The Fan Fiction Studies Reader

Part 3. Fan Communities and Affect

3 Fan Communities and Affect Until very recently, the general public’s opinion of fans and fandom could be summed up with a dismissive imperative: “Get a life!” This was the punch line in the now infamous Saturday Night Live skit where William Shatner dismisses his convention audience of eager and costumed fans by declaring their fannish interests unimportant and not part of real life—unlike, presumably , watching the Super Bowl or going to the theatre or collecting stamps, all fannish activities in their own right. Yet fans of popular culture are often dismissed (Grossberg 1992), and media fans in particular are frequently represented as displaying unhealthy, obsessive, even pathologic behavior (Jensen 1992). The etymological connection between fan and fanatic does little to assuage that apprehension. The essays in this section examine the impetus to engage in fan activities in terms of affect—that is, emotion and impetus beyond thoughtful analysis and reflected knowledge (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Fans and affect are analyzed in terms of the self, the other, and the community. 132 part 3 The three essays that follow foreground the fan fiction communities and their affective behavior. The first two are situated in the field of ethnographic studies of media fans, where an outsider enters a closed community to study it and learn its ways. Camille Bacon-Smith (1992) and Constance Penley (1997) focus, respectively, on their empirical research and textual analysis in the study of one specific community: the fan fiction community surrounding Star Trek. The third essay, by Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst (1998), differs thematically and methodologically as the authors attempt to quantify and taxonomize different types of audienceship. AffectivePsychologyoftheSelf Camille Bacon-Smith’s 1992 Enterprising Women was published at the same time as Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers and covered the same community: Star Trek fan fiction/zine fandom. However, the two studies fundamentally differ in their approach and reception. Jenkins, in his introduction, self-identifies as a fan, but Bacon-Smith maintains her role of outside observer , the traditional ethnographic positioning whose validity was being questioned, however, within the anthropology community (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988). Fan reception differed in that the community members embraced Jenkins’s strategically positive portrayal, which worked against previous academic and journalistic portrayals of fans as alarmingly excessive. However, fans were less welcoming to Bacon-Smith’s book; in particular, her theory of fan fiction as therapeutic felt intrusive and incorrect to many fans. Looking back at these texts and others published in the 1990s, it is remarkable that scholars thought that they had to explain their stance in relation to the text, just as it is remarkable that someone could present herself as a disinterested outsider looking in, without affecting the community she engages. In chapter 4 of Enterprising Women, “Training New Members,” the authorresearcher takes the reader with her on a voyage as she is initiated into the world of face-to-face Star Trek fan fiction fandom. This is the world described in detail by Verba ([1996] 2003) and Lichtenberg, Marshak, and Winston (1975), but Bacon-Smith offers an outsider’s account of how the community welcomes new members, and she analyzes the internal hierarchies that are revealed over time. This procedural narrative provides a present sense of how fandom functioned before the Internet, when most encounters were in Fan Communities and Affect 133 person and were mediated by someone in the know. The layers of knowledge and intimacy that Bacon-Smith describes are important; in fact, her work resembles other ethnographic studies such as Janice Radway’s (1984) study of female romance readers in its emphasis on the female community and the shared interpretations they create. In the excerpt included here, Bacon-Smith showcases an important fan fiction genre, the Mary Sue, and discusses its history and its importance to the community. The Mary Sue is a genre of fan fiction story featuring a young, attractive central female heroine who is exceptional in every respect. It is the ultimate self-insertion: in the Mary Sue, the author projects herself into her fandom’s world, where, beloved by all, she gets to interact with all her favorite characters and save the day. Bacon-Smith discusses the prevalence of the genre and readers’ condescension toward it, attempting to psychologically explain the appeal of Mary Sue stories. She concludes that the Mary Sue represents an internalized model of the ideal woman in U...