Aha!

OK, here's a question (this is against background of OTW).

How many of you see "aca-fan" and think: an academic who is also a fan?

See, because if that's true, that maybe explains some of the rhetoric I've seen. Maybe.

Aca-fan, coined by Matt Hills in his Fan Cultures, refers to academics who are also actively engaged in fandom *and* who are writing scholarship about fandom.

An entirely different group than academics who are engaged in fandom and wouldn't write scholarship about fandom even if bribed heavily.

I don't know, because it's not always clear from bios, about the Board, but I'd say that from what I see on the OTW page that only two of the Board are aca-fen: Francesca Coppa and Rebecca Tushnet (i.e. are fans, are academics, are publishing scholarship on fandom). THe others? I don't know.

Board Info: http://transformativeworks.org/about/people.html

Michelle Tepper might be an aca-fan (she writes about online communities and the internet, but again, news flash: there is a fraking huge amount of academic scholarship on online communities and the internet that doesn't even mention fandom--you know, they look at all the OTHER communities that are out there on the internet and write about them. Crazy, huh?)

There are some other academics who might or might not be aca-fans, but I hope people realize that it is possible to be an academic doing fandom for fun and not be writing about it. I suspect aca-fen are the *minority* of academics on the internet. And the academics are not going to be running/controlling either the archive or the wiki!

***

Otherwise, damnit, you aca-fen who are sekritly planning to take over all of fandom and bend it to your will, let me know so I can get involved with the Ruling Council, puh-leeze! I never heard about slash when I was a Trekkie, and I'm gonna be pissed if I'm left out of the Super Sekrit Aca-Fan Rulers of the World Queens of the Universe plot!

******

ETA: OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHH! Someone pointed out that when a lot of fans say "academic" they are thinking of the meta-fandom crowd, writing meta, etc., so it's this long-standing hostility that's being transferred to 'aca-fen.' I'll have to backtrack and get linky.....OK, I looked for comment and cannot find it, and am sorry. My brain may be dead (I was in a 2 hour faculty meeting this morning).

ETA #2: Thanks to stasha2g, here is the meta connection made by ethrosdemon!

Must leave in about ten minutes to go check my cat traps (spay/neuter, relocate, no-kill shelter, protected barn program, on-going volunteer activity in my life), so I cannot post at length, but in recent discussions over academic discourse, hardness, litcrit, and theory, I think I and others in this admittedly casual environment are jumbling together a lot of separate genres/discourses in the discussion! (Yep, academics write long sentences!)

So I might do a post where I break down and define some of my categories: how I see some texts as critical analysis (major rhetorical purpose is to analyze--by whatever methodology and set of assumptions and questions--a text), and critical theory (to analyze what might be broadly called socio-cultural concepts (like "gender" or "race") by means of drawing on examples from a lot of different texts (which may include but is not limited to fictional texts). With examples, because, well, without examples, what's the point!

And it will let me talk about some of my favorite texts.....and remember, Sturgeon's law (90 something percent of everything is crap) applies across all human productions and endeavors!