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SOURCES - Acafans and Acafandom
Sep. 6th, 2022 07:18 amAcademia and fandom - an uneasy relationship at the best of times. Fandom studies, including studies of fans, fan activities, fan spaces, fan communities, and all sorts of fan behavior, are usually categorized as a type of media studies, but overlap with plenty of other fields, including literary criticism and cultural anthropology.
On the surface, there shouldn’t be discord between academia and fandom. Many academics are also fans and engaged in fannish behavior. Many fans experience or analyze their preferred texts or media through academic lenses or practices. And indeed, there are a lot of academic studies that are written by fans, for fans. But there are differing motives in academia and fandom which can drive a wedge between the denizens who walk in both words. Some academics look at fans or audiences as mindless, naive entities who passively consume mass-produced pop culture, or as infantile social rejects who can’t let go of their ids. There are academics who enter fan communities and study them without respect. Fans, for their part, generally do not want to be seen primarily as objects of study or figures of scorn. There are also academics who are very wary of engaging in fannish behavior because it diminishes the appropriate distance between the scholar and topic. And though fans do process media and fandom thoughtfully and analytically, fandom space contains multitudes - enthusiasms, hatreds, reactions, personal gripes, flame wars, shipping, and tons of activities that could violate copyright laws. While academia certainly has a lot of that (especially personal gripes), there are academics who prefer not to engage with those activities, and view them as distractions that take away from substantive work.
Nevertheless, I am someone who is fannish and someone who has been an academic. It can take a while to negotiate the relationship, but with some care and self-reflection, academia and fandom need not struggle against each other, but can even work together. After all, both include critical analysis, investigations of texts, and a constant interplay between thought, creation, text, and analysis. In the end, we’re just nerds nattering on about our hyperfixations. For me, reading academic works on fandom is a fun, fannish endeavor, and it has helped me understand what I am doing as a fan, where I come from, and where I am going.
In that vein, I now present a reading list/bibliography - books, edited volumes, articles, and other sources that have shaped or informed my own activities and understandings of acafandom and fan studies. This list is not comprehensive, and not necessarily an endorsement. Rather, the listed work has something interesting to say or has been an important piece in the evolution of fan studies. I’ll add to the list as I continue to read and discover.
Start here:
Books
The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, Francesca Coppa
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, Anne Jamison
Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Culture, Nicolle Lamerichs
Edited Volumes
Fanfic and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse - table of contents here https://karenhellekson.com/?page_id=14
Articles
Thinking About Slash/Thinking About Women - Edi Bjorklund (Nome #11)
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Thinking_About_Slash/Thinking_About_Women
Why We’re Terrified of Fanfiction - Constance Grady
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11531406/why-were-terrified-fanfiction-teen-girls
The Fan Historian - E Charlotte Stevens and Nick Webber https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/2125/2955
African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies - Rebecca Wanzo
https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/699/538
Want to Go Further?
Books
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Camille Bacon Smith
Novelization: From Film to Novel, Jan Baetens
Characters Before Copyright: The Rise and Regulation of Fan Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Matthew H. Birkhold
Black Women as Cultural Readers, Jaqueline Bobo
The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel DeCerteau
Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Abigail De Kosnik
Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida
Fanfiction and the Author, Judith Fathallah
Fan Cultures, Matt Hills
Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the movies, bell hooks
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins
Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent, Milena Popova
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture, Janice Radway
Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellctual Property Protection, Aaron Schwabach
Edited Volumes
Fan Studies: Researching Popular Audiences, eds. Alice Chauvel, Nicolle Lamerichs, and Jessica Seymour
Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Story Telling, ed. SA Guynes
The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis
A Tumblr Book: Platform and Culture, eds. Aliison McCraken, Alexander Cho, Lousia Stein, Indira Neill Hoch
Science Fiction across Media adaptation/novelization edited by Thomas Van Parys and I.Q. Hunter
Other Resources
The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom
Fanlore - a wiki about fandom by the Organization for Transformative Works - https://fanlore.org/wiki/Acafan
Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures - a peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works - https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/index
Confessions of an AcaFan - http://henryjenkins.org/
On the surface, there shouldn’t be discord between academia and fandom. Many academics are also fans and engaged in fannish behavior. Many fans experience or analyze their preferred texts or media through academic lenses or practices. And indeed, there are a lot of academic studies that are written by fans, for fans. But there are differing motives in academia and fandom which can drive a wedge between the denizens who walk in both words. Some academics look at fans or audiences as mindless, naive entities who passively consume mass-produced pop culture, or as infantile social rejects who can’t let go of their ids. There are academics who enter fan communities and study them without respect. Fans, for their part, generally do not want to be seen primarily as objects of study or figures of scorn. There are also academics who are very wary of engaging in fannish behavior because it diminishes the appropriate distance between the scholar and topic. And though fans do process media and fandom thoughtfully and analytically, fandom space contains multitudes - enthusiasms, hatreds, reactions, personal gripes, flame wars, shipping, and tons of activities that could violate copyright laws. While academia certainly has a lot of that (especially personal gripes), there are academics who prefer not to engage with those activities, and view them as distractions that take away from substantive work.
Nevertheless, I am someone who is fannish and someone who has been an academic. It can take a while to negotiate the relationship, but with some care and self-reflection, academia and fandom need not struggle against each other, but can even work together. After all, both include critical analysis, investigations of texts, and a constant interplay between thought, creation, text, and analysis. In the end, we’re just nerds nattering on about our hyperfixations. For me, reading academic works on fandom is a fun, fannish endeavor, and it has helped me understand what I am doing as a fan, where I come from, and where I am going.
In that vein, I now present a reading list/bibliography - books, edited volumes, articles, and other sources that have shaped or informed my own activities and understandings of acafandom and fan studies. This list is not comprehensive, and not necessarily an endorsement. Rather, the listed work has something interesting to say or has been an important piece in the evolution of fan studies. I’ll add to the list as I continue to read and discover.
Start here:
Books
The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age, Francesca Coppa
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, Anne Jamison
Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Culture, Nicolle Lamerichs
Edited Volumes
Fanfic and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse - table of contents here https://karenhellekson.com/?page_id=14
Articles
Thinking About Slash/Thinking About Women - Edi Bjorklund (Nome #11)
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Thinking_About_Slash/Thinking_About_Women
Why We’re Terrified of Fanfiction - Constance Grady
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11531406/why-were-terrified-fanfiction-teen-girls
The Fan Historian - E Charlotte Stevens and Nick Webber https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/2125/2955
African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies - Rebecca Wanzo
https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/699/538
Want to Go Further?
Books
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Camille Bacon Smith
Novelization: From Film to Novel, Jan Baetens
Characters Before Copyright: The Rise and Regulation of Fan Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Matthew H. Birkhold
Black Women as Cultural Readers, Jaqueline Bobo
The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel DeCerteau
Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, Abigail De Kosnik
Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida
Fanfiction and the Author, Judith Fathallah
Fan Cultures, Matt Hills
Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the movies, bell hooks
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins
Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent, Milena Popova
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture, Janice Radway
Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellctual Property Protection, Aaron Schwabach
Edited Volumes
Fan Studies: Researching Popular Audiences, eds. Alice Chauvel, Nicolle Lamerichs, and Jessica Seymour
Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, eds. Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington, and Cornel Sandvoss
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Story Telling, ed. SA Guynes
The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa Lewis
A Tumblr Book: Platform and Culture, eds. Aliison McCraken, Alexander Cho, Lousia Stein, Indira Neill Hoch
Science Fiction across Media adaptation/novelization edited by Thomas Van Parys and I.Q. Hunter
Other Resources
The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom
Fanlore - a wiki about fandom by the Organization for Transformative Works - https://fanlore.org/wiki/Acafan
Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures - a peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works - https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/index
Confessions of an AcaFan - http://henryjenkins.org/
