It's a Thing!

This special episode of “It’s a Thing!” features a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Wanzo, Professor and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and author of the paradigm-shifting fan studies essay, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies,” and the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award-winning book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (New York University Press, 2020). This Zoom conversation was the keynote event of the 2020 Fan Studies Network North America conference in October 2020.

Show links and transcript coming soon.

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 6 February 2021. “Rebecca Wanzo at FSNNA” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.12. [Accessed Date]. https://itsathing.net/2021/02/06/episode-12-rebecca-wanzo-at-fsnna

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

On this special episode of “It’s a Thing!” I’m talking with Dr. Crystal Anderson, Assistant Director for Teaching Excellence at the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University about online pedagogy in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. We also talk about her forthcoming book, Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop.

Show Links and Transcript coming shortly

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 6 July 2020. “Crystal Anderson on Pandemic Pedagogy.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.11. [Accessed Date]. https://itsathing.net/2020/07/06/episode-11-crystal-anderson-on-pandemic-pedagogy

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

On this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I talk with Dr. Ross Garner about collecting and material fan cultures, dinosaur fandom and Jurassic Park, and his experiences at Tokyo’s otaku haven, Nakano Broadway.

Show Links and Transcript coming shortly

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 18 June 2020. “Ross Garner.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.10. [Accessed Date]. https://itsathing.net/2020/06/18/episode-10:-ross-garner

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

On this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I talk with Dr. Benjamin Woo about comic books, conventions, race and whiteness in fandom and fan studies, and the study of geek cultures.

Show Links

People

Dr. Benjamin Woo
Dr. Ien Ang
Dr. Bertha Chin
Dr. Alfred Martin
Dr. Rukmini Pande
Dr. Rebecca Wanzo

Publications

Woo, Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture
Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience
Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination
Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West
Huynh & Woo, “‘Asian Fail’: Chinese Canadian Men Talk About Race, Masculinity, and the Nerd Stereotype“
Pande, Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race
Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies“

Terms, Concepts & the Rest

Swarming Comic-Con 2021 Project

Transcript

Lori Morimoto: Hi, and welcome to “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. I’m your host, Lori Morimoto.

[music]

LM: On this episode of “It’s a Thing!”, I’m talking with Dr. Benjamin Woo, an associate professor of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Toronto, and author of Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture. So stick around!

[music]

LM: Ben, I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s really fun and exciting to be able to talk to you.

Ben Woo: Well, thank you so much for the invitation. I can’t think of a better way to pass the time during quarantine.

LM: How is quarantine going so far?

BW: You know, it’s all right, actually. You know, I’m obviously very, very lucky to be able to say that, but as an inside kid, I feel like I’ve been preparing for this my entire life.

LM: I can sympathize with that. I’ve been feeling pretty much the same way. So, to get started, I wanted to ask you a question that I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, and that is, how did you first get into Fan Studies? What was your introduction to the field?

BW: Well, I think that my introduction to the field and me getting into it were two separate processes. I took a kind of combination degree in film studies and sociology when I was an undergraduate student trying to kind of jury-rig together a Cultural Studies or Media Studies program at my university, which at the time didn’t have that available as as an option. And I think I went into it imagining that I would work in media as a creative, or marketing, or something – which is, you know, a very common kind of aspiration for students in those kinds of majors. But I gradually found myself getting more and more interested in the academic side of things all along. And so, somewhere in there, I would have been introduced to fan studies as part of kinds of surveys of theory and methods in the field.

BW: So, my introduction to it would have been, as part of the kind of new audience studies of the 80s and 90s, the kind of cultural studies-inflected versions of researching media audiences. In terms of how I started doing it myself, at that time, I think that I was more interested in being a kind of formalist theory head for a while, and I I tried on that identity a bit when I was doing my master’s degree. And I wrote a thesis that I ultimately was not satisfied with or happy with at all. I didn’t feel like it said the kinds of things that I wanted to say. And so, at the end of that process, I was reflecting, “Where do I go from here? What do I want to do next?” And it seemed that a big part of why that thesis was not satisfying to me was that I made a lot of claims about what certain texts meant. And I didn’t feel confident that that’s what they really meant, or at least really meant for everybody. And so the turn to talking to audiences, and in particular, fans sort of seemed like the natural way of addressing that problem. And that was the way that I found myself getting into doing fan studies.

LM: As you were making that shift away from a theory-centric approach to audiences to a more ethnographic one, were there any fan studies works in particular or audience studies works in particular that especially informed your transition?

BW: That’s a great question. Obviously, like many people that you’ve spoken to on this podcast, Henry Jenkins’s book, Textual Poachers, was really a big part of that. Certainly that was, I am 99% sure, without digging through maybe old archives on a dusty hard drive somewhere, that that would have been what was assigned to me in those undergraduate classrooms when I said I was first introduced to fan studies. I think that Ien Ang’s work has also been really a really big part of how I’ve come to see audiences and fans interacting with us. Particularly, I think, in Desperately Seeking the Audience, where Ang really helps understand, or helped me understand, the way that creating knowledge about or claiming to speak on behalf of audiences is this really important process that media industries do, that journalists and critics do, that particular individual audience members do, that, that we’re all trying to do? You know, I think that that’s really where I’ve seen a lot of … my own work is really built on that insight. I think,

LM: You know, I’m really glad actually, that you brought up Ien Ang. She’s somebody who has also been, you know, deeply influential on my thinking in fan studies as well, and yet, she doesn’t get a lot of airtime as it were. And I just, you know, as a plug, Desperately Seeking the Audience, the Dallas book, as well, has – that’s the one for me that really sort of cemented a lot of ideas. And perhaps because she’s working in the transnational frame, I don’t know, but I’m really glad that you brought her up.

BW: Yeah. And I’ll say, too, like, it’s not super relevant for fan studies specifically, but her book On Not Speaking Chinese, is something that was personally a really influential and impactful book.

LM: I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit, actually, if you don’t mind. And I ask in part because Bertha Chin, who is also a fan studies researcher, has also talked about how influential that book has been to her personally, and I was wondering if you could just speak a little bit to what about it spoke to you?

BW: Well, I think there’s a lot of pieces of that and, you know, I think this might end up being a bit tangential, but we’ll see where it goes. You I mean, the first thing is obviously, if people don’t know this from my last name, I’m a biracial Chinese Canadian person. And so, you know, I was raised in a household by a, you know, one Chinese parent, but I did not learn to speak Chinese and grew up in contexts where I was often the only Asian person, or certainly the only East Asian person, in my classes and things like that. And, you know, I think that that book really captures well the experience of people imputing certain abilities or attributes to someone based on their appearance, without a kind of recognition of their own individual history, and the kinds of frictions that that can cause, I think it captures really well.

BW: And I think it’s also a really interesting attempt at grappling with the politics of multiculturalism in this context. You know, most of the essays in that book were written after she relocated to Australia. I feel like, in many ways, Canada is not that different in terms of the sense of a growing visibility of people of color and people with cultural backgrounds from outside of Europe that likes to signal their presence in many ways, but hasn’t really grappled with what it means to have people like us as part of the fabric of this nation.

LM: Well, that brings up actually an interesting aspect of some of your work. I know that you’ve written extensively in your book on popular culture, consumption, uses, and so on more broadly, but you’ve also written a bit about race, and specifically race in the context of fan studies. And that seems in some ways to dovetail a bit with what you’re saying about multiculturalism in national societies, local societies. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your interest in race as part of a fan studies conversation, and if you see any carryover or overlap between your own experiences within a “multicultural society,” and what you see happening in fan studies?

BW: You know, there’s so many different threads that are tangled up in that in that question, and so I’m trying to think about how I want to take them apart and tackle it. Definitely, there is a biographical or experiential dimension to why I’m interested in the question of this, you know. And I think, again, speaking to that experience of being one of a small number of visible minority people, and particularly an East Asian person, you know, I think that when I was young, it was really easy to subsume my sense of my racial difference into a subcultural identity as a geek or a nerd, right? I’m not a big person. I have a pretty small frame. I’ve always been that way. I have terrible vision, and I’ve always had to wear thick glasses. I have asthma, right. So there were many ways in which I really fit into that nerdy stereotype. And there’s an article I’ve written with my friend and colleague, Ken Huynh, where we talk a little bit about the ways that there’s this slippage between stereotypes or attributes associated with Asian and especially East Asian identities and the kind of nerd stereotype. So, those things came together. And so, for a long time, I think that I understood my own proximity to whiteness as a way of kind of subsuming that into my sense of myself as a nerdy kid who liked comic books and role playing games and things like that.

BW: And then I moved to a big city that had a substantial minority population. When I went to grad school in Vancouver, where the city is roughly 50% non-white, with that sort of split between East Asian and South Asian large minority communities, and finding that the racial politics there were very different than in the smaller towns and suburbs that I’d grown up in. And that paradoxically, being somewhere where there were a lot more people who looked like me meant that the racial dynamics were much more vitriolic and on the sleeve, and that it turned out that I wasn’t just a nerdy kid, I kind of had to discover my political and racial subjectivity as an Asian person in that context, where suddenly I’m receiving street harassment about real estate prices as I walk around my neighborhood. And so, you know, I think that that similar sense of people thinking that a fan community is this kind of open space where race doesn’t really matter, and then discovering like, oh, no race really matters, still, is kind of mirrored in that experience a little bit. And I think I would say Rukmini Pande, in her book, Squee From the Margins, really captures a lot of that dynamic really well. And so that’s why I think, why I’m interested in and concerned about thinking about the role of race in fandom – the sense that it’s lurking there, but we don’t really acknowledge it. And part of what we’re, we need to do is, as fan studies researchers, is engage with that, or at least account for it when we try to make sense of what we see happening.

LM: Yeah, that was something that Alfred Martin brought up, as well, when I interviewed him a few podcasts back – this, the importance of naming whiteness, and that was something which your essay, “The Invisible Bag of Holding,” also speaks to. In your own work, how do you incorporate sort of that broader sense of, we’re not just talking about white people, or conversely, we’re just talking about white people here, and we need to acknowledge that?

BW: I mean, I’ll be the first to say, imperfectly. You know. I think this is a journey that all of us who have been trained within an academy that, like fandom, like my own experiences, right, promises to the world that it is an open space where individual contributions and talent matter more than any other kinds of accidents of birth, but actually is deeply, deeply structured by whiteness and white privilege and white supremacy. In that same way, you know, all of us are getting over the fact, or struggling to get over the fact that the citations that we reach for are the ones that we were taught in grad school, because we’re most familiar with them. And those are overwhelmingly the work of white people, white men, straight people, cis people, etc. Right? So, I want to first say that I don’t see myself as a paragon or a leader or, like, that I have solved this.

BW: I think one of the the troubling things that I found when researching and writing my book, for example, is that I wanted to talk more about race, but I found it something that my interview subjects tended to try to avoid when I brought it up. That they sort of dodged the questions and would take refuge in the idea that well, you know, the people in our community that come to our fan club meetings or shop at the store, their demographic breakdown is basically the same as the surrounding community and the city at large. And maybe that’s true. But we also know that there’s lots of opportunity for cognitive bias that lead us to overestimate the number of minority people, just as men tend to overestimate the number of women in a group. So, definitely the sense that I got from people was that they didn’t know how to tell a good story about race in the way that when I talked to comic book store owners and game store owners and managers, they had a good story that they could tell about gender. That, you know, “Well, when I started in the hobby, there weren’t a lot of women or they, you know, were marginalized in these ways, but it’s getting better, and I can point to these sort of pieces of evidence,” not to say that gender has been solved in geek culture communities obviously, but they, you know, they had a story that they could tell that made them and their patrons and their businesses and their hobbies look good. And I don’t think they had a story to tell about race. And that people felt that, you know, they were worried about saying the wrong thing or using the wrong terminology. And so they just tried to avoid the conversation.

BW: So, as a result of some of those experiences of trying to get people to talk about race and failing, I think that’s where I started saying, “Well, can we talk more about whiteness, and maybe whiteness as this kind of overarching structure,” and one that, as I think I’ve sort of suggested in my own life, you know, that some of these communities sort of think of themselves as symbolically white, so that even people of color participate in comic book fandom or role playing games, right, have this kind of, there’s this whiteness associated with those hobbies that is independent of or in addition to the identities of the actual people. who are participating in them?

LM: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Rukmini Pande actually talked with me for an essay that I was writing, and in that she talked a bit about her own fandom trajectory and kind of coming to a recognition, she said, you know, because she was online, because she was conversant in certain discourses, you know, fandom discourses and so on, she could, you know, “pass” for white in fandom. And it was only when she started coming into contact with other fans of color, who were actively calling out instances of racism and things like that, that she began to incorporate that into her fandom identity as well. And so, that idea of symbolic whiteness seems especially useful in terms of thinking about how whiteness operates, both within fandoms and within fan studies as well.

BW: Yeah, and you know, obviously Rukmini has been a huge leader in advancing this conversation within the field, both through research and publications, but also as a presence and an advocate in our conferences and spaces and so on. I think that there’s an essay in Transformative Works and Cultures by Rebecca Wanzo from a few years ago that, for me, also was just a huge revelation in terms of connecting the idea of the whiteness of fandom also to the particular kinds of fans and fan practices that we choose to study. And that question of, would the picture of fandom that fan scholars draw look so white if we incorporated other communities and other practices into our embrace of what we count as Media Fans?

LM: Yes, absolutely. And that essay is “African American Acafandom and …”

BW: “Other Genealogies”? Does that sound right?

LM: Yeah. I will link to it, but it is open access, so I encourage listeners to have a look at it if you haven’t already. Speaking of your sort of, your own background as a fan, how – what is that trajectory for you? How did you become a fan? And what kinds of things have you done as a fan?

BW: Well, as I’ve already alluded to, I think for me the big thing has always been comic book fandom. So … I mean, and comic book fandom is an interesting thing, because we tend to sort of rewrite its history a little bit in our biographies. Because most of us comic book fans are or were at some point, superhero comics fans, but we get exposed to superheroes before we get exposed to comic books, right, in cartoons and action figures and all of that stuff. So I have fleeting memories of of watching episodes of Superfriends on television, He-Man and, you know, these kinds of superhero genre media before I ever picked up a comic book. But to me, they all kind of bled together and became part of the same story of fandom. So, I started reading comic books after finding these kinds of discount packs of them that were for sale in a sort of cheap department store chain we had in Canada when I was a kid called BiWay. It was one of these things where you would get three or four comics, and they would come in a plastic envelope so you could only see the covers of two of them and you didn’t know what else was inside. And that was my introduction to comics, to slightly out-of-date DC comic books, that I started reading as a kid when I could convince my parents to pick one up for me when we were at the BiWay.

LM: About how old were you?

BW: I would say that that was probably somewhere around the age of eight to 10.

LM: Oh, okay.

BW: When I started reading those. So Superman comics from the mid to late 80s was sort of how I got into things, and I didn’t, the towns that I grew up in as a kid didn’t have specialty comic bookstores, or at least if they were I didn’t know about them, and I couldn’t convince my parents to take me to them. So my reading of comics was always kind of a bit out of date and at a remove. So, either I was finding ways to get comics that were a little bit behind, that had been out of circulation for a while, or I was reading about things that were happening in the world of comics through magazines like Wizard, which, you know, was very much a particular representation of what it means to be a fan in that magazine. So yeah, my primary fandom is comic book fandom.

BW: But, I think that that experience was different from some other comic book fans, because I didn’t have that kind of immediate access to to the the texts themselves, and obviously somewhat different from our our peers and colleagues that come into fan studies from a background in what we call media fandom, more generally, because I think comic book fandom, in my experience, features all sorts of forms of communalized consumption. There are ways of making our practices of consumption feel like they involve participating in a community, but they are less community-oriented compared with, I think, fanfiction communities around television shows, for example.

LM: Sure. Since you started reading in the 1980s, and then, you know, we have this sort of move of fan practices, fandom communications and stuff online, what was your own transition to online fan culture? Well, I’m actually making an assumption – did you transition to any form of online fan culture post-1980s?

BW: Well, I think that my biggest involvement in online communities around comics were actually in creator communities more than fandom communities. But, we were all kind of small-scale aspirant creators. Some of those people in those web forums that I was part of in the late 90s and early 2000s have gone on to successful careers as comic book creators and other kinds of artists. But, at the time, you know, our identities were sort of amateur, aspiring creators who still very much had a foot in our in our fandom. So, for me, yeah, it was some of those spaces where people who were interested in drawing comics, which I’ll confess now I was one of – I wasn’t very good at it and set it aside eventually. But those were the spaces where I sort of stepped into online fandom most.

LM: Where did that kind of community, for lack of a better word, where – what kinds of platforms or forums did that coalesce in?

BW: So, there were a handful of forum sites, right, so bulletin board or forum sites that I was involved in there. Several of them grew out of communities around kind of individual or a small group of artists having a webpage, and then they created a forum and a community grew around that. So, I think while I was in high school, I participated on a forum that was organized by, on the website, personal website of a young animator, and there were a number of folks in that community that have gone on to quite successful careers as artists and cartoonists. And then, as I myself became more of a creator, there were a couple of collectives of web comics creators where community sort of coalesced on their bulletin boards.

LM: Yeah. Okay. Is there anything that you’re into in particular right now?

BW: Well, I am, I have made my way back to monthly comic book buying after sort of a period away from that for some time. So, you know, I’m very excited about the fact that there is a monthly Legion of Superheroes comic book again, that takes me back to my early 80s DC comic book reading experiences very much. So, that’s great. I mean, I’m excited in general about the tremendous flowering and diversity of comics that are now available. You know, superheroes still hold us place in my heart. But, it’s by no means the only only thing I read. And it’s exciting that there are so many options available now, though, obviously, with the pandemic, this is a bit of a scary time for the comic book industry, and for the creators that make it make it work. I have also, like many people, returned to tabletop role playing games in a big way over the past few years, and sort of relearning that hobby now under pandemic conditions, my groups are all sort of putting a toe into virtual tabletop systems and things like that, and trying to figure out how we continue to play this game, that we’re so used to thinking of as a kind of face to face experience, in an online environment.

LM: Yeah. So, I wanted to shift gears just a little bit and talk about your relatively recent book, which is called Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture. And in a lot of ways, I think what you did in the book reflects some of the aspirations of this podcast, and that is to make accessible, to explain ideas about popular culture consumption that a lot of people, especially non academics, but also academics, are unfamiliar with. So for you, what was the biggest sort of takeaway that you wanted your book to have for readers?

BW: Well, let me say first, I mean, thank you so much for that very generous description of the book. You know, I think that while this is a dissertation book, it’s published by a university press, so, obviously, I wanted it to have all of that level of rigor in method, theory, and argumentation, and so on. I did also want it to be a readable book, a book that would be accessible and enjoyable for someone other than just academics to pick up and, you know, maybe part of that, again, comes back to certain things that I learned from my own participation in geeky communities, right? The kind of playfulness of language and taking pleasure in that. So, there’s not a section title that I wrote where I didn’t think about what terrible pun or illusion I could I could work into it. There’s a joke hidden in the index, right? These are the kinds of things that I sweat over when I was putting the book together. But, I think in terms of what I wanted to do with the book, or the kind of intervention that I wanted the book to make, you know … I mean, one of the things about writing about media consumption, one of the things that’s challenging about writing about media consumption, is that everybody’s an expert on media consumption. I mean, we all do it. So we all have some experience doing it. The trick is, I think … so, a book like this isn’t going to tell anybody something that they don’t know, right? Certainly the people who participate in these communities are going to read the book, and I don’t think there’s anything that can be a revelation in terms of, you know, I honestly had no idea about X, Y, or Z, but it’s about trying to give it sort of a new context or give people a new language for thinking and talking about these familiar worlds that they participate in. There’s the old saw in anthropology that, you know, the job of an ethnography is to make the familiar strange and the strange, familiar.

BW: And so, you know, I think in part that was what I was trying to do with the book, to say that there are these things that many of us take for granted, either because we’re so involved in them that they’re just part of our everyday life and are unremarkable, or if we’re not part of a community of tabletop role playing games, or comic book fans or cinephiles, or whatever, it’s not really on our radar. And so, we don’t think much about it. And so, to take those worlds that seem banal or trivial, and really use them as a lens for exploring the ways that people give meaning to their, their lives, and you know, to do something that is, you know, really just basically fundamentally human through the lens and with the means of mass media. So, I think that the story of the book is really an attempt to write a different narrative about our relationship with media. You know, this is not a surprise to people in our field maybe, but one thing that strikes me is how often you know, we – and by we, I guess any kind of dominant cultural narratives – tell stories about media that are about isolation and individuation, you know, and that there’s a whole parade of new media forms that have been blamed for breaking up communities for separating people, for alienating people from from other folks. And the story that I think fan communities, geek cultures, and so on, give us is a different take on that, right? That these media might be isolating, might be individuating in some cases, but there are also ways that we can build communities that are really important.

LM: Yeah, no, I yeah. I really appreciate that perspective. And I think you’re right, and it’s a discourse that doesn’t go away, this one of media consumption being something that atomizes us, rather than has at least the potential to bring us together.

BW: Yeah, I mean, the way that it just kind of shifts on to different media or different cultural practices. And so, then people get nostalgic for the communities created by the media that they used to blame for individuating. And-

LM: Right.

BW: I mean, you know, I think that I guess probably cinema is a perfect example right now, right at this moment where we can’t go to movie theaters, right? The way that people talk about the [unclear], but everyone’s just watching television in their homes or watching movies at home, now. What about the experience of of watching a film together in a theater? And not to knock that obviously, but it’s quite surprising when you go back a couple decades and see people talking about well, but movies are so individuating and isolating because you’re alone in the dark, looking at this big screen, and so on and so on.

LM: Right, right. Since publishing the book, and especially now, what are you, what are your sort of research interests focused on?

BW: At present the projects that I’ve been working on lately have really been focusing on comic book and fan convention cultures. So, one of the things that has interested me is that there’s a lot of research on fan conventions, or fans at conventions, that mostly focus on what it’s like to be in those spaces and what people are doing there. And that work is is really good and very strong. But it’s often seemed to me like we’re missing a little bit of the picture of how does that space get created in the first place. And so, the projects that I’ve been working on, and these are all collaborative projects that have been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, so, I’m certainly not the only person involved in this. But what we’ve been trying to do is get a better picture of the ways that the individuals and the organizations that mount and run those conventions play this really important intermediary role in between media industries and their audiences. So, one project that we’ve been working on has two convention organizations as partners on on the research. And so, in addition to having the really valuable input of their owners and managers at the phase of designing survey questions, and helping us to sort of target those more, more effectively, what we’ve also been able to do is embed a research assistant in each of those organizations over the planning cycle for one of the shows, to do, you know, an organizational ethnography of how those events come together, what some of the struggles that they face are, how they kind of do that complicated work of negotiating between the different interests that are sort of refracted through the events that they run.

LM: Oh, nice. That’s, that sounds like a terrific project. I’m looking forward to seeing the results of it.

BW: Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s one of those projects that it’s hard to know when or how to finish it exactly. Right? It’s one of those projects you could just like, keep collecting data on forever. Keep, you know, and we keep finding certain new pieces of it that we want to investigate more. And so, it kind of keeps getting bigger and bigger. But you know, eventually it will come to an end, we’ll figure out what we’ve learned.

LM: Are you looking at all the impact of COVID-19 on those conventions?

BW: So, obviously, that’s something that was not planned as part of the research. But certainly I am, you know, I’m wanting to see what we can do to at least archive and capture as much as we can at this moment, as you know, press releases are coming out and people are commenting on sort of how things are going. Unfortunately, you know, a lot of the impacts themselves landed at a time when we ourselves were very busy for us here in Canada. You know, the shutdown orders came when we had three weeks left in the semester. So, we’re kind of in the midst of our end-of-term grading and things like that. But as we sort of look to the summer, and I think particularly as some of the, like, summer and fall events are going to have to start making their decisions, or I mean, I suspect in most cases, those decisions have already been made, the thinking – trying to figure out how best to make those announcements, I should say, you know, I think there’ll be a lot to document and capture. And you know, and I think that, speaking to the point you made earlier, how much of these kinds of activities maybe move online, what kinds of experiments there are in trying to make up some of the functions that these conventions have come to play for, obviously, for the marketing of media industries, but also for the livelihoods of individual creators, crafters, artisans, small business, people that use those conventions in very particular ways?

LM: Yeah. Now I’m even more interested in seeing what you come up with eventually.

BW: Yeah, certainly. We picked an interesting time to be in the midst of a project on conventions.

LM: Yeah. So, I usually wrap this up by asking everyone, again, the same question, and that is, if you could tell people who are unfamiliar with fan studies any one thing about it, if you could communicate to people any one thing about fan studies, what is it that you would like people to know?

BW: So, this is the question I’ve been dreading the whole time, ever since you invited me to be on this podcast, because it feels like I, you know, I need to come up with something so profound and, and, and deep and important and encapsulating an entire field that’s so diverse, and that the biggest thing you’ve already stolen with the title of your podcast, right? It’s like, it is a thing, that there are experts on these things, right? I mean, so often you see arguments or claims floated in the media, in everyday speech, where, you know, everyday discourse, where people are making claims about people’s relationships with media, about how media influence or affect them, or or don’t, and I just wish that sometimes they would come talk to us as well, that we do know these things, we know something. And then, maybe the flip side of that is, if I had one thing I wanted to say to, you know, other fan scholars or people who are coming up in the field is to not forget that, you know, the rest of the social sciences exist, too. And that making sure that we are exploring these really important questions in dialogue with our our colleagues across a range of disciplines, so that they can learn from us and that we can learn from what they’re doing.

LM: Yeah, no, I think that’s a terrific point. And one that is near and dear to my heart as kind of an interdisciplinary scholar. So, thank you very much for that. And thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. I know that our schedules, the sense of time has just turned into something completely different right now. And so, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

BW: No, it’s been it’s been really great. Thank you.

[music]

LM: That’s all for this episode of “It’s a Thing!” Next time, I’ll be talking with Dr. Ross Garner, a lecturer at Cardiff University and author of the upcoming book, Nostalgia, Digital Television and Transmediality. I hope you’ll join me then.

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 11 May 2020. “Benjamin Woo.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.9. [Accessed Date]. https://itsathing.net/2020/05/11/episode-9:-benjamin-woo

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

In this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I talk with Dr. Paul Booth about being a prolific writer, life after tenure, fan studies pedagogy and, of course, Doctor Who.

Show Links

People

Dr. Paul Booth
Dr. Henry Jenkins
Dr. Matt Hills
Dr. Louisa Stein
Dr. Kristina Busse
Dr. Jacinta Yanders
Lesley Willard
Dr. Casey McCormick

Publications

Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
Hills, Fan Cultures

Terms, Concepts & the Rest

Gallifrey One
Fan Studies Network North America
Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Transcript

Lori Morimoto: Hi, and welcome to “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. I’m your host, Lori Morimoto.

[music]

LM: On this episode of “It’s a Thing!”, I’m talking with Dr. Paul Booth, a professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University, as well as a co-coordinator of the Fan Studies Network North America conference. So, stick around!

[music]

LM: I want to thank you for joining me today, Paul.

Paul Booth: Thanks, Lori. This is super fun. I’m really excited.

LM: Yeah, me too. And I’d like to get started with what’s kind of my typical first question, which is, what was your introduction to fan studies?

PB: That, you know, it’s funny. I’ve listened to every episode of this podcast that you’ve put together, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is that everyone seems to have a very different kind of entry into fan studies. And I’m going to continue that tradition with a different entry into fan studies, kind of, which is that I, I kind of, I fell into it the way you fall into a like a hole in a forest or something. I was working on my PhD and I had no real idea that fan studies existed. I hadn’t – I mean, I’d read things from Jenkins and other kind of fan work in classes, but it didn’t really resonate with me at the time. I was just kind of like, here’s another reading assignment I have to do in this Media Studies class. And it came time to put my dissertation together, and I thought, what’s gonna be the most expedient thing for me to do? Let’s take all of the final papers that I’ve written for every class, that were all about 20 pages long, and say, what is a common theme that they all have? It’s like, so this will take me the least amount of time possible. And I suddenly, when I took a step back from everything that I’d done in class, I realized that every paper was about some aspect of fandom and I hadn’t realized it at the time. So like in a rhetorical studies class, I did a rhetorical study of the way people talked about the cancellation of Firefly, and they were all about different things, but they were all about fans.

LM: How did you parlay that into your dissertation?

PB: Well, I went to my dissertation advisor, and I said, “I’ve noticed all of these things are about fans. I want to kind of use all of these, what should I do?” And she said, “Here, read this book,” and she handed me Textual Poachers. I mean, metaphorically, I think she probably just told me, go to the library and check out Textual Poachers. And I did, and I’m like, “Ah, this is what my dissertation was gonna be. Shoot. Well, now I have to do something different.” And so that’s what ended up … I kind of read Textual Poachers. I read Matt Hills’s Fan Cultures, and then I kind of said, “Okay, what hasn’t been done?” I was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My main area was kind of digital media and new media stuff. And so, I thought at this point, which was 2007, I said, no one’s really been looking at fans and social media, we didn’t even really have the term social media. So, what, what has changed in this environment from 1990 to 2002? Now 2007, 2008, what has changed? And so that’s where the dissertation came from. And that’s where Digital Fandom came from.

LM: Are you, I mean, I kind of feel like I know the answer to this, but are you a fan of anything yourself?

PB: Oh, geez, Lori. I don’t know. Um… This is a really difficult question as I look around my office-

LM: I know.

PB: -surrounded by posters of Doctor Who fan art, of Doctor Who …

LM: You hide it well but …

PB: Yeah, it’s really tough when you, when you teach a class on Doctor Who and yeah, so it’s Doctor Who.

LM: Yeah. When did you encounter Doctor Who for the first time?

PB: So I was somewhere between the ages of three and four when I first encountered Doctor Who. I have the very … I don’t even know if it’s a real memory or just a memory that’s been implanted in me, but the long story is, my family – at least my dad and that side of the family is from England, from Britain, and my dad grew up watching Doctor Who and is a Doctor Who fan. He was there the first day watching it, he was 10 years old watching the first episode, and he said it kind of blew his mind. And so, we were living in Chicago suburbs, and it came on, it was on public television. So, he was kind of re-watching these old episodes, and he said, “Oh, you, Paul, you should come in and watch this episode with me.” And I did. And it terrified me. And I was hooked. I have a very vivid memory of being in an elementary school after-school program, and going up to some of my friends and saying, just talking to them, like, like everyone watched Doctor Who. I was like, “Oh, did you see, you know, what did you think of that kind of bog monster on Doctor Who last week?” And they’re like, “What the actual f are you talking about?” We were in elementary school, so they probably were a little bit more restrained. So, I’ve been a fan my entire life. And I’ve only really been in fan studies in the last 10, 12 … yeah, 12 years.

LM: How is your experience of sort of negotiating that? I know for everybody, it’s a little bit different going back and forth or just through both being a fan studies scholar and a fan. For you, what is that experience like?

PB: You know, that’s, it’s a great question, and I struggle with it whenever I hear it on your podcast, because I try and think about it when you ask other people, and I’m never quite sure how to answer it because I think it’s different for different roles. So I’ve made fan studies such a part of every aspect of my life that, in some ways, it’s very hard to separate out myself from it. Like I said, I mean, I teach a fan studies class, I teach classes about things that I am a fan of, I research fan studies, and I also write about things that I’m a fan of. In my personal, everyday non-academic life, I’m still a fan, but because all of my friends know of my passion for fan studies, they will ask me fan studies-esque questions, even outside of academic things. And so, it, in some ways, I’m inseparable from these identities and in other ways I think they define me in my everyday interactions. And I love it, I mean, I’m not, it’s not a complaint, I think it’s accurate. And it is a way that I, I would describe myself, but to be able to parse them apart and say, “Oh, this part of me is the fan, and this part of me is the fan studies scholar,” I just I don’t see that distinction as clearly as some other people do. And I think that’s because I studied the thing that I am a fan of.

LM: Yeah. 

PB: You know, like I’ve written a lot about Doctor Who, I sometimes write about things that I’m not a fan of, but most of the time it is I am a fan of this and I am writing about it.

LM: Mm-hmm. I know you’ve been on at least a panel at Gallifrey One, which is the big US Doctor Who convention. In that space, how do people receive you?

PB: They don’t receive me and, and I don’t introduce myself as a “fan studies scholar.” And I think that’s very deliberate on my part because I, and that’s why you have this podcast. I don’t think people know what it is, and I think it’s confusing, so … but I introduce myself as a media studies scholar, a pop culture scholar, a teacher, an educator, you know, and all these different terms that, you know, in a kind of more meta sense or a larger sense encompass what I do. But I don’t ever get so specific as to say I am, I’m a fan studies scholar. But what I find is that, and, and almost universally, I don’t know if I have an exception to this really, people have really embraced and loved the things … I shouldn’t say they’ve loved, I don’t know if they’ve loved it. But they’ve, they’ve embraced the things that I have talked about. They find it fascinating that someone teaches pop culture. They find it absolutely amazing that, especially if you’re at a Doctor Who convention, if you talk about the Doctor Who class they are all in and I get, like, either, “I wish I had a class like that when I was in school,” or they get quizzy, like, “Oh, do you teach this episode? Do you teach that episode? What do you do about this, what do you do about that?” But I almost never had a negative reaction to, “Oh, you’re, you teach fan stuff, and you’re a pop culture scholar,” especially when I’m, when I’m not speaking at academic institutions. If I’m speaking at conventions, if I’m speaking at community events … I just did a talk at a library last week on cult film, and there’s never pushback. It’s always, “I had no idea people studied this, that’s so interesting,” and “You’ve made me see something in a new light.” And I think that’s, that’s exactly what I want. As an educator, I want people to start thinking about the things that they like.

LM: So, I’d like to shift gears a little bit and talk a bit about your writing, because you are an impressively prolific writer, and especially coming from a position where, you know, I am not a prolific writer by any stretch of the imagination, what motivates that writing and how do you keep to it regularly in order to produce as much scholarship as you do?

PB: Insanity? Would that be the word for it? Um…

LM: Well, it would work for me. 

PB: You know me too well. So, when I, I never really, I always wanted to be a teacher, I never really wanted to be a writer or a researcher, particularly. I knew it was going to be part of the job, and I enjoyed writing my dissertation, but it wasn’t like, “I’m gonna write 10 books in 10 years,” you know, like, that wasn’t my goal. But when I first started at DePaul, and I found a very supportive environment for the type of work that I enjoyed doing, and, and they really encouraged me to kind of explore my writing and get into it. They have, kind of, writing workshops and things, and they have, you know, work-life balance and do all that, which I promptly ignored. But what I ended up finding out is that I just, I really enjoyed the process of writing. I really enjoy almost every step of it, and by now I have a pretty solid, what kind of plan, and if I’m going to write something I know what I need to do. I enjoy the research part of it, I enjoy the outlining part of it, I enjoy the drafting, I enjoy the editing probably the most. I enjoy editing the most. And even down to the formatting, like, so that like I really, and this is now you’re delving into psychological stuff my therapist doesn’t even touch, I really like getting into the down and dirty of words and figuring out like, alright, for this footnote to appear here, what combination of things do I need to do?

LM: Yeah.

PB: So, like, that’s really enjoyable, that the whole thing is very enjoyable. In terms of my process, I look at writing as one of the three things that I have to do, right? I, as, as a tenure-track academic, teaching is approximately 40% of what I do, research is approximately 40% of what I do, and then service is about 20%. Give or take, and it changes on what rank you are, and everything, but that’s my rule of thumb. That’s what I was told. So that means I’m expected to spend 40% of my work days, my work week writing or doing some, some research or something writing, productive. So certainly, for the first five years, up until tenure, I blocked off a day and said that’s my writing/research day. I know not everyone can do that, schedules are different. The way that I work, I can work for eight hours on writing stuff, and that’s fine. Some people can’t. Some people do a couple hours and then go away, and a couple hours and go away. It’s fine. You know, however it works for people. I’m not saying this is the best way. It’s just the way that works for me. 

PB: So like Mondays, research day, nine to five. I didn’t grade. I didn’t plan classes. I didn’t take meetings. If someone said, “Can you have a meeting this day?” “No, I’m busy.” And it was because I am. I’m being paid to do research, so this is the day that I’m doing research. And then teach was two days a week. And then service, you can’t always figure out when you’re going to do service. So that fit in when I did it outside that research day. And it usually worked out that there was one other day or half day, the rest of the week, that I could spend writing and researching. And that was my schedule for five years. And it changed every quarter because my classes changed days every quarter. But I had to set aside, and I had to put it on my calendar, like I couldn’t just say I’m going to do this Monday, it had to be on my calendar to remind me. And then I became I became used to that, and and now I just kind of do it naturally. But it was something that I had to plan and I learned that from my dissertation. 

LM: Uh-huh.

PB: The discipline required to do a dissertation while all of your friends are doing other things, and there’s all these opportunities to go and, I mean, you you have no other responsibilities. It’s in some ways, the best time and also the worst time, and I found if I didn’t just sit down and put it on the calendar and say, “Alright, nine to five, that’s my workday, that’s when I’m going to work.” And then give yourself permission to stop. 5pm I stop. I mean, I finish the sentence I’m doing, you know, and then I’m done. And then I don’t feel bad, enjoying my evening and going out, bingeing television for four hours, because I’ve spent the day working and it is work. 

LM: You should try it with a baby. 

PB: Well, see, and there’s, this is where privilege enters into it. Again, I never had children. I always had a very supportive environment, supportive home life, supportive school. So I know not everyone can do this. I know that people have different responsibilities and is impossible for some people to do that. What worked for me was finding out what worked for me. And then sticking to it. And so, it’s not that plan, particularly, it’s just saying, here’s a plan, and I’m going to stick to it. I can’t do that with cutting carbs. I can’t do that with exercise, but I can do it with writing, because I love writing. And, and I found that I really did.

PB: When I finish a draft of a book and send it off, when that happens, and you’re kind of just sick of that book at that point, in that period between sending it off and getting a new, getting feedback, I write a new book proposal. Like, because I like writing, and I have other ideas, but I don’t want to write about frickin board games anymore. I don’t want to write about fans anymore, or I don’t wanna write about Doctor Who. So, I’m going to write about this new thing. And then I have another book proposal. And then I’m like, “Well, I should probably send that one off.” So, it’s, I’m doing it to myself, which is the worst part. It’s kind of masochistic in some way. I will say, you know, I have taken a backseat in a certain respect, and I’ve started editing more and, you know, guest editing journals and editing books, and working on the Fan Studies Network North America conference, because that at a certain point, I feel like people have read Paul Booth. They don’t need to read more Paul Booth. But what I can do with my privilege, and what I can do with the position that I’m in, is help bring new voices in and help, help new people find fan studies and find that. So that I found that to be a very rewarding part of what I’ve been doing now.

LM: Yeah, that kind of ties into another thing that I wanted to ask you. And that is about your involvement in Fan Studies Network North America. For the interest of disclosure, I will say that we’re both on the committee with Louisa Stein and Jacinta Yanders and Leslie Willard [ETA: and the critical involvement of Kristina Busse in our first year]. And so, the five of us have done that for two years. And I’m wondering what your motivation for getting involved in that was what, you’ve found rewarding about it or difficult about it.

PB: It really kind of started, the bringing the Fan Studies Network to North America, it was a whole bunch of us. And as I recall, you know, it really started when Casey McCormick said to me in 2013, or something like that, we should start a fan studies group SIG, at SCMS, and those of you-

LM: Society for Cinema and Media Studies. 

PB: Yes. So that’s a Special Interest Group at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. And it’s kind of like a little club within a much larger club of like-minded scholars or like studied scholars, I should say they’re not like-minded. And we had, which took us a while, and we had all sorts of arguments about what the name should be and what we should focus on. But we finally got it organized, and we had our first meeting, and there were, god, there were like 100 people in a room built for 40. I mean, like, which was a fire hazard, but also amazing to see, you know, like, we’ve built something. And I and Casey, I mean, it was it was 90% Casey, did an amazing job. 

LM: Yeah, she really did. 

PB: And we went around the room and we did introductions, and that took 90% of our time. And then we said, “All right, what should we do?” And almost universally everyone said, “We need a fan studies conference.” Like, we’ve created a group in the space that allows us to have a group, and now we need a separate place for this group to meet. And so, the Fan Studies Network existed in England, in the UK, and so let’s talk to them and see what we can do. And it, it took a couple years of fi- kind of figuring it out and getting people together and organizing, but we did and, and I think part of the rationale was it’s expensive to fly to the UK, environmentally, it’s not very good to kind of fly a bunch of scholars over across the Atlantic, and US fan studies is different than UK fan studies. It concentrates on different things. And so, we, and I say it we, it’s you, me, Louisa, and Kristina was participating in it at that point. And Leslie. So, we contacted the UK one and we created this US one, and we deliberately set out to copy the things that we really liked, like the speed-geeking and, and the food, having food all the time, and then bringing our own ideas into it. The workshops and the pedagogy-focused stuff, and really bringing kind of some US-focused fan studies material. A lot of focus on race, a lot of focus on marginalized fandoms. 

PB: And so, I think we’ve created our own identity, I think we have created a space where a lot of scholars, a lot of junior scholars, younger scholars, independent scholars feel comfortable coming and sharing research that isn’t necessarily seen as, as productive as other research in mainstream academic organizations like MLA or NCA or SCMS. And it’s fun, and we’ve created a kind of environment where we have like a Fan Studies Against Humanity card game at our kind of dinner. So, I kind of touched on this a little bit, as you said, but when I went up for tenure, in 2014, 2014, you know, they asked me, “What do you want to do now?” And I realized, you know, I wanted to start exploring new research. So that’s where some of the board game stuff came from. But I realized that there aren’t a huge number of tenured, full- time faculty in fan studies. Certainly, in the US. There are some and they are and they’re very good, but it’s, it’s not a very large group of people. And I think part of the responsibility of getting tenure and suddenly being told, “We like what you’re doing, even if we don’t quite understand it-“

LM: That’s a pretty powerful position.

PB: It’s a pretty powerful position, and I didn’t want to just spend… it just sounds so self-aggrandizing, and I hate…

LM: You have my permission to say it. 

PB: But I don’t, I don’t, I don’t feel it like this. But yeah, it felt kind of like I have a responsibility to take the position that I am in and help people who are not in that position. Help them through advising, mentoring, you know, answering emails, meeting them at conferences, which, you know, I’m happy to do with anybody. Reading material, which I’m always happy to do. But in a more formal way, is what I could do with my position. I don’t have to publish this book. I don’t have to publish this article. I do because I enjoy it, and it’s, I have time to do it. But if I am trying to divide my time between getting a peer-reviewed article out or organizing a conference that can bring 25, 30, 40 junior scholars a line on their CV, then that conference is going to be more important to me at this point. I’m going to get off my high horse a little bit.

LM: Well, let me ask, you know, this actually does tie into where I wanted to take this anyway. In what ways do you think that that felt sense of responsibility ties in with the, your work on pedagogy in general? I mean, it’s not exactly pedagogical, but its outward-focused?

PB: Yeah, that’s, that’s a good way of putting it. It’s outward-focused. It’s pedagogical, in the sense that it’s teaching people about fan studies, people that are not necessarily used to it or, or may have not thought of it, not, just never considered it as a thing. You know, when I said it’s kind of promoting it in a formal sense, I think there’s, there’s a lot of power and a lot of fan studies power lies in not being disciplined. You know, Sam Ford wrote a great piece about this, the undisciplined nature of fan studies. Like, it doesn’t have formal structures. And, you know, we, we can have great debates about what is the canonical work, and, you know, it doesn’t have strict methodologies. Or rather, I should say, doesn’t have absolute methodologies. They’re strict in the ones that you use, but you can use lots of different kinds of methodologies. But there is also power in the institution. And I don’t think people like to think about that, because certainly in fan studies, we’re largely trained to be critical of large institutions. we’re largely trained to be critical of authoritarian regimes. You know, which academia is, like, less as, we try and pretend that it isn’t because most of, at least the people I know, aren’t, but that’s its structure. And there’s power in using that structure to enable others. 

PB: So, if I can create a conference, help create a conference, if I can encourage younger scholars, if I can get on a tenure, the promotion and tenure committee for my college and help a junior scholar who is doing fan studies work to contextualize that work that helps them get tenure, then then that is helping the field, even if it’s just a byproduct of someone else’s success. So yeah, it’s pedagogical, in that it’s teaching other people what fan studies is. And it is putting, it’s re-contextualizing it in a way that people understand it. When you’re teaching a media, any sort of class, a media studies class, Hong Kong cinema, to a bunch of business majors or a group of law students or whatever, and it’s, so, nothing against them, but there’s, it’s someone familiar to their background. You have to contextualize it in a way that they understand. And sometimes that means simplifying, and sometimes that means emphasizing things that are not what we would normally emphasize. When I teach fan studies, and I’ve got, you know, 30% of the class are business majors, I’m gonna spend a little bit more time talking about the industry. And I’m gonna spend a little bit more time talking about how fans interact with the industry, because that’s a language that they understand. And if I can get them to understand that, I can try and sneak in some of the more critical stuff that I want them to do. You know, so it’s that writ large. When you’re in front of your university’s tenure committee, and you’ve got one representative from every college, and there’s a business full professor, and there’s an art full professor, and there’s a chemist, how do you make these eight people understand the importance of Hannibal fans?

LM: Absolutely. I mean, when we do, well, the first year that we did FSN North America, which was in 2018, one of the things that really impressed me was that the dean, I believe, of your college?

PB: Yeah.

LM: -came and seemed very enthusiastic at our first keynote, and that was something that I don’t think I’d seen in quite as accepting a way. And, you know, we were talked about a little bit on their Twitter feed. And so, we got some publicity and it seemed like, gosh, that’s, that’s an opening of arms that I haven’t seen a whole lot of. And it matters. 

PB: Yeah, it does matter. And it matters to people that aren’t visible. It matters to people who are publishing their first journal article, who are juniors who are looking at where they want to go for grad school.

LM: All right, well, that brings me actually to my last question, and this is something as you know, I ask everyone, as this is “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast about fan studies and how it’s a thing, if you could tell anyone who is unfamiliar with fan studies anything about it, what would that be?

PB: I’ve been dreading this question. I guess if there’s, if there’s something I want to … Okay, here’s one. Um, okay. It’s good, I guess, is it? Okay, well, it is, it’s okay. 

PB: Fan studies is plural. And we don’t really write that, because we look at it as a cohesive thing, even though it isn’t. So, we say “fan studies is” as opposed to “fan studies are,” but in my heart, and in the way that I conceptualize it, I see fan studies as a very plural kind of activity. And I mean that in all senses of the word. So, there are multiple ways of doing fan studies. There are multiple types of fan studies, there are fandom studies, right? So, there’s multiple types of people that we’re talking about, but it’s also plural in the sense that what it actually is looking at is a universal kind of experience. 

PB: I have this discussion with my dad, right, who is a fan of Doctor Who, but would never call himself a fan of Doctor Who. And I like having this tension in my head when I write, because he never misses an episode. He has a bunch of merchandise. He has gone to Doctor Who conventions, he has a ton of Doctor Who t-shirts. He was there and he watched the first episode, and he likes to talk about that. And all these things that if I was going to say, what is a fan, he’s checking a bunch of boxes, and yet he says, I’m not a fan. I’m not one of those people that you study. And so, what is my role as a researcher? Is it to say, is fandom a practice? Or is it an identity? Is it a thing that is done? Or is it a feeling that you get? And my answer is yes. You know, like, it is all of these things, and it is more than that. It is, it is plural. 

PB: I can write about my dad as a type of fan that doesn’t want to identify as a fan for particular reasons. Because I believe, and I think everyone, there is something fannish in everybody about something. It’s just how we phrase it. It’s how we look at it. Someone who is a diehard political junkie would never call themselves a fan, but they’re doing things that are fannish. And so, one of the things I think that fan studies can do is show us the importance of affect, the importance of emotion, the importance of all of these things that we are taught, from day one of school, are less important than logic and rationality. That these things transcend the particular activity that you’re doing and can be described, and can be examined, and can be critically assessed. And it doesn’t matter if it’s media or music, or celebrity or politics or food or whatever. But fan studies offers us such a plurality of ways of examining this phenomenon, that it is crucial.

LM: Well, that’s, yeah, that’s great. And as you know, I agree completely. And I would just simply like to thank you for joining me today. This has been a really enjoyable conversation.

PB: Thank you, Lori. I appreciate it. I appreciate you asking me to do this. And I’m sorry if I talked a lot.

LM: Well, that’s the point.

PB: Well, I know but you, here, you, we’re so, at least I am so uncomfortable. I’m so British in the fact that I am very uncomfortable talking about myself. Except that when you start me, I just can’t stop. So that’s, it’s this tension of being British and being a professor that just can’t, can’t reconcile. But I appreciate the opportunity to introspect a bit.

LM: You did fine. 

PB: Thank you. 

LM: Thanks a lot.

[music]

LM: That’s all for this episode of “It’s a Thing!” Next time, I’ll be talking with Dr. Benjamin Woo, an associate professor of Media and Communication at Carleton University in Ontario, Canada, and author of Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture. Until then, stay safe!

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 18 April 2020. “Paul Booth.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.8. [Accessed date]. https://itsathing.net/2020/04/18/episode-8:-paul-booth

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

On this episode of “It’s a Thing!” Paul Booth of DePaul University interviews me! We talk about transcultural fan studies, scholarship, and even a bit about genealogy.

Show Links

People

Dr. Paul Booth
Dr. Barbara Klinger
Dr. Henry Jenkins
Dr. Louisa Stein

Publications

Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
Finn & Nielsen, eds., Becoming: Genre, Queerness, and Transformation in NBC’s Hannibal

Terms, Concepts & the Rest

Leslie Cheung
Bryan Fuller
FannibalFest Toronto
Adams, that bit from A Last Chance to See that I talk about

Transcript:

LM: Hi and welcome to “It’s a Thing!” the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. I’m your host, Lori Morimoto.

[music]

LM: On this first episode of “It’s a Thing!” for 2020, Dr. Paul Booth, a professor of media studies at DePaul University, will be interviewing, well, me. Because I did this interview with Paul on the same day that I interviewed him for the next podcast, there are a couple of places we refer generally to the podcast I did with him, in case anyone gets confused. For anyone who’s not familiar with my work, I’m an independent researcher of fan studies, and my specialty is transcultural fan studies. So stick around!

[music]

Paul Booth: Thank you, Lori, for inviting me to come on and ask you some questions.

Lori Morimoto: I really appreciate it. I’ve actually, since I started doing this, I’ve been wanting to answer questions.

PB: Was that your whole reason for starting this podcast, is you just, you wanted people to ask you questions about your research?

LM: Absolutely. No…

PB: What the best way to make it sound like I’m, I’m doing this just for other people.

LM: Yes. True.

PB: Well, I’m actually very honored that you’d ask me to do this, because I’m a big fan of your research, a big fan of what you do. So, I – to be able to talk to you more about it is very exciting.

LM: That’s very kind.

PB: I’m going to start with a question that you always ask people, which is what is your story for getting into fan studies?

LM: Mine is pretty typical. I was taking Barb Klinger’s Media Spectatorship and Reception course in grad school, and I honestly… this was 2000… it was about 2000, actually, and I had never heard of fanfiction, I didn’t know that it existed. But I was really into the X Files at the time. And so, when we read, as you do, Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins’s book, I was just like, oh my god, you know. And so, I went and looked online, and sure enough there was all of this X Files fanfiction, and I’m like, oh my god. So, I kind of fell into online fandom in about 2000. I had participated in a Leslie Cheung fan forum prior to that, but that was my first sort of foray into transformative fandom. And at the same time, I realized that it was a thing – fan studies. And so, since I was working on my dissertation, which was a study of Japanese women fans of Hong Kong films and stars, I had been… it’s largely an audience studies dissertation, but I was able to incorporate fan studies research into it and, yeah. I just kind of went from there. It wasn’t very intentional. I just kind of slid in that direction

PB: And when you, I know when you kind of entered this online world of fanfiction, like were you – because it sounds like you started kind of, “Oh, you know, here’s Jenkins writing about fanfiction and now I’m going to go into fanfiction stuff and become a fan.” Like do this transformative fan work…

LM: Yeah, it actually, it was like, it introduced me to fan studies but it also introduced me to transformative fandom.

PB: Yeah, so it seems to have been foundational in both kind of areas, and as you always are curious to know of others, how do you kind of bridge those two together?

LM: Um, I actually… Okay, so my Twitter handle is acafanmom, and I will say that when I made it, I didn’t realize that acafan was a term that we sometimes use in fan studies. And so, my whole thing was that I had just had two children, and at the time that I finished my dissertation, and kind of wandered back onto Twitter, I had a baby and a toddler, and it was painful. And so, I was more interested in reconciling the mom part of the acafanmom. And so, you know, I decided, ‘aca’ could be academic and ‘fan’ could be fan and ‘mom’ could be mom, you know, and it didn’t even occur to me that acafan was a thing.

PB: Hm, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that.

LM: Yeah. And so, I’ve always been interested in approaching my own identity within scholarship as a hybrid, and it helps that I am unemployed in any full-time capacity, so that I can do that without worry or recrimination of any kind.

PB: So, I mean, it – that’s interesting because without a kind of formal institutional mandate, you in a lot of ways have more freedom to research what you want and do what you want to do. The downside is, you know, you don’t get a paycheck from it.

LM: No, no, I do not. Which people in my family like to point out sometimes.

PB: Well, that’s the mom part of your acafanmom.

LM: Yes.

PB: When you were in this kind of online forum, did you try and hide your fan studies identity? Or did you try and explain like, “Oh, I’m a researcher, and I’m interested in audiences…”

LM: The first one, like in the 90s, no, because I wasn’t at the time. I started going on there in about 1996 when I got my first laptop, and I was living in Osaka in Japan. And I kind of, you know, I had just discovered the Internet and oh my god, you know, there’s stuff on here and oh, if I have an hour, I can get a picture, that kind of thing. Seriously. And so, I found this Leslie Cheung Internet Fan Club. Yeah. And it was for, you know, for pay, I paid. But I wasn’t really, I hadn’t gone back to graduate school yet. And so, I had nascent interests in that side of it, in the academic sort of side of it, but I was basically participating there as a fan.

PB: Mm-hmm. So, I know because you’ve, in your writings and in talking with each other, I know Leslie Cheung is very influential for your kind of early, not early, but I guess dissertation era. 

LM: Yeah. 

PB: School era fandom. I know that as a young person, you were very into Star Wars–

LM: I was.

PB: -because you’ve talked to me about that. And recently, I’ve heard, I don’t – one or two things from you about Hannibal. I mean-

LM: Why are you being ugly? 

PB: Is that the term, is that the name for the show? I just, I can’t – you don’t ever talk about it, so it’s really hard to know. 

LM: Nah, I keep that one quiet. 

PB: You keep that one very quiet. 

LM: Yeah. 

PB: Is there, do you see something similar in Star Wars, Leslie Cheung, Hannibal, that has kind of attracted you? Does it speak, does it speak to you as kind of a person…?

LM: Mm-hmm. You know, Star Wars, I think, is a bit of an outlier. I think that one was primarily, you know, it was the first “grown up movie” that I ever saw. And it was the first one that had you know, that sort of sweeping, romantic John Williams soundtrack and all of that, and so Star Wars was more, even though I was absolutely a huge fan, it doesn’t resonate quite as much with the things that I subsequently fell into. And if I had to look at that era, it would actually be Superman the Movie. 

PB: Really?

LM: Yeah, the Richard Donner one. Oh god, I love that movie. And I love the behind the scenes stuff about it. You know, there was like a making-of book, this little paperback that I just ate up. And that one I think kind of resonates more with you know, Leslie Cheung subsequently, Hannibal now, and I think the thing that links them together is I really like stories that one way or another, or figures that one way or another sort of inhabit a kind of hidden identity. And in the case – you know, Superman, Yeah, Superman obviously is, you know, he’s got a hidden identity and Hannibal has a hidden identity. But with Leslie Cheung, you know, one of the things that was always really interesting to me was just the different ways that his real-life sexuality played out in different onscreen persona. I guess the other thing that always really attracts me to something as a fan is just when something could have been one thing, and it turns out to be so much more than that one thing. And so, you know, Leslie Cheung, he was a pop singer, and he was fine. You know, some people love his pop singing, I think it’s fine. You know, I don’t have strong opinions about it either way, except in a sort of nostalgic sense. But you know, that’s “all he did,” you know. He was just a pop singer. And yet, you know, the first thing I saw him in was Farewell My Concubine, and I just kind of felt like he should never have been that good. And he was and you know, everything he did, he was so good, even stupid stuff. Because in Hong Kong at the time, everybody did you know, they ran the gamut from, you know, art film to stupidest movie ever made, and sometimes they did them together.

And I think that’s sort of how I felt with Hannibal as well. Hannibal could have just been monster of the week, regular procedural with some art. It could have been all season one, and season one was fine, but it became so much more than that. And that’s also a big attraction to me. 

PB: Mm. It’s interesting that you are kind of linking these things in terms of secret identity, hidden identity, persona, because I think that also gets reflected in your academic work about transcultural fandom, and – not so much secret identity, but the way that layers of identity can be peeled back and reveal different things about the fan and about the nation and culture that it comes from. Can you talk a bit about how transcultural fandom and this kind of concept really, which I think is one of those groundbreaking concepts and fan studies, how that’s situated within the larger fan studies framework? And then, kind of how does that speak to your particular research interests?

LM: Well, I’ll kinda go in reverse. And to pick up from what I was talking about, I think one of the reasons, you know, as you kind of hinted towards, I think one of the reasons that I’m so interested in those issues of hidden identity is that, you know, I grew up overseas. I lived in Hong Kong for seven years from sixth grade until I finished high school. And I went to an American school and I spoke English all the time. And I went home and it was American. And we were very privileged. We were very privileged. But I still grew up in Hong Kong, and I was out in the city all the time. And I don’t speak a lot of Cantonese, but I know one or two really choice phrases. I can count to 10, you know, that kind of thing. I can I can pick up a little bit more now than I used to be able to just because I watch movies. But for all of that, for all of the caveats that you know, I would never consider myself Chinese or, you know, whatever, my identity is different to what I look like And people generally don’t look at me and go, “Oh, yeah, she totally grew up overseas,” you know. They look at me and they see white suburban housewife, which I also am. But I don’t feel comfortable in that identity. And so, I’m, I’ve always been interested in kind of the juxtaposition between what something seems and what it is. And I think that’s where it piques my interest in terms of research into fandoms. We all of us have these much more complex identities than people know. And I’m interested in how those form and how they play out and, especially within, for lack of a better word, communities, I’m interested in how those play out in communities that perceive themselves as having a sort of central identity.

PB: Yeah. When people have a – if I’m understanding you, when people have this multi-layered identity that is more than just an identity, and by identity, you know, it’s fandom, I guess, multi-layered fandom that comes from identities that are not necessarily visible, how does how does that get reconciled within their larger community?

LM: Yeah, yeah. Kinda, I’m interested especially in the points of friction, you know, where some people see the “fan community” as a sort of a whole, as a community that can be identified by certain characteristics and stuff that usually exceed just liking the thing. You know, what happens within those communities when you get somebody who conforms in one sense, you know, “I like the thing too,” but doesn’t necessarily conform in other ways to how the broader community, you know, sees itself and what kinds of frictions arise from that.

PB: So if, just to play devil’s advocate for a second. 

LM: Oh, please do. 

PB: How is that… and I think this is key to some of your research, how is that different than say, I am a Doctor Who fan and I’m out in mainstream culture and people don’t necessarily see that about me. Like, what is it, that feeling of having an identity and having a fandom that other people in your immediate surroundings don’t share-

LM: Mm hmm. 

PB: -is, I think, is common to how a lot of fans feel, but maybe you could talk a little bit about how it’s different when you’re throwing on, or not throwing on, but when you’re including aspects of nationality and race in into that.

LM. Mm. Well, you know, you’re part British and that does play into your, I think, self-perception, perhaps? I’m gonna psychoanalyze you.

PB: Yes, you are correct.

LM: I believe it plays into your self-perception as a Doctor Who fan, and yet on the surface, you know, you talk like an American, you look like an American. I would never know unless you told me that your father is British. I don’t know the extent to which Britishness informs your identity. I know that in my case, Britishness actually does inform it to a certain extent, because Hong Kong was a British colony at the time we live there. 

PB: Yeah.

LM: You know, so there are things about, you know, British culture, for example, that I’m really comfortable with and things that I don’t get at all. But those are hidden, so say you go into broader or wider American Doctor Who fandom, you know, are there things that you bump up against that don’t quite jive with your experience of it very personally? Or conversely, you know, do people have certain expectations of you, as an American fan of Doctor Who, say in the UK, that don’t hold for you for your very specific reasons? Those are the kinds of things where people expect one thing based on their understanding of, in this case, the fandom, and they get another. What happens then?

PB: Has there been – I mean, this has got to be exacerbated and also encouraged by the rapid visibility of fandom over the past 10 years.

LM: Yeah! Well, I mean, one of the big reasons I do fan studies is because I really do honestly think that it’s a microcosm of our broader social world. And I think that the conflicts that we see, say in online fandoms, that have to do with cultural differences, or just failing to recognize the fact that there are cultural differences, I think those are happening at the broader sort of political scale as well. And so transnationally, intercultural, you know, within America, we’re all, as you say, so much more invisible to one another. And yet, we don’t necessarily have the tools or any kind of experience to tell us how to interact with people. who are different from us. And so, we dismiss the difference, we don’t recognize the difference, we fight to make the difference visible, you know, there’s all of these things that we’re doing. 

PB: One of the things that you mentioned kind of earlier is that you are an independent researcher. And I know you have done a lot of work at the fan studies conference and at other conferences that you have attended, on – and writing about it – how independence, how to be an independent scholar and some of the biggest issues that come with that. What advice do you have for people who maybe don’t have a university position, but wanna study fan studies or, you know, want to get involved in this game?

LM: Have money.

PB: Mmm.

LM: Be able to support yourself. I mean, that’s the baseline. And I you know, it bothers me, and my husband doesn’t understand this, he’s like, “I don’t know why you get worked up about this,” but it bothers me when I’m not earning any money and I’m just doing you know, research or whatever, because he’s the one that’s making money. And so that makes me, you know, dilettante wife who… whatever. So, I have to kind of fight against that self-perception. But the fact of the matter is, you do have to have income, and that is paramount. 

But beyond that, I, you know, one of the one of the things that I try to do in my sort-of outreach type projects, one of the things I try to do is to bring fan voices into conversation with scholarly voices and vice versa. But I, you know, because I think there are quite a lot of fans who are writing really great stuff who don’t necessarily come with a PhD, or a Master’s or whatever, but they’re smart. And I think that’s one of the things that independent scholarship can be. And I think, at least for me, one of the sort-of responsibilities I have as an independent scholar is to try and normalize, or contribute to normalizing, independent scholarship and ways of doing fan studies that people who are within institutional structures can’t necessarily do. So, you know, a lot of my writing is very self-reflexive, which is a nice way of saying that I talk about myself all the time, which is generally not done. But I have the leeway to do it, because, you know, what are they going to do, fire me? It’s not going to happen, so if somebody is prepared to print it, I’m prepared to write it.

PB: You heard it here, first, folks.

LM: There you go. I can do collaborative work. I can cite, you know, whoever I want. I don’t have to – this is a really ugly thing to say – I’m not a performing monkey for anyone. So, I don’t have to do anything that I don’t want to do. And as a result, I try and do things that other people can’t do in the hopes that that helps to normalize them in scholarship. Which I think went really far afield of your question.

PB: Well, it only did in the direction that I was hoping you would go. Because I wanted to, as you asked me about, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the Fan Studies Network conference, and how you see your role in that, certainly in connection with what you just described about being an independent scholar.

LM: Well, I you know, I think one of the one of the great things about FSN North America is that we are generally fairly open to participation by a wide variety of people. I mean, it is an academic conference, the papers that are presented are scholarly papers. But beyond that, I think, you know, we invite anybody who wants to pay to come listen, I think we’re open to you know, scholarship from people who are not necessarily academics in the traditional sense, and so I see my role partly as publicizing those things and making sure that people know about it, that it’s there, that they can approach us if they want to suggest something or propose something. Mostly just, yeah, making us visible, not just to other scholars, but to fans as well.

PB: Yeah. And that’s always been important, I think, as part of our ethos at the North America one, especially, is to integrate fan voices into what we do.

LM: Right. Exactly. And, you know, I think Louisa Stein has been especially pivotal in doing that, and especially with the vid show, which features the work not only of scholars, but especially fans, and taking all of that very seriously. It’s not you know, let’s go look at the, you know, the animals in the cages and talk about them. You know, it’s not that kind of approach at all. It’s very much coming out of love of fandom, love of fans, love of media objects or whatever, you know, sports, what have you, and trying to communicate how that all works together.

PB: Would you say that’s part of why you started this podcast?

LM: Oh, yeah, definitely. My main impetus was that I was getting real tired of looking at articles that explain fans badly, and there is no end to that, apparently. 

PB: Oh, yeah. 

LM: That’s just the gift that keeps on giving. And I don’t know how much I am reaching those people at all. I think most of the listeners of the podcast are also academics or fans.

PB: For now, for now.

LM: Someday I’ll be famous.

PB: Wait till you have Bryan Fuller on, and then all of a sudden-

LM: I totally want to. And if I could get in touch with him, he’d probably do it.

PB: Let’s make that happen, world. If you are listening to this podcast, 2020: bring Bryan Fuller to “It’s a Thing.” Hashtag #FullerThing

LM: Yeah. And so I just I wanted people to know that, you know, “Hello, we’re here, we are talking about this, this has been talked about before,” but make it more accessible, because I know that whether it’s true or not – I think we’ve turned a bit of a corner, at least some of us, in terms of readability of our work as scholars. Nonetheless, there is still quite a lot of difficult-to-approach work. And there’s a perception that’s even stronger than that, I think, that it’s all just impossible to read. And of course, you have paywalls and all of this. And so, one of the things I wanted to do is to have people talk about their scholarship and their work and fan studies in such a way that it makes it approachable, and you can hear somebody talking about whatever they’re working on, a new book, what have you, and go, “Huh, I would be interested in reading that book, or at least having a look at it.” That’s what motivated the podcast, definitely.

PB: What kind of future work, and this is not a question that I had asked you, I was gonna tell you I was gonna ask, but, you know, scholars evolve and change over time. Are there areas that you are kind of interested in exploring in the future?

LM: Right now, I don’t know what my future is in scholarship, academia, I feel like I’ve reached a certain point with work on theorizing transcultural fan studies. That it’s all in the stuff I’ve written, and if that’s not communicating, I don’t know what to do. I cannot help you anymore. You got to read this stuff. 

There’s this, there’s this passage in Douglas Adams’s book, A Last Chance to See, and it’s about endangered species and it’s funny as hell, which it shouldn’t be because it’s about endangered species. But they go, he and his recorder, because they did this for the BBC Radio, they go to Australia prior to going to see the Komodo dragon. And they meet with, I guess you’d call it a venomologist. And this guy is like completely uninterested in venom, because he has done that, or, you know, that’s his job. He has to go and do venom every day. And they’re like, well, what happens if we get bit by, you know, by a snake or something? He’s like, well, you die. You know, like, the line is, “What happens if we get bitten by a deadly snake?” And he goes, “Well, you die. That’s what deadly means.” But his real interest right then is hydroponics. He’s like, I will talk about, he’s like, “I’m so bored of talking about venom. I really want to talk about hydroponics.” And that’s kind of how I feel right now. And so, I’ve been doing, like, genealogy stuff, and right now, I’m much more interested in genealogy than I am in in fan studies or, you know, media studies. So, I don’t know, really. I don’t want to let it go on the one hand, but I’m not quite sure where I’m going next.

PB: I wonder if there’s a way to bridge that, you know, like-

LM: Well, I mean, they’re definitely, there are ways to talk about genealogy.

PB: Yeah. I used my dad as an example in the other podcast, but this is another interesting connection. He has also become extremely invested in genealogy.

LM: See, he and I need to get together.

PB: I think so. And I see this happening with a lot of people. 

LM: Mm-hmm. 

PB: I think it’s the DNA thing, and the fact that that it’s so much easier to go online and find material now, but there is definitely a-

LM: Or get misled.

PB: Well, but isn’t that fandom? I mean, like-

LM: Yeah, no, it is, it absolutely is.

PB: You’re exploring the history and the background of this particular text, and the text is your family but it’s still a text. And it’s, what lessons can we learn, what things can we understand, how can we read between the lines? What’s the subtext here? It’s interesting.

LM: Yeah, I think there’s absolutely crossover, or carryover, between, you know, media fandom and genealogy fans, for lack of a better word, totally. And the things that people seem to get out of it, or want to get out of it, are different depending on who you’re talking about. You know, there’s a very strong contingent of, “I’m looking for royalty,” and especially people who have a European heritage. And so there’s a lot of sort of misinformation about who’s related to what out there, that if you spend a little time online, you finally figure out but, you know, there’s all, you know, and then there’s sort of the kind of higher practitioners, just below the professionals, that are that are all, “No, you have to have documentation or it doesn’t count” and all. You know, I mean, it’s, there’s hierarchies, there’s, you know, it’s structured very much like fandom. And yeah, definitely.

PB: Oh, that’s… yeah, that’s what’s what I find so interesting, is you’re, no matter what people are into, there’s a way of looking at it as a kind of fan studies project.

LM: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s definitely you know, it’s- my husband asks, you know, my husband is Korean-Japanese American, and so, you know, he pretty much knows where he’s from, kind of? You know, not details, because especially the Korean stuff is really hard to find for somebody who does not know Korean. And the Japanese stuff as well, although, that history goes back quite a ways. And so, he asks me a lot, you know, like, why do you do this? Why are you interested in it? And it is kind of like fandom in that sense. You know, people from outside of it don’t get the affective appeal of finding out that, you know, you’ve got a bunch of relatives who are Quebecois. And you had no idea, you know, which was my case, you know, I had no idea that these people, I mean, we, go way back in Quebec, and we only left in, like, I don’t know, 18-something.

And, you know, it’s like these weird little things. There’s my family is related to, this is my mom’s family is related to the first indentured servant who sued for his release, when the person who he had been passed on to refused to let him go. You know, that’s a dumb little story. Or there’s one, you know, this is my favorite one, there’s, you know, one of my father’s relatives managed to go testify at something, get drunk, come home, trip over a fence and die. 

PB: Oh my god.

LM: Yeah, you know. All of that- finding out how many people were slave owners has been new. You know, we have this sort of perception of slave owners as all, you know, being rich with plantations. Hell, no. Everybody was owning slaves, and it’s appalling. But just, you know, finding out that stuff, it tells you a lot about history, and it tells you I think a bit about your place in history.

PB: And how not very far removed we are from that.

LM: And how not very far removed we are, yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s really interesting.

PB: When you can trace back say, great-great grandfather, great-great-great grandfather, and suddenly you’re like, wow, this, you know, this person is only 150 years removed from me and had slaves and, you know, participated in this historical event or whatever, like it shows us that we are not exceptional. We are just part, we’re part of a grand scheme.

LM: Yeah. And we’re not innocent. 

PB: And we’re not innocent.

LM: In the way that we like to pretend we are. Speaking, you know, this is the white “we,” but yeah. And I was also very surprised that my family has, you know, my mom’s family has been here for freaking ever. These people came in the 1600s-

PB: Really?

LM: -for the most part. Yes.

PB: That’s really, that’s just really interesting. I think that whole thing is very interesting.

LM: It’s a lot of fun. And that’s, and I, right now, and I don’t know if it’s because it’s just so far removed from what I’ve been working on in terms of scholarship or what, but right now, that’s, one of the nice things about it is I can research it to my heart’s content without having to write anything. And I kind of like that.

PB: And, and I think that’s fair, you know, like, we all have to have a hobby. And unfortunately, as fan studies scholars, our hobbies are often the things that we also research. So, it’s hard to find something that you can do that you’re not also, there’s a part of you that’s, like, well, how can I apply this to my work?

LM: Yeah, and I think, also in terms of, you know, sort of future work, one of the difficulties of being an independent scholar is that, you know, it’s both a benefit and a drawback, I guess, is that there’s nothing holding my feet to the fire, and I am under no pressure to produce whatsoever. Which on the one hand, is nice, you know. I think at this age, I would probably crack with that kind of pressure. But on the other hand, it means that it’s very easy for me to just kind of go, I don’t even know that anybody’s reading this so why am I doing it?

PB: Yeah, and that’s, even for those of us that are in, you know, jobs where we do need to publish, people still don’t read it. I mean, like, it is really a… I don’t know. That’s why, you asked me about talking at conventions, and I know you’ve talked at, you’ve gone to Hannibal Fest. Things like that. You get to talk to audiences that are actually interested in what you’re doing.

LM: Oh, God. Yeah. I gave a I gave a talk, I guess in 2017 at Fannibal Fest. It was the first year of that convention for Hannibal fans. And we did an academic panel, and I talked about something that eventually became an essay that is in the book, Becoming, and I swear to god, that was the biggest and best audience I have ever had for anything I have ever presented ever. They were into it. They loved it. There were lots of them. And at an academic conference, you know, I’m lucky if I get 10 people. 

PB: Yeah. 

LM: And they’re all sort of, not necessarily there for me. And so yeah, I mean, it’s a, that’s a very invigorating experience and that can make you want to continue. I haven’t had a lot of that lately, so…

PB: Yeah, I, there’s something that is very invigorating about that. And it’s why I keep going back to, I mean, it’s not the only reason I keep going back to Doctor Who conventions, but it’s why I keep doing things at Doctor Who conventions. Instead of just being, you know, the fan that, you know, goes to panels, I actually like to be on them. And then I imagine it’s the same with kind of Hannibal Fan Fest. 

LM: Yeah. 

PB: Fannibal – is it Fannibal?

LM: FannibalFest. 

PB: FannibalFest. Sorry. 

LM: Yeah. 

PB: It invigorates your research in a way that you didn’t think it would.

LM: Uh-huh. I mean, it gets you really, you know, when you see what people responded to, like, “Oh, wow, I’m really onto something there. I need to, you know, work with that.” 

PB: Yeah. 

LM: And that’s the kind of feedback you just don’t get anywhere else. 

PB: Yeah. So, I just wanted to kind of conclude with a question that you always ask, and now you have to think of an original answer. If there was one thing you wanted people to know about fan studies, what would it be?

LM: That it’s a thing, I swear to god!

PB: Oh, you have a built-in answer, Lori! It’s not fair. 

LM: No, but it’s true. I mean, the other day, there was some announcement about some research that some researchers had done, and it irritated the living hell out of me. 

PB: I know exactly what you’re talking about.

LM: Yeah. It had this brand new way of thinking about fanfiction that was, A) wrong-

PB: Yep. 

LM: And 10 minutes looking at fan studies scholarship would have told them that, and, B) it was like, “Oh, we have done this brand-new thing,” and it’s like, “You really haven’t. You’ve done an old thing badly.” And those are the people that I wish would listen to the podcast.

PB: But when you’re talking about their research like that, is it any – I mean, maybe they’re not gonna tune in.

LM: They weren’t tuning in anyway.

PB: No, I know, I know.

LM: If they had been-

PB: If they had been, they might have learned a thing or two.

LM: They might have learned a thing or two, like fan studies is a thing. 

PB: I know. Yes, I know exactly what you’re talking about.

LM: Or there are there was a, you know, there was an ad from some consulting company that was going around Twitter a couple of days ago, and it was like, “What fans want,” and, you know, all of this is quantifiable. And I’m just like, you have got to be kidding me. I mean, yeah, you could quantify it, you’d probably be wrong, or at least you would only have a little bit of the picture. Because if you don’t take the affect seriously, and affect changes depending on circumstances and context. If you don’t take that seriously, then you cannot say anything with any kind of certainty. And even then, it’s hard to lock down fans. 

But one thing that I think fan studies scholars are generally very good at is, we can see a problem coming from a mile away, particularly with fan-producer relationships, and what fans are going to or not going to like. There aren’t a lot of things, I think, that surprise us when they turn into sort of conflagrations. And we, we can do that because, to a greater or lesser extent, we understand what motivates fans and the kind of intersections of media, of the different subjectivities that we bring to it, better than, you know, some algorithm. And I think, I think in a lot of ways fans help to sort of indicate the limits of what’s possible with an algorithm, because of affect. And that is something that I would really like other people to know and take seriously.

PB: Well, Lori, thank you so much for having this conversation.

LM: Well, thank you for talking with me. 

PB: I have, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot about you, and I’ve learned a lot about fan studies.

LM: I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me, because I just really wanted to do it. After doing it for a while it’s like, no, I want somebody to ask me questions!

PB: I should have asked you totally different questions that weren’t even about fan studies, just to, like-

LM: You can ask me one question that’s not about fan studies.

PB: Oh, I need time to think of a really good one. 

LM: Oh, okay.

PB: So we’ll do it as a postscript.

LM: Alright. 

PB: Do little postscript episodes on the off weeks.

LM: There you go.

[music]

LM: That’s all for this episode of “It’s a Thing!” Next time, I’ll be talking with Paul Booth about his work as a fan studies researcher at DePaul University. So I hope you’ll tune in then, and remember, wash your hands!

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 16 March 2020. “Lori Morimoto.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.7. [Accessed date]. https://itsathing.net/2020/03/16/episode-7-lori-morimoto

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

On this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I’m talking with Dr. Alfred L. Martin, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa. We talk about ballet fandom, Tyler Perry, and cultures of race in fandoms and fan studies.

Show Links

People

Dr. Alfred L. Martin
Dr. Janet Staiger
Dr. Kristen Warner
Dr. Rebecca Wanzo

Publications

Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom“
Martin, “Fandom While Black: Misty Copeland, Black Panther, Tyler Perry and the Contours of US Black Fandoms“
Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies“
Gray, Sandvoss & Harrington, eds., Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World

Terms, Concepts & the Rest

Misty Copeland
TLC “What About Your Friends?“
Decolonizing Fan Studies: A Bibliography

Transcript

LM: Hi, and welcome to “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. I’m your host, Lori Morimoto.

[music]

LM: On this last episode of “It’s a Thing!” for 2019, I’m talking with Dr. Alfred L. Martin, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Iowa. So, stick around!

[music]

LM: Al, it’s really nice to have you with me today. 

AM: I thank you for having me today. 

LM: I’m really excited to talk to you. I usually start off these conversations by asking people about how did they get into fan studies, and in your case you seem to have made a bit of a lateral move into fan studies. And so, I’m curious if your experience of finding out about fan studies, of doing work in fan studies, has any similarities with quote unquote “acafans” – although not everybody would consider themselves that – or if you came about it from a different direction? The usual gateway, if you will, is Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers. So, how about you? How did you find fan studies? 

AM: So, I come to audience studies broadly because I am trained at the University of Texas Austin, and in one of the last classes that I took, it was a media reception class with, media reception studies rather, class with Janet Staiger, and part of that class does include a segment on fandom. But at least at the time, I was really interested in the work that I was doing for the dissertation, which is now the book [forthcoming]. And so broadly then, what I’m dealing with in the book is this idea, and theorizing this idea, of the generic closet as a way that the black cast sitcom, as a genre, imagines its audience and, as such, the imagination of the audience structures the ways that it can engage with gayness, or black gayness in particular. And so, I was interested in looking at the ways that that shakes out through production practices. I was looking at the ways that it shakes out in terms of industry and industrial analysis, but I was also interested in the ways that black gay men themselves understood these images and if they understood it, in some sort of very loose way, understood it within the context of what I was theorizing as the generic closet. 

So, I had- was always interested in audience work, and part of that was really a response to a lot of the work that I was not only seeing but also reading, that was making these kinds of assumptions about what audiences were doing with particular media. And so, I was always kind of like well, like I don’t know that that’s necessarily … like if we can make that kind of conclusion based on the available information. So, I was always interested then in audiences. But the turn for me in some ways happened in reading a lot of the sort of seminal fan studies work. You mentioned, obviously, Textual Poachers, which was on Janet’s syllabus, as well as some of the work, early work, by folks like John Fiske. And what was really fascinating to me was this way in which fandom – and I’m, here I’m sort of borrowing from Kristen Warner’s argument from one of her essays – but you know fandom studies really sort of took up this idea of otherness, but it never actually dealt with like for real-for real otherness. 

LM: Right.

AM: So, it was like, hey, we’re talking about white male geeks, and so that’s our otherness. And then Jenkins and Fiske both were, on one hand, acknowledged the idea that they were not studying race, but they were just like, hey, we’re not studying race. And so, we said it. And, yeah, I can’t find this stuff. And so, my own interest in race, gender, sexuality was really sort of in some ways natural for me to go to these spaces and think about and talk about the fandoms of black folks. 

LM: Yeah, one of the things that I noticed, actually, reading a couple of your essays was that you do a nice job of contextualizing very specific audiences, so that it’s not one unified Black Audience in capital letters, but people coming from very specific social contexts that seems to inform roughly generalizable experiences of different kinds of media, and I really like that micro detail to who exactly you’re talking about.

AM: Yeah. Well part of that is also my general disdain for the idea of talking about bodies that are either raced or belong to particular sexual orientation categories, and sort of flattening them out as if you know there is such a thing as a black audience, or if there is a thing as a queer audience. And so, I really, in my work, wanted to be very clear about the idea that I’m speaking about a very specific kind of blackness, and that I’m also not necessarily trying to say that this, the experience of these folks who I talked to, stand in for any other kind of experience. 

LM: Right, right. So, I did want to ask, and this especially kept coming up in my mind as I was reading your work, are you a fan of anything? What are you a fan of?

AM: I am a fan of … so, most of the things that I study I am not a fan of, or at least I have an ambivalent relationship to it. But I am a fan of the 1978 film The Wiz, which I actually am writing about. So, I’m very much a fan of The Wiz. I’m, in some ways. I’m a reluctant fan of the TV show The Voice because, I mean, I see everything on that show coming a mile way, but like somehow it’s still actually give- it gives me so much pleasure. So, I, yeah. I’m a huge fan of that. I’m a ballet fan, or as we call them in the industry a “balletomane.” 

LM: What was it? 

AM: A balletomane.

LM: Oh. A balle- could you spell it?

AM: Yeah, so it’s ballet and then O, the letter O, and then MANE.

LM: Huh.

AM: Yes.

LM: Balletomane. That’s the first time I’ve heard that.

AM: Yes. So um, so yeah, so um, yeah, so I’m a fan-

LM: But not Misty Copeland.

AM: Not necessarily Misty Copeland. I think, well I mean, part of what we do as academics is we like to have nuanced conversations when the broader culture is not necessarily into or interested in nuanced conversations. So, I actually, I think that Misty Copeland is extraordinarily talented, but I think she has the wrong job. Like I think she, I think she’s actually just simply in the wrong ballet company. 

LM: Oh, interesting. 

AM: Yeah.

LM: Where would you put her?

AM: I would put her in a company- so part of, and part of what I actually talked about in the, in the essay is that – “Fandom while black” that is – is that she is in American Ballet Theater, which is a company that is a traditional, or a broadly traditional ballet company, in that they are usually doing evening-length ballet. So, Giselle, Sleeping Beauty. Well actually, Giselle isn’t evening-length but, you know, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and those kinds of ballets. And they require a certain, a certain level of technique that I do not believe Misty Copeland, for as good as she is, that she possesses. 

And in particular it’s this thing that all ballerinas in most classical ballets, at the end of the ballet a ballerina has to do what are called a Fouettés turn. And so they’re these turns on one leg with the leg whipping, and generally speaking you have to do roughly 32 of them, and I think she’d perhaps – and I only say this half-facetiously – is that I think perhaps she needs to like go to a hypnotist or something, because I think she’s actually just afraid of them and so they freak, they freak her out so she can’t actually do them. And so, every time I’ve seen her live in a classical ballet and she’s had to do the Fouettés, she either A) doesn’t do them or B) they actually re-choreograph it so that she doesn’t have to.

LM: Oh interesting. 

AM: Yeah. So, like I think she, she would thrive in a company that hewed more toward contemporary ballet. 

LM: Uh-huh.

AM: And those companies actually certainly have difficult choreography nonetheless, like the New York City Ballet, for instance. I think she would, she would thrive in that company, because while Balanchine’s choreography is certainly difficult. I think she can, she could tackle that difficulty better than she can tackle the difficulty at American Ballet Theater. 

LM: I wonder, you know, listening to you and in the essay where you – in International Journal of Cultural Studies that just recently came out, where you talk about her fans, her black fans who come to the performances in part for what she stands for as much as the ballet itself, do you think that, for her fans, were she to go to, say, New York City Ballet, do you think that would change in any way? 

AM: You know, I think based on a lot of the things that she has discursively said, I think that she, she is very much aware of and takes on the idea of being a role model. She often talks about how she, you know, she wants to be an inspiration for other folks in ballet, you know, and also she sort of talks about the ways that she wants her body to be rooted in and wrapped within a politics of visibility. So, I mean, I think she’s very, very aware of how, how that all shakes out.

LM: Mm-hmm.

AM: So, what I found, and I honestly at this point, I can’t remember if I found a place for it in this essay, because I’m- essentially this is part of a project in which I wanted to kind of do something that felt a little more theoretical and, and now the next piece of it is to parse out these individual fandoms into their own essays. But what is interesting about Misty Copeland and being in American Ballet Theater is that there is something about the phraseology “American Ballet Theater” that resonates with her fans in a way that “New York City Ballet” does not. So even as I would at least argue that New York City Ballet is a superior ballet company, there is something about, like, New York City Ballet or Los Angeles Ballet Theater or Pacific Northwest ballet or Denver, or Colorado, Ballet. Those belong to the area, the state, the city. American Ballet Theater, for her fandoms, means like her ballet is for everybody and that company is for like the whole country. And so, there’s a kind of representational politics, particularly because many of her fans are not ballet fans. And so, the idea of New York City Ballet is just like, oh like that’s just like, that’s just a city company. But American Ballet Theater is the ballet theater, or the ballet company, of the entire country.

LM: Right. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I have to ask, because it just kept coming up in my head every time I read his name, what are your feelings on Tyler Perry?

AM: Absolutely ambivalent. I don’t personally watch any of his … well, I will take that lie back. I don’t watch the vast majority of his content. I’ve seen one of his films, and I watch his television program, “The Haves and the Have Nots.” 

LM: Mm-hmm.

AM: And I used to at least lie to myself and say that I was watching it because I thought it might at some point be research. That still might be true, however, like, I watch it because I like it. Because I mean, it’s yeah, and what I think is – and I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine – what I think actually works about “The Haves and the Have Nots,” or at least works for me, is that I think that Tyler Perry is a melodramatic writer. 

LM: Mm-hmm.

AM: And so, I think that in the primetime soap genre, that melodramatic address really works well.

LM: Yeah, absolutely.

AM: So, in, so like in that way, in many ways rather, I am super ambivalent about him, but I also, I also think that it is not significant – I’m sorry, insignificant, rather – that he now has this gigantic space for Tyler Perry Studios. It is not insignificant that many of the power players like, you know, Spike Lee and particularly the black public sphere was really like, you know, this stuff is garbage, and now the vast majority of them, inclusive of Spike Lee, had to tuck their tails and go to the grand opening of his, of his studio. And for that, like I think that is just so delicious, to have all of these people who ridiculed your work, and now they’re all in their best attire trying to curry favor with you. And I mean, and I think it’s, what’s also really significant is – and within the context of this essay – is that folks are broadly speaking down on Tyler Perry, and like his stuff is artistic drivel, but then, you know, Black Panther, which is taken up as this, you know, this text that is going to save black representation, it’s going to save the future of black production in Hollywood, most of it was shot at Tyler Perry Studios. 

LM: Is that right? 

AM: Yes.

LM: I did not know that. 

AM: Yeah, and so there’s this really sort of, there’s this weirdness about like, Tyler Perry’s bad, but then like, what do we make of like Tyler Perry’s bad, but like this movie that we love is shot on Tyler Perry’s, at his Studios. 

LM: Wow. That, that would be a really rich project. 

AM: Yes. Yes. What’s really, really important about Tyler Perry is, we could actually, we could argue that his stuff is terrible, we could argue that it’s not particularly well made, we could have all of those kinds of arguments, but the fact is his fandom is largely an affective fandom, and there is no arguing against an affective fandom, because we’re not, because an affective fandom is not looking for, oh like this, you know, there’s a boom in the shot or any of that kind of stuff, or this story has a plot hole. They’re actually thinking about how it makes them feel.

LM: Right, absolutely. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that, when I was reading especially the essay in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, you talked about how work on race, and I would add to a lesser extent transnational fandoms, tends to get sort of ghettoized and shunted off to the side, and you make an exhortation at the end of that essay that the frameworks that you’re building could speak in a lot of ways to other kinds of fandoms. That while you’re looking at a very specific black fandom, the framework is not exclusive to that. And so, I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about, since people may or may not have read your essay, about what you mean by that kind of ability of work that seems to be very specific to a certain context, how that can resonate outside of those contexts?

AM: Well, I think the first thing is for us to also challenge ourselves to see quote-unquote “white fan studies”-

LM: Mm-hmm.

AM: -also as specific as black fan studies is. So, the, so in some ways we allow, and have allowed, and I think not just in media studies or fandom studies or any other studies, but in culture writ large, we have allowed whiteness to be both everything and nothing. So that even when I was interviewing or looking for folks to talk about Misty Copeland, I had a lot of white folks who wanted to talk about it. I’m like, you know what? Nope, I’m not interested in that. Like I’d, that’s not A) not what I’m talking about, and B) I’m not going to participate in this exercise in which white fandom is sort of seen as like, well look this is what white folks do, and like look at what these black folks who are deviant, like look at what they do.

LM: Right.

AM: And like, and so I wasn’t interested in participating in that. But the flip side of that is also, one of the things that I talked about in this essay is this idea of “must-see blackness.” And I sort of frame it within sort of black fandom as representational duty, but I think that even as I’m calling it “must-see blackness,” there is a must-see-ness for fans about all of their fan objects. So, there is, there is a reason that, and perhaps the reasons might be different, but there’s a reason that on the first day of its release, Star Trek fans are lined up to watch. But we don’t generally talk about that, or we sort of sidestep it as a kind of capital building. 

LM: Mm-hmm.

AM: But what it really is, I would argue, is the same kind of representational duty that says if we don’t show up en masse–

LM: Yeah.

AM: -on the first weekend of whatever the Star Trek movie is, or Star Wars movie or Star Trek for that matter, we will not get another Star Wars or Star Trek movie, and there is a way that all gets sort of sidestepped. And we talk about, in some ways, these sort of affective attachments, and like, you know, I love this because like it makes me feel accepted as a geek. But we also don’t … like there’s a way in which fandom can get untethered from industrial consideration. And so, I think that that’s, that is one of the ways that it’s reasonably easy to see how this idea of black fandom can actually be instructive for fandom writ large. 

LM: Yeah, absolutely. Well, to change the subject just a little bit, one of the things I did want to touch on, because it’s a little bit of an elephant in the room in fan studies, particularly in 2019, is this has kind of been the year where the structural whiteness of fan studies has become something that we talk about, with varying degrees of understanding and fluency. And in particular we’ve been talking quite a bit about decolonizing our scholarship and decolonizing our syllabi. Henry Jenkins posted a link to his current participatory culture syllabus that he said he was working to decolonize, and I’m just wondering, given all of this, what are your thoughts on any of it, but particularly as regards this term “decolonization”?

AM: So, part of what I think is really important here is, on one hand, I think that “decolonization” generally can have a, it can invite a kind of back- immediate backlash, that people are like, oh like so, what are we talking about? But I mean, I think what it really, what we’re really trying to get at, and I think, you know one of the great things about Rebecca Wanzo’s acafandom essay is that what she is getting at in that essay is, if we talk about where the beginning of fan studies is, or what counts as fan studies, like does it actually mean like using the word “fan,” or does it actually mean something else? 

LM: Yeah.

AM: And so, in even in this media reception studies class that I took, I didn’t read much work at all about race. And so that’s in reception as well as fan studies. And so, I think that what it is, is that it reifies this idea that white fandom is the fandom that matters, but we’ll never actually call it “white fandom.”

LM: Mm-hmm.

AM: We’ll actually just say “fandom.” And so, I mean, part of the thing that I would love for us to do in all of our work is just nominate whiteness. So, when we’re talking about like, you know, the men in this study, you’re not talking about just random men, you’re talking about the white men in the study. And so, in some ways I am interested in nominating whiteness in our work. And again, I know that word count is precious, but sometimes it’s worth it to do it and to call a thing a thing. 

LM: Absolutely.

AM: Because I could not have done this essay that I did and just use the word “fan.” And so, we want to, you know, we want to sort of extend the same courtesy, but I think in some ways the other piece of it is that we also need to think about our own social circles and our academic social circles. One of the things that I, one of the things that I often will quote is an early, early TLC song, which is called “What About Your Friends?” And so, the idea here is if you are broadly surrounded by a bunch of other academics who are also white folks, then you, you’re going to inevitably have some blind spots. And so, perhaps the work is on you, and to lean on your friends as well, to find the things that you need to find. So, I’m very happy to hear that Henry posted that thing talking about trying to get more work from, presumably, scholars of color onto his syllabi, because that’s part of like what is necessary, is to, to not reproduce the system under which we were all taught, and instead to, to try to break the cycle. 

And there is, there’s a sort of underlying anger in the International Journal of Cultural Studies piece, because it’s really this idea that, for what the, for the work that I’m doing here, some blind peer reviewer might very well say, well like, you know, you need to cite this white dude.

LM: Right.

AM: But nobody ever actually says you need to cite this black person when you’re not talking about blackness. And so, the citations- I think in this essay, the only white folks who I quote who are not talking about race, I think, are Fiske and Jenkins, and that is generally just to say their excuses for not engaging race are kind of raggedy. 

Yeah, and if I could also sort of add this, it’s part of the reason why I quote unquote “wasted words” by doing that fairly extensive methodology section, because as you know, at Fan Studies North America two years ago, I think, I was actually talking about the idea of both method, but also about us being very creative, and needing to be very creative, about looking for and finding the thing that we want to, that we want to study. So, the idea of like, I can’t devote attention to this, or like I haven’t been able to find it is like, well you could actually go out and find it.

And to be sure, me being a black person looking for black fandoms perhaps might be a little bit easier. However, as I sort of demonstrated particularly with the Misty Copeland case, it actually takes some work. If this is something that you think is worth studying, it’s worth actually doing the work to find the folks. And I mean in a in a sort of social scientific way, what’s the use in us doing a convenient sample? Like what can, for example, you know, the hundreds of thousands of if not millions of studies that are like, I did my research with an undergraduate class at a large public research one university in the Midwest. And it’s like, you know, so what does that even get us? We actually need to just be a little bolder and think about how we can get to these populations that we really want to talk to. 

LM: So usually I end these interviews by asking about, if you were going to say anything about fan studies to somebody who isn’t familiar with it, what would you say? But I also wanted to open that up to you and ask if you have anything that you want to say to fans studies?

AM: All right, so, what I would say to fan studies, and I think that a lot of this is happening because I think that there’s a lot of work that is being done by people of color who are very forcefully inserting race into fan studies. So, I think on one hand that is happening, but I would argue that we can always do more. We can, can and should, always be thinking about intersectionality, and thinking about, on one hand in this piece, I was talking about blackness as in some ways a flat category, but what does that look like if I actually isolate the interviews with black women? And how does that like, how does that differ? In some ways it’s very social scientific, in the sense that, like, manipulate the variables and see what happens. And so that’s part of what I would say.

But those who are interested in fan studies, or at least thinking about it? I think that what is really great about fan studies is that, even though I think we have some, some really wonderful foundational work that, on one hand, is sort of foundational fan studies work, but that we’re also in many ways building on audience studies work as well, is that fan studies is still relatively new. Even as Jonathan Gray and Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington chunk it out into these three waves and suggest that we’re in this third wave that does account for some of the affective stuff. But I think that what’s great about it is that we’re all still trying to figure it out. And so, on one hand, on one hand what’s great is that there isn’t a set of methodologies. 

LM: Yeah.

AM: So, we could, you can do it through interviews. You can do it through surveys. You can scrape Twitter data, you can scrape Facebook data – whatever it is that you want to do, you can do that as long as your research methods and your research question align. And so, I think that that’s what makes it really exciting, is that a lot of folks are doing the work, and a lot of folks are doing the work having come from different areas of media studies and, you know, some folks from English and literary studies, etcetera, etcetera. And so, there is this really great, and I would argue rich, tool box from which to pull from, but then there’s also this wonderful latitude to say, you know what, like this person didn’t quite do this right, or I haven’t quite seen anybody do this thing this way. 

LM: Yeah.

AM: So, this is actually how I’m going to do it.

LM: Yeah.

AM: And that nobody’s actually saying, no, you can’t do that. 

LM: Right, right. We don’t generally get too much of that. 

AM: Yeah.

LM: Well, that is a great note to end on, and I really appreciate you talking with me today. This has been a really interesting and enjoyable conversation. 

AM: Well again, thank you so much for chatting with me. I’m always happy to talk about this essay, and of all the work that I’ve done it’s really fascinating that this is the piece that, that folks are really sort of gravitating toward. 

LM: It’s a great piece of writing. I really enjoyed it. 

AM: Thank you so much.

[music]

LM: That’s it for this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I just want to thank everybody who had tuned in since it began six episodes ago in September, and I hope you’ll be back in 2020 for more talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. Thanks for listening.

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 2 Dec 2019. “Alfred L. Martin.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.6. [Accessed date]. https://itsathing.net/2019/12/02/episode-6-alfred-l-martin

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

On this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I’m talking with Dr. Louisa Stein, an Associate Professor at Middlebury College. We talk about fanvids and even a bit about Yiddish women’s erotic poetry.

Show Links

People

Dr. Louisa Stein
Dr. Anna McCarthy
Dr. Henry Jenkins
Dr. Tisha Turk
Dr. Francesca Coppa
Dr. Jason Mittell
Dr. Chris Keathley
Dr. Catherine Grant

Publications

Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
Stein, Keynote Lecture, FSN2017 (audio)

Terms, Concepts & the Rest

National Yiddish Book Center
VividCon
Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)
“feral fans“
Real Person Fiction (RPF)
Fan Studies Network North America
Escapade
FanWorks
FLOW Conference
Scholarship in Sound & Image
Console-ing Passions

Transcript

LM: Hi and welcome to “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. I’m your host, Lori Morimoto.

[music]

LM: On this episode of “It’s a Thing!”, I’ll be talking with Dr. Louisa Stein, an Associate Professor at Middlebury College. We’re talking about fanvidding, and we even touch a little on Yiddish women’s erotic poetry. So stick around!

[music]

LM: Louisa thank you for joining me today. 

LS: It is totally my pleasure, thanks, Lori. I’m so excited to talk with you. 

LM: I usually start these by asking people how they got into fan studies, so what’s your origin story? 

LS: When I started out in grad school, because it was really in grad school that I discovered fan studies, I went to graduate school very intent on studying early silent film audiences. So, I was already doing audience studies and, I mean, retrospectively it was kind of fan studies, but maybe not the way I came to know it afterwards. But I was really interested in trying to understand what the experiences were of moviegoers during the silent era, and specifically I was interested in Jewish women going to the movies during the silent era. And I had interned as an undergrad at the national Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., and I had interned and then I had worked there, and I was learning Yiddish and teaching the mangled Yiddish that I had learned to other interns, right? And translating books of erotic women’s poetry from Yiddish to English with my very poor Yiddish at that point. 

So, I was doing archival research with Yiddish newspapers trying to find traces of mentions of going to the movies, or simply sort of what the media culture was like, or what young woman’s experience of media culture would have been like through advertisements and, you know, movie reviews, and it was really like looking for something that wasn’t there. And then trying to read into the fact that it wasn’t there, but then wondering if it just wasn’t there because I didn’t have the linguistic skills to find it. 

LM: Mm-hmm.

LS: But because the folks that I was sharing that research with, you know, at conferences and other silent film scholars, they didn’t speak Yiddish either, and so of course they assumed that I knew what I was talking about.

LM: Right.

LS: And I felt very sort of concerned about the ethics of that, and what it would mean for people to take what I was saying as like gospel. So, I’m trying to wrangle with all of those questions, and at the same time I’m, you know, this is 1999? And I’m discovering online fandom, specifically in the form of like rec.arts.tv.xena newsgroups, Kate Bush newsgroups, and Buffy, right? And seeing this immense wealth of people sharing what they actually felt like in the language that I could understand. I didn’t have to like guess, read between the lines… 

LM: Right, right.

LS: This is… yeah, I’m seeing some irony now in what my current research is looking like. It’s gone full circle. But we’ll get back to that. I was just amazed. Here was this wealth, and I felt like we should take seriously what was being said there, because what a wealth it was compared to like, if people were taking seriously my poor translations and attempts to read between the gaps in these, you know, Yiddish newspapers because it was old and in a foreign language, in an extinct language, why were we not taking seriously what people were sharing now in, you know, in these immense… especially things like [unclear] the newsgroups, you know, very thoughtful posts and elaborate conversations between fans in those newsgroups, and I just, you know. Simultaneously I’m like in graduate school reading all this academic film studies work and film criticism, and that’s all being taken seriously. Why weren’t we taking this seriously? 

So, then I was studying, I was just a Masters student studying with Anna McCarthy, and I guess I was sort of sharing my interests. Maybe I wrote a paper on Xena or something. And she handed me her copy of Textual Poachers and that, you know, sort of pushed me into that next phase. That was a huge moment and discovery, to read Textual Poachers and be able to put into context what I was seeing in the newsgroups in a larger history. And so then at some point I just made, right around then I made the choice like, look, I still care about, you know, these historical communities and the sort of young women of past whose perspectives I can’t access, but I’m going to write about what is present and what is here. And so, then I started, you know, formulating my dissertation not on silent cinema or the Yiddish talkies and their reception, but instead on teen fantasy television and its online fandom, you know. And that was at the same time that I began participating in those fandoms more fully myself. 

LM: Everybody comes back to Jenkins. 

LS: Yes, it is, it is true, you know. And I really do feel that that book is often undercut and dismissed as… I mean Textual Poachers, like the first version of Textual Poachers, as too utopian and simplistic, and I return to it again and again and find that it absolutely is not. It’s nuanced, it never, it doesn’t claim to make larger statements than its particular case studies, and, of course, he’s not writing from 2019. I still feel like that there’s a lot of resonance there and real value. 

LM: Yeah, absolutely. Do you ever think of going back to the silent star spectatorship thing and kind of looking at it again?

LS: I do, or revisiting my… I wrote a big undergraduate thesis, and I wish I could go back and like turn that into a book. I was very, I was a very much an overachiever as a college student. But, you know, I feel like all those same issues would kick back off. 

LM: Yeah.

LS: I do feel more like I have to think about how my own cultural identity figures in to who I am and what my work is, and that maybe I’ve sort of pushed that aside quite completely, and that’s become an issue for me in recent years. But… especially as I do work that thinks about like transcultural positioning.

LM: Right.

LS: But, you know, so I may. Not right now, I guess, but it’s still sitting there on my shelf.

LM: Yeah, that is really interesting. So, that actually that brings me to my second question. You mentioned getting into online fandom, and you said, you mentioned Xena and Buffy and… I know, what was the other one?

LS: Kate Bush!

LM: Right! Kate Bush. So, I know that you have been something of a convention goer, and I’m wondering when did that start and in what way? Was it fandom? Was it through academia or kind of both, or…?

LS: So, the first convention that I ever went to was VividCon, which is the convention for fan vidding, which ended last year sadly. 

LM: When was that, that you first started going?

LS: I am not sure of the exact year. I wanted to remember this before our conversation today, because I had a feeling you would ask me. It was maybe in 2008? I mean I started vidding… well, I started vidding twice. Once as a graduate student with Windows Movie Maker, and there were some painful aspect ratio creations that happened out of that, which I’m sad actually, ‘cause I hid them for myself, and now I truly can’t find them to watch them again. I started again in 2010 once I got my first job and a Mac, because I found that, you know, the software – I got Final Cut Express and it was so much easier. And so…

LM: Yes, it is so much easier.

LS: It was. I mean Final- and it’s funny because Premiere, I use Premiere or Final Cut Pro Express. They’re all very similar logics. So, I started teaching myself how do you do that in 2010, right after I moved to San Diego for my first job at San Diego State University. And, and so, it was really that. The participating in the vidding community. And this was a time where it was, VividCon was in very high demand and you had to like stay up late to be able to get a registration spot. And actually I stayed up with, it was at SCMS, so there was a definite merger of academic and fan worlds here, with a friend. 

LM: Yeah.

LS: And we stayed up late in like the hotel lobby, because that was the only place where there was internet, to register for that first VividCon. 

LM: Wow.

LS: And I registered under my vidder name, and then when I got there Tisha Turk and there were some other academic vidders there, were putting, had put together a panel on academia and vidding- 

LM: Oh, interesting.

LS: -and they asked me to come sit on the panel. And it was about the presence of academics at this convention, and in the vidding world in general, and like the conversations between academia and vidding, and academia and fandom. And so, at that very first VividCon, I just like went up there and sort of had to present myself as both of those dimensions, my academic self and my vidder self, and I remember-

LM: What was the response?

LS: I mean, it was, overall very welcoming and I was one of like five people up there in the same position. So, it shouldn’t have been as nerve-wracking for me as it was, but it was not something I had expected or was quite ready to fully embrace, I think?

LM: Yeah.

LS: You know, at the time there was still some ambivalence and uncertainty about having like those blurred lines, or having academics within fan communities and within the vidding communities. I think that has fallen away so, so much over the years. But, so yeah, if this was back in 2007 or eight or nine, I guess… sorry, nine. 

LM: Okay so, from there, since you, since you started vidding on your own, what was what was the attraction to it? I mean, I guess I’m asking because for me, except for a Real Video sort of slideshowy thing that I did, I don’t know, like 2002 or something? I don’t know. I didn’t really watch vids. I didn’t really know that much about them. I just knew that I had this song that I wanted to use to express something, which eventually was sort of the impetus for learning how to vid. But you know, I didn’t really know anything about them. How did you come into contact with vids? And, and what was it that made you decide, you know, I want to do this too? 

LS: Well, I think vidding was always in my blood, like it is my medium and I have pretty solid evidence for this. I mean, the same way folks are… there’s that term “feral fans,” where you do fannish things when you’re young without knowing that they’re fannish things, like you write fanfiction without knowing its fanfiction. 

LM: Yeah. Oh, is that what that means?

LS: That was that me. Yeah, I believe so. 

LM: I had no idea. You see it sometimes…

LS: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what that’s for. Yeah. So, you’re kind of out there in the wilds doing your fan of thing not knowing that it’s part of larger traditions or that other people do this.  And, indeed, I totally also wrote fanfiction when I was young, not realizing that it was fanfiction.  Well, it was like R- it was like Real Person Fiction. But with, I think it’s more co- you hear more commonly that people are writing fanfiction without realizing that it’s a thing, right? But you don’t really hear that people create vids without realizing it’s a thing very often. But when I was in camp in sixth grade, I made these, like so are they lithographs when you, you make a carving and then a print and multiple prints with different colors? 

LM: Yeah.

LS: So, I did that in camp, and then I some for some reason, this was not the assignment at all, I turned it into a video which I set to “The Sound of Silence,” and I edited it to that in sixth grade. So obviously I wasn’t working with popular media, other than the music, popular visuals, but I was editing visuals, found visuals in a sense, I had created them, but not for this purpose. 

LM: Yeah.

LS: To, and setting it to popular music. At a time, you know, we had a whole VHS set up and everything. This was pre-digital editing. 

LM: Yeah, yeah.

LS: And then in college I took Film Production, in which I edited home movies. Well, what I did was I played VHS tapes of films from of my family from the 1930s and my mother, my parents’-

LM: Oh my God!

LS: -wedding film from the 1960s. Then I sort of played it back on a VCR and slowed it down and paused it, and had all these kind of crazy effects of that-

LM: Wow.

LS: No, no, no, filmed it onto 16mm film. So I was editing together 16mm film and also including translations of that erotic Yiddish women’s poetry I was talking about, and then I set it all to Kate Bush, who I know I’ve also mentioned was quite dear to me at the time. So that, you know, it was very sort of experimental vidding, though I, again, had no clue that that was a thing, you know. And yeah, that, I look back at that as a very, like it was absolutely vidding. You know, I was reworking found-footage, layering effects, such as they were, albeit by like literally cutting and pasting film together.

LM: Sure.

LS: You know, and then, and then all reassembling it all in the end, you know, as a visual articulation of what I heard in Kate Bush. So, it was very much driven by the visuals. It was also very personal, and it was driven by the music.

LM: So, do you think, you know, I’m thinking back to your keynote lecture at Fan Studies Network Conference a few years ago, where you showed an intensely personal vid which got a terrific response. And I know you were nervous about it, but it really, it really worked well. So, do you think in general that your own sort of, I don’t know if the word would be aesthetic or just approach to vidding tends to really engage with the personal?

LS: I think it’s something that I’ve returned to again and again, I don’t think it necessarily defines all of the, at this point, many vids that I’ve made, but it’s certainly like a recurring preoccupation. 

LM: Yeah.

LS: And I think more than maybe the personal in a sort of autobiographical sense, the personal in an emotional and affective sense? And certainly the first vids that I saw when I realized that this was a thing, right? Like fan studies, it’s a thing! Vidding, it’s a thing! I had that that moment of seeing that, were very affective vids, vids that really made you feel something through their audiovisual union. They were less, you know, these very accessible analyses where you came away cerebrally thinking about your interpretation, and more these like gut punches. And those so, and especially like Sisabet’s early vids were the what made me want to vid. What made me need to vid to be able to create something like that, express that synthesis of the image that you care about and the music that you care about into like what you feel, and then to share that and hope that others will feel that through that synthesis. So, I think that that is a truism I would say across all of my vid work.

LM: You mentioned earlier that fanfiction has gotten a lot of attention. When we think of fanworks we do tend to sort of gravitate towards fanfiction, and there’s a lot of really powerful scholarship – Tisha Turk, you mentioned earlier, Francesca Coppa – there is that body of work. What is it, do you think, that has kept scholarship on fan vidding submerged, I guess, relative not just to fanfiction, but also relative it seems like, and correct me if I’m wrong, to scholarship on video remix?

LS: Francesca Coppa has a book coming out on this that I’ve been privileged to see an early version of. She makes the argument, not just in that book but in her work prior, that because fan vidding has primarily been female-authored practice and one in which its, the creators, participants feared, for multiple reasons, to be found out, both because it was seen as trivial or trite or taboo, and also illegal or pirating-

LM: Yeah, right.

LS: -that it was, for a long time vidders hid what they did behind passwords or, and pseudonyms, and still in many cases do, at least you know, use pseudonyms. So that there still is a sort of sense that this is a thing you do on the side. You’re not going to link it with your professional identity. Whereas the remix community has been more male-dominated and more direct in its commercial dimensions, not perceived as copyright, embraced by things like the video game industry rather than fearful of being persecuted with lawsuits.

But these are, I feel like, I mean, A) I’m oversimplifying, and B) it’s Francesca’s argument. So, you know, I just kind of want a gesture to her work on that topic. I think that, A) there is excellent scholarship on vidding, and B) there’s more work coming, and I think we’ll probably see a catch-up, or like a catching-up of scholarship on fan video. But I also think that fan video is harder to explain than fanfiction. That it’s harder to talk about, the same way that film studies, you know, had to struggle to legitimate, like, how do you write analyses about popular media, and how do you explain it visually, and how much description can you give, and how much knowledge can you assume? And these are all issues that are part of film and media and television studies. Fan video has that and, you know, do you have to explain the logics of how fan videos work every single time in order to offer an analysis?

LM: Right.

LS: It’s just more to folks who don’t understand it. It’s more opaque of a form than fanfiction is. And so, I think that that’s been challenged in its scholarship. 

LM: The emotionality of fan works like fanfiction and fan vidding and stuff, the way that they communicate through affect or, you know, they’re there to provoke an emotional response. It’s not necessarily an intellectual exercise. It can it can also be intellectual but, you know, on the first level, as you were saying earlier in terms of your broader editing work, that emotion that they evoke is so critical. And I wonder if that both makes them harder to talk about, but also harder to want to talk about as an academic, if that makes any sense?

LS: Yeah. I think that maybe the affect combined with the opacity does make it sort of hard to introduce them into academic discourse. It also makes them wonderful teaching tools, and I think it’s precisely because it brings in elements that are usually not present in academic work, like letting students feel and respond, and also like affect in terms of the bodily response, right? So not just emotional, but that sort of affect theory bod- that your body as well is tied to your emotions, right? So, having that experience collectively in a class can be very powerful, or allowing students or encouraging students to create their own and then think through what that means about their relationship to the media text that they’re studying, or the form that they’re studying, I think can cut through that academic distance that may color much of undergraduates’ experience of their studies. 

LM: So, I wanted to, and this is sort of an this is a strange question in some ways, or a little bit artificial insofar as we worked on this together, but it really was you. You spearheaded the video show at the Fan Studies Network North America conference both last year and this year, and you really championed including a video show. And I was wondering, first, why you wanted that to be a part of an academic conference on fan studies. 

LS: Well, first of all, I definitely like to think about the video show as a collaboration between you and I. I feel quite strongly that it is a collaboration.

LM: Yes, but you did all the work.

LS: That – no, no, okay, but we’re going to let this go-

LM: Okay.

LS: -so we don’t descend into an argument about this. Okay, so, there are, I- so first of all, and I, you had asked me before what cons I have gone to. 

LM: Yeah. Yeah.

LS: And I talked about VividCon, but VividCon’s not the only con that I’ve gone to. Since VividCon, then I also started going to Escapade, which is a older slash fan convention that meets yearly in LA, that’s a sort of multifandom and multiform, right? So, it’s for fanfiction and fan art and fan video and fan meta, all of those forms. And now FanWorks similarly is also looking at fanwork creativity, rather than sort of the texts themselves, across a broad spectrum. And first with VividCon and then definitely with Escapade and also now with FanWorks, I was struck by how not at all different it was in a lot of ways from my experiences of academic conferences, in that at academic conferences and fan cons alike, people come together to talk about the things that they feel and think passionately about, to share their work and share their ideas and fuel new ideas, and have great conversations in panels and in hallways and over dinner and over drinks. 

LM: Yeah.

LS: And especially for fan studies, where over the decades we’ve, you know, talked a lot about the value of acknowledging our personal investments, and how they can inform and limit our work, that a fan studies conference in my mind would not be so different from a fan convention. And also, VividCon introduced me to the power of the vid show, what it was like to have that sustained experience of watching 45 minutes to an hour worth of vids, or in the case of VividCon you do that like for several hours in a row, potentially, and what it means to sort of see and watch vids in that context, to have vids and made for that context. And that the emotional experience and the intellectual experience of watching videos not like at home, you know, on your computer in between things, but with other people, and then talking about with them with other people and sort of of the insights that can come out of that. 

So, I both, sort of as one of the folks thinking about what the feel of the Fan Studies Network Conference, the North American version, would be, I wanted it to have a con-like feel because the value of the conversations that happen in the hallways, which is something we always used to say about the FLOW Conference, that we wanted to bring that value of the conversations that happen in the hallways into the actual conversations like at the core of the conference, that I wanted that for FSN. And I also wanted to share that experience of watching vids within the fid show context and the conversations that could come out of that, and to see what would that look like, you know, within an academic conference. So, those were sort of my main, the forces driving my wish to see that vid show happen. 

Plus, I just I love vid shows. I love the excitement of them, the notion that vids are premiering, the collective experience of watching vids. I show- I often, I screen vid shows, depending on the course, like when appropriate, in my classes and love the like the art of crafting a playlist and guiding- 

LM: Yeah.

LS: -your audience through a sort of emotional journey, not of a single vid, but of the vids assembled together. 

LM: Yeah.

LS: So, I kind of wanted to do that within the FSN context, as well. One of the motivating factors for the FSN vid show that first year especially was to bring together some of the work or experiments being done in videographic criticism and video essays with the traditions of fan vidding. In my department, my colleagues at Middlebury College, Jason Mittell and Chris Keathley, have been working on and teaching videographic criticism, both in that they’ve been creating their own videographic, works and that they’ve published a book with Catherine Grant, and they’ve been, and they host a workshop where they teach other media studies academics to create videographic criticism. And they use the term “videographic criticism,” rather than “video essay,” to kind of signal a different approach to the video essay that encompasses sort of wider experimentation in its aesthetics. And that also part of the point of it is the process of learning through reworking the material of the source, like, of the visual source. That we learn from doing as well as creating, and that video, the videographic criticism that comes out of that is not necessarily like the didactic version of a, you know, fast-talking video essay that you might imagine from YouTube, although it certainly could include some of that. But it could be something like that leaves more, more open-ended or leaves you more with an emotion or a question, or sort of pondering the relationship between visuals within a source, or between two different sources. 

So, I’ve watched that body of work grow and the excitement around it and sort of what it’s offered to media studies in terms of- we were talking earlier about like why vidding isn’t always written about, because it could be hard to describe what vids are doing with words. And similarly, you know, that’s always been a challenge in film and media studies, is how you describe the text, the media text that you’re working with, and then make an analysis, and videographic criticism bypasses that and instead lets you work with the materiality of media. 

But of course, as I see all these evolving aesthetics and experimentations, I think about the long history, longer history of vidding aesthetics, and I mean multiple vidding aesthetics, not just the VividCon aesthetics, but also all the other, fan videos and music videos and the, and anime music videos. There’s really a multiplicity of fan video editing histories that have similarly reworked the source text to offer insight, analysis, and like affect. And so, to me it absolutely makes sense and feels almost necessary to bring those into conversation with one another, and so our first call for the FSN vid show was looking for videos that merged the two aesthetics in some ways. And I’ve actually found that that call has been, I mean, just that call more broadly looking for work that does that, has been a little bit of an uphill battle, because I think it requires like literacy and both of those two areas, and that’s, you know, kind of culturally not a thing that happens very often. 

LM: Mm-hmm.

LS: And I think it’s too limiting to think of it that way, but I still really want to think about like what they can offer in dialogue to one another, and so I’m hoping that just the more we kind of put them in conversation, like videographic criticism and vids, in conversation with each other, the more maybe there will be sort of a seeping of aesthetics and approaches between the forms.

LM: That’s, yeah, I guess… I like that very much. Okay, well, I usually end this with the same question. 

LS: Okay.

LM: And I will direct it at you. If there was one thing that you could tell somebody who didn’t know much about fan studies, or anything about fan studies, what is it that you would want them to know? 

LS: I think I would want them to know that fan studies has been a space where we have really talked through the questions of the value of investments, like the value and limits of investments, subjectivity and objectivity. I think there can be a perspective that fan studies is just an excuse to academically talk about the things that you love, and celebrate that love without thinking critically about it. And I think not only do we think critically about our investments, in the role it plays, but that critical thinking has led to our sort of demolishing assumptions of objectivity and subjectivity. That fandom itself has given us the tools to think beyond whether we’re being objective or subjective, to think about the nuances of our investments and not be caught up if we’re too close. 

There was a term that we batted around at a conference, I think maybe it was FLOW or Console-ing Passions a few years ago, of “critical closeness,” this notion that we can and do engage critically with what we’re close to, and that very closeness gives us its own particular critical perspective, rather than criticism and closeness being necessarily opposed. 

LM: Yeah.

LS: So, I think that that’s a really valuable thing that fan studies perhaps offers beyond fan studies itself. 

LM: Well, thank you for that. And I would like to thank you for joining me today. This has been a really fun conversation. 

LS: Thank you so much, Lori, I had a great time. I really appreciate it.

[music]

LM: That’s all for this episode of “It’s a Thing!” Next time, I’ll be speaking with Dr. Alfred Martin, an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa. So I hope you’ll join me!

[music]

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 18 Nov 2019. “Louisa Stein.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.5. [Accessed date]. https://itsathing.net/2019/11/18/episode-5-louisa-stein

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

On this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I talk to Dr. Mel Stanfill about how media industry exploits fans, “reactionary fandom,” and fanboy auteurs.

Show Links

People

Dr. Mel Stanfill
Dr. Judith Butler
Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble
Dr. Anastasia Salter
Dr. Bridget Blodgett
Dr. Alexander Doty

Publications

Stanfill, Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans
Stanfill & Condis, eds., Special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures: Fandom and/as Labor
Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
Stanfill, “Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom“
Franks, The Cult of the Constitution
Stanfill, ed., Special issue of Television & New Media: Reactionary Fandom
Salter & Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as a Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises

Terms, Concepts & the Rest

The Frankfurt School
Foucault and power
Gramsci on hegemony

Transcript

Lori Morimoto: Welcome to “It’s a thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. I’m your host, Lori Morimoto.

[music]

LM: On this week’s episode of “It’s a Thing!” I’ll be speaking with Mel Stanfill, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida and author of Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans. So, stick around!

[music]

LM: Before we get started, I just need to mention that, in my interview with Mel, I had a bit of a microphone snafu. I think I’ve gotten it taken care of going forward, but you’ll notice that the sound quality of my voice in this interview is not particularly good. I apologize for that and beg your indulgence. 

So, on with the show! 

I’d like to thank you for being with me today. 

Mel Stanfill: Thanks for having me. 

LM: You have a recently published book, Exploiting Fandom, that I’m looking forward to talking about with you, but before we get there I just wanted to ask, since I actually have no idea about this, how did you become a fan scholar? What brought you into fan studies? 

MS: So, Adorno and Horkheimer, weirdly. So, for folks who don’t know, Adorno and Horkheimer were these guys from this group of scholars called The Frankfurt School, and they were in Frankfurt, Germany prior to World War II, and they were all Jewish, and so they fled and they came to the US. But basically, their idea … they had seen the way the Nazis were using mass media to indoctrinate people. And so, they had this sense that media would control you and would get the masses, you know, quote/unquote, to participate in and support atrocities. 

LM: Right.

MS: And so, I was in undergrad and I took a course called “Literature and Popular Culture,” and we read this piece, this selection from Adorno and Horkheimer. And I was like, “Well, okay, but the media doesn’t tell you what to think. What about fans?” And specifically, in my context it was what about Xena fans? That, you know because fans were so invested in the Xena/Gabrielle relationship, the show got gayer over time. And so that- 

LM: Were you a fan?

MS: I was, yeah. That was where I first discovered fanfiction, actually, was in Xena fandom. 

LM: Yeah.

MS: When I was- when we had dial-up. I mean that’s that’s…

LM: Yeah, yeah. 

MS: …how old I am. But, so that just sort of, it was, you know, it was toward the end of my undergrad career, and I wasn’t really able to get into it. But that sense of, “This is something I want to study” … and I became aware that people were already studying it. So then when I started my Master’s Degree, I actually, you know got into it. But yeah, it really started with these guys, you know, who were very concerned about the media controlling people’s minds. 

LM: Okay. This is actually the second time in a very short podcast, so far, that Adorno and Horkheimer have come up, so I really like that. 

MS: Okay.

LM: The first was Suzanne Scott.

MS: Yeah. 

LM: So, um, I also wanted to ask you something that I haven’t actually asked anybody yet, but it’s been coming up a little bit on Twitter, and that is … you’re employed at a university. You have a tenure track job. I’ll just tell you this. And I’m wondering how much of your academic career involves fan studies, or is it more sort of ancillary to your kind of everyday work? 

MS: Well, I mean I did teach a PhD seminar on fan studies. 

LM: Mm-hmm.

MS: I have two PhD students who are interested in fan studies. 

LM: Oh, that’s great. 

MS: So, there’s, I think there’s some, but because of the particular department I’m in now, my department where I teach undergraduates, is Games and Interactive Media.

LM: Right.

MS: And it’s a production degree. So, they have web design students and game design students.

LM: Yeah.

MS: So, the sort of cultural, structural stuff that is what I do is just one class, and they’re great. And it’s actually a Media Industries class. 

LM: Okay.

MS: So, I do, I did, the article got a little old now and I’m not teaching it, but I was teaching some of the fandom and labor work from my 2014 special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures–

LM: Right.

MS: -as a way to sort of bring fan studies in, but it’s mostly not what I’m doing these days, you know, except with the graduate students. 

LM: Yeah, because since I’m outside of that particular circle-

MS: Yeah.

LM: -I really have a hard time sort of conceptualizing how much, how far fan studies has actually made it into mainstream academia. So…

MS: Yeah.

LM: That’s really interesting. So, I would like to turn to the book again. It’s called Exploiting Fandom, and as with a lot of first books – I believe this is your first book?

MS: It is yeah.

LM: Okay. It really does a nice job of encapsulating the work that you’ve been doing up until this point, and one of the things that I’m really interested about it, this does come pretty early on, but your discussion of normativity and kind of the effects of normativity, the way it’s constructed, is particularly interesting to me. And I’m wondering, well, where does that, where does that interest in kind of the structures of institutional normativity, or however you might frame it, where does that come from for you? 

MS: You know when I, you know, you sent the questions in advance to think about and I was looking at them this morning and I’m like, well, when did I start doing that? So, I went into my file cabinet and I got, I was like, I was already doing it by the end of my Master’s degree. So, it must have been some time at that point. And I looked, and I took an ethnographic methods course my second quarter, I was on the quarter system, and I was doing interviews with fans. And the idea of some fans are normal and fine, but those people over there are weird-

LM: Yeah.

MS: -which subsequently became an article I published in 2013, was already there. And so that, you know, led me to, in that Master’s degree I didn’t just interview fans about their experience, but I looked at how they were represented, and I looked at how the makers of the show – and that was a Master’s thesis that was about Xena – how they were treating this representational question or-

LM: Yeah.

MS: -those sorts of things? And so, that, I think it was probably those early interviews that led me to care about that. As to why I was sort of sensitized toward it, I did, after undergrad, undertake to read the collected works of Judith Butler. I’m not [unclear], but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had taken a class with her. I mean, I knew enough to know that she was famous and somebody I care about, because I went to Berkeley and she teaches at Berkeley. 

LM: Oh, okay.

MS: So, I took a class with her in my senior year. So, I think that engagement with queer theory had really sensitized me to thinking about, you know, norms as locations of power. But I hadn’t formally studied queer theory, you know, more comprehensively until later. 

LM: Do you identify as a queer scholar? 

MS: I do. I mean, I think I, being someone who is occupying this sort of queer studies, queer theory perspective. I’m hesitant to say I am things, I don’t like identity as a framework, but I definitely use queer theory as an analytic and in the way that I participate in things, and I have a sort of commitment to contesting and destroying norms wherever possible.

LM: There you go. One of the things that you bring into the book from some previous work, in the context of normativity, is your discussion of whiteness and fandom. What sort of keyed you into that?

MS: Also. I took a class my second year in grad school that was something like “Race, Sex and Deviance,” or something. And it was a sort of a queer-of-color critique-grounded class that was a sort of thinking about norms through a queer theory lens, but recognizing that race had to be part of the conversation in a way that mainline queer theory has not always recognized, that that matters, and recognized its own position of whiteness as default. And so, I wrote this paper, and I don’t remember much about it except that there was a section about whiteness. And then the subsequent semester, when I took my queer theory class, I’m like this, this two pages, I want to expand this and I want to write about this. So actually, that then became my 2011 Transformative Works and Cultures article. My first article really came out of this… taking this class that was demanding that I think this way, and because I was already in a queer theory space, it was an easy addition or an easy, “Oh, this is a lens I have to use, too, or else I don’t really understand what’s going on.” 

LM: Sure. Sure. I’m curious, you know, there’s – especially this past year – there’s been quite a lot of ancillary discussion of structural whiteness in fan studies itself, and I’m wondering first, what is your take on that as an issue that we’re confronting in fan studies, and if you have anything that you attempt to do to attend to critiques of structural whiteness in fan studies, like in your own work?

MS: Right. That sort of, there’s two answers to that in a way. One is… I want to say it was at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference last year, Safiya Noble, who wrote Algorithms of Oppression, who’s an Internet studies scholar and is one of my good friends from grad school, because I went to grad school with apparently like all the famous people somehow-

LM: Nice!

MS: I don’t know! It was like that cohort of us that all went through together all the like at this position where we’re making a lot of noise. I don’t know. 

LM: Yeah.

MS: She said, you know if white people who are studying white people would just name that that’s what they’re doing, we would be so far ahead. And so, to some extent that’s part of what I’m doing is just sort of to mark that like, this is a description of a community or a theoretical perspective or something that comes from a position of whiteness, and not to allow that to go unmarked. But then the other piece of it is, I have a special issue that is forthcoming on what I’m calling “reactionary fandom.” And so, you know, there’s been all this conversation about toxic fandom, and I don’t think that’s as useful because I think it’s too, it covers too many things. 

LM: Okay.

MS: So, I think toxic, like, toxicity can happen anywhere and that might, you know, I guess it’s important to look at but it’s not as interesting to me as what are the structural toxicities rather than the interpersonal toxicities. 

LM: Okay.

MS: So, structural toxicities leads me to think about reactionary fandoms, that thinks about reactionary politics as integrated into media fandoms that we often don’t think of, and also the ways that reactionary politics can be understood as itself a form of fandom. 

LM: So, what would be an example of what you’re describing as reactionary fandom? 

MS: So, in the special issue, one of the articles is from my colleague, Anastasia Salter, and she’s writing about Harley Quinn/Joker shipping and the ways that it’s about excusing his abusivness-

LM: Mm-hmm.

MS: -and the sort of recapitulation of like really standard conservative discourses about what’s appropriate. 

LM: Mmm.

MS: So, it’s living in a reactionary politics space, even though it’s a standard, you know, shipping media fandom. And then the other side of it is, so, Bridget Blodgett, who is another collaborator, she’s writing about like GamerGate and the tactics they use to get coverage in the press were then picked up and used by the alt-right. 

LM: So, this kind of touches then on, well, on Twitter I’m both in sort of academic Twitter and fandom Twitter. 

MS: Right.

LM: My fandom Twitter currently is sort of aflame with discussions of what the kids are calling fandomentalism. Does this-

MS: Ha!

LM: -sort of – Right?

MS: I like that. 

LM: I do too, but there are people like who really don’t, and I don’t know what to do with it. But I think that’s a great term. 

MS: Well, I’ve seen some people calling TERFs – so, trans-exclusionary radical feminists – sex fundamentalists. 

LM: Mm-hmm.

MS: Because there’s this, so, Mary Anne Franks, who is a constitutional law scholar, wrote this book called The Cult of the Constitution, and in it she talks about First Amendment fundamentalists and Second Amendment fundamentalists. And so, the idea of these sort of fundamentalist is this sort of unfounded sense of persecution and there are certain features that really, you know, so thinking about fandoms and fundamentalism. I think her model would be really helpful. 

LM: Yeah, absolutely. But what is the special issue of it is?

MS: It is in… what is that thing called that has been my whole life for two years? Television & New Media. 

LM: Oh, okay.

MS: Yeah.

LM: Excellent!

MS: I am through copy-editing, so my introduction to the special issue should be up like any day now and I’ll have two free ones. So, people should you know keep an eye out for that on Twitter. 

LM: Definitely. So, we’re kind of sliding into my next question, which is about Foucault and power. For people listening who might not be familiar with Foucault, or who took Camille Paglia seriously and have just sort of eschewed all French theorists, what does Foucault have to say about power and how do you mobilize that in your own work? 

MS: So, we usually tend to think about power is coercive as stopping people from doing things, and you know. And in the sort of Foucault model that gets talked about repressive power, but one of the things that Foucault called attention to is that power doesn’t just say no. It also says yes. 

LM: Right.

MS: And so, instead of saying don’t do that, it says do this, or it says this is the right thing to do. And so, if you’re thinking about a cultural formation that produces a message of, “this is the right thing to do and not that,” that’s a norm right? That’s what the mechanism is of that. And so, the other thing that is really helpful about Foucault is that, in a productive power framework, it’s pervasive, it’s not a single person enacting power, or like it’s… particularly in Discipline and Punish, which is one of the first books that he does this move from his earlier work, is moving away from the idea of a sovereign. So, it’s not like there’s a king somewhere deciding what happens, but that it’s these things we don’t even realize we have collectively agreed to and are enforcing anyway.

LM: Uh-huh. Does that relate to issues of hegemony? 

MS: Yes, it does. So, the distinction I think between that and hegemony is that hegemony assumes a ruling class, because Gramsci was a Marxist, right? So that still has more hierarchy than Foucault’s version, but the ways that people are consenting to this thing that often disadvantages them is definitely common between the two different ideas. Yeah.

LM: Okay. That’s interesting, yeah. 

MS: I mean that’s one of the things that was really important for me to do about the book, is that there was this narrative, especially when I first started to research the book, because the book took about 10 years to write. Because I mean the first pieces of it I wrote you know in that class, like the one I was telling you about and other classes I took that same semester my second year of grad school, and I’m now, you know five years out. So that’s, you know. But that there was this excitement of like, “Oh media industries, media companies, people who make TV and film like fans now, they’re embracing them, they’re including them. Everything is awesome.” And I was like, “No.” And so, part of that is asking, you know, to sort of point back to our whiteness conversation, awesome for who? 

LM: Right right.

MS: But then, also, awesome under what circumstances, with what restrictions like what’re… when, you know, one of the ways that I’ve summed up the book as like a couple of sentences is, when media industry say they love our fans, we love our fans, what do they mean? Who do they mean? What practices do they mean, and how does that then construct a sense of, this is the right way to be a fan and not that? 

LM: No, absolutely, I… yeah, I mean and it is hard to know, especially if a creator is particularly beloved, it can be difficult to see where that sort of exercise of power or normativity is coming from.

MS: Absolutely, and one of the things that’s really great about normativity as a model is that it doesn’t require the anybody be evil. Right? There aren’t nefarious people in some back room smoking cigars. It’s just common sense. But common sense is an exercise of inclusion and exclusion. 

LM: One of the things that you mentioned in your book, and I will confess right now that I have not gotten to this point yet, so, I don’t know what you said but I was really intrigued when I read it, was that sometimes as fans we sort of willingly acquiesce to this. Could you talk a little bit about that? 

MS: Well people get stuff, right? That there is a benefit to cultivating a positive relationship with someone who’s going to, some media maker who’s going to then give you insider information. There is a benefit to being… there’s like tone policing that happens in fandom. Like, “Don’t be a hater, or else they’ll stop doing stuff for us,” right? That we want to sort of keep a positive relationship with media makers so that they continue to potentially listen to our desires for whatever that media is.

LM: Right.

MS: And I think that that’s valid, like- 

LM: Yeah.

MS: But it comes at a cost, and it comes at the cost of abandoning or being asked to abandon, whether people actually do it, but some of the critical traditions of fandom. The transformative traditions of fandom that say, “This media object doesn’t succeed at what I’m looking for, pushing it to do better. Like, a lot of those things become much harder to do when the norm of fandom shifts. 

LM: Okay. So, that leads me to my next question then, in terms of transformative fandom and in particular sort of the… what fans, the hopes, expectations, criticisms that fans bring to, in particular, representations or depictions of queerness. How it should play out on screen. And I was working with this in the context of an essay on Yuri!!! on Ice and transnational fandom of that, and there I sort of split it between a kind of unspoken desire for – well, it’s not an unspoken is pretty well spoken – issues of representation, on the one side, and a more, and this is especially visible in scholarship, a more sort of Alexander Doty, you know, queerness as a sensibility sort of divide between ways people were thinking about queerness in media and criticisms of queerness and media or lack thereof. And particularly in the context of what fans call queerbaiting, I’m wondering, well, actually, I’m just wondering what’s your take on fandom understandings of queerbaiting and this divide, if it’s even such a thing? 

MS: I mean, I have so many different perspectives depending which of my hats I’m wearing. So, if I think about it as a sort of media studies scholar who’s interested and race and gender and sexuality as subject positions and representations, then I think it’s really important to have publicly visible, intelligible queer folks on TV or in whatever media, so that both the queer kid in  Kansas who doesn’t know anyone else can see someone like them in their media, but also that their parent who has no idea how to deal with their kid can see that too. 

But then the part of me that is a queer theorist is deeply skeptical of incorporation into norms, because again, as I’ve been suggesting, it comes at a cost. And so, the idea that you need to appeal to this, you know to the media to acknowledge you and to grant you that legitimacy is dangerous in some ways. And then thinking about it as like a fan studies person, and also to some extent as a fan myself, the idea that it’s not legitimate or it’s not good unless it’s in the text totally devalues all of this sort of work that fans have done to take texts and break them and reassemble them the way they want them for decades, right? And sort of like saying, well the, okay, sure, sure, you can write fanfiction but you know, this thing is canon and therefore… And so I see all the sides at once. 

LM: Yeah.

MS: There’s no definitive answers. It just sort of depends on which thing you’re prioritizing.

LM: Does it, is that something, is that sort of mutual incompatibility or just the contradictions of those different ways of thinking about it, is that something that maybe we should just get used to?

MS: I mean, yeah. 

LM: I mean there’s like no one answer, right? 

MS: Yeah. And I think I’m also skeptical of the desire for simple answers to complicated questions that… I always like to ask, “Who benefits from this?” Because sometimes both media industries and fans can benefit at the same time and then it’s fine. But usually it’s one of the other and usually it’s industries, you know, at the expense of fans. And so, that’s where I would be concerned, and particularly if we think about something like queerbaiting as like deliberate manipulation and we’re going to get your eyeballs for our ratings, or we’re going to get you to buy movie tickets or whatever it happens to be, and we have no intention of actually giving you what you want, feels very different from, you know, this is not what we’re representing but we are happy for everyone to see themselves in our show. 

LM: Yeah.

MS: It’s, there’s different approaches to it. 

LM: Sure. Is there any, just out of curiosity, is there any media sort of fandom text right now that you think has sort of finessed that well? 

MS: You know, I pick up a new TV show about once every 10 years. I don’t know. 

LM: Yeah. Okay. 

MS: I’m still in my love hate relationship with Once Upon a Time. 

LM: Is that still on? 

MS: No!

LM: Yeah.

MS: And in fact, I stopped watching a several years before it went off the air, but I stayed in the fandom.

LM: Did you finish the see the series or did you just kind of have enough? 

MS: I consumed it through gif sets.

LM: Yes, that’s a lot of my, yeah. It’s amazing how well you can follow something through gifs. 

MS: Yeah.

LM: Or jifs if that makes some people happy, but it’s wrong. 

MS: It is wrong. 

LM: I know!

MS: Like, not even though the creator says that that way, that doesn’t make it right. It stands for graphical.

LM: A gift!

MS: Yep. 

LM: If it’s gonna sound… anyway. 

MS: It’s a good Germanic word. It’s not one of your French words. 

LM: That’s right. That’s right. I like that. I really like that way of framing it, because that’s exactly how I feel about it. But yeah, no, it is really interesting how that how you can follow something entirely on Tumblr. 

MS: Yeah.

LM: I’m curious actually, what having finished the book what are you looking at going forward in terms of research? 

MS: So, I’ve got this reactionary fandom special issue. I have a book that the manuscript was just submitted which I wrote with my colleague Anastasia Salter, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy.

LM: Oh, interesting. 

MS: So, looking at media figures who use their fannishness as a branding tactic or don’t. So, it comes out of, obviously, Suzanne Scott’s idea of the fanboy auteur, but she never did a lot with it. So, we’re like we’re going to run with it. And she said she was fine with that. So, we did. She’s been very supportive of the project. She’s awesome. But so, we look at Steven Moffat and how he uses his Who fandom and Sherlock fandom to authorize what he’s doing. And we look at E.L. James, right? And Fifty Shades. And so we have a whole series of case studies, you know, and there’s a whole, there’s a section where we talk about Patty Jenkins, Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi, and how they are always suspicious as fans. 

LM: Oh, that’s interesting. I really oh, wow. I am really looking forward to that.

MS: Coming in 2020 from University of Mississippi Press. 

LM: Excellent. I yeah, that’s right up my alley. I love that. 

MS: And then I have this book I keep trying to write, even though it’s not the book I’m supposed to be writing, that’s sort of tentatively titled Fandom is Ugly. So, there was this sense, when there was this review of the field in 2007, that ‘fandom is beautiful’ was the first phase right? And so, one of the arguments I make, actually, in the “reactionary fandom” issue introduction is, to what extent did we get that argument that fandom is beautiful and open and welcoming because the people who were looking were the people it was open to? And so, I’m sort- it’s a series of case studies I keep you know, giving conference papers, and I’m going to give one at Fan Studies Network [North America conference] about ‘anti’ as a term and its circulation. So, I keep writing little bits of that book without really intending to.

LM: That’s probably the easiest way to do it. Just sort of, you just kind of slide into the book rather than starting. So, if I was, you know, if somebody were looking for someone to speak on something about fan studies and you had certain specializations that you could talk to, what would you, how would you describe those specializations? 

MS: So, I definitely have this queer studies perspective. I have a whiteness studies perspective. But I’m also at the side of fan studies that touches media industry studies, and that’s actually, you know, what I’m teaching at the undergrad level is Media Industries. It’s what my next book that I’m writing on purpose is about, is not a fan studies book, it’s about media industries in the context of music. 

LM: Oh, cool.

MS: But it has a fan studies sensibility, because I’m like, why shouldn’t we just freely remix all the things, and then it’s like well because racism so.

LM: Yeah, that’s actually something that Zina Hutton is doing a lot of discussion about in the context of K-pop fandom and K-pop and appropriations of blackness. 

MS: Yeah.

LM: Well then finally, this is usually my last question: if you could tell anyone who is unfamiliar with fans studies anything about it, what would you want them to know?

MS: That fandom is kind of baked into how media industries are operating at this end of history. That it’s something that’s in, as I mentioned, it’s used as a self-branding tactic from people who are trying to get authority through their authenticity. It’s used… there is an assumption that you can rely on fans to promote your products, that you can rely on fans to continue to show up and buy things in the sequels. And so, so much of how our media is structured works through fandom. And even there’s this thing, you know, I just saw the other day the Elizabeth Warren versus Bernie Sanders stan wars, right? This idea that politics is a fandom is true and disturbing, but you need to be in fan studies to understand what’s going on, right? 

LM: Absolutely. I agree completely. Well, I want to thank you very much for joining me today. This has been a really interesting conversation, and I am looking forward to your forthcoming work!

MS: Thanks.

[music]

LM: That’s all for this week’s episode of “It’s a Thing!” Next time I’ll be talking with Dr. Louisa Stein, an associate professor at Middlebury College. So, I hope you’ll join in.

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 29 Oct 2019. “Mel Stanfill.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.4. [Accessed date]. https://itsathing.net/2019/10/29/episode-4:-mel-stanfill

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/

In this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I talk with Dr. Kavita Mudan Finn and EJ Nielsen about acafandom, fanfiction, AUs [alternate universes], academic publishing, and the TV show Hannibal.

Show Links

People

Dr. Kavita Mudan Finn
E.J. Nielsen
Nick Acosta
Janice Poon
Matt Sorrento
Vincenzo Natali
Michael Doherty
Dr. Suzanne Scott
Dr. Rukmini Pande
Samira Nadkarni
Dr. Amanda Ewoldt

Publications

Finn & Nielsen, eds., Becoming: Genre, Queerness, and Transformation in NBC’s Hannibal
Poon, Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur’s Cookbook
Scott, in Fandom: Second Edition
Nielsen, “Dear Researcher: Rethinking Engagement With Fan Authors“
Jones, “Affect, Activism and Ambivalence: Anti-Fandom in Relation to MTV’s The Valleys and Lostprophets“
lareinenoire & Winter_of_our_Discontent, “Denn die Todten reiten schnell“
Conkie & Maisano, eds., Shakespeare and Creative Criticism
Finn, ed., Fan Phenomena: Game of Thrones

Terms, Concepts & the Rest

Orlando Jones and fandom
Fan Studies Network
Archive of Our Own

Transcript (and a few self-indulgent fangirl photos)

Lori Morimoto: Welcome to “It’s a Thing!”, the podcast where we talk about fan studies and how it’s a thing. I’m your host, Lori Morimoto.

[music]

LM: On this episode of “It’s a Thing!” I’ll be talking with Dr. Kavita Mudan Finn and EJ Nielsen, co-editors of the recently published book, Becoming: Genre, Queerness, and Transformation in NBC’s Hannibal. So stick around!

[music]

LM: I want to welcome you both, EJ and Kavita, to the show, and express my appreciation for you being here. 

EJN: Thank you for having us. 

KMF: Yeah, we’re pleased to be here. 

LM: The book is Becoming: Genre, Queerness, and Transformation in NBC’s Hannibal, and I wanted to start first, since this is a fan studies podcast, you know, there’s a lot of academic books that deal with specific shows. We have Breaking Bad, we have books on Mad Men, we have, you know, all the- especially the sort of so-called Prestige Dramas. By and large those are academic anthologies through and through. In this book, you’ve included an interview with screenwriter Nick Acosta and also a preface from Janice Poon, who was the food designer for the show, but who also has a very special place within the fandom of the show, and I was wondering if you could talk about your decision to include them in the book. 

Janice Poon and me (fangirling over Janice)

KMF: Well part of it was luck, for a start. We happened to get a proposal from Matt Sorrento very early on after we put out the call for papers, asking if that was something we’d be interested in, and EJ and I – it wasn’t even a question. We were like, “Oh hell yeah, we want an interview with the screenwriter.” We would- it’s not something we would have been able to get on our own. So the fact that someone showed up, Matt Sorrento, the television scholar, and he knew Nick from from ages ago. I think they’re like old friends or something, and so he offered to interview him for our book and it was just a great bit of good luck. 

EJN: Yeah, but I mean we were interested in different perspectives and in some level of knowledge and expertise, and I can’t imagine a better perspective or knowledge to get than from one of the people who was involved in that on the level of a screenwriter, because of course the screenwriter is thinking about the themes and how the show works and how the pieces work with each other, and the overarching arcs, and how to do characterization, and … I mean the screenwriter is one of the people, like a director, that is going to be thinking about those aspects of the show, some of which are the most interesting aspects to us.

LM: One of the more interesting things I noticed at the last FannibalFest, which is held in Toronto, was the organizers managed to get one of the directors, Vincenzo Natali, and one of the editors, Michael Doherty, to basically do a sort of live commentary on a couple of episodes, and I have never seen – maybe it’s just because I’ve never been, you know, exposed to this – but I have never seen fans so excited about something at a con that didn’t involve, you know, actors or something, ever. It was really an interesting experience seeing how interested the fans were, and I include myself in that, in the behind the scenes aspects of the show.

Me, Vincenzo, and Michael – it was SO COOL

EJN: And I think that speaks to why we had Janice do the forward, also. I mean, Janice is, in addition to being an incredible cook and a lovely human being, but it’s clear when you talk to her that she was very involved in helping Bryan Fuller create the vision that he wanted for that show. You know, it wasn’t just a matter of he told her what to do and she did it, you know. They worked together, she thought through things, she solved problems, she offered suggestions. That it was a very collaborative process and, you know, all of the writers, especially Nick, Nick and all of them were clearly all very much involved in that process. 

LM: Yeah. It’s interesting to me with Janice, in particular, how much she clearly loves the show, but also how supportive she’s been of the fandom and how fan-directed her interactions have been, with her blog during the show, where she talked about the different recipes and things like that, with the cookbook [Feeding Hannibal] afterwards, and just in her interactions. And so your choice of her to have her do the preface, to me, seemed really interesting, especially in the context of fan studies, where there’s some debate over the role, or even the propriety, of engaging with creators as fan study scholars. In the context of work on fan studies, is there any situation in which you feel like, either of you, that communication with a creator would be detrimental or otherwise inappropriate to your academic purposes? 

KMF: Hmm. 

EJN: I would say it goes down to what are you attempting to accomplish with it? Yeah, if you have a good reason to talk to the creator, then by all means talk to the creator. If you don’t, you don’t. I don’t think you necessarily have to talk to the creator. I think a lot of times, when problems come up, it’s because of unclear goals or- 

KMF: Yeah. 

LM: I think what I’m trying to get at is sort of adjacent to what you’re talking about. I’m thinking of, for example, when Orlando Jones was very vocal about fandom, Sleepy Hollow, and his own role as what he at the time, and probably still would, described himself as, which was a fangirl. Obviously, there’s attendant issues, and those have been discussed particularly nicely by Suzanne Scott. But I’m curious, you know, there were people who, when he was announced as a keynote speaker for the second Fan Studies Network Conference, there were sort of grumblings of, fan studies scholars have no business talking to creators or actors, you know, we need to keep separate from that. And I think that’s sort of what I’m getting at. 

EJN: Yeah … yeah, I mean, I guess I see that as an arbitrary boundary. I mean, it’s sort of like that, you know, where celebrities can’t have political opinions. I mean, I don’t have to respect their political opinions, but they’re people, they’re certainly allowed to have them. Creators don’t exist in this weird bubble. They’re responding to other things within the culture. They are most likely fans of something themselves or influenced by something. So trying to say this weird, you can talk to this person but not this person or … a celebrity is going to come with attendant baggage. A creator is going to come with attendant baggage and power dynamics that I think you have to be aware of, but the idea that you just can’t talk to creators because there’s a weird invisible boundary has never been true, and I think it’s even less true now because we do have the creators that became creators because they were fans of something else. We have, again, the fact that no one exists in a vacuum. People like things. People do things. People talk to other people. It’s …

LM: Yeah. Thinking back to what I had observed a minute ago about fans being very interested in the mechanics of the show, of the behind the scenes of the show, of thinking about the show – and I say that as a participant on a academic panel at a Hannibal convention where people were really enthusiastic. And it was, I mean, it was the best presentation audience I think I personally have ever had. And that includes every conference I’ve ever been to. 

EJN: Well it was certainly better attended than many of the other panels I’ve been on.

The academic panel at FannibalFest, with Nickie Michaud Wild, Leila Taylor, Karen Felts, me, and EJ Nielsen

LM: Oh my God. I have never given a talk to that many people and had them be, you know, interested in what I was saying. But I’m curious, you know, I know that quite a few fans bought the book when it came out. They were excited for it when it was announced. And I’m wondering, first off, if there’s … if you think there are any essays in the book in particular that especially might resonate with, or otherwise appeal to, a fan audience? And, in general, what’s your take on sort of fans as readers of academic work? 

KMF: Well, I mean one of our goals as editors for this volume was to produce a book that would be accessible to a general audience. We didn’t- we wanted it to have the rigor of something that could be academically peer-reviewed, but we wanted the style to be clear enough that someone who wasn’t a specialist could follow it. 

LM: Was that something that you had to work with with any of the authors? 

KMF: A little bit here and there, but most people were pretty content to drop the jargon and write a little more clearly. Hopefully that will continue in academic prose. I would like to see that.

EJN: It’s a good trend. 

LM: Mm. 

KMF: But as far as any essays in the book that work particularly well, I mean, I think your essay is a great one for fan readership, just because fans … I find they have this … or at least – and I count myself among them in this – there’s this sort of twofold reaction to finding out that an academic has written about you. On the one hand you think, “Oh God, what did I do?” And on the other hand … 

LM: Like, “Oh no, no.”

KMF: Well, I mean, I’ve had that reaction to finding myself in another academic essay.

LM: Oh yeah, no, me too! Totally. 

KMF: “Wait, what? How did I – what did I do? Nobody told me!” Which is why, at least, my policy as an editor and as an author is to always get advance permission from fans if I’m using their work. And anytime I have asked for advance permission, the answer has always been yes and the fan has always said, “Oh my God, please send me a copy of this when you’re done.” 

LM: Right, right.

KMF: And so, treat them like you to treat anyone else that you’re going to cite. If it’s, if you’re going to cite your friends, then you tell your friends that you’re citing them. 

EJN: I mean, I definitely didn’t write an entire journal article about this or anything, so … 

KMF: Yeah, you definitely didn’t do that. It’s in the Journal of Fandom Studies. 

LM: So tell us about what you didn’t write. 

EJN: No, I have an article in the Journal of Fandom Studies called “Dear Researcher,” where I talked about the ethics of basically doing research on fan authors and how I wasn’t happy with some of what I was seeing, right now. There was a tendency to treat them first and foremost as vulnerable populations and not as experts in their area. I was just frustrated with the level of almost infantilization I was seeing in research on fans, toward fans, especially fan creators. Because while there are absolutely power dynamics that you have to be aware of, like, I’m allowed to publish and copyright my work, fan authors generally are not for various involved reasons.

But treating them as simply a vulnerable population, where the ethical thing is to obscure their information and not talk to them and pretend you’re just looking at them through a glass, and I think that’s infantilizing and unreasonable. And I feel like instead of treating them always as a vulnerable population, we should also be engaging with them as experts, in which case we are citing them. We are acknowledging them. We are sharing with them what we produce from what they produce, and of course the analogy is gift economies within fan studies. 

LM: What would you say to criticism that, in basically adopting a sort of, you know, approach to fans as experts, as creators, what would you say to criticism that that would sort of necessarily skew your work away from quote-unquote critical distance?

EJN: I think Bethan Jones has done some fantastic work on anti-fandom that is relevant right here. Where she’s talked about what do you do, if you’re talking about hateful stuff, what do you do if you’re talking about, you know, what do you do if you want to talk about things that fans might prefer you not talk about? So I think it’s complicated and nuanced, and a lot of it is just going to have to be on a case-by-case basis, looking at what you’re doing. But I think, just as it would be wrong to say I have to get permission from everyone before I do something, it’s also wrong to say I know better than everyone in this group what is in their best interests. 

LM: Kavita, did you want to add to that? 

KMF: My rule of thumb, as I said, is I like to ask in advance, because one of the things that I find tremendously useful whenever I ask in advance is I always ask, did you have … I always ask a fan author, because I have access to the author. This is not something that I’m used to having in my normal day-to-day work on medieval and early modern literature. I can’t call up William Shakespeare and ask him what he meant by a thing. So I use fan authors as a resource, and a lot of them will offer me, “Here’s what I was thinking when I was writing this story. Here’s what the story was originally written for.”

Because one thing that I always take into account when I’m writing about fic is, was it written for an exchange? Was it written in a very specific context? Is it for a specific person? Because that’s always … that’s something I take into account when I deal with published work as well. I just treat a work of fanfiction the same way that I treat a published work to a very large extent, except that since a fan author isn’t getting any kind of compensation for their work, I like to talk to them and get their permission and ask if there’s anything I shouldn’t mention. Like I always ask, do you want to be referred to by your name? By your pseudonym? Anonymously? However you want. 

LM: One of the things you both circled around, or talked a little bit about, was the specific context of a given fan practice, and I’m thinking, Kavita especially, of, what you were saying about, was a fanfiction story part of an exchange, was it a gift? And that seems to be something that is very specific to this acafan identity in that you know enough to know that these are things that exist. What would you say to that and what, both of you, what is your sort of general take on acafandom, if you will.

KMF: I mean one of the things that I have been seeing in fields outside of fan studies, the other fields that that I kind of move around in, is finally a greater acknowledgement of researcher subjectivity. The fact is that we all come from somewhere. We all have our own our own unique backgrounds, and that is going to impact the way that we read texts and the way that we interact with our subjects of study. In one of my two fields, one of my two primary fields is medieval studies, and there has been a lot of controversy about racism and white supremacy in that field. And it has made people, it has forced people to really look at themselves and think about where they’re coming from. What kinds of biases and assumptions they’re bringing with them.

And so I feel that the whole idea of critical objectivity in academia is coming under scrutiny, and rightly so. Because academia for a very long time has associated neutrality and partiality, critical distance, with whiteness and with maleness. So I feel that fan studies is, to some extent, ahead of the game, because acafans are essentially, they are essentially stating upfront that this is our perspective. We are personally involved in this. It does not make us any less rigorous in our research, but we do, we at least acknowledge.

EJN: We acknowledge. We are, yeah, we are these bodies in this space. And objectivity is a lie. 

KMF: It is.

EJN: Affective disengagement in research is kind of a lie. No one gets a PhD in something they don’t passionately care about. 

KMF: That’s for sure. 

EJN: Yeah, no, it’s way too much work otherwise. Like there’s always affective engagement. Fan studies at least does its best to be upfront about what it is and what it looks like. And I would much rather, I think, deal with those issues of subjectivity and positionality honestly and upfront, than try to pretend there is some kind of cold, white peaks of intellectual distance that one must attempt to climb and then peer down at one’s research subject from. But, I mean, the fact that you get this pushback on acafans because we are willing to be honest about our positionality, and you look at the field of fans studies and it’s one of the more diverse fields I’m aware of. 

Obviously we need work. There’s still a lot of problems in the field, especially around race, but work is being done, and the fact that we are field that gets hit harder for having emotions about what we do, or enjoying what we do or whatever, it’s hard to not tie that in with a larger cultural distrust of feminine interests, of female interests, of interests of younger people, interests of a lot of groups that are almost – I don’t want to say over-represented, because they’re not, it’s fantastic – but are much more common in fan studies than in other fields. 

LM: With that in mind I kind of wanted to ask you both, I know from fannish experience that you’re both active in transformative fandom, and that in particular you’ve co-authored fanfiction that you were, you began working on, I believe, while you were co-editing the book? 

EJN: Uh, yeah sounds right. 

KMF: Yeah, they were around the same time. Yeah, I would say so.

LM: How was that experience of sort of co-authoring and co-editing at the same time? 

KMF: Well, I’m very good at procrastinating on both.

EJN: I mean, I I like working with Kavita. This isn’t our first, actually, we’ve been betaing for each other for years, both fanworks and-

KMF: EJ, we’ve known each other for almost 20 years. 

EJN: Oh God. Oh God. No, um, I- 

KMF: There have been a lot of collaborations over those years. 

EJN: Yeah. Apologies to Kavs in advance for telling this story, but she once wrote this fanfic that she wanted me to beta, and I had not seen the movie that it was based on. And she sat my ass down and made me watch the movie right then so that I could beta that fan work for her. 

KMF: That’s right. It was The Last of the Mohicans, though. 

EJN: It was The Last of the Mohicans. 

KMF: It was a legit good movie. It’s a legit good movie.

EJN: Yeah, even better soundtrack. So I mean, she and I go way, way back for doing this kind of work, and it’s not even our first co-authored fan work. We did one …

KMF: No, it’s not.

EJN: … previous to that in a different fandom that is complete. So … we’ve also co-authored an academic work or two, so we’ve, we do pretty good at knocking the kinks out. It really helps, the technology really helps because we can have those shared Gdocs of our work. 

KMF: Yeah.

LM: Yeah. 

EJN: But you know, you have to be honest, you have to be open, you have to trust the other person. You have to be able to say to them, like, you have to be able to disagree with them, yeah, when you need it. 

LM: Yeah. Well, it seems like betaing, and would either of you like to explain for anyone who’s not familiar with it, what betaing is? 

KMF: Okay, so a beta reader can function as anything from someone to bounce initial ideas off of, someone to help you outline, to help you iron out kinks in a plot, all the way up to just a gra- like, sentence-level grammar proofreading, all of that stuff. A beta reader can be just one of those things or any of, or all of those things at once. It honestly depends on the beta reader. And it is a very interesting relationship that I personally want to take and apply to other literary periods, because I think that that’s what’s going on in some cases – cough Shakespeare. Anyway.

So I think it’s a very interesting relationship, and it’s very interesting power dynamic, because the beta, unlike, say, an academic peer reviewer, the beta does not have any power over whether or not the final story gets put online, or archived, or published or wherever you’re going to put it. But the author offers the beta a great deal of power just because they’re soliciting input. And at least in my case, I, nine times out of ten I’ll take what the beta says and I won’t even question it. Sometimes it’s like, sometimes I use it as kind of a springboard and say, “Okay, I can explain this a little bit better. I still want to do it my way, but I can finesse it so that it makes more sense.” Ofttimes, it’s just another pair of eyes on what you’re writing and sometimes that’s all you need. 

LM: Yeah. Well it seems like, so the reason I wanted you to explain what a beta is, is because it seems to me, thinking about it, that having an existing relationship where you have done critical reading for the other would only benefit a relationship in which you’re co-editing something. 

EJN: Yeah.

LM: Insofar as you’ve already got, as EJ was saying, the trust built in, that you can listen to each other’s opinions whether you agree or not. Is there some overlap there? Does it help, does it not really make much of a difference? 

EJN: Yeah, there are very few circumstances where you don’t benefit from having another pair of eyes on what you’re doing. 

KMF: Mm-hmm.

EJN: And there’s trust, there’s also, I think, a pretty good working knowledge of the other person’s strengths and weaknesses, which is incredibly useful. I know I’ve got a better sense of what I’m good at relative to Kavs and vice versa, which means you know, “Can you handle this? You’re good at it.” You know, I’ve got this thing … that sort of relationship is is incredibly helpful, especially because there’s just, you’re juggling so many things in an edited collection, and so much of it is just organization and keeping track of what’s going on. Like, you have a lot of cats you’re herding and- 

KMF: Many many cats. 

LM: Yeah.

EJN: So many cats. 

LM: Fielding people who keep sending in updated drafts of their essays. [note: it was me, I did this]

EJN: Those guys are the worst. 

LM: I know. 

KMF: Yeah. Well, I also, I have been that person. I’m also that person who constantly forgets to attach attachments to emails. 

LM: Oh yeah, yeah.

KMF: Yeah. But no, like, having, yeah, having this sort of prior relationship, especially one where we’ve been working together on a variety of different genres of writing as well? That also helps. 

LM: Well, speaking of genres of writing, can I bring up the story? Is that all right?

EJN: Knock yourself out. 

KMF: Yes, you can.

LM: Do you mind if we give the title of it? 

KMF: Not at all. 

LM: I can’t say it. It’s not in my language.

EJN: Kavs, you want to do it? It’s German.

KMF: Oh God. I can try. I can’t make any … I make no promises for my German. I believe it’s “Denn die Todten reiten schnell.” 

LM: What does that mean? 

KMF: It means, “For the dead travel fast.” 

LM: Ooh, nice. 

EJN: Which is, of course, a quote from the original novel.

LM: The original novel being Dracula. 

KMF: Yes. 

LM: And this is a Hannibal adaptation, if you will, of the Dracula story. I’ve been following it as a fan since it started being posted on Archive of Our Own – on the Hugo Award-winning Archive of Our Own. I feel like, with all the controversy, I need to get that in there. 

KMF: Very true. 

EJN: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

LM: And it’s, I mean, one of the things about it that is so remarkable, to me, is that it’s written so beautifully in the style, or styles, of the book itself. I mean, in a way, it seems like you would need two people to be able to capture all of the nuances of the language. But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the process of writing that particular story?

EJN: Well because one of the things I enjoy very much about Stoker’s Dracula is it’s an epistolary novel, even if he’s somewhat loose in what epistolary actually means. So we’re trying to mimic that ourselves, with it being journal entries and news clippings, and what have you. So to help keep the voices more distinct, we’re each kind of assigned certain characters that we write, and the other one does go through and edit make sure things are going smoothly. We’ve got overarching, very complicated documents that lay down all the dates, because the dates in the novel are mess.

KMF: My God, yes. Timelines!

EJN: Timelines!

KMF: So many detailed bullet point timelines. 

EJN: Yeah. So, but in order to make sure that each character kind of has their particular voice, I think it helps that one person is doing the brunt of the writing of that person, and also helping keep them different from each other as much as possible. 

LM: So can I ask who is Will and who is Hannibal?

EJN: Well, we don’t actually, because it’s Dracula, we don’t actually have any Hannibal POV. 

LM: Oh right! Yeah, it’s all Will, right.

EJN: Yeah.

LM: Right.

EJN: Just like there’s no actual Van Helsing POV, which is going to get shifted around because we’re not doing a one to one replacement. 

LM: Yeah, well, talk a little bit about that, because I’m not sure people are familiar, you know, if you’re not familiar with fanfiction, you wouldn’t be familiar with sort of the different ways that people adapt existing texts. 

EJN: Yeah. Well technically I would consider – and not everyone in fandom will agree with the definitions I’m giving – but I would say a crossover would be a X meets Y. So, Laurel and Hardy meet the Wolfman. Where everything and everyone is in the same space. The Avengers go to Hogwarts, but they meet Harry Potter and the other characters there.

LM: Right.

EJN: And then you have something that’s what I consider more of a fusion, which is a bridge between those stories where characters are taking on different roles. Like maybe you get these characters, but this world. It’s not just adding them together. It’s kind of mushing them together. 

LM: Mm-hmm.

EJN: So you don’t have red and blue, you have purple. 

LM: You’re seeing a lot of that in Good Omens with Supernatural. And also Lucifer. 

KMF: Oh goodness. I’m sure, yeah.

EJN: And so in this case, we are kind of doing redoing Dracula, but with Hannibal cast, versus if it was the Hannibal cast vs Dracula. 

KMF: Yeah, I think actually a not-terrible way to conceptualize it is, the other fic that EJ and I collaborated on is a more classic crossover, where you have the character, where you have characters from both fandoms existing in the same space. They don’t necessarily all interact with each other, but they are all within the same universe. Whereas with the Hannibal and Dracula story, we’re taking the structure of Dracula and we’re kind of filling in different characters from Hannibal as much as we can. But we’re also taking into account the fact that the characters from Hannibal would make different choices. 

EJN: Yeah. 

KMF: Yeah.

EJN: If you put this character in this place, what would they do? They wouldn’t do the same thing as the person whose spot they’re taking. That’s not how characters work. So-

LM: It puts me, yeah. It puts me in mind of a story in Hannibal fandom that I love, and it’s Jack Crawford point of view, and he’s basically, it’s sort of Jack Crawford, you know, has his Groundhog Day, which is sort of a common – not common, but it’s a fairly popular trope. But in it he ends up one day, he keeps ending up in sort of fanfiction scenarios. And one day he ends up in Adam, the Hugh Dancy film, and he has been cast as a black character that has nothing to do with him. And he sort of cries out in agony, you know, ”Not all black characters are interchangeable!” You know. That, to me, seems like one to one sort of equivalency that, you know, “Well we have to we have to plug in everybody somewhere, so, Jack, you’re going to be the black guy” kind of thing, as opposed to what you’re talking about, which is more … yeah. 

EJN: Yeah. One of my pet peeves as a reader, I see this all the time especially in … Pride and Prejudice seems to be the worst of it. 

KMF: Oh jeez, yes.

EJN: You’ll find a Pride and Prejudice AU in almost every, multiple, in almost every fandom. But often with those it feels very much like we take one character, they’re Mr. Darcy. They do almost, you know, the plot is exactly the same or too close to call, and that seems odd to me because these characters should not act exactly like the book characters. It should not feel like you did a find and replace in your word doc for the character names and that’s it. And again, completely, not as a scholar but as a fic reader, that always frustrates me a little bit. So we tried not to do that and we, but there’s just so many wonderful themes that show up in both Dracula and Hannibal about gaslighting, about perspective, about darkness. And I mean, they’re both just wonderful evocative Gothic texts, so we just mush them the heck up together.

KMF: They are.

LM: Yeah. That’s one of the things I think that’s interesting about that kind of adaptation, that in the sort of translation of the one to the other, it seems like that actually helps sort of sussing out some of the underlying or foundational themes or ideas that might be familiar to a reader of Dracula, but would only occur to you in the context of Hannibal by thinking about it in those terms. 

EJN: I think my favorite thing about AUs, when I’m reading them in other things, is that it’s a chance for the author to let you know what they consider foundational to the characters. You know, you see what they think the essence of that character is by putting them in a different scenario and saying, “This is what I think would happen in this setting.” But it’s about the core of how they see the character, the relationships, the whatever, and I always find that really interesting to see.

KMF: Yeah. I’ve, I mean, I’ve written about AU fanfiction in Shakespeare fandom specifically, and that was something that came up. That was actually an article that I co-authored with someone else, but it was something that had occurred to both of us, and one of the fun things in that particular piece, which is coming out, I think, in another month or two, was that we had, we got to do a critical introduction, and then we each got to include a work of alternate universe fanfiction. 

LM: Oh, interesting.

KMF: So she did one that, basically, it was in response to a Tumblr post that said, what if all of these Shakespearean characters were in high school together? So she did this giant high school AU, with all of these different characters sort of mimicking different things from different plays. It was very cute. And I did a complete AU that transposed Richard III to a crime procedural.

LM: Oh wow!

KMF: And it’s the entire play. I actually managed to finish the fic for this. I hadn’t finished it when I posted it on AO3 and then I had to take it down because now it’s going to be in print. But yes, I did manage to finish the entire thing. And one of the things that you can do in an AU that it is, that I argue in the critical intro, is you can take this, take a text that, for instance, like, Richard III kind of keeps its female characters confined to certain scenes and sort of limits their agency, because obviously, for a number of valid and understandable reasons. And, for instance, I took a bunch of characters and genderswapped them. Half the cast is now no longer men. I also did some racebending in there as well, and it was because, because I transposed it to a modern AU, obviously a lot of things change. There’s no crown involved. There’s no royalty. But a lot of the class issues still come through. So I feel like-

LM: What journal?

KMF: This is, it’s not in a journal actually. It’s a book. It’s called Shakespeare and Creative Criticism. 

LM: That sounds fabulous. 

KMF: It should be fun. 

EJN: Yeah. I mean, AUs act as either, can act as either a prism or diffraction. Distillation. You know, their way of approaching things from a different angle that can allow you to see things you didn’t notice before, think about things that you didn’t before, or by removing some elements allow you to focus on others. 

LM: I wanted to sort of nudge us back in the direction of fan studies a little bit, since this is ostensibly a fan studies podcast. In about, I guess it’s three of the essays that have a sort of explicit connection with fan studies. One is “Hannibal and the Cannibal: Tracking Colonial Imaginaries,” by Rukmini Pande and Samira Nadkarni. One is “Fannibals Are Still Hungry: Feeding Hannibal and Other Series Companion Cookbooks as Immersive Fan Experience,” by Amanda Ewoldt, and then the other is mine, which is “Hannibal… “

EJN: “Hannibal: Adaptation and Authorship in the Age of Fan Production,” by Lori Morimoto.

LM: “Hannibal: Adaptation and Authorship in the Age of Fan Production.” And one of the things that interested me, reading through the book, was that the conclusions concerning, in particular, cannibalism and fandom – which seems like a strange combination, but in the context of Hannibal it is not, not that we’re all cannibals – the conclusions that Pande and Nadkarni reach and that Ewoldt reaches seem rather oppositional. Could you speak to, I was wondering if you could speak to how both are legible as fans studies work and, in particular, fan studies criticism?

KMF: No.

EJN: That’s, no, it’s just that … that’s a lot. That’s a lot all at once to address. I will say that they kind of look at different areas of praxis to one degree, with Ewoldt talking about kind of a fan act and, over simplified but, you know, Ewoldt is discussing a fan activity in that context, while the other, the “Hannibal the Cannibal,” the Nadkarni and Pande essay, which is incredible, I think what it does is it points out things in the fandom that the fandom likes to kind of elide, because it does deal with something that makes people uncomfortable, which is issues of race and fandom. And in a primarily white fandom. Certainly not a fully white fandom, but … and I mean, I think that speaks to a larger issue in fan studies, where sometimes we are so busy being really happy and proud of fans, we’re sometimes a little bit less willing to interrogate some of the things that we should be interrogating as scholars, which is itself a knee-jerk reaction to having to justify the fact that we’re studying fans in the first place, so. 

But, you know, just with this, I love Hannibal. I think it’s fantastic text. Do I think there are issues with race in the show and the fandom? Absolutely. Absolutely and I do think it’s important to interrogate that, especially because Hannibal is a different show in its approach to cannibalism. It’s, I think Janet Poon, actually, at one of the conference, conventions, talks about it through the lens of like Levi Strauss, where Hannibal sees himself as as purifying or perfecting through cannibalism, rather than kind of kind of refining the raw material, the rude, into this thing. And when you consider traditional treatments of cannibalism, the very, kind of The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where it’s considered … that one’s not race, but that’s very much class. It’s very much a class and a cultural thing, where it’s it’s local or its Other, where historically you accuse other groups of being cannibals because eating other people makes you not a person yourself. And so if you’re trying to tag another group as being non-human, subhuman, whatever, you tag them with cannibals and you accuse them of cannibalism.

Obviously, this is this is completely eliding actual, historical cannibalism as practiced by various anthropological groups, but we’re not going there right now. So then in Hannibal you had that subversion, and I think it’s a really interesting subversion, but you do kind of have to address the fact that that’s possible because Hannibal is coded in so many ways as being upper-upper everything. You know, he’s white. He’s European. He’s rich, he’s cultured, he plays musical instruments. He can cook. 

LM: The essay itself argues, very simply put, that, as you were saying, Hannibal is only possible because of his whiteness. That the central conceit, that we have this cannibal, that he’s living in plain sight, that he can be funny, that we can root for him in some circumstances even though he’s a terrible, terrible person, all of that is predicated on the fact that he’s white, and that a non-white cannibal would simply never fly in the same way with an audience or otherwise. 

EJN: Yeah, absolutely. 

LM: So Kavita, I wanted to ask you, it’s, you know, it’s too early right now for reviews of Becoming, so we can’t really speak to those. But you do have a prior publication in the Fan Phenomena series put out by Intellect Press on Game of Thrones, and I was wondering, you know, this is also a collection of essays, but I know that the mandate, if you will, for Fan Phenomena is that it should be both scholarly, but also accessible to a general audience. And I was wondering, first, how you manage that, and what was, what has been the response to that book from academic readers? 

KMF: Well, because academic publishing is what it is, there aren’t that many reviews out yet. The book came out in the summer of 2017, and I think there are maybe one or two reviews that have gone into print so far that I’ve seen. It could well be that there are more and I just haven’t found them. Until recently I did not have much in the way of university library access. The one review that I have definitely read, it reviewed several fan studies books all at once, so it wasn’t just a single review for this book, and it was in, I believe it was in Participations [pdf]. And the critique that it lodged about about the Fan Phenomena book was that it was a little too uncritical, which, I don’t know. I’m not sure if I agree with that, because I did, I feel like we did actually, we did offer some criticisms of both the show and the fandom within the, within our discussions. Particularly the chapters that were written about kind of Game of Thrones in feminist discourse and that kind of thing. But of course, I mean everyone, everyone’s opinions are going to be different. So far the reaction that I’ve had from fans of the series, people have, people seem to like it a lot. 

LM: Why do you think that is?

KMF: I think because it didn’t pathologize them. This is a book that was written by a number of scholars who are also fans of the show and exist within, and are accustomed to, fan spaces. These are people who are invested in not pathologizing fans. And so I think it does make a difference when people, again, to go back to one of the things that we that we discussed earlier on, when people acknowledge their own subjectivity and their object of study. 

LM: Could the refusal to pathologize fans ever be read as a lack of criticism?

KMF: It could be. I mean, it would surprise me to see that in a fan studies journal, so I don’t necessarily think that’s what was going on in this particular instance. But I am sure that I could, I could certainly see that criticism coming up and then having to respond to it. I’ve certainly had my, had certain aspects of my work questioned in that in that way from journals that are not fan studies journals. I’ve certainly had to deal with that, but usually I’ve been able to kind of come back with with a better approach or a better phrasing or what can be done. 

LM: Well before I let you go. I did want to ask you both – this is something that I seem to be asking everyone – if you could tell people one thing about fan studies to understand it better, what would that be? 

KMF: I guess what, I mean, it’s not an unknown thing and a lot, and it’s been a long-standing trope in the literary and the fan studies to talk about how we’ve always done transformative works and that kind of thing. And while I certainly agree with that in general and in principle, I think a more useful way of potentially formulating that argument is to think about how works circulated. The kind of readership, and also fanfiction not just as something that’s being written, but as kind of a conversation between the author, the original text, and an unknown reader/audience. In short, just looking at it the same way you look at any other kind of adaptation.

I think one of the issues with fan studies is that people think of it as navel-gazing, as something that’s too close to your own personal interests, that kind of thing. Self-indulgent. It’s viewed as very self-indulgent. It’s like it’s the same thing you get if you study romance novels or popular television. And I think what I would probably like people to take away from fan studies is that fans are not uncritical. Fans are very, very critical of the things they love and that criticism doesn’t mean that they don’t love it. It means, it’s the idea … I’d like to push back against the idea that criticism is not rooted in love. That you hate something, that in order to critique something you need to dislike it. 

EJN: I mean, studying how people have aspect of relationships with with objects with ideas with media is always going to be relevant because it informs how we interact with the world. 

LM: Absolutely. Well, that seems like a note to end on. I really would like to thank you both for taking the time to talk with me today. This has been a really interesting … and I think … you know me. I like talking to you guys. Anyway. Yes, we know each other. Anyway, I would really like to thank you both for participating today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

EJN: Well, great. Thank you so much for having us. It was, this is a lot of fun. 

KMF: Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. This has been … yeah, always a pleasure.

[music]

LM: That’s all for this episode of “It’s a Thing!” Next time, I’ll be talking with Dr. Mel Stanfill, an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida and the author of the recently published book, Exploiting Fandom. See you then!

[music]

Music: “Neck Pillow,” by Silent Partner

To cite (Chicago): Morimoto, Lori. 16 Oct 2019. “Kavita Mudan Finn & EJ Nielsen.” Podcast audio. It’s a Thing! MP3, 1.3. [Accessed date]. https://itsathing.net/2019/10/15/episode-3:-kavita-mudan-finn-and-ej-nielsen

It's a Thing! is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://itsathing.net/