Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth

Commentary
Title:	Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth
Commentator:	Camille Bacon-Smith
Date(s):	1992
Medium:	book
Fandom:	media fandom
External Links:	front cover by Suzan Lovett
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Enterprising Women is a book by aca-fan Camille Bacon-Smith. It was published in the same year as Textual Poachers and the two books signaled a beginning in the study of fannish culture.

From the start, there were tensions between the fannish community and academics who studied fandom. Enterprising Women created a strong negative reaction among many of the female fans who were the subjects of the book. Among the areas of contention were what may perceived as shallow, or incorrect, gender assumptions: "Some of Bacon-Smith’s theories concerning slash writing include: 1) that the male characters are actually surrogate women and, 2) that slash writers are afraid to write about heterosexual sex because they’re afraid they’ve been doing "it" wrong all these years; that women aren’t really expected to know the mechanics of gay, male sex so essentially anything is allowed and accepted."

On Mary Sues

Camille Bacon-Smith includes a subsection on the Mary Sue concept in her book, Enterprising Women, tying it together with the Canon Sue issue. While not denying that such characters exist, she observes that fear of creating a "Mary Sue" may be restricting and even silencing pro writers, not just fan writers. She mentions "Mary Sue" paranoia as one of the sources for the lack of "believable, competent, and identifiable-with female characters." At Clippercon 1987 (a Star Trek fan convention), Smith interviewed a panel of women authors who say they do not include female characters in their stories at all. She quoted one as saying "Every time I've tried to put a woman in any story I've ever written, everyone immediately says, this is a Mary Sue." Smith also pointed out that "Participants in a panel discussion in January 1990 noted with growing dismay that any female character created within the community is damned with the term Mary Sue."

Several other writers quoted by Smith point out that James T. Kirk himself could be considered a "Mary Sue," or Canon Sue, and that the label seems to be used more indiscriminately on female characters who do not behave in accordance with the dominant culture's images and expectations for females as opposed to males.

Other General Reactions and Reviews

Enterprising Women’ and Textual Poachers have some similarities, in that both analyze fandom and fanzines, especially as they relate to women’s issues., but each has a unique approach. In my opinion, they compliment each other nicely – each examines issues that the other does not cover, and there is little real duplication. ‘Enterprising Women’ largely sorts fanzine stories by category and speculates on the significance of each story category. The Mary Sue story, according to the author, is a coming-of-age story for young women. For me, this explains… why most women fanzine writers have written at least one Mary Sue story… The most illuminating part to me was the author’s analysis of the Kirk and Spock (non-sexual) friendship stories. Bacon-Smith theorizes that this area of storytelling is really about women’s friendships, with Kirk and Spock taking on the characteristics, not necessarily of what they were in the series, that women want to see in their friends. This explains, for example, why Spock is less logical and more expressing of his feelings in the friendship stories that he was in the series or in the moves – it is because the authors of the stories want their friends to be expressive. In friendship stories, Kirk and Spock’s relationship is the most important thing in their lives because the author want their friendships to be the most important things in their lives. And so on. Therefore, it is essential to these authors that Kirk and Spock act in accordance with the writer’s ideals… I suspect, and Bacon-Smith suggests this in the text, that the authors of friendship stories ‘read’ the episodes differently, so that these writers actually believe that on the screen, Kirk and Spock are truly acting out the author’s ideal of friendship, whereas a more objective observer – even the screenwriter who wrote the episode – may not see any such thing. Bacon-Smith singles out the hurt-comfort genre as the ‘heart’ of Star Trek fanzine writing. Here she theorizes that hurt-comfort is an expression of pain or suffering that the authors have experiences in their lives. As a long-time fan of the hurt-comfort stories, I found Bacon-Smith’s discussion accurate, putting into words the significance that I myself found in these stories, but would not have had the means to articulate if I had not read her analysis. There is much more in this book including a chapter on K/S. Throughout the text, Bacon-Smith presents examples of how fans relate to each other, and explains fandom to the general reader. However, experienced fans will not find the treatment too elementary.; on the contrary, the analysis is interesting, whether or not one agrees with her conclusions.

Camille Bacon-Smith [is] same writer who wrote the famous article on fanzines, "Spock Among the Women" for the New York Times Book Review in 1987. It is a good book but very scholarly. It also deals with Blake's Seven and other TV show fanzines. This book is put out by the University of Pennsylvania Press. I think that the book was $18.00 at Worldcon. In fact, the author, Camille Bacon-Smith, a lecturer in the department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, had a program at the Orlando Worldcon and I got her to sign my copy of her book. I don't agree with everything she says, but it was good to see fanzines seen as a serious thing, and not just "dumb kid's stuff'.

Who Watches the Watchers?: I used to wonder how those aboriginal people felt about being observed by Margaret Mead. But I think I understand – now that I’ve read ‘Enterprising Women’ a new academic treatise… Its author Camille Bacon-Smith, is an ethnographer (in my day, we called ‘em anthropologists) who made a conscious decision to become a fan in order to study the phenomenon. She spent five years gradually infiltrating fandom, making friends with ‘mentors’ who could introduce her to aspects of culture not accessible to mundanes. (And oddly enough, she never uses the word ‘mundane,’ which suggests that five years wasn’t enough time for her to pick up the basic lingo.) So how does it feel to be an object of study? Like the aborigines, I felt uneasy and wary. but unlike them, I am capable of reading the published results and judging them for myself whether they are accurate. I approached this book with a built-in bias, because I know too well a basic truth about social sciences: Nobody studies NORMAL behavior; scientists are interested in what diverges from the usual realm of experience. By this standard, we fans are prime targets for research – we might as well be side-show freaks. And despite professing to be one of us, Bacon-Smith does little to dispel the idea. Seizing on the fact that 70% of the women she had talked to had never been married, the author paints a picture of emotionally deprived or even emotionally disturbed spinsters who’ve turned to fandom to fill the void in their lives. Being part of the group helps these pathetic women to control their ‘anxiety’ about ‘risk’. Risk of what you ask? ‘The risk inherent in asking oneself probing questions about life and one’s place in it.’ Oh. Sure, fans feel anxiety, but it doesn’t take an ethnographer to see why. First of all, we spend a lot of time putting form to our fantasies – things that never happened and never will. Society frowns upon that, except in the case of young children. Secondly, what we are doing is definitely ILLEGAL under U.S. copyright law. No wonder we prefer to keep it underground! But for the majority of it, it’s just a goddamed hobby. I wonder if the author would have drawn the same conclusions about us had we been stamp collectors? The book begins with descriptions of fanzines, fan fiction, and the social structure of the fan community. Then the author launches into a lengthy account of her own initiation into fandom, stretching it out over several chapters During this portion, scientific objectivity seems to fly out the window, and I can’t imagine why an academic press would choose to publish this book. Later, the pendulum swings the opposite direction, with page after page of theory and abstraction. Terms like ‘macroflow’ and ‘pattern recognition’ are bandied about, with no concrete examples given to clue the reader in what any of it means… In addition to the relentless use of jargon, I was bothered by Bacon-Smith’s use of quotes. She puts everything in that’s said – every repetition, every stutter, every ‘uh,’ every ‘you know.’ Well, maybe ethnographers think the quotes sound more legitimate, but any professional journalist can tell you that people don’t always talk grammatically, and it’s considered disrespectful to deliberately make your interviewee look stupid. When the author does give examples, they aren’t always the best ones. It’s fine to use Star Trek to illustrate a point, since just about everyone on the planet has heard of that show. But Bacon-Smith devotes as much or more space to prolonged discussions and episode synopses of ‘fringe’ fandoms such as Blake’s 7 which only a tiny minority are familiar with. I was fascinated, though, to read about the fans who gather to watch fuzzy, almost indecipherable videotaped copies of Brit TV. Are those shows really worth the effort? And I was interested to learn about songtapes, a relatively new art form that hadn’t really hit the scene yet during my big con-attending days in the early ‘80s. The book then just peters out, without drawing any strong conclusions or synthesizing what has gone before. I was left with a feeling of dissatisfaction, which was somewhat compensated by the glossary – Bacon-Smith’s attempt to define SF terms and characters. Even there, she doesn’t seem to grasp it all. Starfleet is the ‘military-police arm of the Federation.’ So much for that peaceful mission to explore strange new worlds.

Enterprising Women' brought back a lot of memories, both good and bad, about my early years in fandom. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a women's persecutive of media fandom. If you would like to read a book that takes a wider selection of media fandom, you might want to read Textual Poachers. This book looks at everything from fanzines to filk and covers more genres than 'Enterprising Women' did. These two books make good companion pieces to each other. A note, however. Both of these books look at slash fiction in detail, with 'Poachers' using explicit excerpts. If you are offended by slash, you might want to skip those chapters.

Yes, I have recently read parts of Textual Poachers, along with most of Enterprising Women by Camilla Bacon-Smith. Just the idea that there, were people out there doing serious scholarly studies of fandom disturbed me. The copious footnotes in both books make it clear that this isn't a new trend, either. I haven't been a K/Ser long, but I've been a fan most of my life. It may currently be in vogue to be a Star Trek fan (neofen think "Trekkie" is a complimentary term), but I was teased and insulted for it so unmercifully during my adolescent years that I'm still sensitive about any nonfan even knowing about my affiliation. And that goes double for K/S. So I did feel quite threatened at the thought of these "ethnographers" and other scholars making our underground "culture" public. Both Jenkins and Bacon-Smith appear to be sensitive to this concern; they say it often enough, but that didn't stop them from shouting a lot of our secrets from the rooftops. Still, I take comfort from the fact that they've probably sold more of these books to us than to nonfans or other "outsiders" . . .

Bacon-Smith comes close to the truth when she points out that fan writers use fan fiction to explore issues in their own lives. But that's from a woman who sees h/c as the "heart" of the media fanzine community. I dont think she realty understands the way we work out such issues in K/S. Further, it could be said equally that we explore issues in our own lives in order to write fan fiction!

... about the Jenkins' book: The other one is Enterprising Women by Camille Bacon-Smith. This is, also, at times, massively off the mark. Despite the intriguing title, the bulk of the text concerns fandoms other than K/S, and at one point, the author refers to slash as "dangerous"! Evidently, she talked to some fans and writers who were pretty far out in left field, who needed a BIG reality check! Textual Poachers shares some similar problems. A treatise needs to be written, perhaps from the "inside", more in-depth interviews done with a larger segment of fans, writers and publishers. But, still, I share [name redacted's] doubtful feelings about having this thing analyzed AT ALL. While it's sort of fun seeing such a book in the mainstream bookstore, lending it an ersatz legitimacy, in truth, I don't want too close of an examination that might destroy the "magic" of K/S. I'd rather DO IT, than READ about IT. I'd rather curl with a good zine than analyze it to death. I'd rather discuss K/S with fellow K/Sers than read some report by an outsider (or maybe "outworlder"?) Sharing it with others is a lot different from explaining it.

It is a proud, but not so lonely a thing anymore, to be a fan. At least, not with professional ethnographers like Camille Bacon-Smith hanging around and reporting back to the mundanes in the academic world. In her Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Bacon-Smith tells of her anthropological stay among the media fen. In so doing, she raised a certain amount of ruckus among the natives, once they got a hold of the book.

Camille Bacon-Smith spent about two years going to cons, visiting fans' houses, reading pounds of zines and unpublished stories, and talking to hundreds of the women in media fandom. The primary reason for her fascination with media fandom, she says, is that it is "a conceptual space where women can come together and create-to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on women's public behavior." (Happily, most of the book's language is less academese than this selection.)...

It is remarkable, and Bacon-Smith does remark upon it, that so many women (perhaps twenty-five hundred over the past twenty-five years), when given the chance to write freely, express themselves through male characters, male characters created mostly by men and originally aimed at an audience mostly of men. Jenkins claimed the writers do this, at least unconsciously, because they are creating an example of the kind of men they'd like to have in their lives: more willing to feel, more willing to get personal. Bacon-Smith says the writers use the metaphor of men in order to communicate messages about their own lives, and that they are looking for a way of integrating the socially acceptable strength of the heroic (male) figure with the virtues valuable to women, namely caring, sharing, and deep communication.

But Bacon-Smith ultimately concludes, and this is what upset a number of fans who had let her interview them, that the shared subtext of a great number of media stories reveals a deep vein of pain and sorrow in the women who write, read, and collect the stories. This is especially evident in the huge popularity of hurt-comfort stories. "I didn't want hurt-comfort to be the heart of the [media fandom] community. I didn't want to accept the fact that pain was so pervasive in the lives of women that it lay like a wash behind all the creative efforts.... [F]ans wrote to work through their own problems of personal suffering."

Now, most writers in any fandom are amateurs, and amateurs are easily upset by any hint that their stories aren't the best thing since The Bible. To be told, in a big, thick tradeback book written for an Important Audience, that their writing reveals them all to share "problems of personal suffering" got more than one fan's dander up. Moreover, because Bacon-Smith had seemed to act personally in getting her data-borrowing unpublished zines, visiting fans in their homes, attending small conventions-the offended fen took it personally. She is not likely to get more data from them for a second book.

External Links

• Science Fiction Culture commentary from the blog, Stromata, by Tom Veal
• Enterprising Women Review by Anne Collins Smith
• Temple University's Enterprising Women Collection. Temple University hosts a number of fanzines related to Camille Bacon Smith's book Enterprising Women (the "Enterprising Women Collection").