the reader “creates” the text, fan fiction is a deliberate
reinterpretation and a hands-on change of the narra-
tive as it is rewritten and reinserted into the system,
even if it is a parallel fan-system. The term poaching
is often used in this context, meaning the taking or
acquiring of something in a clandestine way, a form
or pirating, trespassing or a contraventional take-
over. This is the activity at the core of fan fiction and
where we can follow the workings of the abstract ma-
chine of hacktivism.
In his ethnographic study of fan cultures, Textual
Poachers, media theorist Henry Jenkins introduced a
concept of participatory culture, differing fans from
ordinary consumers (Jenkins 1992). These are con-
sumers who also produce, readers who write, and
spectators who participate. Parallel to these there are
also enthusiastic fans that do not produce but still
know every line in the scripts and these fans often
form a support layer in the fan cultures. Jenkins
stresses the co-production part of how popular nar-
ratives have their own life among fans. Fans often
have an anti-commercial attitude to their fandom,
afraid to “sell-out” and regard their subculture as
more “true to the original” than what is often pro-
duced as official sequels. This creates situations where
fans re-edit movies so that they better fit into what
the fans see as the “original intent”, cutting away
characters they don’t like or altering dialogues. It is a
whole subgenre itself called Fancuts.
To describe this, Jenkins borrows de Certeau’s term
‘poaching’ to characterize the relationship between
fans and original authors of media texts as “an ongo-
ing struggle for possession of the text and for control
over its meanings.” (Jenkins 1992: 24) Poaching is the
consumers’ poetic art of “making do” and seizing a
new relationship. According to Jenkins it is a theory
of appropriation, not “misreading”, as a misreading
preserves proper authorial meanings over reader’s
meanings, and breaking the authorial ones would
produce less worthy results. Instead poaching is an
“impertinent raid on the literary preserve that takes
away only those things that are useful or pleasurable
to the reader.” (Jenkins 1992: 24) He quotes de Cer-
teau:
Far from being writers ... readers are travellers; 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 (De Certeau 1984: 174)This is a fluid form of reading and of opposing a
fixed and classifiable form of reading. Poaching sug-
gests an open form of reading, emphasising the proc-
ess of making meaning, clearing way for popular in-
terpretation. De Certeau argues that it is a “type of
cultural bricolage through which readers fragment
texts and reassemble the broken shards according to
their own blueprints, salvaging bits and pieces of the
found material in making sense of their own social
experience.” (Jenkins 1992: 26) This way of reading
differs from the way we are taught to read in school,
dominated as it is by the textual producers, the dom-
inant classes exercising the “mastery of language”.
There, students are supposed to read for authorial
meaning, to consume the narrative without leaving
their own marks upon it. It is the teacher’s red pen
that is the tool for discipline and control and the aim
of reading is to decipher the text “correctly”. The text
should be an objective tool, only to be read in spe-
cific ways, with respect, and as instructed.
Poaching is a struggle over the power of text and of
who has the right to reinterpret the cultural goods
and narratives of our days. Poachers move over the
texts like the old nomads discussed earlier by De
Certeau.Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a posi-
tion of cultural marginality and social weakness.
Like other popular readers, fans lack direct access to
the means of commercial cultural production and
have only the most limited resources with which to
influence entertainment industry’s decisions.
(Jenkins 1992: 26)The fan fiction has of course not gone unnoticed by
the original producers and copyright holders. The
lobby campaigns to alter the behaviour of the fans
have often been met with scepticism or contempt.
According to the lobby organizations the fans “in-
fringe upon the producer’s creative freedom and re-
strict their ability to negotiate for a larger audience.”
(Jenkins 1992: 30) Yet, contrary to this, a lot of the
stories originally made by fans were made into pop-
ular comics and are now coming back as films. Ap-
parently the fans’ works are appreciated, yet seldom
mentioned. The most violent resistance to fan fiction
has come from Lucasfilm, the producer of Star Wars,
who has tried to bring all fan activities under their
supervision. Lucas even “threatened to prosecute
editors who published works that violated the “fam-
ily values” associated with the original films.” (30f )