Reading notes: interesting tidbits on scholarly fans (part 1)

[unjapanologist]

Originally 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.

Comments

part 2

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

The masculine/feminine academic culture--I don't see that much in Jenkins (he talks about some stuff about academic culture being seen as masculine, fan culture as feminine, but then also talks about differences between male and female fans).

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!