Fan culture, also known as fandom, involves fans actively engaging with media through creative works like fan fiction, art, and videos rather than just passively consuming content. Henry Jenkins describes this as "participatory culture." Marvel is a good example as it has cultivated a large, dedicated fan base over decades across comics, films, TV shows, and more. While Marvel owns the characters, once a work is published fans feel entitled to reimagine and critique it. The rise of social media has empowered fans to directly communicate with media companies and shape franchises over time.

1. Fandom and Participatory
culture
A THEORY BY HENRY JENKINS
A PRESENTATION BY AYESHA BAWANY AND MARIUM SAKARIA

2. What is Fandom and Participatory
Culture?
 Fan culture, or fandom, is a term which describes communities built around a
shared enjoyment of an aspect of popular culture, such as books, movies, TV
shows, bands, sports or sports teams, etc. Fan cultures are examples of
participatory cultures.
 Participatory cultures involve fans acting not only as consumers but also as
producers and creators of some form of creative media. Though most fan cultures,
including sports fans and fans of music groups, have elements of participatory
culture, media fandom in particular encourages creative expression and artistic
production by its participants.

3.  In fan cultures, these creations and artistic expressions take the form of fan fiction,
fan art, fan videos, cosplay, folk songs, and other interactions with a person,
group, or fictional universe.
 Media scholar Henry Jenkins contrasts participatory culture with consumer culture,
suggesting that fans “poach” from popular media, appropriating ideas from the
text and rereading them in creative ways for their own uses.
 One theory of popular culture holds that the corporate “culture industry”
prioritizes profit at the expense of quality, and that pop culture is a form of
hegemony, used to spread dominant ideologies.
 The theory of participatory culture suggests that rather than being mindless
consumers, media fans can be understood as active producers and manipulators
of meaning. Fan interaction with media becomes a social activity, and this process
allows fans to build their own communities in which they can express themselves
with.
 Jenkins also theorizes that participatory culture can be a form of resistance. For
example, fan fiction and fan videos are often of interest to the female-dominated
parts of the fan community, going beyond the stories the male-dominated media
industry is interested in or willing to tell.
 Not only do fans actively generate their own creative material, but they often do
so in ways which critique the media they are consuming.

4. Marvel is a good example for this theory;
Marvel produced some of the first famous superheroes on its pages, including the Human
Torch and Captain America. The post-war market proved detrimental to Marvel’s brand of
superhero stories. However, the modern Marvel we know today, was launched in 1961 with the
first Avengers comic released in 1963. Despite the large fan-base that Marvel possessed, it
could have quite easily fallen out of fashion with the arrival of the digital age. However, Marvel
as a media institute has become extremely perceptive in reacting to the age within it is
operating. The Marvel Cinematic Universe resides on multiple platforms, including films,
television and on a web-based level through the fanbase. With the rise of new media and
increasingly inclusive technologies there has been an expanse in participation by audiences
who had previously been unheard by the institutions that were in charge of creating
mainstream media. Through the multiple platforms on which this text resides, whether it be
within the Marvel Cinematic universe, with the multitude of Avengers films, including the Iron
Man, Thor, and Captain America series’, the resulting show Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and
the upcoming Marvel’s Agent Carter, and indeed, the fan-created and re-imagined media that
is so central to how media texts of the modern age thrive, fandom and participatory culture is
increasingly important.

5.  Marvel has always had a wide fan base, and despite the vast shift from print medium comics to
mainstream blockbuster films, they remain true. The difference now from 40 years ago is the platforms
on which fans can communicate back to the industry, which Marvel fans have used in abundance. Along
with this rise of social networking is the increased influence of blogging and fan communities online.
Tumblr, WordPress and the like have allowed fans a platform to share ideas and critique of a text, and
to create a discourse surrounding the various aspects of the text. Fans therefore reach out to other fans,
and are able to create a discussion around these texts, in a way that can be seen as accessible to all.
Marvel own the rights to all Avengers stories and characters, but once a text is publicised, the notion of
ownership becomes problematic. Many fans see this property as theirs to rework and reinterpret. These
texts are something they love, which many of them have immersed themselves completely in.
 The Avengers as a text of the superhero genre is fully ingrained within this. Traditionally Marvel has
created its texts for the “fanboys” With the rise of superhero movies such as The Avengers, came also
the questions of gender, about what it means and requires to be a superhero. This was shown in the
form of Black Widow. The only female superhero within the entire franchise so far, she became a
beacon for all ‘geek’ girls, those who had previously been told by other action movies that they were
destined to be the damsels in distress, waiting for the all powerful man to come and save them.

6.  Most movies couldn’t care less about portraying complex, intelligent, strong, dimensional women,
or gender equitable roles. Jenkins argued that if a large percentage of the fan base is women and
they are not being equally represented then many are forced to turn to re-creation to ensure they
achieve the representation of the majority.
 Social media has become one of the biggest phenomenon to occur in the modern age. Facebook
and Twitter have ensured that anybody who cares to state an opinion can now be heard on a wide
scale platform. This gives fans a more convenient platform on which they are able to change and
shape content in practice, rather than sitting on the sidelines, watching as the stories they love are
changed into things they cannot engage with. Furthermore fans are not only being called upon to
respond and critique media, the input they produce is being listened to. Jenkins (1985) considers
that “fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts; instead they become active participants
in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” This is interesting in looking at the fan
response to killing the popular character of Phil Coulson in The Avengers. The rise of Phil Coulson to
popularity was slow, but from his beginning as a faceless man in black within Iron Man (2008) to his
role within the Avengers, he has fast become a fan favorite. Despite this in the Avengers (2012), he
was killed, as a tool to give the Avengers something to avenge.