To Have and to Hold

Abstract

Studies of VCR usage have tended to seize on the gender politics of nuclear family viewing contexts or, increasingly, the fascination with home entertainment systems that seek to transfer the aesthetic trappings and cultural legitimacy of cinema to the smaller screen. This article argues for consideration of VCR usage by the TV collector, for whom the pleasures and practices of video collecting are regularly decoupled from discourses of “home theatre” and articulated to a range of aesthetic and ideological preferences that challenge media scholars to think beyond the domestic viewer-consumer model of television fandom. In addition, as new media technologies usher in the “postvideo” age, TV collectors speak to the continuing cultural and symbolic power of video as an archiving tool, fetish object, and medium of exchange.