Wither Fandom?

So it’s only five days before classes start up again, and as usual, I am madly trying to update my syllabus. What can I say? I’m a tweeker. If my syllabus were a celebrity face, it would look something like Michael Jackson at this point – reshaped, lightened in some places, darkened in others, unnaturally taut here, still a bit too slack there.

The problem with retooling – yet again – is that it often leads me in directions that I just don’t have the time to go in. Case in point. When looking for images of “Fame” and “Fandom” to tart up my webpages, I came across a film entitled Fandom that, by the look of the trailer, does much the same thing for fans that Trekkies did. Mocks them. Pathologizes them. Makes them objects of fear at worst and amusement at best, even as it sets out to “explain” them. And this is precisely what we set out trying to counteract when we began our own project. We wanted to “prove” (to ourselves as much as to others) that fans were intelligent, creative, big-hearted, passionate people and that fandom was not merely the bastion of nerds and basement dwellers.

I hope we’ve done that. I think we’ve done that. I hope that this semester I will finally be able to convince my students that fandom is not synonymous with the unmedicated. I hope I will have pulled the right bits taut so that the picture finally becomes clear – for their sake and mine.