Jenkins defines textual poaching as “an impertinent raid on the literary preserve where fans take away only those things that are useful or pleasurable” (Jenkins, 2013, p. It also offers a form of escapism from reality through the sub cultures and fan communities created.Textual poaching is a term that was first used by Michel de Certeau in 1984, and was developed later by Henry Jenkins in his book “Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture” written in 1992. Poaching blurs the line between producer and consumer by giving the reader power to produce their own work based upon their own interpretation. Jenkins' extension of the term “poaching” discusses how a fan can simultaneously interpret a text through both the dominant and oppositional reading, allowing readers to stick as closely to the ‘canon’ (official rules and principles put forward in the original text) as they wish.

Jenkins’ book then takes the active audience theory and applies it to fan cultures which ‘poach’ from their beloved text to create new texts such as fan fiction, filk (folk songs) and manuals/dictionaries to ‘fill-out’ further details not originally explained in the text. This ‘poaching’ is a resistance strategy for the individual, however it is inherently weak compared to the dominant culture and will generally be an act, like poaching, which is pushed underground. De Certeau links audience members to poachers by describing how they, “move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it for themselves.”(1984) The Practise of Everyday Life discusses how people individualise mass culture by interpreting texts beyond the dominant meaning which has been decided by the elite (academics, teachers, authors etc) who monopolise the readings. This follows Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication (1980) where each person will create their own meaning from the same text, depending on their situation and unique background.

De Certeau argues that audiences are not passive consumers but instead active interpreters.

The term “textual poaching” was first developed by the French scholar Michel de Certeau in The Practise of Everyday Life (1984) and later developed by Henry Jenkins in Textual poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992).

Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins