theorizing fandom and LJ

[lobelia321]

While everyone else has been waiting for their copies of HP to arrive, I was excited to get the phone call from Heffers to tell me that my copy of Theorizing Fandom , edited by Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander, had arrived!



I have it! I've started to read it! It has chapters in it with titles like:

"Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking"
"Male-Pair-Bonds and Female Desire in Fan Slash Writing"
"'Lookit that Hunk of Man!' Subversive Pleasures, Female Fandom, and Professional Wrestling"

As ever, I find myself nodding when I read some things and getting annoyed with others. Also, the book is old: published in 1998, it talks of fanzines (argh!!).

P.S. The one thing that strikes me as missing is any analysis of the *writing*. There's a lot of analysis using sociological methods and using psychoanalyis, and using feminist theories drawing on sociology and psychoanalysis, but virtually nothing about the *writing* -- genre, formulae, bad!fic vs good!fic, pov, Mary Sue, WIPs, PWP, vocab, characterisation, fanon/canon (and evolution thereof and change over time), style, influences of author upon author, AU, rps/fp, plotting, dialogue -- all the things that interest me. I wonder whether this is partly to do with the difficulty of proving points by quoting. Because I don't know what the ethics and legal issues are here, and how willing authors are to be findable by non-fans.

Another thing: not only is this book pre-net, it is also pre-LJ. I think something changed with LiveJournal. For me, the interface has profoundly changed since I shifted my activities mostly to LJ away from the lists (and even the lists are already a step up from what used to happen on MOOs and MUDs and other mysterious locations that I associate only with cows and Orli's shampoo). (We were talking about this on Sunday, in fact, with lazulus, sheldrake and ukcalico.

Watch this space for further musings.



Thank you so much, girloftheq, for alerting me to this gem! When will I be able to read your essay?

Comments

[qthelights.livejournal.com]

Soon! :)

And did I tell you about the Jenkin's book? That goes into fan fic heaps more.. though I can't quite remember how much.. but it's about fan fic type fandom.. "Textual Poaching" . Jenkin's is the writer for fandom stuff.

[andraste-oz.livejournal.com]

So... we have to write the one that mentions the writing!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Exactly! But how? Because then I came up agains the problem of quoting. How did girloftheq solve that dilemma in the end?

[msilverstar]

Fascinating!

I hope you do write your book, the one with lots of writing in it.

As for quoting, in the Berne Copyright convention, there still is some room for fair use. But I once did something like this for work, we hired a friend who's a famous lawyer in internet legal issues, and he had one basic piece of professional advice: ask. If they give you permission, you're good. And I bet we'd all give you permission.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm writing my book. No hope about it. Just a matter of when. But it's got nothing to do with fanfic. It's on visual narrative in painting. But the research for it overlaps because of all that narratology I'm reading! Which is surprisingly useful vis-a-vis fanfic!

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think this is the book that clara_swift taunted me with in Marks and Spencers once! I didn't think it was still available.

The one thing that strikes me as missing is any analysis of the *writing*.

It always seems to me, when someone writes about fanfic or slash from an outsider perspective, that it's the act of the writing that interests them; the writing itself is irrelevant. Maybe that's why I tend to get so frustrated reading this sort of thing.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

why I tend to get so frustrated reading this sort of thing.
I'm working myself into a whopper of a post about this. I want to scan Henry Jenkins' book 'Textual Poachers' before I do, though. And the outsider/insider thing is difficult. Because as it happens a lot of the academics writing on this *are* fans as well; that's how they got into the writing about it. So they have this uneasy on-the-fence position. I've yet to figure it out.

Also, I think that the type of academics writing about this come from the popular-culture/media studies end of things. And those people are *not* into textual analysis. They sprout Bourdieu and Benjamin and Foucault in random succession (at least in this book they do) and talk at length about trendy topics like gender, class, identity and the Oedipal comples (come to think of it, these topics aren't even that trendy - they're *so* 1980s... *puts on tired, pretentious voice*).

But it's completely true: they care about the process, not the actual writing. Which is fine *but*.