Calling vidders and academics

[rivkat]

So, rather than finishing up my edits or preparing materials for Vividcon (by the way – any intellectual property-type questions vidders want answered? Let me know here and I’ll be sure to work your questions into my presentation) – I’ve been doing more reading, specifically at Henry Jenkins’ website. He has a bunch of interesting stuff up, from Lassie to Mortal Kombat. There’s a long dialogue between him and Matt Hills, who wrote Fan Cultures, that is just wonderful, with too much thoughtful stuff to summarize, though my favorite bits are about the change in cultural production over the past few decades to anticipate, incorporate and respond to fans. If you’re at all interested in theorizing fandom, read it.

What this exchange really got me thinking about was Jenkins’ account of the increasing respectability among academics of being a fan as well as of writing about fans. To a certain extent, this is clearly true; if anything, now one has to defend looking down on fans rather than identifying with them. But Jenkins’ and Hills’ experience is not mine, for a specific (perhaps gendered) reason: As far as I know, though both men are explicit in their academic work that they are fans, they do not produce fiction, art or vids. “Coming out” for them is therefore a lot less fraught. For me, the danger is far more related to my students than my colleagues, most of whom are likely to see my fannish endeavors as bizarre but not academically disqualifying. With students, though, wearing Spock ears really has nothing on the way I’m exposed. Sure, if you actually read Jenkins’ work, you’ll know he’s read a bunch of slash, but, flippantly, it seems to me that the only thing surprising about finding a man reading “porn” is that he’s reading it. My students can easily access what they might well assume are my sexual fantasies – or, at a minimum, what I think might be arousing to readers. Yes, I do feel vulnerable, and it isn’t something I’d ever bring up with students, though I haven’t taken heroic measures to separate my identities and I understand I’ve been outed to some of them.

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear what other fan writers/artists/vidders who are also academics have to say about what your academic colleagues know about your fannish commitments.

Comments

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I haven’t taken heroic measures to separate my identities and I understand I’ve been outed to some of them.

FWIW, it's not a hot rumor *I* ever heard going around about you...

Back when this was actually an issue for me...hmm. I used a particular episode of Angel to illustrate a point about historical adaptation when we were discussing The Patriot in a class on colonial American history. However, I never outed myself and I never had to face the specter of a student outing me as a fic-writer (I used my real email address on Usenet, but not to post fiction; perhaps some connected the dots further, as it's not hard). I personally would not have felt comfortable discussing my fannish *writing* with a student; even what relatively little can be picked up indirectly about my sexual interests via the stories I write (or rec), as far as I'm concerned, is simply not appropriate matter to share between teacher and student.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question, whether the inappropriateness comes more from the sex or the fannishness; I think it's a mix of both, so either alone would still present problems. Part of the current ideology of law school teaching is that we're supposed to be sort-of human beings to the students, so we auction off wine-tastings at our apartments or home-baked cookies or the like, but where to draw the line is always difficult.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

*nods* The fannishness itself didn't really trouble me. It's not like other teachers feel compelled to hide their obsession with the Yankees or the Jets, or their wine fetish, or comparable hobbies. I didn't feel I was in much danger of losing teacherly credibility simply on the grounds of being outed as spending too much time bitching about a TV show about vampires. It could, however, be an issue for others, I suppose, especially those who present as more typically feminine and unassertive.

[chase820.livejournal.com]

Except for a few very close friends, I am as far in the closet with my fannish work as it's possible to get. In fact, I had a bad turn last year when I received a fan letter from a graduate student in my own department for one of my stories. For a moment, I worried that she had somehow figured out who I was, but after I calmed down I realized this was unlikely, even if she had managed to find my livejournal.

Why I was so upset at the thought of being "outed" as a fanfic writer I'm not sure. If I were to make a quick guess, I'd say it's because academic writing in English encourages you take an unemotional, critical, almost cynical stance in response to texts. Reading and especially writing fanfiction about a text seems much more personal and emotional. I was taught that getting personal or emotional with a story, treating the characters as people rather than constructions created within a particular cultural context, was the amateur's response. It was never said but strongly implied that reacting to a story without critical distance puts you on a par with trailer park Tanyas weeping over the daytime soaps in their housecoats and curlers.

Of course, there is very good fanfiction out there that plays with the text in a perfectly respectable postmodern sort of way, or just tells a ripping good yarn that is at least as good as the professionally written mass-market tie-in paperbacks for series. Unfortunately, the image of fanfic writers as shiny-eyed teenage fangirls typing badly-spelled porn seems to prevail. Even many non-academics see writing fan-ficion as weird. The few academic friends I've told about my hobby respond with indulgent amusement at best, apathy and puzzlement at worst. I can only imagine the derision with which others who didn't know me as well would react.

Or perhaps I'm over-reacting. To be honest, I've never had the courage to bring up a discussion of fanfiction with anybody other than my closest friends, even though many of my acquaintances are pop culture critics who might have interesting viewpoints. But the horror of possibly being seen as a subject to be studied rather than a fellow expert to be listened to has kept my mouth firmly closed on the subject.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I was taught that getting personal or emotional with a story, treating the characters as people rather than constructions created within a particular cultural context, was the amateur's response.

Would you mind horribly if I shot every one of your teachers in the head? Talk about a way to churn out soulless monsters who will be incapable of transmitting a love of literature to the next generation.

[chase820.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, pretentious academics are like the mythical hydra--dispose of one head and another grows in its place. It's just the system in some schools.

The system has resulted in a great many graduate students/young profs who are so bound up in critical theory that they can barely communicate with their students, much less transmit a love of good stories. I've never found this to be a problem, but then I spend as much time ignoring my training as relying on it.

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I have no quarrels with even the most complex of critical theories per se. I simply feel you have to have the love underneath. The problem isn't pretension, it's snobbery.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

The Jenkins/Hills discussion I linked to has an interesting section on the relevance of emotion to academia. I get the sense that in cultural studies affective response is a lot easier to admit than in your field. In law, that sort of thing is generally confined to critical race studies and maybe other critical fields.

Your last sentence about being a subject to be studied really rings true with me. I respond to a fair number of the slash research requests that come around, but as the questions get more detailed I find myself more defensive, as if I'm being asked to provide evidence that will show that the researcher knows better than I do about myself. As Jenkins points out, there's some irony in such positions given the relatively highly educated and theoretically sophisticated people one finds in fandom.

Fancademics

[thamiris.livejournal.com]

Can I start off by complaining about academic pseudo-fen? Their perspective is so different from mine as a fannish academic, with theirs almost invariably tainted by typically-mundane snottiness about fannish activities, whether they realize this or not, that whole scientist's superiority to the pinned bug.

That said, as a fan who happens to be an academic, I find myself sharing dribs and drabs of my fannish interests with my colleagues and students, but rarely enough that they can put the pieces together and understand the full extent of it, partly because English departments are still mostly unfriendly to tv as a field of study, partly because my students might freak to learn just what a gay-lovin' porno queen I am, though in both cases I don't hide that I'm interested in both popular culture and erotica.

For me, ultimately, it's a matter of controlling others' interpretations of my activities since most mundanes aren't sufficiently open-minded to accept what I do without the knowledge coloring their treatment of me...

...and, my God, this is so clearly analogous to an in-the-closet, out-of-the-closet situation, isn't it? I just feel that sharing the facts is too much of a hassle, that I won't be accepted on my own terms, that I'll be pre-judged and dismissed. I won't deny that I'm a slasher, and, if you're looking for it, you can certainly assemble the pieces, but it's easier for me to live in a fannishly ambiguous place.

Re: Fancademics

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I hear your complaint, and I find I behave the same way towards colleagues and students. I use a bunch of pop culture examples in class, because they often work well, and I wrote an exam based on less-well-known SV characters, to which a couple of students made explicit reference in their answers. But I don't really want them to put the pieces together. I think you've got it exactly right about controlling others' interpretations.

I think we are at a specially fraught intersection of sex and otherwise-devalued cultural activity. As Jenkins points out, people like Pat Califia have done a lot to make discussion of one's own sexual preferences more acceptable in at least certain parts of the academy, by defending things like BDSM on theoretical grounds while also appealing to personal experience. Fandom is different, because while we're often saying something about our own sex lives (e.g., pretty boys overwhelmed by their fatal passion for one another get me hot), the way we make that statement is through stories, which implicitly make the claim "and you should get hot from this too." (I'm not saying that we mean to make this claim, only that I hypothesize that this perception accounts for some of the discomfort non-fen feel.) In another analogy to homophobia, perhaps some of the unease generated by our perversity is the risk that we will contaminate/seduce our once-innocent audiences.

[agarttha.livejournal.com]

I don't teach full-time, but I do occasionally lecture, if enough people wander into the seminar rooms at the museum where I work.
Museums today, especially British ones, are so avant-garde in their approach, so self-reflexxive in their overt policy, that it would be extremely bad form for any of my colleagues to criticise my place in fandom.

Having said that, I am at least one decade distant in terms of age to most of my colleagues, and of all the ones who remember when computers first came into the department, (and there are many of those) the majority look upon me sometimes indulgently, sometimes frowningly, but on the whole, are far more understanding of my hobby than are my non-academic friends.

Because I straddle the academic and non-academic worlds, my other friends tend to find it strange that the brainy girl in the group likes Buffy or Smallville-- palpably shows for a teen audience, which they themselves find juvenile and vastly inferior compared to Sex and the City. (I have had this disussion, more than once, and I am struck by how I always defend Buffy through its academic qualifications --metaphor and postmodernism sprinkle my explanations, but in fact, I just want to say 'If you haven't seen the point yet, you probably never will.'

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I think it may be a bigger issue for full-time academics because we're so used to defining ourselves by what we write, so maintaining two distinct writerly personalities feels like more of a separation of the self. Also, we often feel entitled to bring our scholarly selves into our fannish analyses, but not the opposite. At the same time, there is a more general tolerance for weirdness in academia than in a lot of professions.

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

I would pay attention to that parenthetical of yours about gender: I think someone like Constance Penley walks a finer line than Henry Jenkins does, just because for a woman talking about desire and sexuality is always more culturally fraught than it is for men. Particularly when your audience thinks they are learning something about your own desire! There must be good anthologies out there on teaching queer theory, and as Tham notes above there's something to be learned from the epistemology of the closet here.*

I would also say that while Jenkins crosses the line between observer and observed, you're mixing cultural production in two areas, and there is always I think a perceived tension between the "artist" and the "critic," even when those functions reside in the same person who doesn't find them contradictory at all -- look at the reception of novels by critics, or of the criticism of novelists, which tends to be either scathing or condescending. There's a way in which literary criticism and literary production have constructed themselves in opposition to one another, at least since the Romantics, that makes someone who feels comfortable crossing that boundary seem suspect to those who identify with it.


*(Speaking of comments above, I'm also carefully restraining myself from commenting on the discussion of literary criticism; suffice it to say I think it's a violent mischaracterization of the field on all sides, and leave it at that.)

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Excellent points. As I said in response to Thamiris above, I think implicit in production of fiction may be the claim that the reader should enjoy the same things the author does, and that may be more threatening than the kind of deep reading of the official texts that Jenkins is more likely to engage in. Which is another way of saying what you said about the artist/critic divide.

[rachelcaine.livejournal.com]

I'm not academic, but I am a pro writer (under several different names, actually) and I run into the very same problems. Fanfic is declasse and largely unmentionable in professional circles.

However, I regularly participate on fanfic panels, and I'm not overly concerned about being "outed" to the rest of the pro community. There are a number of reasons for this, but simply put, I'm proud to be part of the fanfic community. There are fabulously gifted writers out there who are doing amazing work. (Okay, there are also horribly BAD writers as well. But statistically, about the same number as suck in original fiction.)

I'm also of the opinion that being able to write fanfic allows you to explore style and theme and mood in a way that writing your own original fiction doesn't -- it allows you a safety net to experiment and play by locking down som variables. I regularly find myself testing out scenes in fanfic -- in thematic content rather than actual line-for-line echoes -- and working out the rhythm before I write them in my professional work.

It also allows you to be a chameleon, which is something that they strongly teach out of you in more traditional venues -- it's not appropriate to have the chatty style of Buffy in a Harry Potter fanfic (okay, now someone will drag one out and it'll be brilliant and yes, there's always an exception!) so writers who shift between fandoms perforce learn how to shift style to match. And that means having an intuitive grasp of shading and language and rhythm -- very important.

My fanfic has immensely helped the quality of my professional work.

As for the objection to explicit material in fanfic, well, take a look at modern fantasy. Laurell K. Hamilton, George R.R. Martin, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ann Bishop, the Kushiel books by Jacqueline Carey -- all have explicit sexual content. Even more surprising to me, Martin, Kay, Bishop and Carey are writing it within the context of high fantasy. Frankly, I think it's fascinating how thoroughly shattered those barriers have been in such a short period of time. Ten years ago, it was very much The Romantic Idyll in high fantasy; today, it's blow jobs in the throne room. I think that's extremely interesting, that this shift happened and no one seems to have raised an eyebrow.

And that's enough rambling from me, or from fanfic writer juliefortune, to quote my other identity.

Interesting topic!

-- R/J

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I think the pro/fan writer divide has a lot of similarities to the academic/fan divide, though I'm only intimately familiar with the latter. Mixing sex and fandom gives you the dangers to credibility of both. I absolutely agree with your point about explicitness -- it's very interesting to me to compare the level of sexual frankness in, say, Dragonrider, with that in current fantasy/sf. Even intra-author, things are changing: Laurell Hamilton and Robert Sawyer are two very different authors whose explicitness has changed markedly over the course of a decade or so.

Do you have any suggestions of good "blow jobs in the throne room" stories? Because I can always make time to read about a good blow job in a throne room.

By the way, I'm glad you stopped by. I'm a longtime fan, as in back to XF and Pretender days. God, Pretender was such a bad show, with just the right kind of potential for fandom. I'm sad it hasn't had a greater prominence in fandom.

[juliefortune.livejournal.com]

Hmm, blow jobs in throne rooms ... how about Guy Gavriel Kay's "Tigana" (I think that's the right one)? And of course, his "Lions of Al-Rassan," which while nary a blow job, has content of considerable interest along similar lines, as well as fearfully impressive writing.

And then George R.R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" trilogy (which, to my shock, is NOT a trilogy and now I'm left hanging for Book 4) ... incest, fellatio, explicit sex of virtually every description.

And a damn good read.

Heh.

I know my porn.

And THANK YOU for remembering me! :blushes: That's so very cool. I still love tP. Miss Parker is amazingly fun to write, even now. ;)

-- J.

A heartfelt (and long-winded) hello...

[(Anonymous)]

I just sat in front of my computer for thirty minutes debating whether to answer, but here goes...

I'm a 2L at the law school where you're teaching, and I'm in one of your classes this spring. And this is the most elated I've felt in a long time.

I've been pretty deep in the fanwriting closet myself at school until yesterday for fear that our colleagues, teachers and students alike, would be convinced I was a complete lowlife. Heck, considering the online debate that's been raging over the worth/lack thereof of fanwriting, I was starting to wonder if maybe I was! Lots of eccentric hobbies are considered perfectly okay in the academic world, but fanwriting for some reason gets a LOT of flack.

That's actually how I found your fandom persona, your Loyola article was cited in one of the debates:
http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2004/10/what_ive_learne.html#c2466496

You might be interested in reading some of the debates going on in Lee Goldberg's Blog, it got very interesting for awhile.

So there you go: one of your students--well, soon-to-be student--knows, and it had the effect of making her stop feeling like a complete oddball. I know what you mean about feeling vulnerable; being a law student at this school is scary enough without feeling like you have a dirty little secret.

Since I've been even less heroic about separating my online identities (ie the name of the law school is frequently mentioned) I'm posting anonymously, but my username is jocelyncs if you'd like to get in touch. (Or to warn me off your BtVS stories, which I would be plunging into right now if I didn't have Gilbert & Sullivan rehearsal in ten minutes.)

And either way, I promise to keep my mouth shut in class. ;-)

Re: A heartfelt (and long-winded) hello...

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Hello back! I'll have to make sure to attend the G&S this year.

It's funny how divided the online world can be. In my little corner, I rarely get touched by the "fanwriting: good or bad?" debate, since my mind is made up and reading posts like the one you linked to generally just raises my blood pressure. (Aside: yes, the format is bad and I should really get a PDF up, but the bald statement that some of what I say is "specious" somehow fails to persuade me. Also, I'm totally willing to pull rank: and Goldberg's law degree is from where? He's been involved in how many actual cases? Let him get back to me when he's got an injunction in his hand; while copyright owners continue to jump back like scared cats when lawyers show up on the side of fans, I'm gonna keep saying I'm right and he's wrong about the copyright issue.)

If you're interested in the theoretical/academic study of fandom, there are some nice places in LJ: virgule is a slash theory community; fandom_lawyers is pretty much what it says.

Re: eccentricity. I saw Ben Browder on the Late Late Show the other day, promoting the Farscape miniseries, and the host tried to make fun of the sf fans who rallied around the show to get the miniseries funded. Browder pointed out that he'd just seen a bunch of guys who'd stripped off their clothes and painted themselves green, and nobody thought they were strange at all -- they were football fans. The prejudice is real, but unfair, and deciding how to deal with it is always a challenge.

As I said, I've decided that I won't make heroic efforts to hide all of what I am and I won't lie. I expect that students will find out from time to time, and they may tell other students. But in general, I won't volunteer; I like to teach using pop culture, but my fandom activities are rarely relevant. And, obviously, I'm much more comfortable being found by fans than by non-fans.

Re: A heartfelt (and long-winded) hello...

[jocelyncs.livejournal.com]

Oh, believe me, I'll be joining fandom_lawyers. I'm not a slasher by trade, but virgule sounds interesting too. I did not know such enlightened groups existed!

The fandom/football comparison is certainly true! My blood pressure went up quite a bit during the Goldberg debate--did you catch his line to me? I gave him a play-by-play of how starting as a fanwriter taught me how to write, and his only response was: "You've been fanwriting for thirteen years? That's just sad." Grrr.

I both hope and fear what will happen when Copyright Law finally gets put to the test in a full-blown fanwriter vs. author court case.

I wonder sometimes if I should do more to disconnect my fanwriting from my Real World persona, (at least until I get a job.) But then it's the same case: more likely to be discovered by sympathetic fans than unsympathetic nonfans. I did out myself to our Copyright professor yesterday when I told her about the Goldberg debate--my blushing when the subject comes up tends to be the biggest hazard.

Thanks for answering--and do come see the show in two weeks, it's going to be great. The only other fandom people I know at school are in G&S.