I am responding to some of Sue's questions in response to my response. This is starting to get textually dense. Unfortunately, I am still new enough at computing to know how to make those cute little indent qoute excerpts from her correspondence so I will try to paraphrase. She has originally asked me what room there was for future research in fandom and I had responded by listing a range of possabilities. I had written, "every fandom...poses its own theoretical problems" and she asked me to explain. Here's a few examples: In TEXTUAL POACHERS, I use the example of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST fandom to discuss the shifting relationship between fans and program ideology. I wanted to focus on a dispute within the fandom about the status of third season episodes which many fans rejected as a violation of the generic expectations established by the series and thus not "really B&B." I saw this history as a way of showing: a)how fans could still be fans of a program while rejecting what was aired and having a different agenda from the producers; b)how genre functions as an interpretive strategy rather than a property of texts; c)how reception may be understood as a process of shifting alliances rather than the fixed positions of Stuart Hall's dominant, oppositional, and negotiated readings. Now, let's consider another example. Right now I am working on an essay which looks at the Gaylaxicans, an organization of gay, lesbian and bisexual fans who have run a letter-writing campaign to try to convince the producers to add a "queer" character to STAR TREK. This group poses many new questions for me, centering around our attempts to theorize non-hetrosexual spectatorship and the relationship between the fan's politics of cultural preference and a more traditional identity politics of sexual preference. To explore these questions,I have turned towards Gay and Lesbian Studies approaches to see how they might suplament my reliance on Michel de Certeau and have become more interested in questions of "gossip" or "gay window advertising" (as Danae Clarke discusses in "Commodity Lesbianism" in a recent CAMERA OBSCURA issue) as well as notions of camp. Is Q a site of camp within the ST text? Were Yar and Ro intended to be read as "dykes"? Why did the producers feel compelled to give them hetrosexual lovers to foreclose such a reading? What does the utopian dimensions of ST in particular and science fiction more generally offer gay, lesbian and bi spectators? What problems do the producers encounter when they try to deal with the issue of sexual preference through allegory as in "The Host" or "The Outcast" rather than directly? Etc. So, the questions I ask, the issues I explore and the theoretical models I draw upon in relation to this fandom are different from those I used to talk about BEAUTY AND THE BEAST or those I used to discuss computer net fans of TWIN PEAKS or the emergence of an ALIEN NATION fandom, etc. Similarly, Sue asks what theoretical models could be used to talk about fandom. To take existing work on the subject, Constance Penley's psychoanalytic approach with its reliance upon notions of fantasy identification is different from my British Cultural studies approach with its reliance on De Certeau's notion of "poaching" is different from Camille Bacon-Smith's therapeutic model of fan writing as a mode of managing the risks involved in expressing personal pain in a collective forum. I have seen work that looks at the political economy (a la Eileen Meehan) of fandom or that applies a more postmodernism approach (ala Larry Grossberg.) You might look at Lisa Lewis's anthology, THE ADORING AUDIENCE, which reflects a range of different approaches to the study of fandom, some of which I find really troubling, some less so. All I meant to suggest was the rather modest observation that my approach answers some questions about fandom but dodges or opens others. A question I would like to see explored but can not fully answer within my methodology is a consideration of the affective economy of fandom (i.e. why do people choose to invest their emotional energy in some images and not others) and what language people use to describe the moment when they discovered the pleasures of a particular series. Another question that needs to be addressed more fully than I do is the issue of the relationship fans posit between the space of their fan activities and the realm of the "mundane," i.e. the non-fannish aspects of their experience. I had suggested that she might look at computers and fandom and she asked for clarification. In TEXTUAL POACHERS, I do a case study of a computer net group centering on TWIN PEAKS which offered an ongoing critical debate, etc. of the series as it unfolded. I barely scratched the surface in discussing this group but nets offer a rich resource for audience research. Consider Ian Ang's WATCHING DALLAS. She solicted less than 100 letters upon which she basis the corpus of her book. In an average day, at the peak of its activity, the TWIN PEAKS net group generated several times that many entries. The discourse produced is not generated by the researcher but rather reflects the ongoing interpretive activity of the net group. Members of the net are able to challenge each others claims about the text, to debate interpretations and often to articulate the rules or interpretive strategies by which they developed those interpretations. The group offers immediate response to each and every aired episode of the series. The net allows you to trace the audience's shifting relationship to the series over time in a very precise fashion. The question becomes not data collection but data processing. How can I handle so much information not how can I get enough information to make meaningful generalizations? Interpretation on the net becomes an observable behavoir. Now, you have to know how to read it -- both in terms of the status of the discussion as reflecting the social and cultural needs of a fan community (as I discuss in Textual Poachers) but also in terms of the demographic groups which have access to this computer technology. So far, I know of only a few people who have researched the net groups or looked at them as an audience for television. CONSOLING PASSIONS is a conference that specifically addresses questions of feminism and television studies. I will try to post information as soon as I can get it from Lynn but you should seriously consider attending. --Henry