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?
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"Interestingly, these writers [i.e., palaeographers and codicologists] are the only ones who feel no need to justify their activities: there are no comments about the 'value' of early medieval grammars as 'witnesses' to this or that, and no signs of the inferiority complex which seems to afflict so many of the scholars who concern themselves with their content." [Vivien Law, Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (1997), 20]
Which is to say, yes, but I suppose it's something of an old song and dance in medieval studies (as well as other studies), this anxiety about relevance.
But perhaps I am overconfident that my work's relevance, that my own person relevance, doesn't matter. And this is liberating! It means I can get things done, and no matter what I do, it will almost certainly have no palpable outcome, and so I can do them as well as I can. If everything is always already lost, then somehow nothing is lost, for there was nothing to lose. And any good that comes out of it (which somehow seems to often enough happen, without my worrying about it) is gravy.
But it's easy enough to argue that we're living in a culture of the bottom line, and that any "needless" expense must be justified, and that people internalize this, and the panel was still dealing with that. Shrug.
Feel free to swipe my copy of Enterprising Women when you're here. I liked it when I read it, but I think that was partly because it was one of the first books I came across that was taking my hobbies and interests seriously, as in worth discussion and analysis.
Una - ta! I heard from the library guy, and they've ordered it now, so I should get it soon anyway.
Chris - that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. So you think the question is 'Is enjoyment an adequate/valid motivation for the work we do, and is the pleasure we as individuals gain from it more important than any 'relevance' it may have to anyone else?'?. To which the panel was saying, presumably, yes? I guess in that context, I can see why others found the panel liberating.
Then I suppose the questions that should have been asked to frame the discussion were, is *anything* justification for what we do? And does that mean that if we're not enjoying it, we shouldn't do this work? Actually, claiming pleasure as THE reason to do medieval studies rather than relevance is quite depressing, because it seems to mean giving up on caring whether it's relevant or not, or deciding that it has no intrinsic value.
I feel the same way as you about it, sort of; on the one hand, I do have that liberating feeling of thinking, well, I am lucky enough to be in a position where am being paid to do what I want, so I should do *exactly* what I want, because either way I'll be writing and teaching stuff which is relevant and interesting to very few, and arguably useless in the grand scheme of things. But I think this more stems from my overconfidence that my work *is* relevant to something or someone, or will be.
Yes, I guess I think that is what they're saying. And I think that "pleasure" just isn't a very good justification. I think it has to be a mix of pleasure, responsibility to tradition, critique of tradition (or modernity), obligation to (friendship with, love towards) one's peers, panic over deadlines, engagement with the political, and hope for the unexpectable potential of the unknown.
I think the notion of justifying your work is kind of weird, but I realize I live in a fantasyland w/r/t that issue. Or rather, I come from the artsy world, where justification is a thing that -- well, it's a thing you do when you're trying to get your MFA, or trying to get a grant, and it's the sort of thing that those of us who operated outside the system thought were really weird: Why would you do that? Is money or a degree really worth such stupidity? But I guess I have to remind myself that I'm in a bureaucracy now, and I need to justify myself. Happily that hasn't caused any tragedies just yet...
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