Ah, well, you would not be an aca-fan if you did not favor the tl;dr and regularly go over the character length in comments!
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).
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momijizukamori
part 1
Date: 2008-11-01 08:49 pm (UTC)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).