pre-detente fanboy/fangirl conversation

Anticipating the conversations that will emerge from Henry Jenkins’s announcement to host a discussion among fan scholars in his blog, Will Brooker and I started a conversation on his participation, the issues we might have to address and just general thoughts on gender in fan studies. In the middle of it, I realized that we’d kind of done on a smaller (and maybe a tad less academic : ) scale what the summer discussions might look like. So I decided to edit our conversation into more readable form (with his input), because I think they raise some interesting issues about gendering of fandom, academia, fan studies and the emotional investments accompanying them.

Fanboys and Fangirls: Gender, Behavior, or Attitude?

WILL: I see the fan studies community is really kicking off in my absence. I guess I’m involved by implication, but I have a couple of reservations. I don’t really connect with the label “fanboy” and I wouldn’t really call anyone a “fangirl”… it feels a bit trivialising, to me. It’s fine for someone to self-identify as one, but it’s not a label I’d apply to someone else. I don’t much like the stereotypical colour-coding of boys as the blue team, even though I realize this is light-hearted. It seems like starting off a few steps back, and it makes me want to claim pink instead. I entirely see that you’re experiencing real frustration and identifying imbalances, but the idea of men and women needing a detente also came as news to me. Maybe that’s male privilege making me blind to the power dynamics at work, or maybe I’m just personally naive.

The discussion has made me think about my own practice a bit – my Star Wars work was mainly about what seems to be now associated with “female” modes (fan productivity and community, rather than institutions and economics) and it was based on female scholars like Penley and Bacon-Smith as much as Jenkins, as I remember. Also, I’ve read some of Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell’s recent work now, and I feel in their approach a bit of distance - I got no strong sense of the primary text’s tone and feel, and of the fan voices. I guess that’s what I’m most interested in, rather than corporate alliances and producers.

So my reluctance to join the discussion would partly be that (maybe I’m wrong) I don’t much like the assumption that “boys” and “girls” are in conflict and need a truce — but also because I feel out of it. I see my fan work more as a personal hobby or individual labour of love* than representative of any broader trends and approaches, or as part of a communal project.

*Maybe I see my books on fandom in the same way as people see their slash and fan art — just as a tribute to the text, like a love letter you had to get off your chest?

NINA: I know the terms fanboy and fangirl are problematic, but I always prefer to concentrate on the actual meaning rather than get stuck on linguistics. After all, how much are these terms aligned with actual biological gender? What are the primary fannish activities? Does it even make sense to maintain such binary gendering in the face of both increased continuity and overall diversity within each of the groups? I think there’s a general sense of how fanboys and fangirls engage with their fan texts, and at least to me, anecdotal evidence tends to support it. One (male?) version separates the serious, analytic, male engagement from the ludicrous, affective, female one. Another (female?) version narrows it down to: women create and men consume. Yet another distinction can be made between the female aggressively anti-commercial gift economy-based amateur art and the stepping stone, male version.

So to me they’re just signifiers that denote a grouping of particular behaviors and correlated research interests. I’m not sure what term would been the most appropriate (we have so much in common, often, and it’s so useful to have a slightly different point of view sometimes that I think we can all profit.)

And I think your point is really well taken that sex and fannish behaviors do not align neatly at all. I mean, first of all, all of us do a lot of things similarly (I think the obsessive collecting and organizing behavior is pretty much across the board), but then, as you point out, the actual community engagement, affect, creative output may be mixed and matched and not always connected to one’s gender. There are people on the fangirl list I’d classify as fanboys for the most part and vice versa. But that’s OK, I think, if we’re not thinking of it in an American everything’s a competition smackdown way and more in a let’s see what every scholar brings to the table.

I think gendering fandom and acafan studies in such a way is deeply problematic–except where it is often gendered. I actually don’t think of fanboy/fangirl as male or female but shorthands for approaches: we could call them collective and individual; we could call them creators and collectors. And there are always in betweens and exceptions and I’m too much of a postmodernist to not know that binaries deconstruct. But I’m also too much of a modernist to not want to establish them anyway. Seriously, I hear you on your frustration with the terms and the binaries, but I also think that we’re already moving beyond that to something quite different: the role of the personal in our fannish scholarship; the support or discouragement of such personal interest in academia and the way fan studies conflates these things.

Scholarship—Love Letters to Fandom?

NINA: I love your idea of your books as love letters, as creative outputs in their own right. I am in a weird position where every time I talk about “us,” I’m not quite sure if I actually can or should include myself, b/c I don’t create fiction, fanart, etc. And on the whole, the folks who “just” deal with their show and analyze and all are part of but not quite “us.” So where does that leave me? In fact, I don’t even do much show meta; instead, most of my fannish engagement is mostly meta about fandom (though, your books really were that too). And then I wonder if your books are love letters to the media text or to its fandoms?

WILL: I think the books are love letters to the text, but sent into the world with a note of gratitude to the fans. After all, the relationship is between me and the text, not me and the fans. I am one of them and couldn’t write the books without them, so I’m trying to represent them and bring their discourses into a more public arena, partly through reporting and examining my own experience and investment. Fans are on my side of the love relationship, with the text on the other. The idea of love letters comes from John Hartley’s mid-90s work I picked it up as a PhD student and kept exploring it.

Just a few points that it might be worth getting down here, further to our discussion so far. In a real way, I suppose my books are a kind of fan production. I write as a fan, from an open position where I state my “love” for the text (Alan McKee’s anthology Beautiful Things in Popular Culture is interesting about this, and I have a Batman-and-me romance chapter in there). I put my own autobiography on the table often, and examine my own responses and identity in relation to the text. At times, there’s arguably a homoerotic aspect to it (or with me as “feminised”? in relation to the loved-object Batman for instance). In the confessional and personal-diary aspect, there is perhaps an approach more often associated with female fans (or female writers in general, I don’t know).

Further, I’m wondering if I consider my fandom and fan studies to occupy a more “feminised” side of my life - the personal rather than professional. I’ve posted under a female name on discussion boards and in one case established a long-term persona which was treated as female (which included sexist remarks and assumptions directed at me). Maybe I perceive my fandom and fan writing as a very different and more personal space compared to my “male” role as professional manager, co-ordinator, head of department etc, which doesn’t involve any confession, creativity or autobiography. (I have written slash, and write fiction in general, so the distinction between me as fan-scholar and the fan-producers I’m discussing and writing about is pretty thin).

NINA: I want to think some more about love letters and that surplus of interest that’s indescribable and yet at the very heart of fannish engagement (and, of course, how this surplus gets affected by community interaction). Both Matt and Cornel, of course, address affect and try to negotiate that unnamable excess of fannishness, but for myself, I feel that the community needs to be placed much more centrally, i.e., as a fan who is most fannish, most invested within the shared enjoyment, I find the theories that focus on the fan/source text interaction only not actually able to encompass my experiences.

I think you raise two really important points (and I just used you as an example when i actually defended “the guys” against the accusation of us doing the creative work and you guys doing the consumption only): interesting, however, how the creativity is played out, isn’t it? Not that I have much to show for, being a non-creator myself, but I do find it fascinating that your examples are mostly academic nonfiction, creative and autobiographic but certainly quite a bit removed from the Id Vortex so to speak.

The Id Vortex in Fannish and Academic Discourses

WILL: What’s the id vortex? Like a stream of consciousness? The academic books are removed from that kind of impulse because they wouldn’t get published unless they followed certain conventions (I think I’ve deviated a fair bit from standard academia in my books, but I feel you have to work and play within a *certain* framework if you want to have it published as scholarship — unless you’re someone like Barthes, Eco or Baudrillard who no doubt had a freer rein).

But surely female fan-scholars aren’t any closer to a fully-creative stream of consciousness *in their academic work*? I don’t know if there’s a gender difference here. I think I’m about as open and personal in my academic stuff as I can be without getting it rejected. The latest “academic” piece I’ve written, as an offering for David Lavery’s anthology on crying and popular culture, is almost entirely fiction. It’s got truth in it, but it’s mostly invented, creative writing. The piece before that was a review of Deborah Jermyn’s new book Crimewatching that examined the book in terms of my relationship with her, our shared history (especially in terms of the Cardiff scholarly community we both went through) and the scholarly convention that demands we review books by our friends and pretend we don’t know them. My Alice book, prior to that, ended with an extremely personal section about sitting next to Lewis Carroll’s grave and imagining what I’d say to him.

NINA: In a discussion a few years back, LJ fan writer Ellen Fremedon coined the term Id Vortex by which she means that very tailored and customized writing that caters to the writers’ and/or readers’ kinks, that creates stories that not only move us emotionally because we already care about the characters but also because it uses tropes, characterizations, scenes that appeal very viscerally. She says: “in fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material; and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all.” It is important to realize that the Id Vortex includes but is not restricted to sexual revelation and exposure, that it includes what we often call “emo porn” or emotional vulnerability as well.

In fact, that openness is interesting: if women expose themselves that clearly (and I’m actually thinking more emotionally than sexually, though there’s that as well, of course), then your academically inclined love letters are much less risky. On the other hand, as you point out, from an academic perspective they *are* risky, merging the personal and political in ways academia still eschews and there’s clearly a reason we take recourse to gender and queer studies who likewise have brought in the personal.

WILL: Not sure I follow you here. My academic writing is less risky in terms of personal exposure than someone who writes slash, yes — except that most slash (and probably genfic) is written under a pseudonym. One fundamental point about slash is that people aren’t usually willing to take the risk to identify that form of their expression with their professional and personal lives.

So in a way, my writing in Alan McKee’s anthology about my PhD years, my parents, my sexuality and so on in relation to Batman is a lot more risky than “DarthMaulLover” publishing his or her slash fic on a website, because in the former case it’s bound up with a public and professional reputation, whereas in the latter, it’s anonymous and far more liberated. Whatever I write under my real name is immediately googleable back to pages of info about my “real life”. Unless people publish slash under their real names and have that kind of public reputation, I disagree that they’re exposing themselves more.

NINA: I think that’s less true these days. Many fans are pretty out about their RL names and before the mid nineties most of them didn’t have a choice (their Internet access was often by default to their work or school address and thus had their name). Moreover, I feel much more *me* at this moment within my fannish pseudonym engaging in fandom than under my RL name! It’s not anonymous and we spend years of interacting to build a reputation! So, while I think you’re right that there’s more *professional* risk involved, I’m not sure the risk of revelation is the same. So, I think we may be talking about different levels of vulnerability here? Because I see your point about it connecting back to your RL, and if it’s a neighbor or co-worker connecting it, then yes, you’re right. But frankly, I care more about what my LJ friend X thinks about me than the neighbor down the street. My fannish reputation is pretty important to me and at this point might be at the same level as my (virtually nonexistant) professional one.

And yet, regardless of whether your love letters (or my love letters) are less exposing than fic or vids, they are certainly much more so than we might otherwise do. In fact, I remember very clearly my first fannish essay and how I felt exposed in ways that were immensely uncomfortable. There was more “me” in these 15 pages on Buffy than in multiple articles and most of my dissertation on modern and postmodern literature. And I’m realizing yet again how much we do have in common: because for me my academic work comes exactly out of the place fannish creation comes for others–sheer love of it. It’s incredibly freeing not to have to write but to do it because you want to…and for you it’s been the particular source texts; for me fandom as a whole.

WILL: I agree with that, certainly (with the proviso that I don’t think fic and vids are that exposing, as argued above). When I talk about my own research now in MA seminars, it’s a rare occasion where I feel I’m really opening up and becoming vulnerable in an academic situation - because my work is linked to very personal feelings and because my research is based in part around examining my own investment and responses.

NINA: So, I think you’re totally right that the Id Vortex is more at the forefront in fic writing, clearly, but your comments about love letters made me wonder whether there might be more Id Vortex showing in fannish academic engagements. As you point out below, the autoethnographic components are deeply personal, and Hills et al have all commented already on the fannish aspect of academic writing, so the intersection between the two strikes me as eminently affective. Moreover, as we’ve previously mentioned, both of us have been publishing in a position where we did not need to, which reinforces the sense that it clearly is a “labor of love,” doesn’t it? So, the playing within the framework (coloring within the lines as the discourse around fanfic is going at the moment–or lack thereof) is really where I’m fascinated with what you said about not needing to publish. Because at what point does it become a privilege that we are publishing because we want to rather than because we have to? I’m really interested in the institutional framework of academia and the commercial framework as it’s beginning to evolve trying to contain fannish creations (i.e., Lucasfilm’s current Make-It-Yorself challenge).

Community and the Individual Fan

NINA: As for gender. Well, there are certain things associated with gender, and within fan studies I’ve always been under the impression that there was a thinking/feeling split as well (though interestingly, creativity shows up on both sides as does consumerism, depending on where you look). So, yes, the community vs source text relation is quite interesting, and now I’m wondering whether here’s another separation. I wonder if Abercrombie and Longhurst’s “enthusiasts” versus “cultists” (however awkward the terms) might be useful here in terms of where the central focus is (b/c clearly there’s community in the cult and source text love in the enthusiast, but the emphasis may be different?).

WILL: Not in my work. Remember my Star Wars book is subtitled Creativity, Community and Star Wars fans. It is all about communities. Including a long chapter on female communities, which involved me pretty heavily with Star Wars Chicks groups, Darth Maul Estrogen Brigades and so on. And an even longer chapter on slash and genfic, and another on fan films.

Probably the main idea in that book is the way the film provides a network of shared information, shared in-jokes, shared history, shared love… the way it binds strangers together. The book isn’t about economics or institutions. And that’s my big book on fans… that represents my approach to fans, rather than being an exception.

Examining my responses here, I think what comes across is that I’m saying I seem to identify with the “female” approach to fandom far more than the “male”. I’m really not very happy with gendered categories in that sense, if “female” has to mean “personal”, “creative” etc — I don’t think that helps anyone — but as someone whose academic work is autobiographically open, and who’s made films, written slash, focuses above all on community, I don’t see a great deal of difference between my work and what you might characterise as “fangirl” scholarship.

NINA: Except, that’s where the difference comes in, doesn’t it? I still maintain that the role community plays is more central and more driving within the “female” version than it is for “the guys.” Moreover, at that point, the source text often becomes secondary (my essay on popslash really drives home that point, I think. After all, you can imagine that there weren’t many 30+ year old professionals who were *NSYNC fans before the fic).

WILL: That does make sense, though is the division remotely clean-cut about collective and individual? Self-examination, autobiography, autoethnography are all about the individual, and my impression was these were being linked more with the “girl” approach - subjective, creative. Whereas institutions, economics (boy approach?) are about collectives, in a way. (Though not about communities.)

NINA: That’s a really interesting distinction and one I hadn’t quite thought about like that. And now I’m wondering if we need different axes, different trajectories to allow for the way different fans situate themselves in respect to the source text, the community, the collective economic structures, etc. Because, yes, autoethnography is, in the end, all about the individual, but I’m not sure I’d want to do an autoethnography that didn’t always already include the fannish community.