On Fandom, Shame and Culture
I'm currently reading this book in pre-publication copy in order to review it at some point in the near future. It talks a lot about fannish and academic identities, the decision to be 'out' as a fan or not in real life. At the halfway point I am having a difficult time identifying with the attributions of shame-feelings to fandom, and I think I've just realized why.
First, I should state that I am 'out'. Everybody who knows me well real life knows that I have fannish tendencies, that before Supernatural it was various incarnations of Star Trek, before that it was Lord of the Rings, etc. etc. infinitum. Some of my RL friends and colleagues know about this journal and everything on it is unlocked. Now granted, the fact that I'm an academic who studies fandom as well as a fan who is fannish (running out of word-derivations) might be seen to lend a bit of 'credibility' to the whole thing, but most of what's on here is my fanfiction, recs, meta, me talking about my cats, and so on. There is my voice reading podfic containing porn somewhere. There are open links to stuff with my real name if anyone cares to follow them (it's Judith, btw. Call me Jude). It is still the case that Media Studies in popular culture is seen as the poor relation of English and Social Sciences in academia generally, and the fact I did my BA and MA in English before deciding to do a Phd in fan studies can and has been interpreted by certain professors as a waste. I couldn't care less. *I* know how rich and complex popular texts and their fandoms can be, and how rigorous the theory and method an academic project concerning them needs to be if it's ever going to be succesful. Plus, I'm writing what I want. So *raspberry* in the general direction of such naysayers.
Now I would like to believe that given the extreme experiences of my adolescence (anorexia, institutionalization in horrific circumstances, prediction of death) I'm 'over' shame, that I'm immune to it. But that isn't true. I'm immune to *certain kinds* of shame and not others, because the cultural context I was brought up in is different from the Western feminist/psychology one the authors are writing in. They claim that a lot of the shame surrounding women's sexual desire, emotionalism and affect. But, um. That's Western business. It doesn't work on me. (A problem I have in Western feminism in general). But I can't say I've never felt shame around my fannishness. I wrote that thing a while ago about my troubled love affair with h/c and then I remembered: shame, for me, is *vulnerability*. It's not a co-incidence. 'Look, Iraqi women are tough', my mother's best friend took me aside to advise me once in my youth - a cultural/gendered translation of the Western imperative to 'man up' and be a woman. This has to do, as I have recently been reading, with women's position in Iraq in relation to the history of colonialsm and war: Al-Ali's 'Reconstructing gender: Iraqi women between dictatorship, war, sanctions and occupation' is a good reference. And perhaps this explains, to be searingly honest with myself, why I cannot/will not look at h/c academically. I'll talk about sex and desire no problem. But not about vulnerability, because I can own the first but not the second.
First, I should state that I am 'out'. Everybody who knows me well real life knows that I have fannish tendencies, that before Supernatural it was various incarnations of Star Trek, before that it was Lord of the Rings, etc. etc. infinitum. Some of my RL friends and colleagues know about this journal and everything on it is unlocked. Now granted, the fact that I'm an academic who studies fandom as well as a fan who is fannish (running out of word-derivations) might be seen to lend a bit of 'credibility' to the whole thing, but most of what's on here is my fanfiction, recs, meta, me talking about my cats, and so on. There is my voice reading podfic containing porn somewhere. There are open links to stuff with my real name if anyone cares to follow them (it's Judith, btw. Call me Jude). It is still the case that Media Studies in popular culture is seen as the poor relation of English and Social Sciences in academia generally, and the fact I did my BA and MA in English before deciding to do a Phd in fan studies can and has been interpreted by certain professors as a waste. I couldn't care less. *I* know how rich and complex popular texts and their fandoms can be, and how rigorous the theory and method an academic project concerning them needs to be if it's ever going to be succesful. Plus, I'm writing what I want. So *raspberry* in the general direction of such naysayers.
Now I would like to believe that given the extreme experiences of my adolescence (anorexia, institutionalization in horrific circumstances, prediction of death) I'm 'over' shame, that I'm immune to it. But that isn't true. I'm immune to *certain kinds* of shame and not others, because the cultural context I was brought up in is different from the Western feminist/psychology one the authors are writing in. They claim that a lot of the shame surrounding women's sexual desire, emotionalism and affect. But, um. That's Western business. It doesn't work on me. (A problem I have in Western feminism in general). But I can't say I've never felt shame around my fannishness. I wrote that thing a while ago about my troubled love affair with h/c and then I remembered: shame, for me, is *vulnerability*. It's not a co-incidence. 'Look, Iraqi women are tough', my mother's best friend took me aside to advise me once in my youth - a cultural/gendered translation of the Western imperative to 'man up' and be a woman. This has to do, as I have recently been reading, with women's position in Iraq in relation to the history of colonialsm and war: Al-Ali's 'Reconstructing gender: Iraqi women between dictatorship, war, sanctions and occupation' is a good reference. And perhaps this explains, to be searingly honest with myself, why I cannot/will not look at h/c academically. I'll talk about sex and desire no problem. But not about vulnerability, because I can own the first but not the second.