My New Best Friend
Have you heard about Marie-Pierre Renaud? She's known as The Geek Anthropologist, and she blogs about fandom from the perspective of a cultural anthropologist. I contacted her for my paper on "Fake" Geek Girls that I'm doing for a gender and communication class (and hopefully turning into a conference paper for next year), and I've spent the last six hours going through her blog. This post was personally relevant. Because I am a dork.
Anyway, she's been doing anthropological research on the "fake" geek girl debate, and I'm a little in love with her right now. She started with this call for help, and followed with these updates on her research. She's now doing a series on her findings, with a forward called As Always, It Started with Star Trek.
She begins this series by describing her methods, then goes on to describe the "rants" she'll analyze. She then goes on to explain why we should care. Her latest piece is about why now. This is a fascinating series that I'll definitely be following.
Marie-Pierre also co-created a panel on nerd culture at the American Anthropological Association's conference, and one of the panelists discusses my boy de Certeau and his "tactics vs. strategies" argument.
I'm still not sure what I'm going to say about shippers. I know I want to touch on how examining the UST of Kirk/Spock is just as valid as knowing grammatically correct Klingon, how the skills shippers use in fan works have real-world value, and how shipping forces us to think critically to defend our ships ("I prefer Spike's somewhat queer masculinity over Angel's alpha male masculinity because it allows for Buffy to be the hero, not just the girlfriend.") Any new ideas?
Also, I haven't seen the Orphan Black premiere or last Sunday's Game of Thrones (though I know why we're all displeased with Jaime right now), so that's why I haven't commented on anyone's posts about said properties.
Anyway, she's been doing anthropological research on the "fake" geek girl debate, and I'm a little in love with her right now. She started with this call for help, and followed with these updates on her research. She's now doing a series on her findings, with a forward called As Always, It Started with Star Trek.
She begins this series by describing her methods, then goes on to describe the "rants" she'll analyze. She then goes on to explain why we should care. Her latest piece is about why now. This is a fascinating series that I'll definitely be following.
Marie-Pierre also co-created a panel on nerd culture at the American Anthropological Association's conference, and one of the panelists discusses my boy de Certeau and his "tactics vs. strategies" argument.
I'm still not sure what I'm going to say about shippers. I know I want to touch on how examining the UST of Kirk/Spock is just as valid as knowing grammatically correct Klingon, how the skills shippers use in fan works have real-world value, and how shipping forces us to think critically to defend our ships ("I prefer Spike's somewhat queer masculinity over Angel's alpha male masculinity because it allows for Buffy to be the hero, not just the girlfriend.") Any new ideas?
Also, I haven't seen the Orphan Black premiere or last Sunday's Game of Thrones (though I know why we're all displeased with Jaime right now), so that's why I haven't commented on anyone's posts about said properties.