oh my god i just stumbled across this 2008 interview in Transformative Works & Cultures with three women academic friends who formed a collective called the “Audre Lorde of the Rings.” I LOVE IT SO MUCH!!!!!
some of my favorite passages from the interview:
KT: [...] We spend a lot of our time playing with words and ideas to work out, simultaneously, the affinities and frustrations produced by these shared colonial legacies. In terms of what ALOTR itself actually refers to in its ideal sense—we were all especially frustrated about a bad professional encounter, and a particularly antifeminist one, and we channeled that anger into a conversation about old-school women-of-color feminism and about the lack of appreciation for collective endeavors in this profession. That immediately brought us to a mad-respect chatfest about Audre Lorde, then to The Lord of the Rings and to the concept of a motley fellowship, of our motley crew (which included more than the three of us).
As this idea of the ALOTR kept resurfacing in our conversations, we got to thinking about what the fellowship means, about what hobbitry means, and about how we all carry hobbitry in our hearts. The entire Fellowship of the Ring ultimately carries hobbitry in their hearts, regardless of their individual origins (as dwarf, elf, man, etc.). Hobbits are a simple lot who are pure of heart, and who love drink, food, and playing barefoot. But they also bear the tremendous burden of transporting the Ring and resisting its allure of power for the sake of power. What they don't have in physical strength or pulchritude they make up for with their tenacity in spirit and purity of heart.
And I think we identified with Frodo's temptations as well as his burdens, understanding also how significant friendship is, first and foremost, during such arduous endeavors. We understand how easy it is (especially in the academy) to be tempted by the dark powers of the Ring—by the allure of power itself. But we hope and aspire constantly to thwart those darker elements: the covetousness, the useless skirmishes for control, the selfishness. Friendship, fellowship, mutual encouragement, are what make us happier as well as stronger doing what we do.
***
KT: In some way, we were accomplishing some of our best, most "real" work during downtimes at conferences when we weren't presenting (or in the presence of) more ostensibly "polished" academic presentations, and instead having conversations about pop culture and big ideas. I guess we wanted to capture that sense of whimsy as well as naughtiness. Overall, I think we wanted a venue to get these ideas off our chests, or at least to try and figure out a space for our writing that would capture some of our more oblique, popular inspirations. And to acknowledge that these "oblique" forms are central to our intellectual process––not simply props or objects for the typical displays of mastery, ownership, and wankery in the academy and beyond.
ATV: For me, O!I is a place where we're able to put a few things to words. It's that experience of listening to the same song over and over again, except that it happens outside of headphones and in good company. It's about working through a few questions that we wish would get asked of us. It is also the kind of disciplinary mechanism that you might want and need for writing.
Alongside KT, I reiterate that O!I is an entity that sprung from finding family in the abjection of academia, rushed along by a few too many of its conferences. Its nascent rumblings could be traced to exchanging faces across the rooms of professional cocktail parties and to years of note-passing. I think it's worth noting that gravity first pulled our triumvirate together during the Experience Music Conference in 2005, an annual event that gathers journalists, academics, and performers together in Seattle. Being ladies in music scholarship is a very specific and difficult and discouraging and, of course, immensely pleasurable kind of experience. The interface between music and critics and criticism, and the snares to be found there, has been a formative site for the battle-scarred heart of O!I.
I think the kinds of challenges presented by EMP—namely, the procedures by which we had to take ourselves more seriously as music critics—provided the collective stuff behind our virtual reckoning. We had long been working through some fluster over ways of talking about music—the crazy-making kind that has certain folks making claims to and over things, and their fascinating ability to go unchallenged. The crazy-making was also due to our shared frustration over the lack of hospitality our work has found in certain venues—which is not only about being published in a book but also about being in the room. Together, we urgently needed a way to make productive use of all that frustration. O!I forces us to not spend energy on that anger, but to take said energy and do our own work.
***
Q: Would you call Oh! Industry a fan site? How do you conceptualize your and your project's relationship to fan cultures?
KT: I think in certain respects, O!I is a place for us to express some of our enthusiasms and fanaticisms. But I also think it serves as a venue for us to try other things out and on. To test-drive some of our passing fancies—songs of the moment, as well as of a lifetime. I have always been a believer and proponent in the critical labor of fandom. In fact, I've been teaching a course on "Fan Obsession, Imitation and Expertise" since graduate school, bringing together certain urtexts in philosophy and literature (Nietzsche on Wagner, Ruskin on Turner) and thinking about how these "boy" genealogies carry over into more contemporary incarnations while also being exploded or remade by queers/women/working/people of color. Our insistence on affect, deep engagement, investment in our objects (even if those affects are negative and off-putting), is also related to fandom. I always say I can't deal with works that refuse to feel it or somehow can't feel it. The object, especially the popular object, is not an end in and of itself.
***
Q: Your blog takes something of a defiant tone toward the academic 'verse. How do you understand O!I's relationship to your institutional day jobs? Do you think it could or should be recognized as part of your professional work? Would you like to see academia's view of popular culture and fandom change?
ATV: I think part of surviving and having a good time in the academy means that you have to let go of what is permissible in and to it—what it recognizes and what it finds recognizable. It is kind of liberating when you decide to just do your work, however out there you think it might be. Of course, there are material implications for doing so. Many women who have been doing their work (often when they do it brilliantly) have been denied promotion, a paycheck, a book deal. But to do otherwise—to not do one's work—is no way to live either. In terms of the writing itself, I don't think you would find much disparity between our popular and our academic voices. Some have had a hostile reaction to such blurring, but others have found some relief in it. It is such a tremendous honor when someone approaches us and speaks of finding a newfound sense of permissiveness by what we're trying to do.
**
KT: I agree with everything my sistahs say. Especially to any and all references to Ann Jillian and It's a Living. As I mentioned at the very beginning of our chat, O!I serves as a venue for some of our digressions. It also offers a kind of starter kit for each of us, I think. I know that I turn to writing pieces for O!I when I feel I really need to get something off my chest. To do something quickly. To express my interest and passion in something that it might take me longer to write about in a more "official" context.
More than anything, O!I offers a place for us to say whatever we want to without worrying about whether or not it will "count." It's tremendously freeing and a great cure for writer's block to have a place to work ideas out, even if they're only seeds of ideas. Sometimes the ideas on O!I even end up more polished or thoughtful than when I sit down to write more officially, with the burden of formality and making it count hanging over me.
All this said, doing a site like O!I also requires a lot of prep time and work. Time spent organizing the page, inviting guests, writing posts, etc. In that sense, I believe it should be recognized as part of our professional labor. And as for the latter part of the question, about academia's views toward pop culture and fandom, I can only say yes. I'd have to ramble on forever if I tried to explain why.
“If Adorno and Horkheimer viewed the culture industry as cultivating a homogeneous audience and stamping out individualism, then the convergence culture industry attempts to reign in the least passive collective of consumers (fans), and to homogenize fandom itself. The convergence culture industry is equally concerned with discipline and control, but it must operate within the emergent (and decidedly more unwieldy and undisciplined) conditions of participatory digital media culture.
Media industries operating within a convergence context need audiences to be active, to behave like ‘fans,’ but they would prefer prescribed modes of activity that are promotionally beneficial and not ideologically challenging. The convergence culture industry’s systemic support of some fan identities and modes of fan engagement over others in no way forecloses the capacity of fans to subvert these models of prescribed participation. But, importantly, to be noncompliant often results in having one’s fannish authenticity called into question. Thus, a key distinction is that fans themselves are now working as the agents of the convergence culture industry, reinforcing these industrial predilections and routinely using them to alternately dismiss and harass female fans.
Suzanne Scott, Fake Geek Girls: Fan Culture, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry
i don’t even knoooow god i’m at that point where you are so deep into the draft that you can no longer tell if anything you’re saying is actually accurate or if you am just constructing your object of study in your mind to fit the argument you want to make lol
idk if any of this will go in the piece i am just writing through some thoughts:
"Play is a voluntary, intrinsically motivated, child-directed activity involving flexibility of choice in determining how an item is used. No extrinsic goal exists. The process of play is usually enjoyed, and the end product is less important. Play involves the child's physical, mental, and emotional self in creative expression and can involve social interaction. Thus when the child plays, one can say that the total child is present."
had a teaching observation today and my kids did soooo well. also we are having some truly fascinating discussions about whether or not fandom can/should be studied in literature classrooms. like i feel like it’s such a genuinely sticky question -- and also one that makes people really have to articulate what they think literature is, what it means to study it, what the purpose of a literary education should be, etc. and it doesn’t just break down around “fanfic GOOD” vs. “fanfic STUPID.” it’s actually such a complex issue that involves thinking about so many ethical and practical concerns. we read raymond williams’s “culture is ordinary" much earlier in the semester and i keep thinking this week about what he says about mass culture at the end -- it’s something like, mass culture is not inherently good or bad; it’s not something that we should feel we have to wholly accept or wholly reject. those kinds of reductive “for” and “against” accounts of pop culture are not helpful to us and will not help us navigate a rapidly changing media environment. the fact is: we live in an expanding culture. today, six decades after “culture is ordinary,” we are immersed in media cultures that have expanded and proliferated SO far beyond anything williams could’ve anticipated. we can’t stop it, we can’t turn back the clock, we can’t slow it down. and that is something i find INCREDIBLY overwhelming and often quite scary, but it is also just a fact, one that requires us to continually engage in this ongoing reckoning with what it means to read, write, tell stories, learn, and communicate in that kind of culture.
“Why does every female genius have to die insane and alone?” writes one student in my class in response to the story of Judith Shakespeare in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Woolf famously tells the story of Judith, William Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister whose attempts to duplicate her brother’s career end with her suicide, to make the point that social and educational inequities would have prevented even a woman as talented as Shakespeare from finding success as a Renaissance writer. This is an essential point to make, but as my student’s response emphasizes, women’s doomed and helpless fate under social oppression is a story that high-culture literature tells repeatedly.
It is also a story that can, as romance writer Jennifer Crusie observes, be profoundly alienating to women. In her former career as a Ph.D. student, Crusie writes, “I had to read Madame Bovary, I had to read Anna Karenina, I had to read ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ I had to read Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Lawrence. I had to see Hester Prynne as the great American heroine who triumphs by remaining celibate for the rest of her endless life.” While in the middle of this mandatory curriculum of stories of disastrous female sexuality, Crusie, looking for examples of women’s narratives, begins reading romances:
‘For the first time, I was reading fiction about women who had sex and then didn’t eat arsenic or throw themselves under trains or swim out to the embrace of the sea, women who won on their own terms (and those terms were pretty varied) and still got the guy in the end without having to apologize or explain that they were still emancipated even though they were forming permanent pair bonds, women who moved through a world of frustration and detail and small pleasures and large friendships, a world I had authority in.’
For Crusie, romance is not utopian fantasy. It describes a world more familiar and real to her than the world of the academic literary canon, in which sex condemns a woman to an early death (often at her own hand), and marriage means slavery. In the world of romance, the autonomous woman need not “die insane and alone.” She can live on and have a successful relationship that assists rather than thwarts her self-realization—which, after all, is something that many women actually do.
-Julie M. Dugger, “I’m a Feminist, But…” Popular Romance in the Women’s Literature Classroom in Journal of Popular Romance Studies
I was working today on a section of my dissertation intro where I am explaining why I spend so much time talking about fandom in 2018 in a project that is supposed to be about middlebrow women writers in the 1930s. there are a lot of reasons why, which I will not go into here!! but I wanted to share some draft writing I did today that may or may not make it into the document itself, where I tried to think through some of the ways that I have written about fandom in the past, as well as some of the reasons why I find thinking about fandom to be so generative for thinking through some of the more abstract questions I am always trying to work through, like why do we read, and what do reading/writing DO or allow us to do, and why are reading and writing worth passionately defending at every turn, and what makes some people fall in love with reading/writing and stay in love with it their whole lives long? (and how can we make that happen for our students???)
*
i. why don’t academics (and other literary snobs) “get” popular fandom?
In my experience trying to explain fandom to academics, I often get the impression that they think of fandom in a couple of ways that strike me as…not quite right. The first is that they define fandom primarily in spatial terms – as a (virtual) location where people gather to share stories that they have written on their own about their favorite books, TV shows, bands, etc. They think of fandom communities as spaces that people log into for a few hours and then log out of (or sometimes, if they know what conventions are, as events that fans fly to for a weekend of cosplaying as their favorite characters and then fly home from).
The second misconception is that academics think of fan writing in terms of time – specifically teleological or developmental time. To describe a practice of writing as teleological means that it is geared towards some predetermined end or goal, and that every step should ideally be moving you closer to that final goal. For academics (as for many non-fan writers), that end goal is the publication of a polished, professional text that will circulate among “real” readers and be received by “real” audiences. One of the many reasons academics are disparaging towards fan writing is that they think of it as underdeveloped writing, or writing that has gotten temporally stalled somewhere. If the goal is to write something “real” or “original,” i.e., a standalone work that could be published and marketed, then fanfiction seen as writing that got stalled somewhere along that developmental path. Academics and other non-fan writers tend to assume that fan writing longs to be more developed, more polished, more “real” than it is – and that fanfic writers (almost always imagined to be silly teenage girls) are amateur writers who lack the experience, imagination, or skill to make that happen. I think we are all familiar with this framing: fandom as a phase you grow out of, fandom as a slightly embarrassing past that gets left behind as you mature into an adult.
ii. on how not to defend fandom (or: mistakes I’m trying to stop making)
At first when I started trying to grapple with these two misconceptions, I spent a lot of time/energy attacking what now feel to me like symptoms rather than underlying causes, or offshoots rather than roots. When I heard academics say or imply things like, “Well, let’s face it, fanfic is just not really that good. It’s amateur (juvenile, underdeveloped) writing,” I initially responded to what felt like the most emotionally charged part of that statement. I was like, “OH, SO YOU THINK FANFIC IS ALL LIKE FIFTY SHADES OF GREY and AFTER? Well, here’s a list of ten fics that I think are gonna BLOW YOUR MIND with how good they are.” And typically I would cite a list of fics that were novel-length and that were written in a sort of self-consciously “literary” prose, while sweeping under the rug all of the PWP, fluff, fragmentary WIPs, fic outlines, etc. The more I thought about it, though, the more conflicted I felt about this approach. Did I really believe that all of Wattpad needed to be just like, cordoned off and sacrificed so that we could be validated by literary critics? Also, did I really think that Fifty Shades was a greater crime against literature or ~Feminism than like… idk… the collected published works of J.M. Coetzee? (GOD I HATE COETZEE.) Who was I protecting here? Who was I throwing under the bus to get my piece of cultural validation or authority?
I realized, too, that I couldn’t really say “look at how many fanworks look just like the stuff you already think is valuable” if I was serious about defending fandoms as amateur cultures, where people could learn how to tell stories, make art, and express themselves through creative activity. The stereotypes about fanfiction as underdeveloped writing were closely linked to stereotypes about fanfiction as like… niche subcultural spaces where weirdos gathered to do weird things. When people said things like, “Aren’t fandoms just, like, teenage girls and crazy Star Trek fans who dress up for conventions?” my response was, at first, to be like, “NO, LOOK AT ALL THE SMART PEOPLE HERE!!!! look at the lawyers and the people with advanced degrees and the literary critics who write fanfic in their spare time!!! Fans are basically critics! We basically have PhDs in our subjects!”
But again: the more I made some version of that argument, the more uncomfortable I became with it.* While I don’t want to suggest that fandoms are political utopias I do believe that in their best or most ideal forms, they are spaces/communities where culturally marginalized people can write and create in settings that are less heavily scrutinized or policed by people who might disparage their work. There are a lot of hidden barriers to access within fandom, but fandoms can/do provide… if not a safe space then safer spaces, partially sheltered havens, in which people our culture does not typically authorize to create can write – including but not limited to girls, queer people, trans folk, teenagers, people learning new languages, people without college degrees, people struggling with mental health issues, and anyone else who is trying to learn to tell stories that mainstream culture has not provided them models for telling. I started to realize that I couldn’t argue passionately for fandom as a space where people could figure stuff out in a less highly scrutinized environment – a space where people could be messy, could take risks, could try things that might not work, could explore things that had deeply personal emotional significance for them – and then in the breath say, “But you know what, let’s just keep them out of the way when we have company over. They’re sort of a bit, you know, embarrassing, and we want to put our best face on for our guests! So if we could get all of the fans with advanced degrees, perfect grammar, and socially respected professions to sit here in the living room – yes, good – and then everybody else, why don’t you go play in the cellar until our Very Important Visitors leave!”
The tl;dr version of the above: I tried to push back on academic stereotypes about fandom by trying to prove that fandom was “worthy” on academia’s own terms. Fan writing was just as good as published writing (because some of it looked like published writing), and fans could be just as smart as critics (because some of us came from similar demographic backgrounds). And also (I said hurriedly, and not very loudly) maybe it was okay if some of fandom didn’t look like what we already thought was good! Maybe there could be valuable things about it even if they didn’t match up with academia’s values!
What I’ve come to realize, though, is that there is something super limiting about having to work within those two definitions of fandom: fandom defined in spatial terms (as a space you log in/log out of) and fandom defined in developmental terms (as a phase you age out of). Accepting those framings puts us in the position of continually having to prove that our practices “measure up” to standards that have been set by someone else – in this case, by academics and/or critics (mostly dudes, lbr) who have historically uhh not had our best interests at heart, to put it mildly. Much of the writing I have done in the last few years has focused on where those standards come from and who sets them. Who decides what “good writing” is? I wanted to know where our ideas about literary quality come from, both in a more abstract historical sense (do those ideas have an origin point?) and in a more practical sense: where do we learn what makes good writing, and who teaches us that? I wanted to know, too, whose interests those standards have historically served. Who benefits from our ideas about what makes “good literature”? Whose work is discounted or dismissed as bad, amateur, or insufficiently rigorous under those standards? Why do Hemingway, Eliot, and Joyce get to be geniuses, while my favorite fanfic authors (and many of my favorite published writers, too!) are dismissed as second-rate hacks, who lack the discipline or visionary insight required to write “real” literature? (I could spend a REALLY LONG TIME talking about that last question, but I will spare you the hundreds of pages of angry writing I’ve done about it in the process of writing my diss!)
iii. fandom is a good!!!!!
I believe that one of the reasons academics have so much difficulty valuing or even understanding fandoms is that they do not understand that fans use writing (and reading) in very different ways – and towards very different ends – than a literary critic or highbrow writer does. Academic and highbrow cultures place a lot of value on individual genius or exceptionality – a writer’s ability to buck convention and rise above the mindless masses, creating a shimmering, timeless work of genius that breaks with everything that came before. And genius (in this framework) is something that you either have or you don’t have. It is innately given! Divinely ordained! The genius rises above! (Oddly enough, it only ever seems to be white dudes who scale the lofty heights of genius, rising above the stupid, slavering, mindless masses… so weird, isn’t it, how women and writers of color never seem to quite measure up!)
In fandom cultures, much of the content fans produce on a day-to-day basis would look like frothy, insubstantial fluff if that content was carved out of its spheres of circulation and subjected to a rigorous close reading. This is not because fan writing itself is devoid of meaning or ingenuity. It is because fandom cultures generally do not conceiving of the activity of writing as a linear or teleological process, geared towards producing a final, polished text. Indeed, within fandom spaces, “writing” itself has a much broader meaning: it can include sitting down and writing polished fiction, to be published as a completed story online, but it also encompasses many other forms of content-creation, such as creating Tumblr posts, reblogging images or other content with discursive tags; composing meta-analysis of characters or unfolding situations; outlining stories on social media platforms or in group chats; responding to anonymous messages about story ideas; writing short sketches or excerpts (“drabbles”) in response to prompt challenges; and so on.
Fan practices of writing are always collaborative to some degree. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that all fanwork is essentially groupwork, or that individual writers do not expend significant energy creating works for the fandom communities they belong to. Maybe social is a better word to use here than collaborative. Fan practices of writing are always social practices, as opposed to models of creative practice that emphasize the self-made genius, the man set apart from the masses, who might be responding to his era but always seems to be creating works that are timeless and universal, speaking TO ALL GENERATIONS AND ALL PEOPLES, FOREVER AND EVER AMEN. Fandom is just so much more – local, shifting, evolving, alive. We write in response to what’s happening within the fandom community, and we situate our work as part of an ongoing conversation. And because fan writing uses a shared set of characters, we don’t have to put so much weight on “originality” in the sense of total uniqueness (behold, a character/premise that is totally unlike anything that came before!).
Fan cultures take pleasure in tropes, in mixing newness and familiarity, in drawing upon – sometimes in ways that challenge or rethink – collectively constructed fandom headcanons. Fandom headcanons (fanon?) are never the product of one individual thinker. They are loosely shared understandings of characters, relationships, or canon dynamics that get built up over long periods of time, which are articulated through many overlapping, ongoing conversations (fics, tags, anon/blogger exchanges, other private and public discussions, and so on). Those loosely shared understandings don’t just move along a linear track or unfold as a progressive development towards some final, complete answer, either. In our conversations about who a character is or what they mean to us, our positions shift, evolve, circle back. We repeat themselves, we take things back, we react excitedly to someone else’s take on something, we discover new information or find ourselves in new situations that prompt us to reframe older ideas.
I love the liveness of fan cultures – the messiness of them, the perpetual work-in-progress feeling of fan practices of making, even when we finish/publish our WIPs. i love that when I am immersed in a fan community, engaging with & thinking about stories becomes so fully integrated into my daily life that it is just like… part of what it means to be a living, thinking human in the world. And I also love that this work is done with other people. In creative fandoms, writing and reading are not just activities that we perform independently and then gather in the same (virtual) space to share the results with each other. Worldbuilding is, in a sense, how we talk to each other. Those forms of creative writing/making, broadly defined, are the loosely shared social language through which we forge relationships, negotiate conflicts, cultivate in-groups within larger communities, and develop a sense of who we are.
I’m still working on articulating what i mean here, but – there’s something I want to say about how the “chatter” of daily fandom activity (tags and anons and responses and back-and-forth of fic outlining and so forth) seems to be not “added onto” fan practices of writing, but an integral part of what it means to make things as a fan. I wrote about this in an anon response the other day, but I think that a lot of times we seem to get hung up on this idea of finishing, of producing a complete work that we can publish on AO3 or wherever. I’m super interested in thinking through that particular feeling – that pressure to feel that we must contribute completed works in order to be “valuable” contributors to a fandom, and that dissatisfaction with ourselves when we fail to measure up to our own standards – and it’s something I’ve written about (and discussed briefly in those little mini podcast recordings) from different angles in the past.
I’ve been thinking lately about how a lot of that internal pressure we put on ourselves comes from these preconceived notions about what real art is, what real writers look like, what constitutes “valuable” work or work worth making. But I think that this pressure also stems from some other sources, too, which I’m just gonna bullet point for ease of reading:
We do not have many models for valuing creative activity as an activity that is generative but not productive (in the sense of producing a complete, self-contained “product” or text). It seems to be hard for us to even talk about writing as, like, a mode of creative exploration or a form of imaginative play, something that can be joyful, exhilarating, absorbing, therapeutic, life-enriching, and just straight-up magical. Writing as play; writing as dreaming; writing as exploration; writing as something that grounds us in ourselves even as it opens us to new experiences. One of the things that fan practices of writing can offer, I think, is a way of accessing those forms of non-goal-directed writing (or perhaps a way of mixing non-goal-directed creativity into our more goal-directed activity).
We do not have many models for valuing the social aspects of reading and writing, which are such a huge part of fandom for me. As I near the end of my formal education, I often think about how deeply lonely academic writing is. So much of it takes place in solitude, and even if you get to share your work at conferences or in workshops or in journals or whatever, those moments of “sharing” often feel totally isolated, disconnected from your own history as a thinker. They’re like little performances you stand up and give, and then you go back into your study carrel and toil away for another six months alone, maybe checking in periodically with a writing group to do the performance-and-limited-feedback thing on a smaller scale. I plunged headlong into 1D fandom in 2015 at just the moment in PhD programs where you are structurally and physically most isolated from the intellectual community most people have in the early years of their programs. I was spending a lot more time working alone than I had been before, and it was kind of killing me. I genuinely think that some unconscious part of me understood that I was going to suffocate in this institutional atmosphere if I just holed up for three years trying to produce Knowledge alone. My body knew it needed less lonely forms of making.
Thinking about fandom as a place that we enter/exit at certain points, or as something that we ideally should mature out of, misses much of what I think is most amazing about fan cultures as creative spaces.
