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{ FIREBENDER }
» tumblrweed: tiktokofoz: temporarilyobsessive: why can’t there be a major for...
why can’t there be a major for fandom studies
I actually plan on someday writing a legit paper about what happens when the fanbase of a product makes it onto the Internet and how fail 95% of it gets.
Of course, I’ll have to disguise with some…
There are tons of different people getting degrees at all levels doing work that is essentially fan studies through so many different disciplines (sociology, English lit, queer studies, media studies, etc). If you want to do it, it’s there to do. I mean, JFC, I gave a paper at an academic conference in the UK because Ianto died and people were sad.
You know, just the other day I was thinking of doing a paper on Beta’ing in fan fiction communities and comparisons to the editorial/peer-review process in academic publishing. Then I realized that to do that I’d have to “out” myself as a fanfic reader/occasional (VERY occasional) writer. Anyone else have that dilemma?
Extremely common problem, I think, especially for women and other scholars who face marginalization. There’s a reason that our loudest scholarly voice on fannish things is Henry Jenkins (who is a lovely man, and whose work I enjoy, but it’s no slight to his brilliance to say that a woman would have had a much harder time positioning herself as he has been able to).
One of the reasons I did the conference I mentioned previously in this thread was because of its core viewpoint that what we call the fannish experience is not only not solely modern, but can’t be cast aside due to high/low art dichotomy BS.
The quote below (bolding mine) was from the CFP for it, and I don’t lie when I say I found it life-changing, because here was a non-diagnostic/non-medicalized/non-marginalizing description of how I interact with the world.
Love, desire, fannish obsession and emotional identification as modes of engaging with texts, characters and authors are often framed as illegitimate and transgressive: excessive, subjective, lacking in scholarly rigour. Yet such modes of relating to texts and pasts persist, across widely different historical periods and cultural contexts. Many classical and medieval authors recount embodied and highly emotional encounters with religious, fictional or historical characters,while modern and postmodern practices of reception and reading – from high art to the subcultural practices of media fandom – are characterized by desire in all its ambivalent complexity. Theories of readership and reception, however, sometimes seem unable to move beyond an antagonistic model: cultural studies sees resistant audiences struggling to gain control of or to overwrite an ideologically loaded text, while literary models of reception have young poets fighting to assert their poetic autonomy vis-à-vis the paternal authority of their literary ancestors.
Like so many things, fannishness is just one more category where secrecy is sadly often necessary, but where a lack of it can produce real and meaningful change. The idea that those who live stories experience them in some lesser fashion than those who do not is as absurd as the idea that academics should only study what they do not love.
One of the accidental, and amazing, themes of that conference that emerged only in the discussion that came out of it, was secrets and exile. We are all looking, always, to go home, not only in what we love, but in how we love it, and our desire, no matter how constrained, to shout it from the rooftops.
Being outside of the Academy, and having studiously sort of created my life around a lack of secrets and doing what I please in a way that’s open about a ton of crap, including sex and sexuality, means I get to talk about whatever I damn well please within the limits of a personal discretion that I mostly engage in for the care and feeding of others. Not everyone has that luxury even remotely, but every little bit counts so, so much.
Matt Hills, bless him so much, wrote a chapter in his book ‘Fan Cultures’ about the affective experience of fans and fandom is actually much more widespread than we believe, and that we need to reject past interpretations of fandom done through psychoanalysis that pathologize fans and fandom as mentally or emotionally deficient. Emotional attachment to a narrative isn’t weird, it’s just stigmatized as weird, because there’s a dominant culture that doesn’t understand it. But everybody has the capacity for it, I think. And ‘coming out’ as an ‘acafan’ (Jenkins’ word), an academic AND fan, will substantially de-stigmatize fandom and ultimately fandom’s reconstructions of narratives, and what they mean in a larger context. Writing about and studying fandom will strip away the ‘crazy’ and get to the more important ‘fuck your hegemonic status quo’ underneath.
p.s. proud acafan
