#project: my life as an acafan

[studiesof-fandom]

I'm back and I hope for good this time!

My God, I'm like EXO - always swear to come back for good and then post twice to disappear for another year lmao

Let me update about my life, so you can understand the reason I disappeared.

Do you guys remember the master degree program I was applying to and I even did a Google form to gather more information to include in my research proposal? Well, I was rejected big time. Mostly because I applied to the wrong type of program. They were expecting something from me that I didn't deliver, so I failed big time. The evaluators wanted me to research about fanfic aesthetic or the poetic language in fanfiction or something along those lines. So yeah, they didn't like my project. It sucked even more because the project they were evaluating was the one my advisor kinda forced me to change and it wasn't even close to my original project (which is kinda funny cause even after changing it to fit his taste I got rejected anyway, so there). Because of all this drama, I've decided to shelve the whole Master program for another year. I'll get a new advisor when I apply for my Master degree, but this time it'll be in the right program. Meanwhile, I decided to focus on finishing my undergrad degree, which I just posted about.

Just so you know, I'm not heartbroken for not getting in the program. Honestly, I think it was the best for me. I learned a lot and I think I grew up as a researcher in a way I haven't done in a long time.

I'm coming back not only because I have to write my undergrad thesis about fic writing, but also because I want to focus in being an Acafan, which is something I haven't done at all. I confess I'm more enthusiastic about fandom research because now I'm part of a study group at my university that focus in researching fanfiction (@nepf-ufrj). So, I think I'll bring the blog back. Maybe I'll find someone who commits to keep this thing going with me. Let's pray for it!

Last thing: I'll update the library soon! I found so many new books, you guys have NO IDEA!!! Can't wait to share everything I found!

I'm sorry for the long text, but that's it! I hope you guys forgive me now!

Have a nice Sunday and see you soon!

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

My Life as an Acafan: So I finally talked to my advisor

When I first started researching fanfiction (back in 2018), I had a very different idea about what I was going to study. The only thing that remained the same was the subject: fanfiction. Everything else? It changed so much. 

At first, I had a general idea of what I wanted to research: fanfiction as queer representation and link that to Captain America’s fandom, specifically the Steve/Bucky (aka Stucky) pairing. Around the time I had realized this, I found an English literature professor in my college who was open to be my advisor. Then, I started reading a few introductory texts from fan scholars, mainly people that studied fanfiction, and those readings started shaping my perspective better. That was when I realized I should study the construction of queer romance in fanfiction and how it was portrayed in it, using Stucky stories as reference. That was when my problems with my research really started.

In 2018, I hadn’t accepted yet, but I was mostly out of Captain America fandom. I was kinda holding onto it and I’m still not sure why I did that. Maybe it was because once I promised myself that if I ever had the opportunity to research fanfiction, I’d definitely pick Stucky stories. I have this stupid tendency of trying to stick to every promise I make to myself, even if I’d grown out of it ─ which was exactly what happened to me.

By the time I started researching fic, I was barely participating in Captain America’s fandom and that was Marvel’s fault. First, we had the whole Steve is actually Hydra plot in the comics and I got pissed off beyond reason because of it. And then, shortly after that nightmare of storyline, the movie Civil War was released and it was everything but a Captain America movie. So, I think you can imagine my frustration at that point. I was so mad at Marvel that not even fandom could salvage it. Unfortunately, it took me almost a year and a half to understand this. 

When I finally realized the problem was the pairing, I changed to Merlin/Arthur (aka Merthur) from Merlin BBC (2008) TV series. After I got rid of Stucky, I was able to actually work on my research. I researched about Romance Theory, Queer Theory, representation of minorities in movies and TV shows. And, even though I read the most important books in those fields, I got nowhere. The reason it happened was that nobody had a framework that met my needs and that realization was the crucial part for me. I finally understood what I was supposed to do. I needed to create some kind of framework that could define fanfiction, specifically, slash fanfiction. Then, I’d be able to discuss how queer romance is constructed within a fic. That changed my world. 

After I understood that, I contacted my former advisor and I explained to him I was going to change fields. My research evolved into something really different and it made more sense to have an advisor from Literary Theory than English Literature. He was very understanding and wished me good luck. Quickly after that, I sent a message to one of the best professors I’ve ever had in my life, who conveniently taught Literary Theory, and he accepted to become my advisor. And last week we finally had our first conversation about my research. 

It was very productive. My conversation with him was the solid proof that I’d made the right call. We managed to establish so many things. First, I already know how I will start to build the framework I had in mind, which was the greatest breakthrough of all time to me. 

I’m not gonna pretend I wasn’t terrified about the idea of creating a framework from scratch. I had no idea how I would even start before my advisor talked to me. He went over every piece I had written related to my research and he ended up seeing a solution. However, he didn’t directly tell me the solution, he walked me through it until I reached the conclusion myself. He didn’t deliver the answer to me on a silver plate. For the first time since I’ve started my research, I felt actually capable in carrying out the whole thing. It really helped me to build the confidence I was lacking and that was a beautiful development. I finally saw actual progress. So, one important lesson I’ve learned with this whole situation is that an advisor needs to make you feel secure that you will find a way with their guidance, even if they don’t really understand your subject. 

Now, you must be asking yourselves: what are you actually going to do then? Well, I’ll build a framework to delineate slash fanfiction that follows the standard of “well-written” stories, published on AO3 between the end of the 2000s and throughout the 2010s. To create this framework, I’ll use excerpts of fanfictions and compare it to a book series written by a former ficwriter that successfully reproduced the fanfiction style, but using original characters. My goal with this research is to offer an academic definition to our famous compliment ‘this (story) is like fanfiction’. It’s a way to show that fanfiction has its own style and it’s actually affecting the literary market. Actually I’m pretty sure someone (I think it was Kristina Busse but could also be Karen Hellekson or even both) pointed out the lack of research focused on the structure of fanfiction. They said the field needed someone who attempted to define said structure in academic terms. So, that’s what I’m gonna do now. This is going to be my lifetime work and honestly? I can’t wait to start it!

[fidgeting]

thoughts on my own relationship to fanfic writing, b/c there was some talk about it on the tl (plus many many posts in recent weeks/months):

i went through a period a few years ago when i was trying to convince myself that what was necessary to pursue my original writing “seriously” was to quit fandom and stop writing fic, etc etc, because i was conceptualizing it like a sinkhole for my attention or writing energy. taking that step back was useful for me in some senses, mostly in terms of gaining perspective wrt stupid and stressful fandom infighting and making me reassess what i actually wanted to get out of being involved in online fan communities, but it was quite lonely--for better or for worse, i grew up a terminally online rural queer teenager in an evangelical christian mileu, and online fan culture was really formative to the person i grew into as an adult. it’s a type of social interaction that isn’t easily replaceable, even as i have a very different irl environment now.

so, in practice, what “backing off of fandom in the name of my Art” led to was a fallow period in my writing life. think i was so fixated on the dichotomy between my fic writing as something inherently silly that i needed to grow out of and that had no bearing on the “real” writing i wanted to make, which was going to Say Something About The World, that it became really hard to actually do that “real” writing because it felt joyless and bogged down in expectation vis a vis quality and Seriousness. what ended up getting me back into writing after a year or so of not producing much of anything worth talking about was rediscovering a sense of joy about writing through getting back into fanfic, because it was something that i could do as part of a community that felt playful--i wasn’t overthinking things to death or berating myself for how my work was out of step with what publishers want to see, etc, because it was irrelevant. the only point was to make something for myself--which you can do with original writing, of course, but i needed that encouragement and sense of group interest that comes from sharing work to a limited-but-enthusiastic ready-made audience, which is one of the things fanfic has going for it.

it’s been a few years since then and my relationship to writing in general has changed A Lot, but losing my sense of shame about fic writing being a hobby that i enjoy for its own sake did a lot of good for my relationship to my writing in general. taking on self-indulgent projects that exist outside of publishing marketability has done a lot for helping me get a sense of what kinds of narratives and unexplored corners of existing works i’m drawn to, in a way that i can then take and apply to my original writing. that could definitely have happened even if i never came back to writing fic, but i think would’ve been slower. i’ve stopped writing original work with the mentality of trying to appeal to a nonexistent subset of the publishing market, and instead been following desire lines to figure out what i, personally, want to be reading that doesn’t yet exist, rather than trying to figure out how to pivot my own personal history into thinly-veiled autobiographical queer memoir that could get some minor success as a cancon title or whatever. is writing novels without consideration for what editors want to see in slushpiles a good decision? probably not, but i’m actually, like, writing them now instead of just feeling guilty for not writing them, which is better than nothing. and i do find writing fanfic really fun and joyful, and cultivating a joyful approach to fic writing--as something done purely for pleasure with no expectation of material gain or name recognition etc--really helped me figure out how to translate that mentality to my original work.

so anyway. corny careerist acafans who claim that fanfic is inherently radical and artistically valuable are embarrassing, but i’ve also stopped giving a shit about the opinions of people who think it’s cringe to write fanfic as a 25 year old or whatever, largely because it’s truly just a hobby i do for fun and i don’t think i owe anyone an apology for that. that being said, i think it does enrich my relationship to my original work, which it should be noted is also just a hobby, as i have no desire to be a writer full-time (though i would like to pursue publication at some point.) at the same time, i can’t subsist on a diet of fic alone--i’ve read a lot of fic in my time that’s stuck with me and impacted me artistically/emotionally, but i have a hard time maintaining my interest in writing in general unless i’m consuming other types of fiction and poetry as much if not more than i am ~transformative work~, and i always experience the cringe emotion when people who feel insecure about their writing/reading patterns respond to that feeling with wild takes about the lack of value of genres of published fiction they patently don’t read. kids can we lighten up a little...

tl;dr i think writing stuff for fun in the context of an online fan community can be an end goal itself if you are indeed having fun with it and there isn’t anything inherently embarrassing about it; personally speaking my orig work and fic work have interacted in generative ways but are also just different activities that serve different purposes for me; the two positions of “fanfic is actually the most amazing real and true form of art because it’s METATEXTUAL and QUEER and POPULIST etc etc unlike stupid ‘BOOKS’” and “no one has ever written fanfic for any reason than to jack off about cartoon characters” are both dumb asf and it really is not that serious

that being said i do also just like to read and write weird p*rn in an environment where writing and consuming weird gay p*rn is socially normalized. i’m only HUMAN

[olderthannetfic]

I just realized it’s Fandom First Friday and the topic is meta!

For months, I’ve been slowly working my way through How To Be Gay by David Halperin, which talks about drag queens and how certain aspects of gay male culture appropriate from women to empower gay men. (Halperin uses the word ‘appropriate’ extensively, not necessarily in a negative context.) He brought up some points I thought were highly relevant for thinking about slash.

Last February, I went to Escapade and chatted with a bunch of acafans. To my total lack of surprise, they too love Halperin’s book and had the same reaction I did. I thought when I finish the book, I’ll write up some meta. But I got busy, and it’s a long, dense book. So then in August, I went to the final Vividcon. There, I ran into Francesca Coppa and mentioned this idea. Her response? “Oh, I just wrote a journal article about that.”

…

AHAHAHAHA! Oh god, we are the same person.

(NB: We are not actually the same person.We just have similar first names, similar fandoms, and similar flists back on LJ, have done similar fandom history oral history projects, go to the same cons, and have both been on the OTW board. Laura Hale once went so far as to “out” me as her. And now we like the same academic books too. Heh.)

So, obviously, now I have to write meta about this, and Fandom First Friday is the perfect time to take a stab at it. I have so much more to say and I want to go back through How to be Gay and pull out many more amazing quotes, but better to write something than wait for perfection.

What I found the most interesting about Halperin’s analysis was that he points out that women may find these funhouse mirror versions of femaleness upsetting, and those feelings are completely understandable and valid, but they don’t make drag any less empowering or significant for gay men. He neither thinks that we need to get rid of drag nor that women should stop having those reactions.

He also talks about how subtext is often more appealing than text: when he first started teaching his college course ‘How to be Gay’, on which the book is based, he assumed that students would connect more with literal representation of their identities. That’s the narrative we push: now that we have literal X on TV or in a Broadway show, we don’t need subtextual old Y anymore! Instead, many of his students loved things like The Golden Girls and failed to connect with current gay representation.

It’s a long book, but what many of his ideas boil down to is that a Broadway show that is massively subtextually queer allows the viewer to identify with any of the characters or with all of them simultaneously or with the situation in general. It’s highly fluid. Gay representation often means a couple of specific gay characters with a rigid identity. Emotionally, that can be harder to connect to.

Sometimes, allegory gets closer to one’s own internal experiences than literal depiction does.

Coppa’s article (book chapter?) is about exactly that. It’s titled: Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. She uses Halperin’s book but extends the idea further. I particularly liked her example of how female fans use Bucky to tell stories that are essentially (and often literally) about rape. His story is about a loss of bodily autonomy and about having one’s boundaries violated in a way that is familiar to female fans, but he’s a male action hero, so those stories don’t have the same visceral ick factor as writing about literal rape of literal women.

Partly, that’s due to how society treats men vs. women, but it’s also about which fans are writing these stories and which fans are the target audience of them. Just as a cis gay man appropriating Joan Crawford to talk about his experience of gayness isn’t really for or about women, most slash fanfic about Bucky being victimized isn’t really for or about cis gay men.

It was on the dancefloor at Vividcon that I realized that, as a woman, I have this unconscious feeling like I am appropriating gay men’s culture when I’m into Joan Crawford and other over-the-top female performers. It’s ridiculous! How can I be appropriating a female celebrity from gay men? But it’s an experience I share with lots of other women. Telling women we have no right to things is the bedrock of our culture.

That feature film Slash, which featured a bunch of cis male slash writers was inspired partly by the male director going on Reddit and finding a bunch of gay guys saying that slash squicks them. He felt that he was being progressive by erasing women.

On Tumblr, the fujocourse gets reblogged not just by toxic pits of misogynist, delusional bullshit like thewoesofyaoi, but also by seemingly reasonable fans. Hell, I’m pretty sure I used to suffer from this problem myself: I remember a time when I felt like I, as a bisexual woman, liked slash better, differently, and more correctly than straight women did.

I no longer feel this way.

There are lots of reasons for caring about slash, some of which are just about the pretty, some of which are more about gender, and some of which are more about sexual orientation, but after seeing decades of arguments about who is allowed to like slash, I have come to the conclusion that none of them are valid. All of them are “Not like the other girls!” and hating on femaleness. Some of the fans who do this are female and some are not, but it all boils down to not feeling like women have a right to a voice.

And then there’s Halperin calmly asserting gay men’s right to self-expression!

It struck me like a bolt of lightning because it was so self-assured. He never doubts that there’s something valid and important about giving gay men space to explore their own emotional landscapes. Literal representation is important, sure, but so is the ability to make art that speaks to your insides, not just your outside, and that sometimes means allegorical, subtextual art played out in bodies unlike your own.

“Fetishization” a la Tumblr often means writing stories with explicit sex or liking ships because they’re hot. Sometimes, it means writing kinks that are seen as dark or unusual. Frankly, this sort of fujocourse boils down to thinking that sex and desire are dirty and that m/m sex is the dirtiest of all. I do write some ~dark~ kinks in my fic because, for one thing, I’m a kinky person in real life, and for another, I often use fic to explore the experience of having dark thoughts and wondering what that says about me.

A lot of slash writers are exploring feelings of victimization. Another big chunk of us explore things like rape fantasies from the bottom: maybe we have and maybe we haven’t experienced assault in real life, but for all of us, having that kind of rape fantasy brings up questions of whether we’re asking for it, whether it’s okay to be into that kind of thing, whether it means something. Another chunk of us are exploring a different kind of “bad” thoughts: feelings of aggression, violence, dominance. In my own work, I’m interested in sadists and how they come to terms with their desires, but I think slash is also often a way to explore any sort of violent, dark feeling, not just rape fantasies from the top. Society tells us women aren’t allowed to have dark thoughts–hell, that we’re not capable of impulses that dark. Sometimes, it’s easier to write even a relatively banal action story about a male action hero because he, in canon, is allowed to have the feelings and impulses that interest the writer.

The fujocourse is all about saying that women aren’t allowed to have dark impulses ever. That we’re not allowed to be horny. That we’re not allowed to enjoy art for the sake of an orgasm. When we depict people not precisely like ourselves, we’re overstepping. When we make art for our own pleasure instead of devoting our lives to service, we are toxic and bad. Any time. Every time.

It’s just another round of saying that women’s pleasure is not valid and women’s personal space should not be respected. No hobbies for you: only motherhood.

And yet that’s not actually what most slash fans think. I was heartened to read Lucy Neville’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica. A friend read it recently and was trying to guess which quotes were from me. I have to admit, I was playing that game too! I honestly couldn’t tell, until I looked at demographic info, that some could not have been mine. They sounded so familiar. On Tumblr, I tend to wade into meta discussions, so I see a lot of loud, divisive views. I especially see a lot of views that, over time, make me start to wonder if I’m a crazy outlier. Intellectually, I know that this is all down to bad curation of my dash and a love of browsing the meta tags. I didn’t realize how much it had crept up on me unconsciously–how much I had started to feel like I had to justify and explain the most basic and common experiences of being a slash fan.

What was interesting about Neville’s book is how alike many of the women sounded. Now, no one book represents everybody, and she makes no claims to have figured out the exact size or demographic breakdown of fandom. Her focus is on women who like m/m material, whether slash or porno movies or anything else. At the same time, though, she surveyed heaps of women, and the responses were amazingly similar. Nearly every quote in that book strikes a chord with me. Nearly all of them, with a few minor variations, could be something I’ve written. Gay, straight, bi, asexual: we all had many of the same things to say about slash and what it means to us.

So, some brief, and more digestible thoughts:

Slash is “overrepresented” in meta and scholarly literature because people still ask us to justify ourselves constantly.

People ask us to justify ourselves because they assume that “good representation” is literal representation.

There are key emotional, psychological aspects of our experiences that are often better expressed allegorically, whether we’re gay men doing drag or women writing slash or any other sort of artist.

Here are some choice quotes from Coppa. (I will restrain myself and not just try to quote the entire thing. Heh.)

“There are endless transmedia adaptations of characters like Sherlock Holmes or Batman, so it is clearly not appropriation that’s the issue: it is the appropriation by the other—by women, in this case.

One could argue then that it is our awareness of this appropriative doubleness—of the familiar characters acting in an unfamiliar script, of the female storyteller animating the male characters— that boots slash out of “literature,” with its illusions of psychological coherence (see Edwards’s Chapter 3 in this volume), and puts it instead into the category of performance, itself so often associated with the fake, the female, the forged, the queer. My argument in this chapter is that it might be useful to compare slash to other forms of appropriative performance; drag comes powerfully to mind and, more recently, the musical Hamilton. These are forms where it’s important to see the bothness, the overlaid and blurred realities: male body/Liza Minnelli; person of color/George Washington.”

“In his book How to Be Gay, David Halperin (2012) discusses the ongoing centrality of certain female characters to the gay male cultural experience and takes as his project an explanation of why gay men choose those particular avatars and what they make of them. Halperin argues that gay men use these female characters to articulate a gay male subjectivity which precedes and may in important ways be separate from a gay male sexual identity (or to put it another way, a boy may love show tunes before he loves men, or without ever loving men). The gay male appropriation of and perfor- mance of femininity effectively mirror—in the sense both of “reflect” and “reverse”—slash fiction’s preoccupations with and appropriations of certain (often hyper‐performatively) male characters in service of a female sensibility; in both cases, appropriation becomes a way of saying something that could not otherwise easily be said.”

“A character like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne speaks, obviously, to boys who are getting mixed messages about what successful manhood looks like in the twenty‐first century—it was hard enough in the old days to be Charles Atlas, but today you have to be Charles Atlas and Steve Jobs at the same time, which is a problem of time commitment just for a start. But these characters speak to women, too: differently. The doubled nature of the paired male characters taken up by slash fandom—these aliens, these costumed heroes, these men wearing man suits, men in male drag—make them appealing sites of identification for women, or proxy identities, to use Halperin’s (2012) term; that is, they provide “a metaphor, an image, a role” (185). They are sites of complex feeling.

But what these characters are metaphors for, what they make us feel, is not simple, singular, or easily reducible. Halperin takes hundreds of pages even to begin to excavate the complicated web of meanings around Joan Crawford; I am not going to be able to unpack any of these iconic male characters in a few paragraphs, and it is also the nature of fandom to build multiple and contradictory meanings around fan favorites (and to get into heated arguments over them).”

[In Halperin’s class] “Works that allowed gay men to be invisible were preferred to those where they were explicitly represented. “Non‐gay cultural forms offer gay men a way of escaping from their particular, personal queerness into total, global queerness,” Halperin (2012) writes. “In the place of an identity, they promise a world” (112). I would argue that slash offers something similar—that queer female space, as well as the ability to escape the outline of the identity that you are forced to carry every day—and that for gay men and slash fans both, the suggestion that you would restrict your identification to those characters with whom you share an identity feels limiting.”

“Visibility is a trap,” Phelan (2003) concludes, referencing Lacan (1978) (93): “it summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession”—and fans on the ground know this and talk about it in very nearly this language. Again, this is not to say that fans—or gay men, for that matter—do not want or deserve good representations: female fandom, slash fandom included, championed Mad Max: Fury Road, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, and the new, gender‐swapped Ghostbusters, all of which have multiple and complex female characters. Rather, I am arguing that representation does not substitute for the pleasure or power of invisibility; for, as even the most famously visible actors say, “But what I really want is to direct.”

[ao3datafan]

Aggregate Data and Meaningful Conclusions: A Response to Fansplaining’s Fandom Study

Before I get into this, I just want to give a quick update on a few things.

1)      I am still looking for a new home for the AO3 DataFan project. Pillowfort may be viable in a few years, but it’s not currently viable as it lacks a lot of the key infrastructure needed to make these posts (and it’s chunky and buggy as hell but that’s a different problem). If you have suggestions, shoot them my way!

2)      WOW Look at all these new followers! Where the heck did you all come from? Oh my gosh! When I started, I thought I’d maybe get around 50 or so followers, most of whom would be acafans themselves or adjacent.

3)      I’m having all sorts of “fun” (read: horrible) times with my current analysis on the taxonomy of Big Name Fans. I knew it would be a tricky question to answer when I started (but honestly, why not try to attempt it anyway?) but I didn’t quite anticipate HOW complicated this would be. Haha! I’m actually working with a non-fandom involved coworker on how to do some *insert technical data science talk here* with the data to see if we can’t get a conclusion from the data we have. However, we’ve both come to a very water is wet conclusion; BNFs are not defined solely by the popularity of the work they create. More on that when I finish the post.

Okay, with the announcements out of the way, let’s talk about data collection and fandom analysis, and why Fansplaining’s fandom study has left me feeling a little let down.

So I could have sworn I’d talked about univariate analysis before, but since I can’t find where, I’ll recap it for you here. Univariate analysis is analysis conducted on a single variable. It’s relatively straightforward (and boring) and it usually lends itself to making pie charts and bar graphs. This has been the prevalent trend in fandom analytics for a few years now. Blogs like fandometrics and projects like FandomStats use univariate analysis to reveal information about fandom on the broad scale. Most often, univariate analysis is preformed on what’s called aggregate data.

The process of aggregating data and performing analysis on that aggregation does have it’s uses, but it’s largely the problem with fandom analytics that I started this project to address. Aggregation and univariate analysis can tell us the “WHAT” of the data, but it can’t tell us the “WHY/HOW.” Take, for example, FandomStats queries.

Above is a query on the “Fluff” tag on AO3. It’s… nice. You can see how authors chose to rate their fluffy works and if you read further down you can even see which fandoms are the “fluffiest” in terms of works. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a very solid “WHAT” answer to the data. “What are people writing?”

Compare this to my analysis of “Fluff” versus “Angst” tagged works. 

In this post, I used two variables to make a comparison. I tracked an individual work’s hit count compared to it’s uses of either the “Fluff” or “Angst” tag. It’s actually still considered univariate analysis when you do this, but the difference is that it’s performed on non-aggregated data. In this case, you can compare how the tags influence the hit count of a story. It answers a “HOW” question. “How does a work’s tagging effect it’s hit count?”

For an example of multivariate analysis, see also my post on the relationship between the length of a fic and its hit count which attempts to answer “How does the chapter length affect hit count?”

Okay, so what does all this have to do with Fansplaining’s Fandom Study?

As I showed earlier, aggregate data can only be used in univariate analysis. It makes good pie charts and bar charts, but not much else. Aggregate data can tell you “WHAT” something is, but it can’t tell you “HOW” or “WHY” something is. In order to get to the heart of those, you need to know how data points interplay with one another. To do that, you need individual data points. Like an individual work’s metrics or an individual’s responses to a survey.

Which is why I’m slightly annoyed with Fansplaining. Dear Flourish and Elizabeth – you conducted one of the largest surveys of fanfiction reader’s habits with 7,500 individual data points of users ranking their fanfiction reading preferences. I would literally KILL to be able to do that! That is a GOLD MINE of data.

So why the hell did you decide to aggregate it all and only release the aggregated results?

Now I want to be clear that I am not bashing Fansplaining’s study or their thoughtful and well written article explaining their results. They did a decent job even if it is frustratingly banal to someone like me who wants to understand the interplay between data points. It’s especially frustrating that the article itself even asks the kinds of questions that multivariate analysis can answer.

And while mpreg is widely disliked, pregnancy in general is met with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯—a highly suggestive difference. We’ve got a lot of theories on why, but they’ll need to wait; it deserves a lot more space than we can give it here.

You know what would be a good start to answering this question? Knowing the demographics of your participants. And by demographics, I don’t mean whether they’re male, female, non-binary, black, white, Asian, young, old, etc. (although I would kill to know that stuff too). What I mean is knowing how they answered other questions in the survey. For example, is there a high correlation between people who answered “Yay!” for both mpreg and pregnancy? Did people who enjoy mpreg also tend to enjoy some mpreg-adjacent tropes such as omegaverse? Is pregnancy met with a warmer reception by people who prefer relationships involving a female character (het or F/F for example)? You COULD read any freeform text comments on the survey and attempt to get some answers from that, or you COULD do multivariate analysis. Or, even better, you could use that fancy data science technique called NLP and do both!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There’s also some data I would have killed to analyze on a purely selfish level. As a Domme in the BDSM community, I’m keenly interested in the interplay of power and relationships – who has power, how did they get it, and how do they maintain it? – so when Fansplaining reported that “slavery” was an almost universally reviled trope, I really wanted to know more about the psychology of why that is. Again, multivariate analysis could help us identify the relationship between how people feel about “slavery” tags and how they feel about other tags and tropes. For example, people who hate slavery might feel strongly negative towards fics about racism, which can be an indication that they dislike the implications of chattel slavery or that the trope hits closer to home than they want to deal with when they’re enjoying their leisure time. On the other hand, people who like slavery might come it for much the same reason I do – because it’s an interesting study of how people negotiate power and relationships in an inherently unbalanced system. In that case, they may also enjoy omegaverse, prostitution (wherein the power is in the exchange of sex and money), or even teacher/student fics.

(I also really want to know what’s going on with centaurification. I’ve been in the BDSM community for 8 years and the online fandom community for 18 years. I thought I had seen it all, and yet I am completely stumped about what centaurification is.)

Alas, I may never have the answers to these questions. In my professional life, I’ve had clients hand me datasets upon datasets of aggregated data and then ask me to use sophisticated machine learning/artificial intelligence to glean insights for them. I’ve always managed not to laugh in their faces even if my eyebrow is developing a bit of a twinge. Instead, I patiently explain to them what I just explained to you guys, my wonderful dear followers. Maybe if I explain it often enough, someone will gift me with raw, unaggregated data of one of these surveys.

A girl can only hope.

(But seriously, I really would commit murder for a copy of the raw survey results.)

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

My Life as an Acafan: Bringing This Project Back To Life!

Hello, people!

You might have thought this project was dead, but it’s not! I’m bringing this back to life like a good necromancer ahahaha I’ll use this project to give an update about my researches and how the whole ‘bringing Fan Studies’ to Brazil is going. And man, a lot went down since my last update!

First, the last article I wrote I talked about the research for my Master’s degree: to create a framework to define slash fiction during the 2010s. This plan is still up, but it’s pushed back for now. I couldn’t go through the entrance exam thanks to my mental health issues.

I’m not sure if I explained this, but I already have a bachelor’s degree in History (also a teaching license, but we don’t talk about it), so in my country I can apply to any type of Master’s degree - so that’s why I was applying to a Master’s degree last year. However, you might also remember I am getting a second degree: double major in English and Portuguese. Yes, I was going to apply to a Master’s degree in Literary Theory while being an university student (it’s allowed in my country because I need just to have a bachelor’s degree to get in a Master program). Yes, I am a crazy person.

Anyways, as my mental health didn’t allow me to go through my crazy plan, I decided to let this plan to 2022 and focus in finishing university. That’s when my dear advisor, without warning me, applied me to the undergrad thesis class (well, it’s not really a class because we don’t have classes, it just means I’m finally working in my undergrad thesis and I’ll have to present it in 3 semesters). Spoilers: when he did that, I had no idea what I was going to do for my undergrad thesis because I was pretty much focused on my Master’s project and I lowkey freaked out when I opened my schedule and there was this discipline I hadn’t applied for. As my Master’s thing was put on the back burner, I was like: okay, I’ll do it because there’s nothing else for me. Even if I had no idea what I was going to do. Keep in mind that all of this happened between November and December last year.

Fast forward to January, I haven’t talked to my advisor since November and I was dedicating my time to the first round of exams because my college finally came back in the online mode. So, I was watching my English Narrative classes and my professor started explaining things related to the rise of the novel and about the perspective of the public related to it and that was when something clicked inside my brain and offered me a solution to my undergrad thesis problem. Or lack of if, in this case.

The idea is basically to write about fanfiction and its characteristics based on Tumblr posts written between 2014 and 2020, compare with my own experiences  and then with academic studies related to fanfiction - basically it’s a weird autoethnography about fanfiction in the late 2010s.

In a matter of 2 weeks, I managed to put the project together and present to my advisor as my undergrad thesis and he approved! Now, I’m already working on it and I already wrote two pages of it - which is a great progression if you think about all my past failures regarding my fic researches. So, I’m finally going somewhere. Next time, I’ll bring more updates related to my research ♥

xoxo

Naty

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

My Life as an Acafan: it’s complaining time!

Right now, I’m reading the key works of fan studies. I’m reading and selecting works that will bring the type of debates I want to have in my classroom. It’s an exercise any competent teacher does - no matter how long they’ve been teaching. I’m not well versed yet on most things related to fan studies because I’ve started studying it kinda recently, but I’m slowly reading most of things any fan scholars should read and I’ve a couple things to say. Most aimed to non-fan academics.

If any non-fan academic is reading this, I think you should be aware that it is glaringly evident that you have never set a foot on fandom more than necessary and don't understand the core of fandom. You all try, you all make some good points and, somehow, you’re always off the mark. You do not get it. 

As a black bisexual woman, I’m going to do an analogy to make it easier to understand. The feeling I have when I read a non-fan academic talking about fandom and fans is almost the same feeling I get when I read a white person or straight/cis person trying to explain racism and homophobia/transphobia. You do not get it and you will never get it because you didn’t go through it and, probably, won’t ever go through it. It’s not your standpoint - and take this standpoint I’m saying here as the same one from standpoint theory. It feels off place and like missing several points about fandom.

Another thing is that non-fan academics come off, not sure if it’s intentional, as people that believe their analysis are impartial or mostly impartial because they are not fans. I’m gonna say this as a historian: there’s no such thing as impartiality. Everyone has a bias, especially if you ‘re studying something. If you commit to do research, and one that ends up being your lifetime work, it’s indisputable you have a bias and it shows. My God, you’ve no idea how much it does show, even if you think you don’t. I can read between the lines and understand most of you think we are akin to cultists - which shows you do not understand fandom at all. The least thing fandom has, as collective, is a behavior of venerating or excessively admiring anything at all. Fandom is a bunch of ruthless critics that even if they swear they love something, they’ll absolutely tear it down at any time and any place without hesitation if they feel like they are entitled to. Nothing is sacred and nothing is safe from criticism or fandom’s cruelty. If you do not know or understand this very basic notion, you truly have no idea what you’re studying or talking about. 

Also, I think the terms fan and fandom are used carelessly by some non-fan academics (I’m so close to calling them local academics, just so I have a label to identify them ahahaha). Everyone that has an intense enthusiasm for a particular work is a fan for them and, kinda automatically, are part of fandom. I don’t agree with that notion at all. Those fans are not part of fandom. Fandom is a collective, they are people coming together and interacting and forming relationships. It’s a social thing and I say this as a fandom fan since 2005. Listen, I’ve always been a fan in the sense of getting obsessed with several media works. I mean, by the time I was 10, I knew how to recite every single line and sing every song of The Lion King, The Little Mermaid and Mulan. Does that mean I was part of Disney fandom? Hell no. I just became a fandom fan in 2005 when I became part of the community and started consuming fanworks. Non-fan academics need to start listening to fans, because we set ourselves apart from those people. It’s so disrespectful to us to take our terms and apply them in a way that they are not supposed to be used, especially to explain experiences that are not related to us. 

But maybe the problem stems from the name of the field itself. Maybe if it was called Fandom Studies, we would not have this kind of controversy in relation to the use of terms like fan and fandom. After all, Fan Studies implies all kinds of fans and not only the ones that are part of an organized collective. Maybe the solution is to have two fields: Fandom Studies, to deal with the social experience and the individuals that carry out fan practices (like Jenkins pointed out that, when people identify themselves as fans, they are not focused in just one particular work, but rather a range of works and apply sets of practices on them) and Fan Studies, to deal with individual and isolated experiences of being enthusiastic (read having emotional attachment) over mass media works. Like enthusiastic people, they might identify themselves as fans because fan is a common word nowadays, but they do not use the term fandom because, most of time, they don’t even know the word or what it means. So, how can you reduce fandom to any experience of emotional attachment to any kind of media? I mean, if fandom fans so many times differentiate their investment to a particular work by saying ‘I watch this, but I’m not part of the fandom’ i.e. consume/create fan practices in this media; how dare you to take our term and apply to people that don’t even know what it means just because they’re emotionally attached to a piece of mass media work? 

If someone does not partake in fan practices (aka content created by fans in an organized community), they’re not part of a fandom. And, when I say partake, I mean consume and/or create, not just one of them. This is fandom 101. This is a problem that I see with non-fan academics, they do not respect what we establish in our community.

Someone who watches a series or movie regularly or just really loves them is not a member of said fandom. It’s not that simple. And, if you think that it’s not like that, I dare you to do just one thing: go to a movie premiere of a big franchise like Marvel and, without proper context, start asking people who seems invested (aka wearing shirts or looking really excited to be there) things like ‘So what is your favorite fandom discourse/meta about this franchise you’re about to watch?’ and then you come back to me and tell me how many people actually knew what fandom is and what meta/discourse means in that context. I’ll bet good money not even half of the people who are wearing t-shirts of said franchise will understand what you’re talking about.

So, being part of fandom means being engaged in particular social practices. That’s how, among ourselves, we differentiate us from the people that just love very much certain mass media works. It’s different. Non-fan academics need to remember they are studying living and breathing subjects who are incredibly analytical, so I think maybe it’s time to take a step back, rethink your attitude and respect the norms dictated by the community you research. I mean, I’ve been part of fandom for 15 years and I haven’t ever seen one single fan defend the idea that people who just love intensely some work of fiction and do nothing more than buy a t-shirt cause it looks cool are part of fandom.

Ever.

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

My Life as an Acafan: an autoethnography but not really

When I started this text, I thought of the different ways I could do it. I even wrote three paragraphs talking about how the pandemic affected my life and how I had to find ways to deal with the losses I went through during the quarantine (the loss of my plans, of my steady income, of my emotional stability, of the balance between my depression and anxiety). However, I couldn’t evoke the feelings I wanted to. So, I decided to start talking about how everything started. 

Last year, I started going to Clube Coréia (Korea Club), which is the study group to learn korean at the university (UFRJ) I attend, and that’s how I met @sunshvness (Gyu). We started speaking to each other because she saw a fanart on my phone case that featured our favorite Thai actors, so it was fairly easy for us to become friends. 

I don’t really remember how I ended up mentioning my research project, but I know we eventually talked about my love for fanfiction. I told her I’ve decided to study my passion during my undergrad, with plans to expand and deepen my research in a master’s and doctorate programs. She confessed her desire of studying fandom too and, being the good fangirl I am, I offered my support. Because that’s what we always want! We want people studying what we study, especially if they are already part of the fan culture. I sent her my “small” library of fan studies on the chance that she really wanted to invest in research. A few months later, she took my invitation because she had the idea of creating an extension course about LGBT representativity in fanfic (quick explanation: in our university it’s possible for undergrad students to manage an extension course as part of their professional training under the supervision of a professor). I was pretty excited with the project, but I ended up forgetting about it thanks to the end of semester distress followed by our really lengthy Summer vacations.

At the end of February, my work spouse Marcelo (don’t forget this name, he’ll be mentioned several times as this project progresses) let me know there was a new extension course that seemed to be made for me! So, he sent me the poster of the course ‘Representativity LGBTQ+: dialogues between mainstream production versus fanfiction’ and what surprise! It dawned on me it was the project Gyu had mentioned to me the previous year. Obviously, I enrolled in the course and I was extremely excited to finally be part of something that really enthralls me. And then COVID-19 happened, the university stopped… So you get what happened. Or, in this case, didn’t happen.  

Well, due to my excitement about the course, Gyu and I started texting each other and talking a lot more. That’s when she invited me to give a lecture about fanfiction in her course. Not only did I accept, but also I got really into the idea of teaching about fanfiction, its history and relevance to our culture. I confess that I started lowkey daydreaming about my future, about having my own course that I could teach not only fanfics, but other fan practices and explore even more the field of fan studies. And that’s when I had my eureka moment. 

Why would I leave this idea to the future, when I could do it now? So, I quickly outlined the kind of course I wanted to teach and presented the idea to Gyu , inviting her to become my partner in this crazy venture and she said yes. And that’s why I’m writing this text now.

Before I go further, let me explain one thing: we are from Brazil and we don’t have anything consolidated about Fan Studies here, so we would be the first in our country to do something like that - at least that we are aware of. In Brazilian academic world, we do have a few researches about fandom, but nothing related to Fan Studies as a field. Just to everyone understand the situation of studying fandom in my country: we have around five books in Portuguese directly related to it. What we want to do is to bring Fan Studies to Brazil as a consolidated field and make it accessible to people that don’t speak English - but to make it happen we need people interested in it, so the course would help us with that. 

My Life as an Acafan is going to be a kind of diary to register the process of creating the course and, at the same time, a place to write down my feelings and thoughts related to the work I’m doing. The plan is to keep a register from the planning to the conclusion of the course (which means it will include my thoughts regarding the course once I’ve taught it), so there isn’t a real deadline to finish this project. My proposal here is to develop something close to an autoethnography where I’ll write about the progression of my role as an academic fangirl, even if I don’t have any intention of doing a serious study based on this particular experience. I don’t know if this will be actual useful in the future, but this is the kind of meaningful register I want to keep for future me. I want to be able, when I’m older, to look at my past and see how much I evolved and matured since I’ve started my lifetime research. And, if you are still confused about the title of the text, the term acafan is the combination of the expression academic fan - which is how researchers who are also part of fan culture call themselves.

So, keep an eye here because in a few days I’ll be back with some thoughts related to fandom, especially related to academic research from a fangirl point of view. This text here is much more an introduction of what I’m going to do during this project and the reason it exists.

So, see you all soon and have a good week ♥

[studiesof-fandom-primaryblog]

After a long time inactive, we are back! However, we changed a lil’ bit!

Why did you change the name?

I found out back in 2019 there was already a site with the name Fan Studies Network. I had no idea back in 2018 when I first created the blog, but now that I am aware, I thought it was better to change the name. One of our amazing followers suggested the name Fandom Studies, but it wasn’t available - I picked one close to the name she suggested tho. So, here we are! Brand new name, but same mission!

Okay, so what is Studies of Fandom?

It’s a blog dedicated to people interested in Fandom and its practices as academic subject.

What is the main goal of Studies of Fandom?

The main goal is to provide access to useful reading material for Fan Studies researchers, especially for people that don’t have money to buy them because it’s really expensive.

What will you find on Studies of Fandom?

You’ll find several articles and books related to Fan Studies available for download, donation to buy agreed upon books to expand the resources, and posts related to fandom as an academic subject. Also, a few of my personal projects related to my research. Right now, I have My Life as an Acafan, which is a kind of diary to register the process of creating the Fandom Studies course I’ll teach at the university I attend. It’s a crazy venture and I want to write down every minute of it, so I don’t forget anything.

You can find in our sidebar the links for our Library, our tags to find what you look for and, when it’s once again open, the place to donate money to acquire a new book. For now, just reblog this post and help spread the word that we are alive and kicking!