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

[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.