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

[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.