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.

Do the aca-fans have a point?

I read a paper today from a student who was indignant about media bias and I found myself, strangely, asking him whether that was such a terrible thing? Aren’t we all biased, I asked. And hadn’t we grappled with the question in class of whether or not there was such a thing as unbiased writing? And yet, he resisted the idea that the bias could be so blatant, as if the more subtle variety would be the lesser of two evils? No, I wanted to scrawl across the paper – the more blatant the better!

Later I realized some of this may have been a defense mechanism. We’ve been at this “research” (I’m reluctant to take the quotation marks away – is real research supposed to be this much fun? Is it valid if it is?) for a year and a half, immersing ourselves in all things Supernatural. But there are times (ok, many times) when I question whether we’ve dug in a little too far, and wonder if that isn’t why all the aca-fans out there don’t keep that distance we were originally rebelling against for a reason. The anthropologists have gone native, we care too much, know too much.

At times like these, I berate myself for a while and then swing in the other direction. Do we need to be objective? Is it possible to write lucidly about something we love passionately? And if we don’t love it passionately, can we write about it at all? We’re still working these questions out.