses
certain rules and regulations upon the writer. For the hacker, the
‘legitimate’ fan writer finds multiple ways of rewriting and
re-privileging the text. ‘Problematic’ fan writing, then, is that
which does not establish the necessary degree of creativity and
plurality required for the fiction to be viewed, by the hacker, as a
‘legitimate’ rewriting of the show.
Celebrating ‘Trash’
However, it is not enough to say that
hackers merely act as monitors of the activities of other fan
authors, omniscient protectors of the virtues and meanings with
which authors instil their works. The hackers’ position is an
altogether more complex and contradictory one than this. One hacker
offered the following reasons for their work:
<<Hacking fan fiction is like therapy.
It lets you get all the bad feelings that you are left with after a
horrible fic that violates one of your favorite TV shows or books
out of your system. It’s also the chance to be a big meany and be
accused of being “just jealous” by the “Sunshine up your ass happy
moron brigade”(c)>>Nerys. (Nerbie)
This notion of hacking as therapy is an
important one in developing an understanding of the reasons behind
the hackers’ motivations for hacking, why they are driven to hack
fan fiction that they believe violates a show rather than
maintaining an observational distance from and distaste of the work.
By ‘violating’ fan fiction writings, hacking not only allows them
the opportunity to impose a voice upon another, deriving their own
meaning from it and simultaneously exaggerating and stifling the
voice of the fan fiction author, but also becomes a means of
indirectly negotiating their own positions in relation to the text
of the television show. It improves their own potential for deriving
meaning from the show while also providing a relatively safe
framework through which they may ‘test the water’ as such. Using as
a medium and a stimulus the writings of other fans, hackers are free
to play with their own notions of what it means to be a fan,
exploring their understandings of both the text and of fan culture
itself. Hack fiction allows them the freedom to assert themselves,
to ‘be a big meany’ and to develop their own original and critical
style and to test the constraints of fan fiction.
As such, they negotiate the boundaries of the fan fiction
universe, allowing themselves the flexibility to cross these
boundaries, while simultaneously reinforcing them for other writers.
This gives them the opportunity to act as commentators on the very
process of fan fiction writing itself.
Furthermore, hackers themselves act as
bricoleurs upon the fan texts, viewing them as matter for public
consumption and moulding and re-shaping them to suit their own
tastes and desires. Fan fiction thus acts as the stimulus for the
production of meaning within the community by which this new style
is formulated and explored. The author becomes the unknowing victim
of the hacker, subject to the imposition of the hacker’s meanings
and the marginalisation of his own voice within the text. The
hacking community is evidence that the pattern of bricolage within
fandom is not merely a visible component of fan activity but also
persists and reproduces internally, within and across fan activity,
the bricoleur acting upon the bricoleur. This act of deconstructing
the deconstruction, of recontextualising an already recontextualised
meaning, forces the hacker into a complex position. While hackers
boast about their ‘violations’ of other fans’ works, they must also
realise that it is this work that drives them, that essentially
inspires and motivates the entire community. It is for exactly this
reason that the meanings for the hacking community remain such
implicit, unspoken ones. While they may be enforcing their own form
of punishment upon other writers, they are also being mobilised to
write by these writers. For the hacker, then, the writings of ‘bad’
fan fiction authors do, in fact, possess those meanings which they
so fervently deny in their hacks. They continuously brand the works
that they hack as ‘meaningless dreck’, telling the authors that they
‘suck’, but before they hack they must somehow acknowledge, even
unconsciously, that the works are endlessly meaningful and, above
all, that they derive a strange and inexplicable pleasure from its
reading. They unwittingly celebrate what Jeffrey Sconce has termed
‘trash’ culture with reference to fans of ‘paracinema’, establishing
and reinforcing ‘a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic
turned subcultural sensibility’ (1995: 372) in which meaning is
produced through an intertextual dependency on other fans and other
fandoms, in this case, ‘suckfic’ writers. For the paracinema fan,
the emphasis is upon the extremities of ‘badness’ necessary, as
Hills notes, to ‘revalue “bad film”’ (2002: 60). For hackers, the
‘trashy’ nature of the text produced by the ‘suckfic’ writer becomes
the focal point for ‘celebration’, offering the hacker the excesses
of ‘bad’ writing necessary to ‘revalue’, to give new meaning to the
‘suckfic’ text. The process of hacking would not exist were it not
for other fans’ readings of the show, and hackers are wholly
dependent upon the meaning these fans produce; they must exploit and
exaggerate it in order to hack. The ‘bad’ or ‘trash’ fan fiction,
then, is the meaning-laden object of the hacker’s bricolage activity
upon the text, becoming, as Hebdige notes, that familiar object that
warrants analysis as a sign of collected meaning, an object that
must be ‘worn’ in such a way as to violate that collected meaning (Hebdige,
1979). The collected meaning is that which underlies fan fiction,
that claim by the writer to authorial status of the text; the ‘sign’
that must be violated becomes, for the hacker, the ‘bad’ author, the
one who does not deserve this right, yet whose claim persists. The
hacker’s gesture of refusal towards the collected meaning, then,
becomes the process he engages in, a literal attempt to negate all
‘illegitimate’ claims to authorial status. In this way, hackers not
only use other fans as a referent, they also use themselves as such.
It is impossible for hackers to understand their culture without
firstly understanding fan fiction culture; it is impossible for them
to hack fan fiction without firstly, and crucially, examining their
own position within that culture. They represent their concerns and
doubts with regard to their positions in relation to the wider
expanses of fan culture, a postmodernist condition of uncertain,
fragmented identity. They violate and re-invent the texts of fans to
reflect these concerns, juxtaposing a celebration of the objectives
of fan writing with deep contempt for those same objectives. As one
hacker noted:
<<…there
were a lot of fanfic writers who became "elite", had a lot of fans,
and let this go to their heads. I just wanted to shake these people
and say "you write... fanfic.">> (EPK75)
Conclusion
In these ways, and indeed in many more
ways which are beyond the scope of this paper, the hacking community
inhabits a complex space within fan territory. Concerned with the
writings of fans and the production of meaning, they seek to
safeguard and protect the fans’ relationship with the text, giving
the voice of the ‘authentic’ and ‘legitimate’ fan writer precedence
over his authorial claim to the text. They simultaneously work to
marginalize the works of certain authors, denying them their voices
within fan culture and their meanings in relation to the primary
text of the television show, whilst creating and reinforcing
distinctions and hierarchies within and between fan communities.
However, they are also essentially bound to the texts that they
hack, forcing them to at least unconsciously accept and acknowledge
the meanings produced by these ‘deviant’ fan writers. In the process
of denying them these meanings and performing the rituals of hacking
practice upon them, they are coerced into a mutually complex
relationship with them, one which constantly reinforces their
dependence upon ‘suckfic’ writers for the production and maintenance
of meaning within the hacking community and intrinsically causing
them to continuously question, negotiate and re-examine their own
positions within the broader expanses of fan culture.
Contact (by e-mail):
Fiona Carruthers
References
Baym, Nancy K., Tune In, Log On:
Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community, London: Sage, 2000
Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A
Social Critique Of The Judgment Of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984
De Certeau, Michel, ‘The Practice Of
Everyday Life’, in Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (eds.), The
Audience Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 2003
Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: The
Meaning Of Style, London: Metheun, 1979
Hills, Matt, Fan Cultures, London
and New York: Routledge, 2002
Jenkins, Henry, Textual Poachers:
Television Fans And Participatory Culture, London: Routledge,
1992
Macdonald, Angela, ‘Uncertain Utopia:
Science Fiction Media Fandom And Computer Mediated Communication’,
in Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (eds.), Theorising Fandom:
Fans, Subculture And Identity, New Jersey: Hampton, 1998
Muggleton, David, ‘Inside Subculture:
The Postmodern Meaning Of Style’, in Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn
(eds.), The Audience Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 2003
Sconce, Jeffrey, ‘“Trashing” the
Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”,
Screen 36(4), 1995
Thornton, Sarah, Club Cultures:
Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1995
Electronic Sources:
http://www.smartania.com
Accessed April 2003.
▲
◄ |