Abstract
The practice of ‘vidding’, which E. Charlotte Stevens defines in this monograph as ‘a textual expression of fannish interpretation …[which] has been enabled by the development of home media technologies’ (p.10), has had a satellite presence in studies of TV fans since the early work that established the subfield during the early 1990s. In recent years, a small-but-dedicated group of scholars has begun affording greater academic visibility to these processes of (re-)combining footage from (either individual or multiple) commercial film and TV properties with musical soundtracks. Stevens’s monograph, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use, represents the first full-length study of this enduring form of fan practice, making the book of immediate interest to those exploring television from a cultural perspective relating to fans’ transformative works. The book consists of six chapters (plus an Introduction and Conclusion). These chapters are structured in a way that begins by reviewing vidding’s formal characteristics in relation to relevant continuing debates within television studies, including Raymond Williams’s concept of flow and debates about ‘quality’ television, as well as exploring the historical, cultural, and technological developments that have enabled vidding’s development as a subcultural practice. The discussion then progresses to presenting empirical analyses of specific themes within vidding in the final three chapters, covering topics including archiving, ‘transfandom’ and character development. Also included is a methodology chapter (Chapter 2) that outlines issues of corpus formation and the approach taken to analysing the chosen vids.
This overview indicates that the monograph will primarily be of interest to fan and audience scholars. The arguments made in Chapter 4, however, concerning how the ‘raw materials’ used for creating vids (such as off-air VHS recordings, DVDs, digital files) move across discourses of collecting and ‘the archive’, resonate well with debates emerging elsewhere in the subfield which are re-evaluating the meanings and knowledges that emerge from fan practices of preserving televisual ephemera in physical form.
Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use moves beyond fan studies’ preoccupation with issues of ‘transformation’, however, by taking vids on their own terms as aesthetic objects. The form’s overlaps and fissures with other audio-visual modes including music video, video art installations and found footage films are explored in detail, leading Stevens to make convincing differentiations between vids and their peers. For example, the arguments made concerning how vids’ aims and objectives differ from music video (for example, not serving promotional purposes and assembling a montage of clips to present an argument about a character) is well argued. This sensitivity also extends to the analysis of the vids themselves: Stevens consistently demonstrates her status as a highly competent reader of the form and makes insightful points about how vids use either editing or correlations between sound and image to construct meaning and how aesthetic choices assist with constructing a vid’s point-of-view. Because of the skill and sustained focus displayed, I could see specific sections from individual chapters being set as readings on undergraduate modules teaching audio-visual aesthetics.
The monograph is also informed by feminist perspectives as Stevens argues that vidding is a form of affective and textual productivity that women predominantly participate in, whilst also being – and continuing to be – embedded within gendered appropriations of domestic recording technologies. This does not mean that the monograph’s arguments are continually situated within feminist theories; instead, these perspectives provide a background to the study and are only occasionally returned to, meaning that the book will be of interest to feminist scholars who are either interested in vidding specifically or, in a broader sense, fandom’s transformative practices. Nevertheless, the volume is well-aligned with television studies’ ongoing aims of revaluing the medium due to the patriarchal positionings that have historically denigrated both its programming and audiences.
However, there can be no denying that this monograph is ‘the book of the PhD’ and the decisions made by the author and perhaps the publisher in translating the thesis in to monograph form are its greatest weaknesses and hinder its potential for connecting with a broader scholarly audience. Many sections of the book read as if they have been written to satisfy the requirements of a doctorate: certain chapters could easily have either been cut or drastically reduced (Chapter 2, for example); individual chapters contain sections where detailed summaries of either preceding scholarly works or programme narratives are unnecessarily provided; each section finishes with the type of signposting that PhD supervisors recommend. The latter rhetorical strategies do make the monograph easy to follow, and again increase its potential saliency to undergraduate methods courses. Nevertheless, an opportunity has been missed as these decisions limit the space for offering more sustained analysis of trends within vidding and the development of the author’s own original arguments.
Moreover, questions remain regarding the method used for selecting specific vids within the study. In the Conclusion, Stevens argues ‘I chose to use examples that resonate as exemplars based on my long experience in fandom’ (p. 222). However, the subcultural histories motivating inclusion, and the researcher’s embedded identity within these, are not reflected on in, for instance, an autoethnographic manner. This absence led me to question why individual vids had been chosen. For example, Chapter 6 focuses solely on three vids dedicated to the character of Starbuck in the mid-00s Battlestar Galactica, (2004-09), and I was left wondering why this trilogy had been chosen: were they exemplary of historical themes, styles, or aesthetics in vidding? How representative of vidding were these? The lack of reflexivity afforded to the sample is problematic as it raises questions concerning both representativeness and rigour and undermines confidence in how generalizable the arguments are. These are questions that, beyond this individual study, fan studies must continue to defend itself against if it is to gain legitimacy in the face of dismissals of the field as being methodologically based in ‘personal preference’ rather than objectively verifiable criteria.