more on pleasure

More thoughts about the Kalamazoo Pleasure panel. I continue to have the feeling that I completely missed the point, somehow. I remember that a man at the back of the room put up his hand at the end and said that he was from Alaska, and that he'd been moved to tears by the panel; afterwards, my friend suggested that for a scholar isolated from other medievalists who only gets to talk to them once or twice a year, being able to be in a room with a hundred colleagues and being told that it's okay to love what we do is enough of a point. And maybe it is, or maybe I was looking in the wrong place. I think my frustration partly came from my own pet quarrel with Fan Studies, that up until very recently -

- and from this point I'm going to be making vast generalizations based on my own, incomplete reading in the field, and if you know better, please correct me -

- much of the scholarship is very much on the defensive in exactly the same way that I felt the panel was. I am tired of reading articles which spend half their argument on whether or not fan texts are worthy of study, and that frustration bled over into the way I felt about the pleasure panel.

In Fan Studies, that defensiveness has come from people having to present their work to a very hostile academy, and also at conferences where their audiences have to first be convinced that the field exists. It is also a consequence of the way the field has evolved; before Jenkins (and a little after), most scholarship on fanfiction was done by non-fans who took, as I said in my blog, a very pathologising line ('socially/sexually frustrated women find outlet in writing erotica about Kirk and Spock, etc'), or were simply inaccurate - Camille Bacon-Smith's 'Enterprising Women' is, I've heard, a good example of both, although I'm still trying to get my university library to buy it so I can read it.

Jenkins was one of the first to 'come out' as a fan in his academic scholarship, and much of the last twenty years of Fan Studies has been taken up by 'acafans' - academics who both work on and are involved in fandom - finding a way to negotiate between their scholarly interest in fandom and their own avowed emotional involvement in it, and working out what level to pitch their work. One of the problems, as I'm sure you know, is that fandom has a vocabulary all of its own which can make it very difficult for non-fans to read academic work on fandom - or even fans of the X-Files to read work on Buffy fandom - without a fairly detailed primer. This seems to rob conference papers, particularly, of sophistication, because they spend so much time explaining terms and context, but I've seen it in articles too.

I think that finally, finally, the scholarship is now moving on from the question of whether fan texts are worthy of study, and are starting to ask interesting questions about the texts and practices themselves, now its authors are more confident both about their right and ability to speak as academics and fans, and also about having a knowledgeable audience in their field. As the field grows and gains confidence, this will change.

Anyway, I felt as if the pleasure panel was struggling with those questions that I wish Fan Studies would move on from - is it okay to be fans and academics? Is it okay to blur our academic and fannish selves and voices? I read the panel in the context of that argument, and within that context it seemed both out of date and irrelevant, hence my bewilderment. I'd be very interested to know the actual context of the panel - what was it arguing against? What was it for?