MiT5 Review

This is a revised version of a response post I made to my fannish journal. It was friendslocked and several people asked me to open it up. Since I all but spell out my name, I figured I’d more safely dust off my RL name account and post it here. The title is particularly appropriate for me given that my paper revolved around an event at last year’s James Tiptree Jr Award.

The Women Men Don’t See

I’m finally back from MIT’s Media in Transition 5, and I’m not even sure how to express all of the different emotions that I’m feeling. I’m still somewhere torn between the excitement and enjoyment and collective creativity I encountered with the people I knew and met there and the dismissal and refusal to engage and plain ignoring us from “the guys.”

For those of you who haven’t been around the past few years listening to me rant about the gender issue, let’s just say that there’s been a pattern of fanboys ignoring fangirls, of male scholars dismissing and ignoring our interests or, when discussing the same material, our outlook and insights. Henry’s latest with its move from fannish (female) communities in Textual Poachers to media convergence and engagement with business is indicative to me of the shift that has taken place. It’s not that I need media fandom to be the only kid on the block but that I’d like us scribbling women not to be written out of history, getting replaced by fanboys and their concerns.

I find both Matt’s and Cornel’s books immensely interesting and intellectually stimulating, but they also indicate this clear shift in fandom studies from the collective to the individual, from fan as part of a community to fan as direct media engagement. I responded to my discomfort with that approach in my Flow response paper where I try to get at the difference between fannish behavior and partaking in fannish communities, and I think that difference is gendered to a degree as well. Henry’s response to that was interesting in that he acknowledged a change in his work that might just be gendered…

Moreover, I think I read it through the lens of repeated encounters where we’re always left wondering why the history seems to be written without us (mostly as subjects, but often even as objects). These are examples of conferences I or close friends came back from disenchanted.

* When a guy can show a machinima vid and proudly announce 1996 as the date of origin for that art form, he’s eliding decades of female vidding history. And that’s very, very wrong. (Harvard 2005)

* When the only female-suggested fan panel gets scheduled parallel to a fanboy panel, it might be a scheduling mistake. But the fact that the fanboy panel is focused on the new Doctor Who and the amazing rise of Russell T. Davies from fanboy to auteur is not. And it is yet again indicative of an emphasis and valorization on the commercial, on convergence, and professionalization that creates a power differential that, needless to say, remains heavily gendered. (SCMS 2005)

* When I hear a variety of papers by TV scholars who’d do well to read up on fan studies because they randomly use fan voices without awareness of the context (or the ethics involved in referencing these voices) yet not a single one of them comes to the panel on fan studies (thus missing some amazing papers), that’s very sad. (Console-ing Passions 2006)

* When all the women applying to a specific panel get moved to another (opposite a much more popular one) so that every single person on that original panel ends up being white and male, many of us are beginning to wonder why the only mention of women is as subjects (and even there I can only recall Henry talking about female fandom creations). (Flow 2006)

* When, at the final roundup session, a sole woman after a series of long-winded (male!) commenters stands up to complain about the lack of gender issues at this conference and gets interrupted by wild applause it might indicate that at least we made ourselves heard. (MiT 2007) Except for the fact that another woman did the very same thing two years ago at the last MiT—-and nothing has changed. (MiT 2005)

For me, personally, it’s even more complicated, because this weekend really drove home to me what it means to not be part of the academic community. It’s part practical (i.e., no, I wasn’t at SCMS, because I’m paying my own way, and there was no way we could have managed another conference given that it has no professional/monetary advantage for me), part psychological (yes, I’m five years older than you and don’t have tenure; yes, my name tag doesn’t have an institution because I’m not officially affiliated with a department). Like many women, I was forced into a choice between my academic career and my role as wife and mother. But it’s pretty darn hard to not only have to do my scholarship on the fly, at night, after doing my “real” work, but also to then be taken less seriously than I would have been had I stayed on the fast track. And it’s especially rankling when it happens in a community that claims to value marginalized spaces and the democratization of creativity and intellectual thought.

Our panel (Creative Transformations) was just one case in point. No one who had presented on the previous fan panel or sat in the audience seemed to show up (though there were a few people I didn’t know in the audience, but the folks I knew and had talked to certainly weren’t there). Who did show up were bunches of women; in fact, I think I counted a good dozen of my online friends). What the guys who missed our session didn’t hear were three intelligent papers that presented novel ideas.

Mine used a case study to argue for a quantitative (if not necessarily qualitative) difference in fan fiction in terms of intertextuality, ephemerality, and intimacy, trying to theorize fan creations as “ephemeral traces” both hinting at and hiding their originating performative event. Francesca Coppa’s presentation was a tour de force through the beginnings of vidding and Star Trek’s forerunner The Cage and the role of Spock. In her reading, Spock is not incidentally the featured character of the first vid but rather a cinematically overdetermined and eminently meaningful choice for women vidders, who were themselves often in science and engineering and technically adept. Her connecting Spock to the FEMALE first officer in the proto version was sheer brilliance! Rebecca Tushnet presented on copyright issues and alternatives like attribution and raised some fascinating questions in terms of who actually profits from remediated and transformative art. We were on time and thus had half an hour discussion that was smart and lively and at a level that suggested we’d all been talking to one another, which of course we had. I’d venture that any of those fanboys might have learned something, seen something they hadn’t known before–if nothing other than a video of Kandy Fong’s slide show, one of the first vids ever.

I’ve been on the fence for a long time about how much I want to be part of academia, how much I want to play to the fanboys. Flow in Austin had me irate, but it also had me hoping that things could be different. We tried really hard and, in a way, MiT was my last hope–the conference I knew had had gender issues in the past, but shouldn’t the brand new frontier of new media studies bring us together? We put together the strongest panel we could: four great papers, all of us good scholars who’ve published in the field. And it made not one iota of difference.

What fascinates me in all this is the way it connects with institutional and professional issues. We had a full room. I counted 23 women and 4 men. What I only realized belatedly, however, was that quite a number of the women came from outside the conference, came to hear us. All this BS talk about exceeding boundaries and opening up and how and what new media accomplished could have been seen in our panel: several people in the questions self-identified as librarians; several people who were from Boston, not academics but academically interested came to see us; some of them were, like me, independent scholars, who basically did scholarship in their free time. It was like the old bats’ network had drummed up the folks the old boys’ network refused us. Except that we’ve remained overeducated and underemployed; we’ve remained on the outside. [Not all of us, thank God, but even being on the inside it’s harder and slower and all that good stuff that can always be explained away unless you look at it large scale.]

And, y’know, every single guy probably had a great excuse why he couldn’t make it. The two I actually singled out and asked both certainly did. Except…when every guy has an excuse not to see us while we show up to theirs, well, it begins to look more systemic, more problematic, doesn’t it? One guy not making it may be happenstance; all of them is a problem!

So where does that leave me? I was up all night after the panel thinking about why I’m doing this, what I want, what I gain. Because on some level it’s never been about them, it’s never been about the guys. Yes, I want them to read our book; I think they should, because they’d learn to step outside of Lost and Heroes and see what else is out there. At the same time, they weren’t my primary audience. I’ve always been on the fence on whether my primary audience are other fans or other academics, and I’m still not sure. I’d like it to be both, like to be able to write in a way that makes fans recognize themselves and academics not dismiss it.

After our panel, Karen Hellekson mused whether our book might have gotten more response had Henry written a foreword, and I had to remind her that we purposefully and consciously hadn’t asked. [Which has nothing personally to do with Henry btw, because he has been an amazing supporter every step of the way when he didn't know either one of us, so kudos for that.] We didn’t want or need the fatherly frame presenting us to the world of fan studies…or did we? We went with McFarland, because they bridged the gap between scholarly and fannish to a degree…and yet that very fact already makes the book seem less worthy, less valuable in the eyes of some academics.

I’m eternally fascinated how academia manages to talk the talk but not walk the walk. When I was in grad school, everyone was encouraged to go interdisciplinary, to have wild visions and interesting projects. And yet, the job market in English lit demanded you have a solid field. I wasn’t wild, but my American and British modern and postmodern made me near unsellable for British and American modernist positions most of the time. Likewise, there’s so much talk about bridging the gap between academia and RL or academia and you-name-it. And yet that’s not really what I’ve experienced. Not just on the institutional level, where the very desire that you might have outside needs and obligations makes you near unemployable because academics are asked to move cross country, can barely stop the tenure clock to maybe take a year off from rigorous research for personal needs, etc. I think it’s also visible in the way we may have had more walk ins on our panel than in many others…and yet I can’t help but fear that the very aspects of us and our panel that made us appeal to those that came are the very things that allowed the fanboys to ignore us.

Gender and academic success are tied together for me on a number of levels. I’ve given up a traditional academic career to raise my kids and not move my family. And yet I had the (naïve?) hope that I could at least continue my intellectual interests, that I could be an independent scholar. But I’m seriously interrogating that belief at the moment, because if I’m writing and no one outside of my community here is reading? I might as well not bother with the conferences and the journals and the academic BS and really step outside the system and just publish it all here or in a blog. And I could continue to connect with other female fan scholars, many of whom have created a strong web where we support and work together and have managed to positively translate all the fannish virtues into academia, nonpaid labor and paying it forward and all.

In fact, this very post is an example of the collaborative nature I’m talking about, since it wouldn’t exist in a public place if several friends hadn’t asked me to post it publicly, and it’d sound a bit more awkward and maybe more aggressive if my initial readers hadn’t commented with responses and corrections and suggestions. Because there’s something about the way we engage on LJ and in female-dominated fandom that is different from the way I’ve been trained to engage, both rhetorically and in terms of group dynamics versus individualism. In a way, the very shift in discourse from community to individual in fan studies that I’d argue is gendered replicates different approaches to academic engagement. While I complain about the good ole boys’ network, I’m actually pretty sure that it is nowhere near as supportive and tight as its female counterpart—and yet it’s more powerful because most of its members are. [And this doesn't mean that we haven't experienced random acts of mentorship and support, and I am quite aware and thankful for every one of them. But it seems to happen less frequently and less intensely for us.]

In effect, then, the systemic gendered power differential replicates itself, and I really want to know how to change that. I want to find a way to bridge the gap. One way it happened this weekend was in the BSG panel TV 2.0: Remixing Battlestar Galactica. Four women presented on BSG and a large number of fanboys came. Maybe we just need to find the intersection? But the burden still seems to be on us; I mean, if I can go to hear a guy speak about soap opera fandom, why in the world can’t he come listen to Francesca talk about the history of vidding?

[ETA: Karen just posted a wonderful recap of most of the panels we went to and papers we heard HERE]