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July 2011

[META] Bringing Fandom to the Classroom

Most fans know how it feels to contemplate sharing their fandom with the outside world.  You dwell, you ponder, you cogitate and you finally decide that you are not gonna hide, dammit!  You are gonna fly your geek flag, because this is important to you and you have nothing to be ashamed of.  (Or maybe you decide for very good reasons not to reveal yourself, but let’s assume otherwise for the purposes of the moment).

So you “come out” to someone.  You tell them about your love.  You explain all the ways that you express your love and you brace yourself for judgment.  You are ready with your arguments:  You do know the difference between fantasy and reality.  You do have a life.  You are a contributing member of society and it isn’t just a tv show/movie/book/game, it brings you meaning and pleasure and friendship.  It allows you to express parts of yourself that wouldn’t see the light of day otherwise.

Except, to your surprise, the judgment doesn’t come.  You get vague, puzzled expressions and shrugs but little more, and you leave the encounter feeling oddly disappointed and maybe just a tad uncomfortable, as though you just tried to write a really cracky crossover fic and the characters just refused to exist in each other’s worlds.

Bringing fandom into the classroom is a lot like this – except entirely different.

I write on this topic today in the genuine hope that other acafen might have wisdom to impart.  You see, I just finished teaching an introductory level course called Media and Society.  On the whole, it was a great experience.  The students were engaged and talkative.  They were full of opinions, so I imagined that when we got to the section on fandom there would be a plethora of exciting conversation.  Some might react, others would challenge the reactions…. or if not, I would intervene gently but firmly.  Perhaps some would admit to being fans themselves, even talk about their own transformative works.  We would debate whether or not fans are harmless, folksy innovators  or the dupes of capitalism.  If nothings else, we would have fun.  I brought to class some great examples of fan vids, fan films, machinima, fan art.  I told them about slash, yaoi, hurt/comfort, and I waited for the questions.

The party was a bust.  Just as with my more generic revelation fantasies, I got silence and blank faces.  There were the occasional giggles and expressions of shock but otherwise the galvanizing encounter that I had expected did not materialize.  (I did have a bunch of athletes in the class who quite willingly owned up to being sports fans, but in this sport-centric society who would feel the need to hide it?)  At the very least I expected the subject of slash to inspire curiosity or outrage – but no.  The void I that I contemplated in response to slash was particularly gaping.

The way I see it, there are four possible explanations for this.

One:  I was too obvious and the students didn’t want to risk getting on my bad side.  Now, I did not make a secret of the fact that I am myself a fan, but I did not name outright my fandom, nor did I tell them that I have written fanfic and slash.  Still, they may have been able to figure it out.  I did show an excerpt from an episode of Supernatural and followed it up later with a Supernatural fanvid.  But this only made sense, didn’t it?  I had discovered early on that I could make no assumptions about them having seen any show or film, regardless of its popularity, and if I was going to show a vid then they ideally needed some context for it.  It’s not like it was all-Supernatural-all-the-time.  In fact, I thought I had done a good job of being not-too-overly-enthusiastic when I mentioned the show, using it as just one (very apt) example of what Sharon Marie Ross has called “participatory viewing”.

However, it is entirely possible that I was not as inscrutable as I had hoped.

Two:  I was not obvious enough.  In my desire to not seem too partial, to have a balanced dialogue about fandom, perhaps I undersold fandom.  I did not express how I adore the unquenchable, idiosyncratic, joyful creativity of fans.  I did not manage to make my students understand the depth of feeling that we fans invest in our loved objects, how strange yet ordinary that emotion, how necessary and yet how secret.  And even though I touched on the gender divide in fandom, I did not adequately convey my wonder at women all over the world turning media to our own purposes the way that we do.  I did not advance any arguments about slash being more than just gay sex.  Perhaps I should have told them how slash is so much more than dirty stories, how it is an entire woman’s genre built from our desires and fantasies – exciting, mundane, cute, sentimental, passionate, sometime violent.

Maybe I failed in all this because still, after everything, there is something about fandom that is embarrassing to me.  I don’t care if people know that I read and write sexy man-on-man stories but I do mind people knowing about all the sentiment.  There is something squirmful about the fact that I need a fix of emotional goop every day.  Even if I know cognitively that there is nothing wrong with it, I still find it hard to face the discomfited sniggers when displaying a piece of fan art that depicts excessive tenderness between two naked male characters.

Third:  Fandom is no big deal.  Maybe these kids are just too accustomed to the idea that people are entitled to their pleasure as some inalienable right.  Maybe they secretly think “Yeah, total geek…but hey, to each his own” along with “I like my shows/games/movies too.  I’m not going to wear a costume though…I’m not a fan like that.”  Maybe they figure there’s nothing much to argue about and that, again, would be my failure.

Fourth:  Now I’m going to make a confession.  I’m exaggerating a bit.  My students did ask some questions.  There was even a group of four or so who stayed after class one day (I had just shown the first 30 minutes of Trekkies), to argue about the meaningfulness of fandom relationships and the ethical implications of spending thousands of dollars on collectibles.  It was an energetic, intellectually satisfying discussion that we never had the chance to resume.  I had hoped to pick it up in class but the same students didn’t seem interested anymore.  So I was disappointed, and that just may be my problem.  It is possible that the “fan” in “acafan” will never be able to find the experience of teaching fandom satisfying, either because her students are not fans and don’t quite get it, or because her students are fans and they do get it but, like her, they aren’t willing to expose their quivering, emotional, fannish self.  Perhaps there must always be a limit on how much of the fannish experience she can reveal, not because there is anything inherently wrong about what she does and feels and believes but because it will simply never translate into the classroom.

Am I once again being the idealist, comparing my imagined experience with reality and finding reality wanting?  And wouldn’t that just be typical of me.

[META] Harry Potter, History, and Endings

Like much of the rest of the world, I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 last weekend.

The Harry Potter books, and fandom, hold a very special place in my heart, and the seventh book in particular holds a very special place in my reading experience as well: namely, it’s the only book I can recall in years that, while reading, I deliberately forbade myself from flipping to the back of and reading the ending. Just about every other book I read, especially fiction, after about twenty pages I find myself turning to the ending and reading the final chapter or so.

I’ve gathered from people’s reactions that this is something of an odd reading practice. The only other person I’ve met who does make a habit of it, actually, is a professor in my department, and we had a satisfying moment of solidarity when we discovered that we both read the endings of books before reading the rest of the book.

I’m frequently asked why I read this way, and I often answer that, for me, the plot of a book is often the least interesting aspect. Did I suspect that Harry would (eventually) vanquish the Dark Lord when I started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 1997? Yeah, I had an inkling. Whether or not there are only seven stories in the world, there are certainly a limited number of plots; for me, how the author gets there–language, characterization, style, subject matter, setting–is usually far more important than the actual ending itself.

My professor, however, told me that I should be taking the same approach to academic works that I do to fiction: namely, reading the introduction and the conclusion before the actual core of the book, to see whether an author actually fulfills the claims they make. This is certainly good advice; I’m constantly surprised at how many scholars’ introductions and conclusions don’t quite match what their books actually say. But, as is perhaps inevitable, the entire conversation got me to thinking about fanfiction.

To wit, part of the pleasure of fanfiction in general–and Harry Potter fanfiction in particular, because there are oceans and oceans of Harry Potter fic out there, as befits a rich, sprawling, transcendently popular canon–is how much we as readers and writers already have in common when we come to the text: we’ve read the books, we’ve seen the movies, we’ve sampled the Chocolate Frogs and Every Flavor Beans and we’ve listened to our wizard rock. So we’re free to focus our attention on other things: characterization in light of whatever canonical aspect has been transformed, whether the fic is critiquing or celebrating a particular aspect of the text, the hotness of any included sex scenes.  No matter how many brilliant fics I read, I’m never unhappy to read another fic covering the exact same emotional territory or scenario, for the pleasure of getting a new spin on a concept I love.

All this being said, I’m glad I didn’t spoil myself for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when I first read it, though I hardly wept any less in the theater than I did at the resurrection stone scene in the book. Just as in fanfiction, one of the pleasures of the Potter films has always been the simultaneous impossibility and possibility of spoiling them. We walked into the movie theater already knowing the plot every time, and yet how the filmmakers would transform the books into movies remained a mystery. And even in this final film, which only covers the last half of the final Potter book, my friends and I were quite happy to be unspoiled about just how the filmmakers would interpret everything. (We were, on the whole, quite satisfied.)

I’ve come to believe that this same fascination–not what but how, not actual events so much as means, causes, and consequences, hidden realities within familiar stories–is part of why I enjoy studying history. History too offers us a closed, finite narrative that most of us are familiar with at some level of detail; it’s the historian’s job to dig in to the inner workings of that narrative and explicate how events took the shape they did, to excavate forgotten, actual and possible pasts while illuminating possible futures. Lacking a Time-Turner, a Pensieve, or a position in the Department of Mysteries, more often than not for my own research I’m following Hermione Granger’s lead to the library, but even magic takes effort and study. We in fandom know well that canon is only one possible version of any given story; similarly, just because the past worked out the way it did doesn’t lend that past any authority beyond that of the actual. Both are crying out to be disassembled, remixed, and transformed.

[LINK] Signal boosting: Check Out the Acafan Convo!

One of the organizing concepts of the Symposium Blog is the intersection of academic and fannish modes of analysis.  Sometimes, these converge in a single acafan (an identification I myself am perfectly comfortable with, as I spend equal portions of my time on my academic and fannish work), and other times, they refer rather to the possible terrain of an argument, a feeling of accountability to the very different, but equally intellectually exciting “rules of engagement” in the academic sphere and in fandom.  The term “acafan” is controversial because, like “queer,” it is in flux, and has different meanings within and outside the academy, as well as within and outside fandom.

This summer, Henry Jenkins is hosting a series of conversations called “Acafandom and Beyond,” which bring together some of the “people from Game Studies, Critical Race Theory, Performance Studies, Queer Studies, and Gender Studies, who are confronting similar issues surrounding the role of subjectivity and cultural criticism,” which are at the heart of the acafan debates.

Now that fandom has finally gotten a momentary fair shake from the mainstream, I’d say that it’s high time to return to the complex questions that self-reflexive fans are so good at asking, like: the role of passion in serious debate, the importance of complex media engagement, and the intersections of various forms of privilege and taste.  It is certainly not the case that one needs to be a practicing academic to engage, either.  However, academics who form part of the critical sphere created by the media landscape, especially those who also value fannish as well as institutionalized methodologies, are uniquely equipped to have conversations that fascinate me.

The first installment, an overview, is located on Henry Jenkins’s blog here, and the latest installment, in which participants talk about everything from Comic-Con to foodies, is located here.

Check it out!  And feel free to join the conversation on the blog, or on the Dreamwidth mirror site.

[LINK] A Thoughtful and Well-Researched Article About Fanfiction

Yesterday a story by Lev Grossman appeared on the Time Magazine website, titled “The Boy Who Lived Forever” (soon to be available in print).  The occasion of the story, of course, is the imminent conclusion of the Harry Potter saga, at least in movie form.  However, the article is really all about fanfiction.  Grossman is amazingly thorough.  In his five pages he covers the various genres of fanfiction – including some of the ones that aren’t always mentioned in articles sympathetic to fanfic, like hurt/comfort, noncon, mpreg and incest – the breadth of fanfiction, the legal status of fanfiction, and even the occasional rants from published authors who feel offended or violated by the existence of fanfiction.   He also touches on the aspects of fanfiction that express diverse sexualities and obsessions, and he manages it with wit and aplomb.  It is obvious that Grossman did his homework and I really must commend him for it.

Best of all, Grossman touches on the fundamental issue raised by fan fiction:  What does it mean to be creative?  He is aware (perhaps coached by some fannish informants, hmm?) that many more accepted and prestigious forms of  literature resemble fanfiction in their taking up of previously existing characters and worlds to create a new work.  I was very pleased to see him mentioning the fact that until the era of Romanticism in the 19th century, the prevalent cultural definition of “originality” had nothing to do with the creation of something completely new.  In other words, the idea that valid artistic expression must aspire to complete originality is one of recent coinage – at least in the western context.  Reading Grossman’s piece recalled the satisfaction I felt when reading a certain essay by Thomas Sobchack;  how enlightening it was to learn that, before the Romantics, it was not only permitted but expected that a writer would work within previously formulas, structures, storyworlds, myths and histories!  The artist’s goal was an original restatement, not a discrete new world.

I’m pretty sure that if you look it up in the dictionary, the definition of creativity is “original recombination”.   Sure, Grossman acknowledges the deep emotional connection an author may have with his/her characters.  He can understand and appreciate the perspectives of the Anne Rices and Robin Hobbses and Orson Scott Cards out there – and so can many fanfiction authors.  As someone who has written an original character now and then, I can also appreciate that rather irrational feeling of ownership.  But as Grossman perceptively points out, if an author is like a parent to their characters, it is the wise parent who realizes that their children are going to go forth into the world to have lives, connections, even identities apart from them.  In our current age convergence and participatory culture, this is not just a possibility – it’s a guarantee.

“There may be hurt in that,” Grossman concludes, “but there is a great deal of comfort as well.”  And it is a comfort to know that our stories go on and on (neverending, maybe?) – that Harry Potter will live and live forever, as will Frodo and Luke Skywalker and Buffy and the Winchesters and so many others.

Note:  Thanks to Baranduin for bringing this article to my attention

[LINK] Fascinating CFP Alert! Attention Boys’ Love Fans!

It’s at moments like this that I realize how much I have to learn about fandom, its far-reaching impact on global popular culture forms, and its awesome and endless variety. With that in mind, I heartily encourage fans, fan scholars, and acafans with the relevant expertise to think seriously about submitting a piece of writing to this upcoming special issue of the academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures. The editors have put together a welcoming and intellectually exciting set of questions to inspire contributions from a range of disciplinary and fannish perspectives. I can’t wait to see how the issue takes shape.  But enough about me, onto the editors’ CFP:

Transnational Boys’ Love Fan Studies

Edited by Kazumi Nagaike and Katsuhiko Suganuma, Oita University

‘BL’ (Boys’ Love), a genre of male homosexual narratives (consisting of graphic manga, novels, animations, games, films, and so forth) written by and for women, has recently been acknowledged, by Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike, as a significant component of Japanese popular culture. The aesthetic and style of Japanese BL have also been taken up, deployed and transformed by female fans transnationally. The current thrust of transnational BL practices certainly raises a number of important issues relating to socio/cultural constructs of BL localization and globalization.

A historiographic approach to Japanese BL studies clearly shows that Japanese BL originally developed through fans’ amateur aniparo (anime-parody) writing, in which the male characters in popular animations (as well as manga and other genres) are recast in homosexual pairings. From the outset, then, BL was a fan-oriented activity, established on the basis of a fervent, female-oriented fan community which has produced, circulated, and consumed dōjinshi (amateur coterie magazines) and other materials in this genre. The Tokyo Comic Market, the biggest fan-dōjinshi event in Japan, is held twice a year and attracts more than half a million participants in each event. A large portion of these Comic Market participants consists of BL fans, who have become a dominant force in the development of such dōjinshi activities. As well, Japanese female BL fans have recently received a great deal of public attention in relation to the popularized concept of fujoshi, which literally means rotten women and connotes the presumed “perversions” of women who fantasize about male-male eroticism. A specialized body of academic analysis concerns the formation of Japanese BL fujoshi, detailing their consumptive and productive activities, both as individual fans and as members of specific fan communities.

Such scholarly endeavors would certainly be enriched by further research concerning the activities of transnational BL fans. This research would examine BL fans, fan communities, fandom, and fan fiction in each of the regions where BL (or BL-like) activities have originated and developed. For example, several critics (e.g. Antonia Levi 2010) have previously described the arrival of BL in the West, but this is surely premised on the existence of local fan communities and practices. Further, Matthew Thorn (2005) has investigated the similarities between Japanese BL fans and North American female slash fans and found, in both cases, that these fans “come out” only among fellow fans, showing that women’s pleasure in such “unhealthy” materials still possesses some degree of public stigma. On the other hand, Ting Liu (2009) has examined the development of BL fan communities in China and Hong Kong, along with the gradually shifting cultural perceptions which surround them, demonstrating the ways in which BL fan activity problematizes established gender formations in these regions. Thus, transnational BL fan studies can and should also be incorporated into the broader socio/political critical frameworks offered by studies concerning economy, gender/sexuality, race/class, and others.

In order to develop transnational BL fan studies further, we are therefore seeking contributors working in this field, in particular those engaged in the exploration of non-Japanese and non-North American contexts (e.g. Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and others). We welcome submissions dealing with, but not limited to, the following topics:
Case-studies and ethnographic examinations of BL fans, specifically examining fans’ sex/gender, age, occupation, class, race/ethnicity, et cetera.
Local ethnographies relating to BL fans’ production, distribution, and use of these materials.
Discussions concerning the ways in which broadly framed socio/political issues or forms of consciousness (e.g. gender/sexuality formations, authorities’ interference, censorship, and so forth) impact fans’ BL activities.
Media and social responses to fans’ involvement in BL activities.
Commercial aspects of BL and fans’ contribution to the development of BL economics.
The integration of research on BL fans into a wider discussion of social theory, differing cultural discourses, and globalization.
Discussions concerning the ways in which BL fans’ forms of production, distribution, and consumption might challenge traditional notions of Author, Reader, and Text.
Theoretical overviews reflecting traditional/contemporary ideas of fandom, fans, fan communities, and fans’ means of communications, demonstrating how these ideas specifically relate to BL fans.
Explorations of the ways in which BL participants are motivated to become involved in other fan-oriented activities (e.g. cosplay; female fans’ cross-dressing as male BL characters).

Submission guidelines
TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. Contributors are encouraged to include embedded links, images, and videos in their articles or to propose submissions in alternative formats that might comprise interviews, collaborations, or video/multimedia works. We are also seeking reviews of relevant books, events, courses, platforms, or projects.

Theory: Often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offer expansive interventions in the field. Peer review. Length: 5,000–8,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Praxis: Analyses of particular cases that may apply a specific theory or framework to an artifact; explicate fan practice or formations; or perform a detailed reading of a text. Peer review. Length: 4,000–7,000 words plus a 100–250-word abstract.

Symposium: Short pieces that provide insight into current developments and debates. Editorial review. Length: 1,500–2,500 words.

Submissions are accepted online only. Please visit TWC’s Web Site) for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail the TWC Editor (editor AT transformativeworks.org).

Contact
We strongly encourage potential contributors to contact the guest editors with any inquiries or proposals:

Kazumi Nagaike, nagaike AT oita-u.ac.jp

Katsuhiko Suganuma, suganuma AT oita-u.ac.jp

Due dates
Contributions for blind peer review (Theory and Praxis essays) are due by March 1, 2012. Contributions that undergo editorial review (Symposium, Interview, Review) are due by April 1, 2012.