a thought on reparative reading

Our discussion during Wednesday's class of Ann Cvetkovich's "Public Feelings", and her ideas about reparative reading, reminded me of Henry Jenkins's work on fan fiction.  He sort of says that Marxists and others would say that sitting around watching a lot of star trek and journalling about it is just passive consumption, but that's not true, because "writing back" to imposed narratives totally changes up the power dynamic and in fact is a form of "productive consumption".  I don't think he uses the word utopian?  but he might as well.

INTERACTIVE AUDIENCES? THE 'COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE' OF MEDIA FANS
"Creative activity, [Pierre Levy] suggests, will shift from the production of texts or the regulation of meanings towards the development of a dynamic environment, 'a collective event that implies the recipients, transforms interpreters into actors, enables interpretation to enter the loop with collective action.'(29) Room for participation and improvisation are being built into new media franchises. Kurt Lancaster, for example, has examined how commercial works (including computer, role playing and card games) surrounding the cult science fiction series, Babylon 5, facilitate a diverse range of fan performances, allowing fans to immerse themselves in the fantasy universe.(30) The producers of the teen melodrama, Dawson's Creek, hired a team of writers to produce a website modeled on the protagonist's laptop and including e-mail correspondence, personal journals, and class essays, updated weekly in response to and in anticipation of the aired episodes. As the site developed, fans were offered opportunities to correspond in character with Dawson and his friends and thus be incorporated into the commercial text. Cult works were once discovered, now they are being consciously produced, designed to provoke fan interactions. The producers of Xena, for example, were fully aware that some fans wanted to read Xena and Gabrielle as lesbian lovers and thus began to consciously weave 'subtext' into the episodes. As Levy explains, 'The recipients of the open work are invited to fill in the blanks, choose among possible meanings, confront the divergences among their interpretations.'(31)" Henry Jenkins