When I wrote about my chosen research site, I didn't know at all what I was doing with this project, and at that point I'd chosen a specific website to examine. That approach didn't really work for the way my project was going, and since it eventually turned into an autoethnographic study of my own experiences as a fanfiction writer, my site changed as well.
For this project I was, essentially, studying myself and my experiences. That still ended up being a little more nebulous than I'd have liked, but it did narrow my focus onto my own fanfiction, the ways I attempted to gain attention (and reviews) for it, how that attention or lack thereof affected my writing, and the specific attention and reviews my fanfiction received. That makes my study a little more difficult to quantify as a research site, of course, given that it's different from what might be expected.
However, my position as a community insider (though by no means really well-known in the community, just familiar with it) does give me a perspective that's not often seen with such studies. I can more easily look at the specific practices of writing and distributing fanfiction, since it's likely that many other writers have similar practices to mine, and I can look at my own motivations for what I do since they'll be quite plain to me. The primary participant is of course myself, but given that I'm also viewing the comments I receive, the actual participants in these exchanges can fluctuate.
Aside from being a member of fandom in general, I'm also a member of numerous specific fan communities on Livejournal, and the vast majority of my friends are also members of the same fandoms I am, making my actions community-building exercises on a number of levels. I'm also a member of the sub-community of fandom that values high-quality fanfiction, which is a somewhat nebulous term in itself, but other community members would probably define such fiction as being of publishable quality--if it weren't for copyright restrictions, of course. Writers of quality fanfiction are eager to improve their works and are open to constructive criticism, and they apply traditional practices of good writing to their work.
For the most part, I find that fanfiction is rarely studied from an insider's perspective, which often leads to misconceptions and the alienating of those being studied. A closer, more critical, and more nuanced look at fanfiction could definitely be valuable to this field of study.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Revision: synthesis of related research
(The original version of this post can be found here.)
Academic studies of fanfiction seem to have come a bit behind studies of fandom in general. Henry Jenkins, one of the biggest names in fandom studies, has spent a good deal of his career trying to legitimize the study of fan practices as a fan himself, and has seen the field come a long way; originally, even academics writing sympathetic audience ethnographies did so from a strictly outsider viewpoint, trying to remain separate from the fans themselves and often introducing significant misconceptions and errors to their work because of this perspective. As the existence of the fan-as-academic and academic-as-fan have become accepted, however, fandom studies itself has become more accepted as a worthwhile field of study, opening up opportunities for close study of fandoms and fan practices by the fans themselves.
Fanfiction has generally been included in these studies of fan practices, but it seems that actual study of fanfiction by itself has largely happened in recent years--and even then, studies of fanfiction may be playing catch-up with studies of general fan practices in that little has been written from an insider's perspective. Studies of fanfiction seem to take either a cultural/sociological or an educational approach, often blending the two. Rebecca Black's work is fairly representative in this case--"Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction," from Lankshear and Knobel's A New Literacies Sampler, is one of at least two articles she has written about the role of fanfiction in English language learners' developing English-language skills, and other studies that focus on the young age of many fanwriters emphasize the skills that these writers can gain through writing about something they enjoy in a relaxed environment. Henry Jenkins, too, has devoted an entire book-length report (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century) to the use of new literacies and the media in education, making reference to fanfiction only in this context.
Other studies of fanfiction tend to look at what this fan practice says about the communities and individuals who participate in it and how these fans use fanfic to explore their own identities; Angela Thomas' "Blurring the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction" is one such example, focusing on the young authors in question and the ways in which they collaborate to write their stories. Other articles examine fanfiction from the perspective of gender studies, thanks to the popularity of slash (male/male) and femmeslash (female/female) fiction in fandom.
However, such studies often fail to examine the actual content of the stories and their actual place in the fan community, largely because of this outsider perspective--it's difficult to ascertain a text's place in a community with which one isn't intimately familiar. Chander and Sunder's "Everyone's a Superhero," for instance, recasts the Mary Sue character type as an empowering voice of social dissension. Given that a Mary Sue is a cliched, one-dimensional, and generally perfect character inserted by the author (or, at times, a canon character twisted out of character using these characteristics), often as wish-fulfillment, it should be easy to see why the fan community in general derides these sorts of characters, and while Chander and Sunder acknowledge this view, they use the Mary Sue as essentially a feminist model rather than examining why the community holds this view--and in doing so they introduce a number of inaccuracies of their own that reveal what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the fan community, if this extremely unusual view of Mary Sues didn't already work to alienate that community. While significantly older, Felder and Scodari's "Creating a Pocket Universe" creates a similar effect, examining X-Files fans and casting "Shippers" (fans devoted to a particular relationship in a fandom) in that community as a marginal subgroup somewhat antagonistic and resistant to the creators of the show...a rather odd stance to take, given that shippers exist in every fandom, most fans are shippers to one degree or another, and the ship in question (Scully/Mulder) was not only about as mainstream as you can get, it was also likely shared by a significant portion of the show's fanbase, even if only the "Shipper" segment was vocal about it.
Jenkins, even if he doesn't devote as much space as I might like to fanfiction, sums up these difficulties very well. He began writing about fandom just as academics were discovering it, so he experienced fandom studies as both a fan and an academic, which created a rather uncomfortable position for him: "Historically, academics had abused that power [imbalance between fans and those who studied them], constructing exotic and self-serving representations of fans. Even many of the most sympathetic audience ethnographers signaled their distance from the communities they described. I did not have the option of distancing myself from the fan community. What I knew about fandom I knew from the inside out." From the opposite perspective, too, "fans have often been hypercritical of academics because of their sloppiness with the details that are so central to fan interpretation."
Fandom studies have come far, particularly as the field has become more open to insider interpretations; what it lacks is much in the way of similar treatment toward fanfiction. The few articles that take a critical insider approach tend to be from popular magazines and newspapers rather than academic journals, such as Young's "The Fan Fiction Phenomena," written by a self-professed Xena fanwriter. She describes the frustration of "the high crap-to-quality ratio" and the genuine danger that "inexperienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story," noting that reviewers on fanfiction.net will often compliment a writer simply for having good grammar and spelling since those qualities are so uncommon there--but her article is a brief overview, not an in-depth study.
References:
Black, Rebecca. "Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction." A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 115-136.
Chander, Anupam and Madhavi Sunder. "Everyone's a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of "Mary Sue" Fan Fiction as Fair Use." California Law Review 95.2 (2007): 597-626.
Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
---. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.
Scodari, Christine and Jenna Felder. "Creating a pocket universe: "Shippers," fan fiction, and The X-Files online." Communication Studies 51.3 (2000): 238-258.
Thomas, Angela. "Blurring and Breaking Through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction." A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 137-165.
Young, Cathy. "The Fan Fiction Phenomena." Reason 38.9 (2007): 14-15.
Academic studies of fanfiction seem to have come a bit behind studies of fandom in general. Henry Jenkins, one of the biggest names in fandom studies, has spent a good deal of his career trying to legitimize the study of fan practices as a fan himself, and has seen the field come a long way; originally, even academics writing sympathetic audience ethnographies did so from a strictly outsider viewpoint, trying to remain separate from the fans themselves and often introducing significant misconceptions and errors to their work because of this perspective. As the existence of the fan-as-academic and academic-as-fan have become accepted, however, fandom studies itself has become more accepted as a worthwhile field of study, opening up opportunities for close study of fandoms and fan practices by the fans themselves.
Fanfiction has generally been included in these studies of fan practices, but it seems that actual study of fanfiction by itself has largely happened in recent years--and even then, studies of fanfiction may be playing catch-up with studies of general fan practices in that little has been written from an insider's perspective. Studies of fanfiction seem to take either a cultural/sociological or an educational approach, often blending the two. Rebecca Black's work is fairly representative in this case--"Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction," from Lankshear and Knobel's A New Literacies Sampler, is one of at least two articles she has written about the role of fanfiction in English language learners' developing English-language skills, and other studies that focus on the young age of many fanwriters emphasize the skills that these writers can gain through writing about something they enjoy in a relaxed environment. Henry Jenkins, too, has devoted an entire book-length report (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century) to the use of new literacies and the media in education, making reference to fanfiction only in this context.
Other studies of fanfiction tend to look at what this fan practice says about the communities and individuals who participate in it and how these fans use fanfic to explore their own identities; Angela Thomas' "Blurring the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction" is one such example, focusing on the young authors in question and the ways in which they collaborate to write their stories. Other articles examine fanfiction from the perspective of gender studies, thanks to the popularity of slash (male/male) and femmeslash (female/female) fiction in fandom.
However, such studies often fail to examine the actual content of the stories and their actual place in the fan community, largely because of this outsider perspective--it's difficult to ascertain a text's place in a community with which one isn't intimately familiar. Chander and Sunder's "Everyone's a Superhero," for instance, recasts the Mary Sue character type as an empowering voice of social dissension. Given that a Mary Sue is a cliched, one-dimensional, and generally perfect character inserted by the author (or, at times, a canon character twisted out of character using these characteristics), often as wish-fulfillment, it should be easy to see why the fan community in general derides these sorts of characters, and while Chander and Sunder acknowledge this view, they use the Mary Sue as essentially a feminist model rather than examining why the community holds this view--and in doing so they introduce a number of inaccuracies of their own that reveal what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the fan community, if this extremely unusual view of Mary Sues didn't already work to alienate that community. While significantly older, Felder and Scodari's "Creating a Pocket Universe" creates a similar effect, examining X-Files fans and casting "Shippers" (fans devoted to a particular relationship in a fandom) in that community as a marginal subgroup somewhat antagonistic and resistant to the creators of the show...a rather odd stance to take, given that shippers exist in every fandom, most fans are shippers to one degree or another, and the ship in question (Scully/Mulder) was not only about as mainstream as you can get, it was also likely shared by a significant portion of the show's fanbase, even if only the "Shipper" segment was vocal about it.
Jenkins, even if he doesn't devote as much space as I might like to fanfiction, sums up these difficulties very well. He began writing about fandom just as academics were discovering it, so he experienced fandom studies as both a fan and an academic, which created a rather uncomfortable position for him: "Historically, academics had abused that power [imbalance between fans and those who studied them], constructing exotic and self-serving representations of fans. Even many of the most sympathetic audience ethnographers signaled their distance from the communities they described. I did not have the option of distancing myself from the fan community. What I knew about fandom I knew from the inside out." From the opposite perspective, too, "fans have often been hypercritical of academics because of their sloppiness with the details that are so central to fan interpretation."
Fandom studies have come far, particularly as the field has become more open to insider interpretations; what it lacks is much in the way of similar treatment toward fanfiction. The few articles that take a critical insider approach tend to be from popular magazines and newspapers rather than academic journals, such as Young's "The Fan Fiction Phenomena," written by a self-professed Xena fanwriter. She describes the frustration of "the high crap-to-quality ratio" and the genuine danger that "inexperienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story," noting that reviewers on fanfiction.net will often compliment a writer simply for having good grammar and spelling since those qualities are so uncommon there--but her article is a brief overview, not an in-depth study.
References:
Black, Rebecca. "Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction." A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 115-136.
Chander, Anupam and Madhavi Sunder. "Everyone's a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of "Mary Sue" Fan Fiction as Fair Use." California Law Review 95.2 (2007): 597-626.
Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
---. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.
Scodari, Christine and Jenna Felder. "Creating a pocket universe: "Shippers," fan fiction, and The X-Files online." Communication Studies 51.3 (2000): 238-258.
Thomas, Angela. "Blurring and Breaking Through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction." A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 137-165.
Young, Cathy. "The Fan Fiction Phenomena." Reason 38.9 (2007): 14-15.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Conclusions & implications
In the first place, of course, not only am I studying fanfiction and the space in which it exists (fandom is an integral part of fanfiction, naturally, since the latter can't really exist without the former), I'm also studying myself and my experiences. That...makes it just a little difficult, given that I'm then analyzing myself, a subject I can't approach with any degree of objectivity. That seems to be part of the point of an autoethnography, if Ellis and Bochner's "Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography: An Autopsy" is any indication, and my closeness with my own work and the connections I've made with others through fandom makes some analytical objectivity even harder to achieve. I can look at certain parts of fandom in sometimes tolerant or alarmed amusement (or just plain alarm with a side of disgust, when it comes to the inordinately large amount of crazy in the Twilight fandom...), but I can't be detached.
That, more than anything else, makes my project different from the normal in studies of fanfiction, and it's my biggest reason for wanting to continue this project in one way or another: the vast majority of academic views of fanfiction come from an outsider's perspective, rarely looking at the value the community itself places on certain aspects of fanfiction, at what is and is not valued in the community, what practices are applauded and derided and why, what quality fanfiction looks like and who writes and reads it. Articles from an insider perspective do exist, but they tend to be short pieces written for a popular audience rather than in-depth studies of the fanfiction community and its practices, which means that such in-depth studies tend to misrepresent or ignore aspects of that community. Black's article on English language learners, for instance, fails to situate the fanfic she studies in a larger context, in that the conventions of fanfiction.net and the anime fandom have some distinct differences from other parts of fandom--some of the author's practices are actually frowned upon within fandom, and her writing itself is fairly mediocre, compared to publication-quality work produced by some fanwriters. It's still better than average, however, particularly compared to others in her age group, and the fact that she's highly receptive to critical feedback is itself unusual, two pertinent facts that Black seems to overlook. That sense of widespread fan practices and conventions would help set apart an insider perspective from an outsider's.
Some existing studies do take a somewhat more critical approach, pointing out some of the downfalls to fanfiction without condemning it across the board, but there's still a lack of this sort of study. Pointing out that fanfiction should be held to the same standards as original writing and listing some of the pitfalls of bad fanfiction is one thing, but the majority of fanwriters just don't care enough to get a beta reader to "help budding writers avoid these embarrassing gaffs," and only an insider perspective will tell you what is and isn't typical in the fanwriting community. The practice of beta reading would itself be an interesting focus of study, as would the practice of "sporking" bad fanfic (mocking them in the manner of Mystery Science Theater 3000, essentially), but these practices aren't likely to be on the radar of a community outsider.
Expanding on fanfiction studies from an insider's perspective could help open this field up to more exploration from those who already have a stake in it, which would be valuable in and of itself--rather than speculating on why certain groups write certain kinds of fanfic, those writers themselves could enter the academic arena to examine the practices of their own community. Dismantling misconceptions, it seems to me, is always worthwhile.
That, more than anything else, makes my project different from the normal in studies of fanfiction, and it's my biggest reason for wanting to continue this project in one way or another: the vast majority of academic views of fanfiction come from an outsider's perspective, rarely looking at the value the community itself places on certain aspects of fanfiction, at what is and is not valued in the community, what practices are applauded and derided and why, what quality fanfiction looks like and who writes and reads it. Articles from an insider perspective do exist, but they tend to be short pieces written for a popular audience rather than in-depth studies of the fanfiction community and its practices, which means that such in-depth studies tend to misrepresent or ignore aspects of that community. Black's article on English language learners, for instance, fails to situate the fanfic she studies in a larger context, in that the conventions of fanfiction.net and the anime fandom have some distinct differences from other parts of fandom--some of the author's practices are actually frowned upon within fandom, and her writing itself is fairly mediocre, compared to publication-quality work produced by some fanwriters. It's still better than average, however, particularly compared to others in her age group, and the fact that she's highly receptive to critical feedback is itself unusual, two pertinent facts that Black seems to overlook. That sense of widespread fan practices and conventions would help set apart an insider perspective from an outsider's.
Some existing studies do take a somewhat more critical approach, pointing out some of the downfalls to fanfiction without condemning it across the board, but there's still a lack of this sort of study. Pointing out that fanfiction should be held to the same standards as original writing and listing some of the pitfalls of bad fanfiction is one thing, but the majority of fanwriters just don't care enough to get a beta reader to "help budding writers avoid these embarrassing gaffs," and only an insider perspective will tell you what is and isn't typical in the fanwriting community. The practice of beta reading would itself be an interesting focus of study, as would the practice of "sporking" bad fanfic (mocking them in the manner of Mystery Science Theater 3000, essentially), but these practices aren't likely to be on the radar of a community outsider.
Expanding on fanfiction studies from an insider's perspective could help open this field up to more exploration from those who already have a stake in it, which would be valuable in and of itself--rather than speculating on why certain groups write certain kinds of fanfic, those writers themselves could enter the academic arena to examine the practices of their own community. Dismantling misconceptions, it seems to me, is always worthwhile.
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