Chad Kahn's Theories of Spectatorship Commonplace Book

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

Terminology and motifs such as mpreg (male pregnancy), hurt/comfort (stories in which one or both characters suffer severe trauma and the healing process creates ties between them), or domestic discipline (stories which establish a dominant/submissive pairing with disciplinary encounters) have evolved in conversation with wider cultural genre discourses but have developed their own histories and meanings within fandom. Male pregnancy, time travel, and animal transfiguration all have precedents in science fiction literature, but they have also developed as specific generic discourses within fandom, with clearly recognizable subtropes and characteristics.

Louisa Stein and Kristina Busse, Limit Play: Fan Authorship between Source Text, Intertext, and Context

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

Fandom has no Bounds

“There exists people who write erotic versions of Star trek where all the characters are Furries. Like Kirk is an Ocelot or something, and they put a furry version of themselves as the star of the story”

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

Whereas once the technological device determined which media entertainment one might experience (TV programs were on TV, newspapers were in print, films were in the cinema), now the digitization of media means that the mediated entertainment does not depend on the technology of its viewership. Interactive media means not only that the media product can influence its viewership’s identities, but also that viewers themselves can influence their interpretation of the media product.

Paul Booth, New Media Studies

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

The assumption of an underlying duality of power that marked the first wave of fan studies has, however, attracted increasing critical scrutiny for two key reasons: first, the Post article reveals how it is all too common for fans to be dismissed as Others... Moreover... frequently our gaze at the Other is imbued with significant desire and longing

Jonathan Gray, Why Study Fans?

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

Not only do we need to conceptualize spectatorship as a process that mediates between the two levels, as a historically constituted and variable matrix; we also need to complicate the issue with a third term--one that accounts for the social, collective, experiential dimension of cinematic reception.

Hansen, Camera Obscura

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

American Beatlemania soon reached the proportions of religious idolatry.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, Beatlemania

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

Women's memories of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood often take the form of a particular 'frozen moment', taken out of its temporal context and captured as 'pure image': be it Bette Davis's flashing and rebellious eyes, Doris Day's fun outfits or Rita Hayworth's flowing hair. This is not only true of memories of the stars, but also of the spectators' memories of themselves.

Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

Contemporary film theorists have made careers out of underestimating the basic intelligence and reality-testing abilities of the average film viewer and have no trouble treating previous audiences with similar disdain

Tom Gunning, An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

From its inception in 1895-96, cinema was defined as the projection of films... in public... With the elaboration of a type of narration that seems to anticipate--or strategically frustrate-- the viewer's desire with every shot, the spectator became part of the film as product, rather than a particular exhibition or show.

Miriam Hansen, Spectatorship in American Silent Film

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

Around the same time I discovered the Philadelphia Inquirer's facinating and entirely unexpected description of a 1904 showing of The Great Train Robbery: 'There is a great amount of shooting. The smoke of the pistols is plainly seen, and men drop dead right and left, but no sound is heard. Nevertheless, while witnessing the exhibition women put their fingers in their ears to shut out the noise of the firing.'

Rick Altman, The Silence of the Silents

[sundayaftersupper-blog]

How, I asked myself, could a blind pianist possibly accompany films?

Rick Altman, The Silence of the Silents