Fandoms. Definitely plural.
May. 18th, 2008 03:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethAm now reading the last 'About Time' book.
There's lots of interesting, but the feeling of Not My Fandom persists... until crystalising in a footnote to one essay.
30 Slash is assuredly a minority hobby, and British fans just don't do it... well, we should clarify that. Fans of the pre-2005 stuf generally don't. Fans of the Welsh series sometimes do, but they're usually part of the British Public, and not what we commonly regard as Doctor Who fandom. Most of us hadn't heard the term 'slash' until the Jenkins / Tulloch Tag-Team of Terror casually informed us that this was what we spent our waking hours doing. Actually, most of us were busily writing professionally by that stage, even getting original Who fiction into print by way of Virgin Books or the BBC or getting proper novels published. (We shouldn't get too snobbish or elitist about all of this, however, because - and here's a whole new dimension to the debate - some of the New Adventures authors wrote gay erotica for Virgin under pseudonyms.) But even now, with people coming to Who from other 'Cult' TV fandoms within the UK, slash numerically remains a minority interest, however much of it is swilling around online.
If you're among the uninitiated, slash is a kind of fan-fiction where the male protagonists of butch shows such as The A-Team discover how tehy really feel about one another, in maladroitly written gay porn by people who often have no clue what gay men actually do with one another. The classic example is Spock and Kirk, doing all sorts of ponn-farr related rudeness. The most worrying recent example - not so far discovered by academics, so we offer this to anyone looking for a thesis - is slash about the three presenters of blokey auto-review show Top Gear, which may cause British readers to feel slightly ill. Doctor Who is its own slash, as a glance at What Are The Gayest Things in Doctor Who? under 25.2 "The HAppiness PAtrol" will amply demonstrate.
To be frank, the idea that Who slash was even needed was part of an overall misconception that Doctor Who was somehow just Star Trek with different accents. British Doctor Who fandom started from rock music fan activities: not three-day conventions but pub-quizzes; not merchandise tables but sarcastic fanzines modelled on Punk handouts.
The essay on what media theorists did about Doctor Who is interesting cause it talks about Jenkins and Textual Poachers gets as far as:
And of course, as everyone knows, these conventions that people go to are almost entirely run and attended by women. Err... Go back and read What's All This Stuff about Anoraks? under 24.1, "Time and the Rani", if you can't see why applying all this to the UK is monumentally dumb.
ETA after I wrote the rest of it: Earlier essay duly consulted, the Anorak stuff -
"supposed core Who audience of teenage boys" refers back to how the idea of family television being for actual families drifted off in the 80s when teenagers got their own TVs and VCRs changed the TV landscape. Earlier, Who was for everyone.
Think it is again now?
I mean, I watched it with my mum until she gave up. That's pretty rare in our family. But I have no other data points.
Those 'real fans', though, what were they like? Well, everyone knew that they went to conventions, and dressed as their favourite cahracters. Because that's what Trekkies do, and Doctor Who fans are supposed to be just like Trekkies, aren't they? Well, except that - according to the stereotypes - Trekkies are fat middle-aged women with hair dyed the colour of Ribena, and Doctor Who fans (no suitable name existed for them then, except the American thing 'Whovian', which nobody here uses) are all geeky boys. Or slightly creepy older men with no kids. Just like trainspotters.
Yes, they are talking stereotypes about other people, but... that isn't the Trekkie stereotype as I've read it every other place. That would involve both the middle aged women and the teenage boys. They're chopping it up by gender in a most peculiar way.
spends many paragraphs on the stereotype of the anorak-and-badge-and-long-scarf Who fan, such as appeared in Eastenders.
They're really annoyed about that.
It wasn't flattering, but to a certain extent this caricature covered up what was really happening within fandom. You might expect that the 'sadcase' label was something we all tried to avoid. It has to be said, some did rebel against it and - predictably, perhaps - most of these expressed their individuality in teh same ways as each other. Fandom had - proportionately, when compared to the rest of the demographic - more than its share of tragic Goths (black nail-varnish, Sisters of Mercy T-shirts, smelly leather greatcoats and so on), Casuals (designer sportswear, pastel shaded jumpers, conspicuous consumption trappings) and amusing moustaches, but the *real* statistical anomaly was how gay it all was.
... and mocking slash fic. Yes. I can in fact see how that makes sense, and yet.
Perhaps spending so much time in an environment where people already knew the most embarrassing thing about you made it easier to make the second-most awkward admission of your life.
... hey look, a sense of humour. self deprecating or just plain mean? you have to decide...
Perhaps some people found that a hero who never quite belonged, and had other priorities than getting the girl and looking cool, helped them though[sic] difficult school years. Or perhaps it was the fact that the Nathan-Turner years were the most overtly homosexual mainstream TV ever transmitted at that point. [...] Whatever the reason (and entire theses have been written on this topic), a significant percentage fo fandom in the UK - and a very high proportion of the high-profile fans and future spin-off creators - were gay or bi. If you weren't, you either accepted those who were, or grumbled darkly int he bar at conventions and missed out on all the good parties. Because let's face it: in a building full of people who profess to be fans of a series about tolerance and different perspectives, being homophobic would get you about as far as expressing racist opinions, even if you were amongst the slim majority of straight fans.[...] But, amazingly with hindsight, the trainspotter cliche allowed fandom to keep this from the public view. Michael Grade made jokes about how the Doctor Who fans probably didn't have girlfriends and we laughed along - because the joke was on him, really.
And now the other comments make a different kind of sense than it sounded like in isolation. Their fandom has no women. Their fandom needs no women. Proudly.
Which unfortunately reads as rude if you are, for instance, a woman.
Also, the persistent lack of the kind of referenced research textbooks provide seems a weakness here. Without saying 'we went and we counted and this is what we got from events x y z and mailing lists a b c and etc and so on' then what they're saying is... this is true cause we remember it this way. For a value of we with 2 people in it. And no counting. It's difficult to make statements about majority/minority proportions without the actual counting. I'm sure someone somewhere has done the counting, but this book is not the place where it happens. So it ends up kind of sounding like a couple of grumbly guys in a bar trying not to be mistaken for any of those other freaks.
or, in other words, *facepalm*
Then it goes on to talk about Queer as Folk and Vince Tyler as "the first realistic portrayal of a fan ever".
And I love QaF. Really, I do. But somehow with the tone of the rest of the essay I... I don't know, want to tuck him away somewhere these guys don't get hold of him?
See comment kicking off next paragraph:
Unlike the Trekkies / Trekkers (incidentally, which is the preferred term these days? whatever it is, we'll use the other one to annoy them)
... is it a joke or are they trying to piss people off? Well since every reference to Star Trek is about how much worse than DW it is and how much more intellectual the DW fans are... *facepalm*
And then
Doctor Who fans in the UK didn't think of the series as in any way 'Cult'. It was as mainstream as it got until 1980,
and still pretty pervasive after. Seeing as I grew up after, and DW was always around somewhere.
and the foundation of fandom came at a time when activities associated with Punk and New Wave seemed more useful to us. Sarcastic fanzines and meeting in pubs was how we began, so when some bright spark had the idea of running conventions along the lines of Trek cons, we were already slightly uneasy about looking like the kinds of people who wear costumes and buy action figures. We weren't yet that different from the general public. Once this division set in, some of us bought into the Convention lifestyle wholesale, and started doing other things American fans did, but they got laughed at even by other anoraks.
... who are these people and why are they calling their thing fandom? What happened to that bit up there about tolerance of difference? And don't try to tell me that a world that contained a Doctor Who knitting book didn't have people doing dressing up. Oh, wait, they must be the general public, or Americans. Some embarrassing set or other.
To reiterate: British Doctor Who fans love Coronation Street far more than they like Stargate SG1, and were in those days more prepared to stay in for House of Elliot than The X Files although Top of the Pops and Later with Jools Holland were more vital than either.
... I progressed from X Files fandom through Highlander to Stargate SG1, and Buffy and Angel. They haven't mentioned Buffy in their us and them list. Possibly because one of the writers of earlier volumes also wrote a similar guide to it.
Hang on, I just double checked - this volume has only the one author. So all this 'we' bit is *one guy* sitting in the bar grumbling.
It was a very blokey world, characterised by piss-taking, quite unlike the suspiciously gushing American scene.
I think all I object to here is him us and them ing on the basis of nationality. I mean, if he was saying simply that his blokey world was very different than the ones he's stereotyping as female, well, maybe he noticed he couldn't get away with that. But by saying Doctor Who fandom is male and British, and American fandom is Star Trek and female, he leaves me out. Twice. No place for me and friends. Bloody stupid.
I mean, I'm used to disagreeing with how they read episodes. No two fans read episodes the same way. And, er, where are these gushing Americans they mock? Is any squee a gush or is some small amount permitted without tainting the mighty sarcasm? Cause really, the post episode dissection is honored everywhere I ever seen. And have you read Wil Wheaton about Next Gen eps?
/ETA
and then
The other thing was that - even in the mid-90s - the general public knew about Doctor Who, and so the boundaries of fandom were more porous here than in the States. That said, we were fairly close knit. That had a big impact, as we sort of patrolled one another's tastes and memories.
... and again their definition of we and not-we gets ever so much smaller than the one that many people who consider themselves fans would agree with. Apparently standing four hours in the rain for Tom Baker's autograph is not in fact enough to qualify - some particular group is fandom, the rest is just the public who know.
WTF???
There's a bit about educational psychologists and "the process of assimilating new information or attitudes is faster ina group of like-minded individuals than done alone or in a crowd of 'others'. There was a funnel effect. So, far from being powerless parasites, British fandom was a mechanism for educating and training people in how to be a Fan, and this was transferable expertise for the wider world and in particular Higher Education.
And it goes on about "our way of thinking" and... sounds rather like creepy cult brainwashing.
Do we sound like this to the not-we???
And then it goes on to absolutely fascinating stuff about how academic argument and fanzine culture were pretty much the same thing, with people writing papers about Doctor Who the way online writes meta, with university library stuff involved. Which is cool. But makes you wonder what they thought of all us fans who were, well, not doing that yet.
And there's a good bit about "because with Doctor Who off the air, we own it now. It's fans who write the books and audio dramas, fans who find the missing episodes in vaults, and fans who get to patrol what the public think of it as a social phenomenon." Which was sounding so uncreepy up until 'patrol'.
and then it goes back to "so the more freakish the program (and you don't get more freaky than slash fiction about The Professionals or Top Gear)
... and I'm stuck in, what is this thing where we call each other freaky?
Only they're not thinking of it that way. They're drawing lines and making Good Fan and Bad Fan rules, with Americans of course in the Bad Fan camp. Or non-camp, since they quite like camp. There's a section on the Gayest Moments in Doctor Who... which does in fact mean Gay-and-not-lesbian, even if it mentions one apparently lesbian character, cause it includes female characters that gay fans are fans of even though the characters aren't themselves gay even in subtext, but leaves out a lot of what we'd call the incredibly obvious in the femslash.
(and by we I mean, well, me, and at least one other person I've read. and everyone who has watched Ghost Light and Survival and commented on them that I've ever seen.)
And there's a persistent use of 'homoerotic' to mean simply 'scantily clad men', without a comparable use of 'sapphic' to mean 'scantily clad women'. The women in bikinis are there for the 14 year old boys to look at. The men in shorts are apparently also for the boys to look at... which, yeah, can't argue that in a great many cases, *but* they're using examples where it's just one guy on their own who happens to be (un)dressed that way. Not interacting with other men. Unless the viewer/camera is presumed male. Which is a persistent assumption in film theory, but still rather annoying.
So the feeling that this book is telling me that I and everyone I read and interact with in fandom do not in fact exist is... persistent and offputting.
I don't know this DW fandom of which it speaks. I've been around in-person fandom since 1998, and online a couple years before that, and I *still* don't know this fandom they're talking about. My fandom *is* almost all female, and writing slash fic. And we've been in Doctor Who fic, ooooh, at least since 2005... but we have in fact been in the UK for longer. My whole life, I'm pretty sure.
When I went to Bad Wolf last year I also got this feeling of having stepped into new territory. Bad Wolf was not fandom as I knew it. There were actual males everywhere. Deeply weird.
The Rift? Fandom as I know it - women running things, women in the audience, and slash on stage.
Is this a time thing? Did we really not have fandom as I know it in most of the 20th century? Or do we have two sorts of fandom running in parallel, women in one corner and men in another? Either way, pretty frakkin weird.
Also, for the record, their persistent dissing of Star Trek and treating it like a fundamentally different animal and the fandoms as an Us and Them sort of thing... this, to me, does not compute. I mean, sure, I've not participated in Trek fandom in any of its forms... because like Doctor Who before I got serious into Torchwood, I could get the level of Trek discussion I was interested in just by asking around. Didn't need a seperate fandom, had it soaking through all the other fandoms. I can see there's differences - some I'm really happy about - but every time they mention ST it's to knock it, and it's really getting on my nerves. I love DS9 quite thoroughly, albeit somewhat less than I love Babylon 5. Maybe they only mean Star Trek, the original series, but, well, that puts them in a decade where I was either not born yet or not fully people, so, really not my world.
Okay, I turned the page - yes, I had to start replying to the essay before I finished the essay - and:
Once a fan got to make the series in Wales, Fiske's Adorno-flavoured interpretation became more relevant. There's still a trend towards fan-wank, but it's only to do with things Joe Public might know about, like Daleks, Cybermen, or BBC Wales' own new monsters. [...] Fans once again look like an excluded minority, but so many are in such a lot of interesting positions in wider society, BBC Wales is finding it hard to police the PR distribution.
Adorno, btw, was summed up earlier as saying "that anyone who liked something popular was a stooge of the state. We are all stupid cattle-like consumers, being lied to and loving it."
... this is how he sees New School fen?
... I feel vaguely sulky I paid money for this book. Despite a lot of it being interesting/useful. Don't want to be called names, thanks.
And what's he complaining about with lack of fan-wank? Oh, is that the thing where the word means something different in DW fandom than other places? Um, like fanservice, talking about continuity, that stuff? But how much more does he reasonably expect there to be? Elements from the old series are reintroduced in every season. And they have to be introduced, cause one thing with show meant for young viewers is, you can't just retain your audience, cause new ones get made every year. I don't really get the compaint even with that definition in.
I mean, the new series required some adjustments. I didn't like Rose - still don't, much, sorry - and the introduction of textual romance where none had gone before was a bit jarring, but it has leveled out somewhere I can live with.
And also, Captain Jack Harkness.
On the side of buses with his gun out.
Leading Torchwood, all queer... some of the time.
That just doesn't stop being cool.
And yeah, we're writing slash fic. So is the series. Isn't it fun?
I'm not saying his fandom doesn't exist. But I am saying, loudly and with quite a lot of force, MINE DOES TOO. And the fandoms of others are not as he is portraying them. I not be mocking fan activities of others, even if they don't want to be in same fandom as me. We've all got our academics and our writers and our tie in novels and our original novels and everything else. And we're not all blokey gay men down the pub. Please to be leaving room in the narrative for us.
PS hair the color of Ribena is interesting fashion statement. :-p
There's lots of interesting, but the feeling of Not My Fandom persists... until crystalising in a footnote to one essay.
30 Slash is assuredly a minority hobby, and British fans just don't do it... well, we should clarify that. Fans of the pre-2005 stuf generally don't. Fans of the Welsh series sometimes do, but they're usually part of the British Public, and not what we commonly regard as Doctor Who fandom. Most of us hadn't heard the term 'slash' until the Jenkins / Tulloch Tag-Team of Terror casually informed us that this was what we spent our waking hours doing. Actually, most of us were busily writing professionally by that stage, even getting original Who fiction into print by way of Virgin Books or the BBC or getting proper novels published. (We shouldn't get too snobbish or elitist about all of this, however, because - and here's a whole new dimension to the debate - some of the New Adventures authors wrote gay erotica for Virgin under pseudonyms.) But even now, with people coming to Who from other 'Cult' TV fandoms within the UK, slash numerically remains a minority interest, however much of it is swilling around online.
If you're among the uninitiated, slash is a kind of fan-fiction where the male protagonists of butch shows such as The A-Team discover how tehy really feel about one another, in maladroitly written gay porn by people who often have no clue what gay men actually do with one another. The classic example is Spock and Kirk, doing all sorts of ponn-farr related rudeness. The most worrying recent example - not so far discovered by academics, so we offer this to anyone looking for a thesis - is slash about the three presenters of blokey auto-review show Top Gear, which may cause British readers to feel slightly ill. Doctor Who is its own slash, as a glance at What Are The Gayest Things in Doctor Who? under 25.2 "The HAppiness PAtrol" will amply demonstrate.
To be frank, the idea that Who slash was even needed was part of an overall misconception that Doctor Who was somehow just Star Trek with different accents. British Doctor Who fandom started from rock music fan activities: not three-day conventions but pub-quizzes; not merchandise tables but sarcastic fanzines modelled on Punk handouts.
The essay on what media theorists did about Doctor Who is interesting cause it talks about Jenkins and Textual Poachers gets as far as:
And of course, as everyone knows, these conventions that people go to are almost entirely run and attended by women. Err... Go back and read What's All This Stuff about Anoraks? under 24.1, "Time and the Rani", if you can't see why applying all this to the UK is monumentally dumb.
ETA after I wrote the rest of it: Earlier essay duly consulted, the Anorak stuff -
"supposed core Who audience of teenage boys" refers back to how the idea of family television being for actual families drifted off in the 80s when teenagers got their own TVs and VCRs changed the TV landscape. Earlier, Who was for everyone.
Think it is again now?
I mean, I watched it with my mum until she gave up. That's pretty rare in our family. But I have no other data points.
Those 'real fans', though, what were they like? Well, everyone knew that they went to conventions, and dressed as their favourite cahracters. Because that's what Trekkies do, and Doctor Who fans are supposed to be just like Trekkies, aren't they? Well, except that - according to the stereotypes - Trekkies are fat middle-aged women with hair dyed the colour of Ribena, and Doctor Who fans (no suitable name existed for them then, except the American thing 'Whovian', which nobody here uses) are all geeky boys. Or slightly creepy older men with no kids. Just like trainspotters.
Yes, they are talking stereotypes about other people, but... that isn't the Trekkie stereotype as I've read it every other place. That would involve both the middle aged women and the teenage boys. They're chopping it up by gender in a most peculiar way.
spends many paragraphs on the stereotype of the anorak-and-badge-and-long-scarf Who fan, such as appeared in Eastenders.
They're really annoyed about that.
It wasn't flattering, but to a certain extent this caricature covered up what was really happening within fandom. You might expect that the 'sadcase' label was something we all tried to avoid. It has to be said, some did rebel against it and - predictably, perhaps - most of these expressed their individuality in teh same ways as each other. Fandom had - proportionately, when compared to the rest of the demographic - more than its share of tragic Goths (black nail-varnish, Sisters of Mercy T-shirts, smelly leather greatcoats and so on), Casuals (designer sportswear, pastel shaded jumpers, conspicuous consumption trappings) and amusing moustaches, but the *real* statistical anomaly was how gay it all was.
... and mocking slash fic. Yes. I can in fact see how that makes sense, and yet.
Perhaps spending so much time in an environment where people already knew the most embarrassing thing about you made it easier to make the second-most awkward admission of your life.
... hey look, a sense of humour. self deprecating or just plain mean? you have to decide...
Perhaps some people found that a hero who never quite belonged, and had other priorities than getting the girl and looking cool, helped them though[sic] difficult school years. Or perhaps it was the fact that the Nathan-Turner years were the most overtly homosexual mainstream TV ever transmitted at that point. [...] Whatever the reason (and entire theses have been written on this topic), a significant percentage fo fandom in the UK - and a very high proportion of the high-profile fans and future spin-off creators - were gay or bi. If you weren't, you either accepted those who were, or grumbled darkly int he bar at conventions and missed out on all the good parties. Because let's face it: in a building full of people who profess to be fans of a series about tolerance and different perspectives, being homophobic would get you about as far as expressing racist opinions, even if you were amongst the slim majority of straight fans.[...] But, amazingly with hindsight, the trainspotter cliche allowed fandom to keep this from the public view. Michael Grade made jokes about how the Doctor Who fans probably didn't have girlfriends and we laughed along - because the joke was on him, really.
And now the other comments make a different kind of sense than it sounded like in isolation. Their fandom has no women. Their fandom needs no women. Proudly.
Which unfortunately reads as rude if you are, for instance, a woman.
Also, the persistent lack of the kind of referenced research textbooks provide seems a weakness here. Without saying 'we went and we counted and this is what we got from events x y z and mailing lists a b c and etc and so on' then what they're saying is... this is true cause we remember it this way. For a value of we with 2 people in it. And no counting. It's difficult to make statements about majority/minority proportions without the actual counting. I'm sure someone somewhere has done the counting, but this book is not the place where it happens. So it ends up kind of sounding like a couple of grumbly guys in a bar trying not to be mistaken for any of those other freaks.
or, in other words, *facepalm*
Then it goes on to talk about Queer as Folk and Vince Tyler as "the first realistic portrayal of a fan ever".
And I love QaF. Really, I do. But somehow with the tone of the rest of the essay I... I don't know, want to tuck him away somewhere these guys don't get hold of him?
See comment kicking off next paragraph:
Unlike the Trekkies / Trekkers (incidentally, which is the preferred term these days? whatever it is, we'll use the other one to annoy them)
... is it a joke or are they trying to piss people off? Well since every reference to Star Trek is about how much worse than DW it is and how much more intellectual the DW fans are... *facepalm*
And then
Doctor Who fans in the UK didn't think of the series as in any way 'Cult'. It was as mainstream as it got until 1980,
and still pretty pervasive after. Seeing as I grew up after, and DW was always around somewhere.
and the foundation of fandom came at a time when activities associated with Punk and New Wave seemed more useful to us. Sarcastic fanzines and meeting in pubs was how we began, so when some bright spark had the idea of running conventions along the lines of Trek cons, we were already slightly uneasy about looking like the kinds of people who wear costumes and buy action figures. We weren't yet that different from the general public. Once this division set in, some of us bought into the Convention lifestyle wholesale, and started doing other things American fans did, but they got laughed at even by other anoraks.
... who are these people and why are they calling their thing fandom? What happened to that bit up there about tolerance of difference? And don't try to tell me that a world that contained a Doctor Who knitting book didn't have people doing dressing up. Oh, wait, they must be the general public, or Americans. Some embarrassing set or other.
To reiterate: British Doctor Who fans love Coronation Street far more than they like Stargate SG1, and were in those days more prepared to stay in for House of Elliot than The X Files although Top of the Pops and Later with Jools Holland were more vital than either.
... I progressed from X Files fandom through Highlander to Stargate SG1, and Buffy and Angel. They haven't mentioned Buffy in their us and them list. Possibly because one of the writers of earlier volumes also wrote a similar guide to it.
Hang on, I just double checked - this volume has only the one author. So all this 'we' bit is *one guy* sitting in the bar grumbling.
It was a very blokey world, characterised by piss-taking, quite unlike the suspiciously gushing American scene.
I think all I object to here is him us and them ing on the basis of nationality. I mean, if he was saying simply that his blokey world was very different than the ones he's stereotyping as female, well, maybe he noticed he couldn't get away with that. But by saying Doctor Who fandom is male and British, and American fandom is Star Trek and female, he leaves me out. Twice. No place for me and friends. Bloody stupid.
I mean, I'm used to disagreeing with how they read episodes. No two fans read episodes the same way. And, er, where are these gushing Americans they mock? Is any squee a gush or is some small amount permitted without tainting the mighty sarcasm? Cause really, the post episode dissection is honored everywhere I ever seen. And have you read Wil Wheaton about Next Gen eps?
/ETA
and then
The other thing was that - even in the mid-90s - the general public knew about Doctor Who, and so the boundaries of fandom were more porous here than in the States. That said, we were fairly close knit. That had a big impact, as we sort of patrolled one another's tastes and memories.
... and again their definition of we and not-we gets ever so much smaller than the one that many people who consider themselves fans would agree with. Apparently standing four hours in the rain for Tom Baker's autograph is not in fact enough to qualify - some particular group is fandom, the rest is just the public who know.
WTF???
There's a bit about educational psychologists and "the process of assimilating new information or attitudes is faster ina group of like-minded individuals than done alone or in a crowd of 'others'. There was a funnel effect. So, far from being powerless parasites, British fandom was a mechanism for educating and training people in how to be a Fan, and this was transferable expertise for the wider world and in particular Higher Education.
And it goes on about "our way of thinking" and... sounds rather like creepy cult brainwashing.
Do we sound like this to the not-we???
And then it goes on to absolutely fascinating stuff about how academic argument and fanzine culture were pretty much the same thing, with people writing papers about Doctor Who the way online writes meta, with university library stuff involved. Which is cool. But makes you wonder what they thought of all us fans who were, well, not doing that yet.
And there's a good bit about "because with Doctor Who off the air, we own it now. It's fans who write the books and audio dramas, fans who find the missing episodes in vaults, and fans who get to patrol what the public think of it as a social phenomenon." Which was sounding so uncreepy up until 'patrol'.
and then it goes back to "so the more freakish the program (and you don't get more freaky than slash fiction about The Professionals or Top Gear)
... and I'm stuck in, what is this thing where we call each other freaky?
Only they're not thinking of it that way. They're drawing lines and making Good Fan and Bad Fan rules, with Americans of course in the Bad Fan camp. Or non-camp, since they quite like camp. There's a section on the Gayest Moments in Doctor Who... which does in fact mean Gay-and-not-lesbian, even if it mentions one apparently lesbian character, cause it includes female characters that gay fans are fans of even though the characters aren't themselves gay even in subtext, but leaves out a lot of what we'd call the incredibly obvious in the femslash.
(and by we I mean, well, me, and at least one other person I've read. and everyone who has watched Ghost Light and Survival and commented on them that I've ever seen.)
And there's a persistent use of 'homoerotic' to mean simply 'scantily clad men', without a comparable use of 'sapphic' to mean 'scantily clad women'. The women in bikinis are there for the 14 year old boys to look at. The men in shorts are apparently also for the boys to look at... which, yeah, can't argue that in a great many cases, *but* they're using examples where it's just one guy on their own who happens to be (un)dressed that way. Not interacting with other men. Unless the viewer/camera is presumed male. Which is a persistent assumption in film theory, but still rather annoying.
So the feeling that this book is telling me that I and everyone I read and interact with in fandom do not in fact exist is... persistent and offputting.
I don't know this DW fandom of which it speaks. I've been around in-person fandom since 1998, and online a couple years before that, and I *still* don't know this fandom they're talking about. My fandom *is* almost all female, and writing slash fic. And we've been in Doctor Who fic, ooooh, at least since 2005... but we have in fact been in the UK for longer. My whole life, I'm pretty sure.
When I went to Bad Wolf last year I also got this feeling of having stepped into new territory. Bad Wolf was not fandom as I knew it. There were actual males everywhere. Deeply weird.
The Rift? Fandom as I know it - women running things, women in the audience, and slash on stage.
Is this a time thing? Did we really not have fandom as I know it in most of the 20th century? Or do we have two sorts of fandom running in parallel, women in one corner and men in another? Either way, pretty frakkin weird.
Also, for the record, their persistent dissing of Star Trek and treating it like a fundamentally different animal and the fandoms as an Us and Them sort of thing... this, to me, does not compute. I mean, sure, I've not participated in Trek fandom in any of its forms... because like Doctor Who before I got serious into Torchwood, I could get the level of Trek discussion I was interested in just by asking around. Didn't need a seperate fandom, had it soaking through all the other fandoms. I can see there's differences - some I'm really happy about - but every time they mention ST it's to knock it, and it's really getting on my nerves. I love DS9 quite thoroughly, albeit somewhat less than I love Babylon 5. Maybe they only mean Star Trek, the original series, but, well, that puts them in a decade where I was either not born yet or not fully people, so, really not my world.
Okay, I turned the page - yes, I had to start replying to the essay before I finished the essay - and:
Once a fan got to make the series in Wales, Fiske's Adorno-flavoured interpretation became more relevant. There's still a trend towards fan-wank, but it's only to do with things Joe Public might know about, like Daleks, Cybermen, or BBC Wales' own new monsters. [...] Fans once again look like an excluded minority, but so many are in such a lot of interesting positions in wider society, BBC Wales is finding it hard to police the PR distribution.
Adorno, btw, was summed up earlier as saying "that anyone who liked something popular was a stooge of the state. We are all stupid cattle-like consumers, being lied to and loving it."
... this is how he sees New School fen?
... I feel vaguely sulky I paid money for this book. Despite a lot of it being interesting/useful. Don't want to be called names, thanks.
And what's he complaining about with lack of fan-wank? Oh, is that the thing where the word means something different in DW fandom than other places? Um, like fanservice, talking about continuity, that stuff? But how much more does he reasonably expect there to be? Elements from the old series are reintroduced in every season. And they have to be introduced, cause one thing with show meant for young viewers is, you can't just retain your audience, cause new ones get made every year. I don't really get the compaint even with that definition in.
I mean, the new series required some adjustments. I didn't like Rose - still don't, much, sorry - and the introduction of textual romance where none had gone before was a bit jarring, but it has leveled out somewhere I can live with.
And also, Captain Jack Harkness.
On the side of buses with his gun out.
Leading Torchwood, all queer... some of the time.
That just doesn't stop being cool.
And yeah, we're writing slash fic. So is the series. Isn't it fun?
I'm not saying his fandom doesn't exist. But I am saying, loudly and with quite a lot of force, MINE DOES TOO. And the fandoms of others are not as he is portraying them. I not be mocking fan activities of others, even if they don't want to be in same fandom as me. We've all got our academics and our writers and our tie in novels and our original novels and everything else. And we're not all blokey gay men down the pub. Please to be leaving room in the narrative for us.
PS hair the color of Ribena is interesting fashion statement. :-p