This isn’t the first time I’ve read Jenkins and looked at fan studies for class, and every time it happens I feel somehow weirdly disconnected from the discussion. It feels like it should be something I’m interested in studying, as involvement in fandom isn’t insignificant in my life, but every time I just feel slightly uncomfortable. Some of this probably stems from my involvement in fandom being similar but different from the practices discussed – reading fanfiction online and scrolling through Tumblr only sharing things with my immediate friends is different from the more active community involvement in conventions or creating content. I also think there’s a large part of me that sees academia as a professional sphere of interest, and fandom as where I go to relax/recreate/generally turn off my brain. In the theme of so many of the class readings about the blurring of leisure and work, or free time and discussion time, it makes sense to look at these readings through these angles, and there’s definitely value I can get from them. And so much of cinema and media studies is just taking recreational things and studying them seriously, so I’m still not fully sure why this disconnect is so strong, but I thought I’d at least attempt to reflect on the reasons.
Supplemental Post #2 - Andrea
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad to see someone also feels the weird disconnect reading Jenkins's analysis of fans/fandoms! Fandom has been a large part of my life for the past 10 years or so, and while renewed interest in some fandoms I'd left for a period of time have sparked my interest in fan studies, I also feel like a strange spectator whenever I read anything formal about fans. It's almost a feeling of watching the Peeping Tom peep on me, particularly because academics writing about fans almost always seem to place themselves outside of fandom. This distance just deepens the dissonance I feel reading about fans as both a fan and someone involved in media scholarship.
I've been thinking about why fan studies feel so voyeuristic, and I think Jenkins himself speaks to this feeling when he writes, "This ability to transform personal reaction into social interaction, spectator culture into participatory culture, is one of the central characteristics of fandom" (473). To me, it is the strange blurring between private and public lives fans must navigate that leaves me either feeling exposed as a fan, or voyeuristic as someone engaging with academic texts. While fandom requires connection between communities of people, it is (at least for me personally) a guarded set of public interactions stemming from deeply personal interests. I feel I must protect these interests from anyone who isn't close or wouldn't "get it," as they say. Particularly as someone invested in fangirls (and having been one for half of my life), I often feel protective(?) of the ways we talk about fangirls and the media they consume. (P.S. "Fangirls" by Hannah Ewens is a fun book that takes a deeper look at fangirls from the perspective of a former fangirl) Finally, I just want to echo your point about it being weird to hold a mirror up to myself when looking at communities that resemble the ones I'm a part of when, like you said, a lot of this is just fun escapism. Maybe I'm just reluctant to investigate the reasons why and how fans do the things they do when I generally engage in fan activity to escape and have fun outside my "local irl" life.