Star Trek Fandom – Henry Jenkins

Robert V. Kozinets (2001) used “field notes and artifacts from 20 months of fieldwork at Star Trek fan clubs, at conventions, and in internet groups, and 67 interviews with Star Trek fans”, to form an ethnography of Star Trek fans, examining the “cultural and subcultural construction of consumption meanings and practices as they are negotiated from mass media images and objects”. (p. 67). Kozinets explored what it meant to be a “Trekkie” (“someone with a special interest in the television show ‘Star Trek’”, Cambridge Dictionary, 2023) and as much of their communication was via e-mail with fans, it was possible for fans to offer an unfiltered opinion on various subjects compared to discussion on an online discussion board where it may be moderated at the very least to keep the language inoffensive, but in other cases to restrict opinions that are contrary to the moderator or website’s own.

A key part of their research was examining conflicts within fan groups. These conflicts were often started when a member, in the eyes of their peers, either cared too much or too little about how the public perceived them as fans. Kozinets uses Barbara Adams as an example – Adams wore their Star Trek uniform to serve as a juror on the Clinton Whitewater case, demonstrating what Kozinets defines as the difference between a Trekkie and a Trekker: “Trekkers only wear the uniform ‘when it’s appropriate’” (p. 79).

Star Trek has hundreds of official novels, licensed by Paramount, which form new stories surrounding the Star Trek universe, such as Spock Must Die! (Blish, 1930), From the Depths (Milan, 1993), and Child of Two Worlds (Cox, 2015), but over the years fans have produced their own stories, satisfying their personal desires for the characters, or perhaps changing the “official canon”. Lincoln Geraghty notes “[The novels] and fan literature are not seen as canonical because the stories they tell have not ‘happened’, they have not taken place on-screen and are therefore unofficial.” (2007, pp. 36-37).

 

Another example of an official/unofficial canon can be found with the Star Wars universe: When Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012, they wiped the canon clean of virtually all the expanded universe novels, to mixed reactions from fans (Thomas Malone, 2014; Van Caeseele-Cook, 2014). Anything that officially happened in the many novels was no longer canon, but all future novels published by Del Rey, such as A New Dawn (Miller, 2014), Thrawn (Zahn, 2017), and Brotherhood (Chen, 2022) would be official canon.

Geraghty continues with “Both official and fan literatures have attempted to fill in the gaps between storylines and character backgrounds originally aired on-screen.” (p. 37). This is important because official literature will have guidelines to follow, which are set by the intellectual property owner and restrict them from making a multitude of different stories canon, whereas fanfiction is not bound by these restrictions.

In Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins discusses a fan’s response to Star Trek: The Next Generation (Roddenberry et al., 1987-1994), suggesting that an intimate relationship may be formed with a primary text (Jenkins, 2013, pp. 87-88), specifically with someone who has a great knowledge of the show and is critical of certain aspects of it. This may encourage a fan to take matters into their own hands and write their own story.