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Short Report
Apr. 21st, 2011 01:53 pmOkay first off my talk went very well. The Fan Studies area is meeting in small rooms so the seventeen people made it a pretty full room. Plus everyone laughed at my jokes which is always a good sign in the morning. The conversation and discussion after was beyond great.
I stayed for the next panel. It was...less great: a pair of grad students who were noobs, one of whom was discussing slash and a) hadn't read any scholarship on it and who seemed to have b) not read any at all. The audience was smaller and mostly dudes, probably because panelists were also discussing comics and games. There was also one old school guy in the audience who wanted to discuss fanfic as plagiarism but he pretty quickly got shut up. Anyhow the whole thing really annoyed me and I've been trying to analyze why that is. I think a part of it is my usual frustration with people who are new to an area and haven't read as much as they need to have. I also think a not insignificant part is a frustration with dudez who want to walk into an area of literature primarily written by and for women, with mostly women scholars critiquing and discusding it, and they not only don't do their homework but treat it as something "new" when there's been bodies of work around for, oh, over twenty years now.
Grr.
Anyway, I'm taking a break for a bit and then I'm going to go get some coffee and jump back in the fray. More anon!
I stayed for the next panel. It was...less great: a pair of grad students who were noobs, one of whom was discussing slash and a) hadn't read any scholarship on it and who seemed to have b) not read any at all. The audience was smaller and mostly dudes, probably because panelists were also discussing comics and games. There was also one old school guy in the audience who wanted to discuss fanfic as plagiarism but he pretty quickly got shut up. Anyhow the whole thing really annoyed me and I've been trying to analyze why that is. I think a part of it is my usual frustration with people who are new to an area and haven't read as much as they need to have. I also think a not insignificant part is a frustration with dudez who want to walk into an area of literature primarily written by and for women, with mostly women scholars critiquing and discusding it, and they not only don't do their homework but treat it as something "new" when there's been bodies of work around for, oh, over twenty years now.
Grr.
Anyway, I'm taking a break for a bit and then I'm going to go get some coffee and jump back in the fray. More anon!
