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

Re: part 1

[fanficforensics.livejournal.com]

Hearing how many other disciplines are related to fandom makes me feel quite at ease, actually. It sounds much like "back home". I'm coming to fan studies out of area studies, which is a very odd field in the sense that it encompasses pretty much every other field there is out there -in relation to a certain country or area. In my case, Japan. I share an office with an educational technology guy and a financial history guy. The other members of our unit research art and literature, law, language, politics, and something about pronunciation in South-East Asia that I couldn't begin to explain. While we don't sit down as a group and talk about our research nearly often enough, there is definitely quite a bit of cross-fertilization. Even if I'd blundered into fan studies all on my own, eventually, I'd never be approaching it the way I am now if the educational technology fellow hadn't infected me with the open source bug. That openness can be wonderfully inspiring.

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 :)