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points out, many in the fan culture discourage this subgenre of fan writing.
9. Emotional intensification – the production of what are called ‘hurt-comfort’ stories
in which favourite characters, for example, experience emotional crises.
10. Eroticization – stories that explore the erotic side of a character’s life. Perhaps the
best known of this subgenre of fan writing is ‘slash’ fiction, so called because it
depicts same-sex relationships (as in Kirk/Spock, etc.).

In addition to fan fiction, fans make music videos in which images from favourite
programmes are edited into new sequences to a soundtrack provided by a popular
song; they make fan art; they produce fanzines; they engage in ‘filking’ (the writing and
performing at conferences of songs – filk songs – about programmes, characters or the
fan culture itself); and they organize campaigns to encourage television networks to
bring back favourite programmes or to make changes in existing ones. 56 As Jenkins
points out, echoing de Certeau, ‘Fans are poachers who get to keep what they take and
use their plundered goods as the foundations for the construction of an alternative cul-
tural community’ (223).
In his discussion of filking, Jenkins draws attention to a common opposition within
filk songs between fandom and ‘Mundania’ (the world in which non-fans – ‘mundane
readers’ or ‘mundanes’ – live). The difference between the two worlds is not simply one
of intensity of response: ‘Fans are defined in opposition to the values and norms of
everyday life, as people who live more richly, feel more intensely, play more freely, and
think more deeply than “mundanes”’ (268). Moreover, ‘Fandom constitutes ...a
space ...defined by its refusal of mundane values and practices, its celebration of
deeply held emotions and passionately embraced pleasures. Fandom’s very existence
represents a critique of conventional forms of consumer culture’ (283).
What he finds particularly empowering about fan cultures is their struggle to create
‘a more participatory culture’ from ‘the very forces that transform many Americans into
spectators’ (284). It is not the commodities that are empowering, it is what the fans do
with them that empowers. As Jenkins explains,

I am not claiming that there is anything particularly empowering about the texts
fans embrace. I am, however, claiming that there is something empowering about
what fans do with those texts in the process of assimilating them to the particulars
of their lives. Fandom celebrates not exceptional texts but rather exceptional read-
ings (though its interpretive practices make it impossible to maintain a clear or pre-
cise distinction between the two) (ibid.).

In a way reminiscent of the classic cultural studies model of subcultural reading, fan
cultures, according to Jenkins, struggle to resist the demands of the ordinary and the
everyday. Whereas youth subcultures define themselves against parent and dominant
cultures, fan cultures define themselves in opposition to the supposed everyday cul-
tural passivities of ‘Mundania’.
Grossberg (1992) is critical of the ‘subcultural’ model of fan cultures, in which ‘fans
constitute an elite fraction of the larger audience of passive consumers’ (52).