fandom, gender and knowledge
Kristina Busse has posted a great blog post on the gendered exclusions going on in media studies and fan studies, in response to the Media in Transition 5 conference. I wish I could have been at the conference!
Anyway, I think that her points are extremely important and far-reaching, and I think that everyone should go over there and read.
They are points I have been thinking about recently too, as I have been discussing fandom in a lot of different academic and quasi-academic contexts. The intersection of geeky, girly, queer (in multiple senses and sometimes problematically), uncool and un-self-aggrandizing just doesn't have the intellectual marketability of media convergence, the explosion of 'web 2.0,' and mainstreaming fan practices, I suppose. And the 'fangirls' flock and stay anonymous while the 'fanboys' publicize themselves furiously. But the historical and current practices affect each other, and it seems that the public, male-oriented history is being written without any understanding of the communities created largely by women. It's all there in Kristina's post.
I have regular panic attacks about the triviality of what I want to work on, over my desire to do my theorising around an archive of geekery that could bar me from being taken seriously in the academic world. But I continue to believe that it's important, intellectually and maybe even politically, that these overlooked texts, and these models of knowledge production, collaboration, mentorship, the interactions that happen there/here–– it all needs to be taken seriously and needs to be discussed beyond the communities that form around the texts and genres (much as I love those communities). And I don't just mean sf and media fanfiction, but meta arguments, the intersecting and overlapping spaces that have been created on LJ, the gender and sexual and racial politics of it all no matter how ugly or uncomfortable they get, even the wank. Some days I think especially the wank.
I got very little of my academic interests and intellectual passion from classes. I just recently realised that this is probably relatively unusual. I came to them from reading sf which turned me on to theory, from queer and feminist online communities that brought me into the relation I hold to identity politics, showed me more theory, taught me to think seriously and critically about race and gender and sexuality and capitalism and class; I got them from being sucked into LJ and fanfic and meta fandom and being encouraged to keep thinking and writing by people I met here.
I have certainly learned a lot from university and classes too, especially since I began my PhD. But I wouldn't have my PhD topic without what I learned outside the academy; I probably wouldn't be in my PhD program without it. And I maintain, fervently and stridently, that there needs to be more attention paid to the ways knowledge circulates outside academic contexts. I hear far too many people assuming that the only way you can learn anything is to take (and to pay for) a class in it. The internet is far from the only way to learn outside of an economy that commodifies and instrumentalises knowledge, of course; but it's the route that I have most often followed, and for those who have access it is probably one of the easiest to pursue.
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