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unjapanologistOriginally published at Academic FFF. You can comment here or there.
Some disorganized thoughts on Fan Cultures (preface and introduction), Matt Hills.
pxi-xii: "In specific institutional context, such as academia, 'fan' status may be devalued and taken as a sign of 'inappropriate' learning and uncritical engagement with the media."
I don't want to write about fandom if that means I have to distance myself from it first. A grown woman with a few years of scholarly experience can be expected to write about her 'fannish' experiences in an academically sound way, I should say. (Besides, nobody accuses an economics scholar from liking economics too much to write about it objectively.)
pxiii: "...one of the main points of this book... is its 'suspensionist' position, a position which refuses to split fandom into the 'good' and the 'bad' and which embraces inescapable contradiction (the ugly?)."
On the same page, Hills remarks that academics often appear to be more attached to their 'discipline' than to their 'subject'. The 'discipline' of Japanese Studies/area studies being ill-defined and ill-supported by theory in general, I believe there's little chance of me neglecting the subject in favour of the discipline -on the contrary, the lack of a theoretical framework is a much more immediate concern. Pay special attention to judicious application of semiotic and open work theory.
p4: "Possessing their own cult heroes and cult theorists of the past, academics are -in terms of their embodied and actual subjectivities- out of alignment with the imagined subjectivity of 'good' rationality."
So true :) The japanologists who study 'serious' topics like poetry or economy study those topics because they like them, because they find those topics fascinating.
p6: "For Rowe, it is ironic that academics might want to think of themselves as fans."
I haven't read anything by Mr. Rowe, but giving how many scholars do seem to think of themselves as fans, this sounds like a very peculiar idea.
p6-7, quoting Cavicchi (1998) "(fans describe becoming a fan as) ...a lasting and profound transition from an 'old' viewpoint ... to a 'new' one, filled with energy and insight."
Sounds rather like finally 'getting' your particular research topic.
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no subject
And your doctoral project sounds fascinating (not even close to my areas, but I learn so much from reading other people's stuff).
I read Hills a few years ago and while I initially liked some of his stuff, it didn't hold up over time, and other than his useful distinction between aca-fan and fan scholar, little has stayed in my mind. My main sense after a couple of reads was that he was overgeneralizing "academics" (and a particularly masculine culture of academia as well), and that his own sense of himself as a "fan" (somebody who didn't really want to engage in a community, only hang out with a small group of seriously engaged friends) was entirely counter to my sense of myself as a fan, and my sense of fan cultures (and, again, he seemed to be overgeneralizing). I also didn't care much for his critique of Camille Bacon-Smith and Constance Penley (while being the first to find their work problematic in areas as well)--I could not put my finger on it, it just seemed weird.
Then he agreed to be on a panel discussion organized by a friend on fan issues, and stood us all up without even an email, so I sort of wrote him off my life.
no subject
I'll definitely keeping your comments on Hills in mind while I read the rest of his work, thank you. Delving into a new research subject always feels a bit like reinventing the wheel -you spend ages reading all the 'basic' texts, and then it turns out that everyone and their mother has already found twenty valid reasons why those text don't make sense, and you have to read them all over again to get rid of your misconceptions.
After following the fans<->academics discussion for a few more days, I feel tempted to just dive straight into data gathering and rely on common sense to interpret those data reasonably correctly, instead of first wondering exactly how to study fans and their work. That could probably be debated into eternity, and I might never get any actual work done. I've been reading up on data-driven research in physics. After this aca-fan discussion, it's starting to sound pretty reasonable to start by gathering a mound of data, analyze it, and then drag in the theory instead of starting with theory.
May I ask if you perhaps have any recommended reading about masculine/feminine academic culture? I remember reading about this distinction multiple times on Henry Jenkins' blog. It may be due to my non-existent attention span, but the point in those blog posts always got lost in the verbosity. I'd like to learn more about this.
We may be on the same track as to that sense of what it means to be a 'fan' and the importance of engagement in fandom. Warnings about getting overly involved in the little world of your research subject always sound odd to me -as if an intelligent and discerning person will suddenly turn into some sort of partisan zealot the minute you take away the glass between researcher and subject. I dropped out of active fandom after my first years of university and sort of tumbled back in last year after I started reading HP fics. Reams of HP fics. Still, just lurking around made me feel as if I wasn't 'fannish' enough anymore to be able to do a well-founded analysis of work produced by fans, so I recently hauled myself over to LJ and IJ and am trying to do some writing and drawing again. Actually getting involved might keep me from spouting bullshit about fandom much more effectively than reading ten books on the subject.
part 1
I think that fan studies is not much different than any academic field, except we're seeing it at an earlier stage than many academics do (although in my case, I also got to see the development of feminist science fiction criticism as well!). It's possible to argue that fan studies has relationships with a variety of other disciplinary fields: audience reception studies/theory, definitely; anthropology (the insider participant in ethnographic work) as well; sociology (leisure studies, hobbyists); and more. There can be a literary field of fan studies (only studying the fan fictions using literary methodology, or in my case functional grammar, a linguistic methodology developed by M. A. K. Halliday, or queer theory). There are people in many disciplines doing fan studies, or maybe it's better to say, studying fandom and fan productions. It's impossible for any one scholar to do it all, but it's useful to know that one has to check social science databases as well as literary ones (in my case!).
The early work, which I define as Jenkins, Bacon-Smith, and Penley, was done at a specific historic moment and time, drawing quite a bit on second wave feminist theory, reader response theory, and in Penley's case, feminist psychoanalysis. I don't consider their work incorrect as much as incomplete and partial, something they'd mostly say themselves (Jenkins has!). Academia is dialogic in nature, and of course the later work will engage with and criqitue and build on the earlier work (I have realized some time ago I not only study fan culture, I also analyze academic culture!).
The development of the internet, the explosion in not only the ability to circulate fan productions but also the ease of people finding fan communities, has made things radically different (add to that the fact that the internet didn't replace offline fandom!). I was in a Trek group in the late 1970s, with ditto fan zine, and then in an Amateur Press Association until about 1990--we mailed stuff around. It was hard to recruit. I tried for five years to run an sf reading group on my campus,and it came down to me, a physics prof, one reading prof, and a few students. Going online in 2003 was this huge blessing and thrill--finding so many people who were fans! But the issue of research on the internet is new and complex as well (I can highly recomment the Association of Internet researchers, btw!). www.aoir.org
I am dubious of any scholar trying to achieve a universal theory of fandom (have debated a few friends on that) because I think fandom does not exist; a whole bunch of fandoms do exist, and I think there's much more need for more local, descriptive, and certainly, for those who are trained in it, data work. I also think there's a need for work on the fan productions (which is a different method--one that I think does make many people nervous--i.e. academics analyzing their fan fiction). So the more the merrier! (And the more specifics we get the more possible it might be to discern patterns of similarity across the differences.)
A lot of the earliest work on fandom was about U.S. fans--there's a huge need for more work on fandoms and fan studies in different countries, and on the cross-currents in fandom (that's why your project struck me as so fantastic).
Re: part 1
On the other hand, the great weakness of area studies is precisely the lack of theoretical foundations -or even the possibility of building those foundations specifically for area studies, with all those different fields under one umbrella. Once you leave that student phase of simply describing your chosen country/area ("Tons of fan manga are being drawn in Japan and they're surrounded by interesting issues X and Y and Z") and have to start approaching those fan manga from a certain academic angle ("I shall now do a semiotic analysis of fan manga's contents"), you suddenly need theory, and you simply haven't learned anything about theory while you were struggling to understand a whole damn country for three or four years. It's disconcerting to be plunged into this ocean of theoretical approaches without something to anchor yourself. I often end up not knowing what to think anymore.
So if I sound like a total idiot when talking about theory, that's why ;) Thank you for the primer on the various theoretical influences on fan culture research, it's immensely useful to me. I'm not looking for a universal theory of fandom -just a way of talking about it in a realistic, largely correct fashion. Maybe fandom is a little bit like area studies. There's literatary aspects there, social, aesthetic, psychological... You may be able to pin down certain aspects of it, but the whole -I doubt it. You'd have to be able to define 'fandom' in a sensible way, to start with.
Another reason I'd like to start mostly from data analysis instead of theories about fan psychology is that I'm analysing Japanese fandom as well as English-speaking online fandom. I know enough about Japanese approaches to psychology, literary analysis and so forth to know that those approaches sometimes differ from the ones at my Western European university in ways I simply don't grasp at the moment. Fan studies in Japan are nowhere near as developed as the ones we're talking about, to boot. I would like to make a meaningful comparison between the two fandoms, not throw darts at a cloud of buzzwords for three hundred pages. A semiotic analysis of the content of fanwork seems like an approach that is both doable for me and relatively objective.
(By the way... A limited preliminary experiment I did last June showed that Japanese fan authors a) produce James Potter/Severus Snape fanworks in much larger quantities than English-speaking authors, relatively, and b) that they mostly present the pairing in a way that is totally different from our fanfics, putting the characters in a friendly, even loving relationship, while English-language fanfics involving the two are very often dub-con or non-con. I'm salivating at the prospect of looking for meaning in that bit of data :)
part 2
I do think that the whole 'too emotional to write about stuff if you're a fan' in academic culture is extremely gendered: that is, I bet women are told that more than men in ANY academic discourse. My perception of my colleagues in literature is that their love for their academic area is major, and many of their behaviors are similar to fans' (while being given an entirely different social status). But then literature has tended to run on a rhetoric of love that doesn't exist in, say, history (or as I tell the medieval historian I live with, it's not that they don't love their stuff, they just don't say they love it!)
I just re-read your post, and realized you're probably referencing the aca-fan debate, which I was a part of! Most of the critique of academic culture in terms of gender comes from feminists--and covers all disciplines! (Philosophy is the worst among the humanities, in the US, in terms of graduating and hiring and publishing women, and I follow a couple of feminist philosophy blogs on my LJ feed).
In terms of fan studies--that debate came because a whole group of women scholars doing fan studies existed on LJ--when some of the group went to a media conference or two associated with Jenkins, they noticed a real pattern of the male scholars (in this case Henry and Hills) hanging out with the male graduate students and in one notorius event, at a fairly small confernce, none of the males came to the female's presentations, plus the guys hang out in blogland rather than LJland (and the few who came over to play in LJ found it terribly confusing). So the question of how their work might be overpriviled in the sexist institutions of the academy (plus the higher prevalence of independent scholars among women, because of women's status in the academy) became something the women discussed on their own, often behind locked posts, until one worked with Henry to organize the debate (for which he seemed to get a lot more credit than she did).
As a participant, I was not happy with the casual dismissal of women's points by both younger males and more established males, but I was also not surprised (I've been an academic brat, a professional student, an adjunct, and now as a tenured professor, and seen sexism in academia my whole life--the racism also exists, but as a white woman, I've not had to deal with it directly).
So, um, well, YES! We will talk more!