Textual Poachers

Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture is a nonfiction book of academic scholarship written in 1992 by television and media studies scholar Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers explores fan culture and examines fans' social and cultural impacts.

Jenkins builds from a definition of "poaching" originally introduced by Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, where de Certeau differentiates between individuals who are "consumers" and others who are "poachers," depending on how they use resources put out by producers. Jenkins uses this idea to introduce his own term "textual poachers," which he uses to describe how some fans go through texts like favorite television shows and engage with the parts that they are interested in, unlike audiences who watch the show more passively and move on to the next thing. Specifically, fans use what they've "poached" to become producers themselves, creating new cultural materials in a variety of analytical and creative formats from "meta" essays to fanfiction, fanart, and more. In this way, Jenkins argues, fans “become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.”

Textual Poachers was highly influential in the development of fan studies as a legitimate field of academic scholarship. At the time of its publication, it also introduced many new fans to media fandom itself. Textual Poachers was unusual for its time because it celebrated fandom instead of pathologizing fan practices and fans. Certain quotes from the book became quite popular with fans, who used one as a statement on many fan-created websites in the late 1990s and early 2000s: "Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk."

An updated version of Textual Poachers was released for the book's 20th anniversary in 2012. This edition replaces the Star Trek: The Next Generation fanart by fanartist Jean Kluge that served as the first edition's cover; it also includes a teaching guide and discussion questions. Jenkins collaborated with another Star Trek fan for the cover art of the new edition.