I'm tired but must continue because more copyediting is due tomorrow, and my brain is buzzing.
I'll cut from your post and try to respond directly since I admit that my past experiences may be affecting my reading abilities. I was driven out of fandom once by anti-academic battering in an APA I was in, and after I left, I stayed away for years. I came back only because of women, and I purposely hang out with mostly women. Some are academics, but many, if not most, are not.
I'm not very clear about what you mean here. I'm not intending to set up a right/wrong argument about fandom, only to say that the power to shape and affect discourses about fandom accrues more readily to fans whose fannishness is also a cause of affiliation with institutions that pronounce on culture.
I agree that in some places, academics have more power to shape some discourses. However, in many discourses, we have little or no power. An occasional academic gets called by the occasional journalist, but most of the time, media types sail right on into writing about fandom with no input from academics. And, yes, most of the time it's Henry Jenkins, but we can talk more about that later.
I guess that as someone in an academic discipline which has very little impact on anybody these days (the culture wars during the 1980s went after literature departments first, for daring to teach Alice Walker and Toni Morrison which meant that Shakespeare was thrown into the gutter -- and I can give you name and titles of the people saying that: Lynne Cheney and George Will among them. Michael Berube has blogged about all the anti-multicultural lit and anti-gender stuff coming from the popular press and media), I have a hard time believing that the stuff I write really affects anyone because I've had very little external proof that anybody reads my stuff, beyond a fairly narrow circle of academics all in my own field(s). I write about feminism and science fiction, Tolkien's book and Jackson's novel, and fan studies (I've had one article published, and I'll be glad to send you a copy if you wish).
I've given a few papers, to a room with maybe 10-30 people, who spend four days listening to other papers. I've made some good connections with some of them. Print can always have effects beyond the immediate--but I don't see my discipline as having any major cultural capital and haven't for years (my theory is they wouldn't be graduating women as 60% of English PhDs if the discipline had any stature--and even then it's a rare department that has even 30% women tenured raculty). The cultural capital and power is in Computer Science and engineering, and I suppose Business, and medical and related disciplines.
So in effect: yes, aca-fen have that connection to outside cultural institutions that create and circulate discourses.
But so do fen who are journalists, bloggers, and those work in tech and computer science and internet related companies. Does anybody worry about those people's opinions shaping anything--and yet they must!
Fans jumped in with FanLib too. That's shaping discourse.
So why so much ire against *one* group?
And I know I keep shifting to individuals--but well, when people make arguments about a group/aca-fen, all I can see is that MY experience, my publications, my theories, my methods aren't being represented (hmmm, that does sound familiar!).
So a lot of the anti-academic arguments I was mocking in that one post set up what I considered a straw-aca-fan.
When I actually talked to a few fans who could tell how they'd been hurt by a publication, the actual examples were mostly students--that doesn't negate their hurt (publishing on the internet something that had been presented as for a class only), but again, that's not me, and yet, I'm being lumped in with that group beause I'm part of it.
By that argument, if one fan behaves badly, all fen are in the same boat, and nobody would accept that.
no subject
I'll cut from your post and try to respond directly since I admit that my past experiences may be affecting my reading abilities. I was driven out of fandom once by anti-academic battering in an APA I was in, and after I left, I stayed away for years. I came back only because of women, and I purposely hang out with mostly women. Some are academics, but many, if not most, are not.
I'm not very clear about what you mean here. I'm not intending to set up a right/wrong argument about fandom, only to say that the power to shape and affect discourses about fandom accrues more readily to fans whose fannishness is also a cause of affiliation with institutions that pronounce on culture.
I agree that in some places, academics have more power to shape some discourses. However, in many discourses, we have little or no power. An occasional academic gets called by the occasional journalist, but most of the time, media types sail right on into writing about fandom with no input from academics. And, yes, most of the time it's Henry Jenkins, but we can talk more about that later.
I guess that as someone in an academic discipline which has very little impact on anybody these days (the culture wars during the 1980s went after literature departments first, for daring to teach Alice Walker and Toni Morrison which meant that Shakespeare was thrown into the gutter -- and I can give you name and titles of the people saying that: Lynne Cheney and George Will among them. Michael Berube has blogged about all the anti-multicultural lit and anti-gender stuff coming from the popular press and media), I have a hard time believing that the stuff I write really affects anyone because I've had very little external proof that anybody reads my stuff, beyond a fairly narrow circle of academics all in my own field(s). I write about feminism and science fiction, Tolkien's book and Jackson's novel, and fan studies (I've had one article published, and I'll be glad to send you a copy if you wish).
I've given a few papers, to a room with maybe 10-30 people, who spend four days listening to other papers. I've made some good connections with some of them. Print can always have effects beyond the immediate--but I don't see my discipline as having any major cultural capital and haven't for years (my theory is they wouldn't be graduating women as 60% of English PhDs if the discipline had any stature--and even then it's a rare department that has even 30% women tenured raculty). The cultural capital and power is in Computer Science and engineering, and I suppose Business, and medical and related disciplines.
So in effect: yes, aca-fen have that connection to outside cultural institutions that create and circulate discourses.
But so do fen who are journalists, bloggers, and those work in tech and computer science and internet related companies. Does anybody worry about those people's opinions shaping anything--and yet they must!
Fans jumped in with FanLib too. That's shaping discourse.
So why so much ire against *one* group?
And I know I keep shifting to individuals--but well, when people make arguments about a group/aca-fen, all I can see is that MY experience, my publications, my theories, my methods aren't being represented (hmmm, that does sound familiar!).
So a lot of the anti-academic arguments I was mocking in that one post set up what I considered a straw-aca-fan.
When I actually talked to a few fans who could tell how they'd been hurt by a publication, the actual examples were mostly students--that doesn't negate their hurt (publishing on the internet something that had been presented as for a class only), but again, that's not me, and yet, I'm being lumped in with that group beause I'm part of it.
By that argument, if one fan behaves badly, all fen are in the same boat, and nobody would accept that.