Over the last twenty years, Cultural Studies and Media Studies have
seen growing attention to reception, to the ways that audiences
decode media texts. Previous theories had constructed the spectator
as an abstract, disembodied entity who passively responded to the
strategies and messages of media texts and industries. Scholars began
to employ historical, ethnographic, and empirical research to examine
how individual viewers or groups of viewers responded to films, TV
shows, and other media within specific social contexts. These
scholars helped diversify ideas of who spectators are and how they
use media texts, showing the importance of age, gender, race,
ethnicity, and nationality to discussions of viewing.

Within this context, the study of fans has emerged as a particularly
vital area of inquiry. Working against the common misunderstanding of
fans as crazies or misfits, researchers analyze the fan as a
spectator par excellence–an avid, participatory consumer of media
texts whose practices can speak volumes about the interpretive
strategies and pleasures of viewers. In this course, we will begin by
examining the methodological tools used in fan studies (particularly
ethnographic and empirical methods), weighing their strengths and
weaknesses. As we proceed, we will examine several questions that
have structured this area of research, particularly in relation to
film and television: Who are fans and what makes their viewing habits
and strategies distinct? What are the interpretive practices of fans
and how do they affect textual decoding? How do fans use media as a
resource in their everyday lives? How do fans form communities over
the Internet and elsewhere? Can we consider fan activities as
subversive? All of these questions are posed as a means of
understanding the relationship between viewers and mass culture,
especially, but not exclusively, in a U.S. context.

Readings include Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance, Henry Jenkins’
Textual Poachers, and a selection of essays from major writers on
this subject in Cultural and Media Studies. Weekly screenings will
feature films about fans (such as Love and Death on Long Island,
Galaxy Quest, and Nurse Betty) and TV shows and films that have
attracted significant fan attention (such as Star Trek and other
science fiction series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Batman TV
series, the Titanic, and other mainstays of mass culture.