Freakin' sociology... help!

[burnfor]

So we have to do an essay outline (which will be turned into an essay next semester) and we get to choose our own topic/thesis. What I wanted to focus on was fan culture. That's where I'm stalled at the moment. I have to approach fan culture in a sociological perspective... but I really don't know how. The material I'm finding is broad and I'm not

Comments

[burnfor]

EEE! *cling* Nope, they gave us no guidelines/restrictions which is making this a lot harder for me to focus my idea.

I figure if I needed one fandom/two to compare, I'd always have SPN and HP.

The issue right now is.. I have no idea how to narrow it down and what would count as a sociological view. If I were to take etiquette, for example, would looking at how society's expectations are translated superimposed upon the behaviour we have online/in fannish culture? Or.. if using the community and how it's expressed, um. *scratches head* How, maybe... hmm. The only thing that comes to mind right now is possibly how it has become more consumer culture now than it was before (all the figurines, magazines, collectibles, etc.) and how that is a result of value changes in society? (The whole value change thing was really briefly mentioned in lecture, which is how that sentence is even vaguely coherent).

It's all sort of a grey blob in my mind, ack. Your dissertation sounds fascinating, actually. I can definitely see how it's hard to look at fannish culture as a whole since it's just so broad and encompasses a hell of a lot.

[mrflibbleseyes]

That does make it harder. How long have you been studying it? Don't make it too hard for yourself! Also if you do decide to do something on fandom I'd pick not just one fandom but one segment of fandom - for example a message board or lj, or even not internet based fandom - trying to cover all the bases would be very broad.

Always best to work with what you know and as they're two fairly big ones there's a lot of stuff about them. In fact I think there have been books written on Harry Potter fandom or at least online essays.

You can make practically anything a sociological issue, that's the beauty of it! With etiquette, you could look at how that etiquette is created, then how it becomes a 'norm', how it's enforced by fandom. For example lj fandom is mad keen on lj-cuts for spoilers - it's considered incredibly rude to not cut for spoilers and anyone who contravenes that 'rule' is very quickly set straight - sometimes by other ljers, a mod etc. With society's expectations, I think you could argue they've been subverted by some parts of fandom. Take society's expectations of women and what sexually excites them - conventional thought might say that women don't like porn, prefer romance, nothing explicit and wouldn't like two men together etc. whereas you could argue fandom contradicts those ideas about what women like and find arousing. What I've said here is generalising in the extreme, but I would think it's still more socially acceptable for a man to acknowledge fantasys about lesbians than it is for a woman to say she fantasises about gay men together.

With community, yep how it's expressed - how different media are used (writing, art, video) to feed the culture. Maybe how it's evolved from zines and the effect of the internet on fans - that would be a big one!

Are you doing any anthropology? Just had a thought about how the fannish community thrives on gift & exchange ideas. Most of fandom does not involve money - it's not like going to see a movie or buying a book. Fans come together out of a mutual like/love for something and share things (opinion, discussion, fic, art etc) about it. I know I've seen stuff on metafandom about this.

Sorry, I'm probably not helping with the grey blob thing - I'm kind of doing a stream of consciousness thing.

Links - this guy calls himself a acafan (academic fan) has tons of stuff on fan culture http://www.henryjenkins.org

Stuff on etiquette (dogpiling) here http://poisontaster.livejournal.com/336048.html
There's quite a bit on metafandom if you look through the tags. I think someone mentioned fanthropology which is pretty good.

Apart from all my nonsensical rambling - one thing you need to have is peg to hang your discussion on. When I first started my dissertation I wanted to write about some aspect of fandom - at the time the allure of wrestling! But I found it so hard to narrow it down because I didn't have a focus. In the end I chose to look at religious extremes and used Harry Potter as an example. What themes have you been looking at so far? Is there something you find interesting and think you can use fan culture for?

Sorry for the mega long rambly confusing comment!

[burnfor]

This is my first sociology course. (SOCY100! ack!) And the stuff we did in high school really wasn't.. interesting in the slightest.

Hmm.. I think I'm going to sleep on that tonight and see if I can puzzle something out. (I had to travel home for thanksgiving weekend!) This is starting to give me a headache and make me anxious. TWO DAYS OMG. *spazz*

There's just so much that I want to cover, yet I know it's not possible. And knowing that I need to be able to find at least six academic resources on this (along with annotated bibliographies) freaks me out a little.

And I absolutely don't mind the mega long comment. It's a little bit clearer in my head as to the vague direction I really need to head in.

[burnfor]

H'okay. So I've been going through the results that come up in the database, and I think I'll have to end up doing something on online communities in general. From what's available to me (at our uni library) there really doesn't seem to be enough material to do a thing specifically on any segment of fan culture (hi, wtf 6 sources).

ETA: I tried doing a search on our online library database on some of the things you'd mentioned (etiquette, female stereotypes concerning sexual arousal, or even how fans within a community use different medias as ways to express themselves - like from zines to the effect of the 'net) and came up with zilch. Disappointed me, since I would've loved to explore the power of technology in a situation like this.\

ETA 2: I'm looking at the couple of books by Henry Jenkins, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet edited by Karen Hellekson, Fan Cultures by Matthew Hills, and Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity edited by Cheryl Harris.

Thank god for Amazon. I'll have to see if they've got copies in uni-town, though. *sigh* It's starting to make me really nervous that I still don't have a firm thesis yet and I've got less than two days to go.

[mrflibbleseyes]

It's only your first course! To do something like this might be a bit ambitious, especially if you've only 2 days to gather materials. If you can find some of the books mentioned brilliant, but I would run those by your lecturer/TA to see what they think. Every uni has different ideas about what's academic and acceptable - mine was very open to all kinds of research and topics - others can be narrower so it's always best to check with your own.

[mrflibbleseyes]

Also just having a quick look through the journals - I found these articles, I can't access off them my uni server but you might be able to. Don't know if their any good, but some are about online fandom.

"How Come Most People Don't See It?": Slashing the Lord of the Rings
Author: Allington, Daniel
Source: Social Semiotics, Volume 17, Number 1, March 2007 , pp. 43-62(20)
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Frozen in Time: Gender, Fan Culture, and a Young Widow's Icy Terrain
Author: Scodari, Christine
Source: Communication, Culture & Critique, Volume 1, Number 2, June 2008 , pp. 143-162(20)
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing

Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities and Audiences
Authors: Dittmer, Jason1; Dodds, Klaus2
Source: Geopolitics, Volume 13, Number 3, July 2008 , pp. 437-457(21)
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and participatory fandom: mapping new congruencies between the internet and media entertainment culture
Author: Shefrin E.
Source: Critical Studies in Media Communication, Volume 21, Number 3, September 2004 , pp. 261-281(21)
Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

[burnfor]

Ooh! The first one's one of the articles I've been looking at at.

Yeah, I've decided to put this on the back burner for now. Changed the topic last minute, so now I've got something along the lines of masculinity and how social expectations shape behaviour. Something like. Thesis and arguments aren't firm/are a bit fuzzy, but at least I'm getting somewhat more material on this!

♥ Thanks so much for your help. Very very much appreciated.

Now.. back to doing annotated bibliographies and figuring out what I actually want to say.