A Fan Studies Primer

Method, Research, Ethics

Rebecca Williams, Paul Booth

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781609388102
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The discipline of fan studies is famously undisciplined. But that doesn't mean it isn't structured. This is the first comprehensive primer for classroom use that shows students how to do fan studies in practical terms. With contributions from a range of established and emerging scholars, coeditors Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams pull together case studies that demonstrate the wide array of methodologies available to fan studies scholars, such as auto/ethnography, immersion, interviews, online data mining, historiography, and textual analysis. This collection also probes the ethical questions that are unique to fan studies work, such as the use of online fan content for research, interview methods, consent, and privacy.

PART 1

FOUNDATIONS

CHAPTER 1

WHAT DOES FAN STUDIES FEEL LIKE?

Elise Vist, Milena Popova, and Julia E. Largent

#feels is a channel in the Slack we used to coedit a Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) special issue on fan studies methodologies.¹ We created it in our first meeting, when we were virtually strangers, to provide a space where we could acknowledge that working together on something had an emotional impact on us as individuals and as a group. We used it to voice frustrations (with each other, the process, the state of academia). We used it to set boundaries: one of us is driven to anxiety and insomnia by the mere existence of email; another went through a mental health crisis in the middle of the project; we all have teaching and marking loads and our own scholarship, and this was a side project for all of us. #feels allowed us to make each other aware of these things, seek help when we needed it, and leverage each other’s strengths and cover for areas we weren’t so good at. Most often, though, #feels was a space to voice our appreciation of each other. #feels was created on feminist principles of care,² it has allowed the three of us to progress from virtual strangers to friends over the course of the project, and it shaped every aspect of our collaboration. For us, #feels is a way to understand how fan studies works—and doesn’t work.

Because #feels has limits. #feels can’t address structural issues of working conditions in contemporary academia. It can’t help with precarity, marginalization and oppression, or the root causes of our depression, anxiety, and other struggles. And #feels (at this point we’ve moved beyond the Slack channel and more generally to feelings, emotions, and our affective experiences) can sometimes be used to hide a multitude of sins. Discomfort when we are asked to examine a privileged aspect of our existence is a feeling, but arguably one that should be handled differently to some of our other #feels. Feminist principles of care alone can only go so far in enabling us to cope with structural oppression. And sometimes those same principles demand that we help each other examine and sit with the more problematic of our #feels.

#feels, of course, can feel thoroughly antithetical to academia, and that’s part of what makes it such a useful metaphor for fan studies. Traditional academia tells us we’re meant to be dispassionate, objective scholars. And yet every time we come together with fan studies colleagues—at conferences, on social media—there is an affective fabric that binds the field together, whether or not we admit it. We know this because we cried at Louisa Stein’s keynote on fandom, politics, and #feels at the 2017 Fan Studies Network conference. We know it because of the emotional and professional tightrope we sometimes walk when disagreeing with colleagues. We know it because some of the best papers we have seen at fan studies conferences are those where the scholar has put a piece of themselves into their work. #feels, then, have enormous potential to enrich our field, to enrich us as scholars and individuals, and they have limitations. So what does fan studies feel like? What does it feel like to us as scholars, to fans, and what do we think it might feel like in the future? What follows are our answers to these questions. Yours may be different—but they almost certainly exist even if you haven’t thought about them. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

As Scholars

Summer 2019: The A Side

I am in the middle of the worst depressive episode of my life. I have tried twice to flake out of FSN 2019, and the only reason I make it to the conference is that I’ve told myself it’s okay if I don’t. In the end, I do alright. I catch up with old friends. I make new ones. Generally, I do a remarkably good impression of being human, but I am also open about my struggles. I talk about the slow process of leaving academia. I compliment bright-eyed, bushy-tailed younger scholars on their work. As I listen to colleagues talk about their originary disciplines, I realize (again) that fan studies is a quirky, queer community where a lot of misfits come together and find a home of sorts.³ It is a community I want to help build and maintain—I want to make sure that others have access to this home too.

Lesson 1: fan studies is a space where you can express your fullest, queerest feelings.

On good days, fan studies feels like rainbows and sunshine. It’s an incredibly uplifting discipline: you can connect with other scholars on social media and feel like you have known them for ages (and maybe you have, through Archive of Our Own [AO3] and fan fic). Fan studies feels like home. A home where people are willing to talk about what’s important, share in each other’s successes, and make jokes about things that make us angry. It’s a place accepting of stans,⁴ slash pairings, and wild fan theories.

Because there aren’t many/any “Fan Studies” departments, most of us who call ourselves fan scholars come from other disciplines: cultural studies, English, history, gender studies, media studies, sociology, sports studies, and so on. However, while we may not share a department, we do share the feeling of having to explain fandom to people who just don’t get it. But when we’re among fan scholars, we don’t have to explain why studying fans is okay, why slash matters, or why paying attention to fan theories can tell us important, meaningful things about our world. This is what makes fan studies a comfortable place. This is what makes it home for so many fans-turned-academics and academics-turned-fans.

For many fan studies scholars, the field is an academic and personal refuge. Academically, it is a space where the conventions of our originary disciplines can be relaxed; where we can engage in experimentation; where we can admit that we have feelings, that we are passionate about the things we study.⁵ This is radical and revolutionary, especially for those of us whose originary disciplines force us into an untenable pretend-objectivity. And because (some) feelings are, to an extent, permissible, fan studies is a space where we can allow ourselves to be personally vulnerable. We can be our queer, feminist,⁶ misfit selves; we can talk about our mental health struggles; and we can blend those facets of our selves almost seamlessly with our scholarship.

Or, at least, we try to.

Fan studies can be home, especially for those of us who never quite fit into the disciplines we ended up in, but just because something feels like home doesn’t mean it will always feel good.

In some ways, fan studies is not unlike fandom: a community of misfits, writing about weird things outside the academic, literary, or aesthetic canon. And like fandom, we produce meta and squee. But (let’s face it) we also make a fair amount of wank and fail, too.

Summer 2019: The B Side

It’s still the same conference, the one that feels like home, but there’s a session I’m avoiding. It’s a session I was meant to take part in but is increasingly looking like a whitewashing exercise, so I am taking the opportunity to catch up with a colleague in a similar boat instead. Because as much as fan studies offers a home to my queer self, it doesn’t to my ever so slightly off-white self, and most definitely doesn’t to those browner than me. This is one of many anecdotes I can tell about how as a field we keep failing at dealing with issues of race in our scholarship and our institutional structures. And it, too, is part of what fan studies feels like.

Lesson 2: don’t buy into myths of exceptionalism.⁷ Fans and fan studies are imperfect and messy.

It is easy to tell the story of fan studies as one of the scholarly underdogs: we write about weird stuff, made by weird people, and we answer our questions in ways that make the narratively necessary old white male professor haunting our academic nightmares scoff and wonder if what we’re doing is even really scholarship. But we need to listen to and act on the calls to action from the fan scholars who push back against this story, the people who say that fan studies is not the haven we’ve made it out to be. As a field, we have resisted critique of our white networks, which have enabled us to make assumptions about the best way to “do” fan studies. For example, white fan scholars have become attached to the autoethnographish methods that involve embedding themselves in a fandom and writing from the perspective of an insider. However, we need to pay attention to those who tell us that it’s fine to embed yourself in a fandom and participate in it as a genuine fan, until the fandom you want to study is racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, ableist, and/or made up of actual Nazis (see Drouin’s essay in this volume). We must trust the people who ask us if our desire to tell the story of fandom from the perspective of fans has limited the kinds of research we can do.

Many of us react with intense discomfort at the merest suggestion that fan studies, like fandom, may not be a utopia after all. When scholars of color bring our attention to these structural issues that privilege some fans and scholars over others and reproduce racism in our scholarship and practice, it is all too easy to get defensive. Tiptoeing around white fragility is a crucial skill for some—we are doing it right now.⁸ Another crucial skill: backchanneling, making sure that in this suddenly unsafe space we, the misfits among the misfits, can provide a small amount of comfort to each other. The knowledge that others feel they are the same misfit as you can help you survive, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

The rejection, disappointment, and betrayal that scholars of color experience are part of the fan studies affective fabric. So are the discomfort and defensiveness of white scholars, their/our desire to protect the good feelings of fandom and fan studies turned desire to protect whiteness. Untangling that desire produces bad feelings, but bad feelings are often necessary for change, as Sara Ahmed would remind us.⁹ So although we may be tempted to use the metaphor of home to create a feeling of happiness and comfort, we cannot let that metaphor become the only story of fandom or fan studies. When we erase “uncomfortable” stories from our research, we whitewash—literally—a discipline that has every right to exist in messy feelings. Fandom is messy! How could fan studies be anything but?

Messy research doesn’t mean bad research. It should still be founded in good scholarly practices, but maybe we can start looking to those methods that include affect and feeling. For some, this could be a move away from the traditional scholar’s toolkit of suspicion and critical reading and toward surface and reparative reading. Instead of only asking questions like “What meaning can I create from this text?,” we can learn to trust fans who tell us why they created something. For example, what if we seek the exigence of the utterance (“the occasion” that allows us to “mak[e] public our private versions of things”), rather than the “gap” that inspires the reinterpretation?¹⁰ We can move away from diagnosing fans to understanding the community and culture that creates the need for that specific fanwork. This kind of research will be messier, however, because maybe the thing that created the need for that fic was the fact that someone was bored and horny and wanted to write something to alleviate these fe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Foundations
• Part 2. Ethnographic Methodologies
• Part 3. Textual Analysis
• Part 4. Platform, Industry, and Data-Driven Analyses
• Contributors
• Index
• Series List