Acafan

Synonyms:	scholar-fan, aca-fan, acafen
See also:	Fan-scholar
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An acafan (sometimes aca-fan) is an academic who identifies as a fan.

Though we don't have an exact date for the coinage of the word, the practice clearly happened between the time the first academics, Patricia Lamb, Diana Veith, and Joanna Russ, started writing about fandom in the mid-to-late 80s, and in 1994 (or possibly late 1993), and when Patricia Gillikin started ACAFEN-L, the Academic Study of Fandom.

The term "aca-fan" was popularized by Matt Hills in his 2002 monograph, Fan Cultures. Hills ascribed different meanings to the terms aca-fan and fan scholar and based the different use on primary interest. If the primary identity was academic, they were acafans; if it was fannish, they were fan scholars. After Hills, the term acafan has taken on a use of its own, both with Jenkins's blog title and the use among acafans themselves, who've used the term to indicate that there is no primary identity whatsoever.

The next generation of academics who published scholarship on fan cultures and productions only sometimes defined themselves as fans in their scholarship. Henry Jenkins was an example of someone who identifies as a fan in Textual Poachers, 1992.

Now, many current academics self-identify as acafans.

The Beginnings of Academic Interest in Fandom and Tensions with Fans

An example of interest in 1977: an academic paper titled The Final Frontier: An Ethnography of STAR TREK Fandom was printed in Interphase #4. An excerpt, one that sets a less-than-positive tone: "The culture of Star Trek fandom seems to serve two basic needs of trekkers: "to belong" and "to be somebody." Insurances with regard to the former of these are achieved by uniting membership through three criteria: the person must be a fan of the Star Trek series; this fan must be an active member of ST fandom; and the fan must communicate with other trekkers. By implicitly controlling membership in this way, many of the uncertainties trekkers face in society as a whole are eliminated. Thus, people who were "socially less successful and introverted" have now found a niche."

From the start, there were tensions between the fannish community and academics who studied fandom.

Thinking About Slash/Thinking About Women, a 1988 article in Nome #11 (06/1988) -- a recap of an academic presentation by fan Edi Bjorklund

In 1968, Joanna Russ, who was a teacher at Cornell University at the time, gave a speech that addressed academic's rising interest in science fiction and its fans. In it she described "an invasion of outside people," of "goggle-eyed, clump-footed types" who would treat science fiction as a "literary California gold rush":

Now I’m going to try, today, to talk about something that people will disagree with — some people, anyway — and some of you may get pretty mad at me before I’m finished. But I think it’s worth it, anyway. I’m trying to operate on the old Leninist principle of presenting a united front to outsiders but being perfectly free to quarrel among ourselves. I think this is something science fiction ought to do — I mean the quarreling among ourselves. And if we’re going to indulge in it, we had better do so pretty quickly: there isn't much time left. The days of our privacy are numbered. Really. The academicians are after us, and there is going to be an invasion of outside people into this field of the kind none of us has ever seen before — all sorts of goggle-eyed, clump-footed types who will be bringing in all sorts of outside standards (good or bad), outside experience, outside contexts, outside remarks, naivete in some things, great sophistication in other things, all sorts of oddities, all sorts of irrelevancies — well. Heaven only knows what. I don’t even know if it’ll be good or bad or how good or how bad. But it is going to happen. The academicians are after us.

[...]

Now, if you don't already know it, literary academicians -- and, by the way, I want to include what you might call semi-professional types, like the sort of writers and editors and critics who write for magazines like the Atlantic, even though they may not be actually connected with universities — anyway, literary academicians are always looking for something new to criticize or some new way to criticize something old, and they are just beginning to realize that right under their noses is a whole new, absolutely virgin field of literature that nobody has even had a go at yet. What’s going to happen when they realize this fully will be a sort of literary California gold rush. With what we have always considered our own private property trampled under mobs and mobs of people who haven’t the slightest respect for our uniqueness, or the things we like about ourselves, or the pet grievances we've been nursing for years and so on. Some of these people are fools but some of them — and I know some of them — are a lot more sophisticated than anybody in this room. I know that they are certainly much more sophisticated than I am. I think when they get into the field of science fiction, as critics of course, that they will find sf is an antidote for a lot of nonsense that they are subject to, but I'm afraid it's going to work the other way round too.

Actually I want to get my own licks in before the crowd [of academics] arrives.

All this was brought home to me in a very personal way a couple of weeks ago. I teach at Cornell, and when Cornell University people find out that I write science fiction, there's this sort of wary and cautious couple of steps back — "Oh, you write science fiction?" — and then, with a kind of glaze over the eyes, they say, "Ah — that's H.G. Wells and all that, isn't it?" and I say, "Right!" And then they run away. This is how it happens. Well, this is no longer so. Just two weeks ago today I found in my office mailbox a note asking me to teach a course in Science Fiction this summer: ENGLISH 305 SCIENCE FICTION — Open to Graduate Students!

Though she doesn't specifically use the term, "acafan," in 1982, a fan writes of academic interest she has been seeing:

I am aware of that a number of fans have done or are doing academic papers, projects, etc. which relate to Star Trek or its fandom. I think a listing of these would be an interesting and helpful fan resource. If enough interest exists, perhaps papers and printed materials could be compiled and printed in zine-form. Let me hear your thoughts on this, please.

Another fan wrote in about acafandom in late 1990:

Fandom is actually attracting a lot of academic interest at the moment. I think it's going to emerge as a hot topic of study in Media Arts over the next couple of years, but I'm convinced that's a good thing. I know I couldn't have begun to conceptualize this project [the fan survey she has and what it was to be used for] if I hadn't actually become a fan first. It was only after I'd jumped in and started participating that I thought, hey, this is great. I wonder if anyone in Media or History or whatever's looked at it. The answer was very, very few... Fandom as a network is much more complex than most academic[s] (who aren't fans themselves) are willing to allow for. I've met with resistance from most of my professors and many of my peers.

In 1991, a fan commented on the recent academic interest in fandom:

What's all this about 'Comlink' and other fanzines being a source for scholarly research? I shudder to think of some eager PhD candidate might find my ravings of some academic interest in the future or that I might even be somebody's PhD thesis... What's worse is that I won't make any money off of it! Seriously, it is somewhat comforting to know that the ephemeral of our subculture is being preserved for future generations. Pity the poor scholar wading through all the Mary Sue stories, though.

Another fan in 1991 was also not accepting of this academic interest:

I get uneasy when academics start questing for subjects in fandom. Not that I don't think it's an intriguing social phenomenon, because it is. Nor do I believe that most researchers have Evil Designs on fans or fandom. However, I do think that putting fandom under a microscope and scrutinized for the benefit of bored academics would have a chilling effect. Spontaneity and free expression in fandom are already endangered species, thanks to both a society's general shift away from first amendment freedoms -- a shift that fandom seems to be mirroring faithfully and to a certain petty vindictiveness to be found among a few within the fold. According to one publisher, quite a few zine buyers with careers to protect are afraid to deal with zine editors and fellow fen on a one to one basis, opting instead for the relative safety of anonymity. I think that's sad. And knowing you might end up in a psych or sociology journal could put a real damper on your enthusiasm and willingness to participate, taking away fandom's greatest appeal, and leaving paranoia in its place.

Depends on the acafan's motives—a Blake's 7 fan in 1998 wrote:

Fans in general do have a history of being burned in varying degrees by people who are not themselves fans but just want to study fandom for the sake of an academic ulterior motive, or in order to write a "Look at the freaks!" type piece of journalism, or some such thing. This is quite different from what happens when fans themselves study fandom, as Una is doing. It's a matter of the attitude of the person doing the study, and there are indeed people out there who have betrayed the trust of the fans they dealt with in one way or another. Under the circumstances it's not unreasonable for fans to be a bit wary.

A fan in 1993 warned about the Observer Effect:

Reyrct academic studies of fandom—the only thought I have to add is the cautionary statement that the process of study changes that which is being studied.

Enterprising Women and Textual Poachers

Camille Bacon-Smith's 1992 book, 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 many 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.

In 1992, Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture was published. It was a book that was massively influential in the development of fan studies and coincidentally introduced many new fans to media fandom. The book was unusual in that it celebrated fandom instead of pathologizing it. The book made Jenkins the go-to man for many things, one of which was a reliable quote. When mainstream interest in fanfic, specifically slash, became a staple of journalists in the mid-to-late 1990s, something that coincided with the availability and popularity of the internet, Jenkins was quoted and interviewed in just about every newspaper and magazine article on the subject of fanfic, something to the amusement of some fans.

One fan's reaction to both Jenkin's and Bacon-Smith's books:

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"... .

Who gets it right, and wrong, and in between regarding K/S? One fan writes:

I also disagree with Jenkins' conclusions about why we women write K/S. Jenkins, a man himself, is mostly sympathetic--but he is a man. And isnt it interesting that he and so many others believe this phenomenon is about men? I've seen it suggested that we're writing about idealized male characters, more sensitive, emotionally whole men, because we can't find such men in our own lives. Well, maybe we cant, but I'm not sure any of us are really trying. I think my husband is wonderful (and sensitive), but I don't expect him to be a swashbuckling hero or an "ideal" person... 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 don't think she really 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!

Acafans Among the Natives

Screenshot of the header of Henry Jenkin's blog

In some instances, having aca-fen attend fan run conventions helped bridge the gap in the 1990s. Henry Jenkins attended several Escapade slash conventions in the 1990s and was generally well received. In comparison, Camille-Bacon Smith did not fare well at conventions with one fan describing her interactions with fans as "patronizing."

The differences regarding in person reception may have been that Jenkins openly identified himself as a fan, whereas Bacon-Smith felt it important to stress that she was not a fan and that her interest in fandom was academic. In 1992, Sandy Herrold offered the following assessment of both Jenkins and Bacon-Smith to the Virgule-L mailing list:

Camille has spent some serious time in fandom (paid her dues? I don't know). But, she *herself* says she is *not* a fan. She wants to keep her distance, her "objectivity" (as if there is such a thing in the social sciences). I'm not saying this makes her a bad person, but I do think that, as with many choices made, it carries consequences. Henry Jenkins, on the other hand, is willing to admit to his academic peers that he is a fan, a member of the community that he is observing, and take the flak for that. Again, this doesn't make him god, or make his observations more (or less) valid/interesting than Camille's, but he is taking responsibility as a member of the community. But to heck with a lot of that; I think *I* learned things about fandom, and the ways I play (if not particularly *why* I play (more on that later, maybe) from both Camille and Henry's books. So I am glad they were written.

Henry Jenkins said this at a 1993 panel at Escapade:

I want to say ... what had changed within the academy over the last ten years that allows this work to be done. That is—I'm thinking about film and media studies—we as a discipline had to define ourselves in opposition to fans and buffs in order to gain admission to the academy. That is, if you're going to be taken seriously, and you're writing about popular culture, the last thing you want to do is be accused of being a fan. Right? You want to say, I am an academic.

I'm studying this just like you study art history and you study music history, and you study literature. And you push away those personal implications of this stuff in your own life, and you devalue them. And I think a lot of the attacks on fans by academics previous to us grew out of their desire and discomfort at the relationship or parallel between academic engagement with popular culture and fan engagement with popular culture. I began a conference paper recently by turning to the audience and saying, you know, we've been talking about television this entire weekend, many of you traveled all the way across the country to be here with us today, and I just wanted to say—get a life, will you? [Laughter] And sort of turn the table around and realize that the stereotype of the academic and the fan are virtually the same. It's only now that there is a secure base for film and media studies within the academy that it is possible for people like me to go through graduate school publicly as a fan, to assert to out myself as a fan, which a number of people, academics and fens, have referred to in letters about Textual Poachers, that I outed myself as a fan within the academy. And I've in fact heard very negative things from some academics as a result o f that. I was quoted in Lingua Franca as saying that I'm a fan first and an academic second, which is actually a misquote. It was a chronological statement; it wasn't a statement of priority. But I said that the things I write about grow out of things that I care about as a fan, and that I choose to write about them and engage with them as an academic as well. But I got a lot of ribbing and uncomfortable remarks from other academics because of that statement. But I think it is now possible to be a fan academic in the infrastructure of the academy as it's now evolved.

Further Early Fan Comments

1992

... the emphasis on acquisition in the fandom pales beside an even more insidious trend: the academizing of Trekdom. Star Trek has become the pet project of many celebrated mass culture critics. Feminist film theory professor Constance Penley, who found it necessary for her research to infiltrate the fandom at the deepest levels by pretending to be a Trekker extraordinaire, delved into slash fiction in order to speculate on the feminist subversiveness of the genre. Marxist mass culture critic Henry Jenkins studied fan-published fiction as “textual poaching,” placing it in a specious opposition to mass marketed Trek fiction. In addition to analyzing and patronizing the fen, these critics committed the grave sin of dissecting their fandom for intellectual purposes.

The reason Classic Trek worked was that it never got too smart or too preachy. Whenever the dialogue threatened to Make A Point, William Shatner managed to subvert it by allowing his overblown acting to put a comic twist on the proceedings. Fen watch countless reruns not to hear Captain Kirk sermonize about its ideals, but because it showed those ideals in practice by people who were having a good time...

Penley, Jenkins, and other academics’ intellectualizing of fan pleasure seems worse than its commodification. Trekdom has always been committed to the exchange of ideas in as open a forum as possible, without scientific jargon, without poststructuralist jargon. Trek devotees from the slashers to the Trekkers are committed to the notion that their ideals can and should be allied with pleasure. Between the capitalists and the Marxists, Trek gets lost. The mainstreaming of Star Trek may have gotten it out of the closet and into the academy, but it’s costing fan culture its soul.

1993

The worst thing about academic interest in fandom is that it has made some people feel really self-conscious about a part of their lives that had once been free of censure from society at large. Wait, censure is probably the wrong word, but I can't get much closer to the feeling. Let me try again, I have an acquaintance in local fandom with someone who is DEEPLY into hurt/comfort. For whatever reasons, she gets something she needs from it. Imagine her feelings on reading Bacon-Smith's theories about hurt/comfort. It's an icky feeling to have your psyche thrown back at you.

[snipped]

For a lot of people, what they write and read is a deeply personal catharsis. Having a light shined on our psyches by academics who don't truly understand (and if they do , they pity it) our connection to fandom is unnecessary. Who is it benefiting? Nobody except the Academics themselves. Worst of all, academic scrutiny is influencing fandom. They are breaking the Prime Directive, so to speak. I was in a brief e-mail discussion with Jenkins about fandom. More important, I was able to see the SCREEN-L listserv messages to him from other academics. Frankly, the whole thing was eerily like Sci-Fi fandom, but substituting Jenkins for a major sci-fi author--lots of ass-kissing. One guy wanted to "teach" the book! Another student wanted reference material and wanted to know where to get it. He advised her to find a fan at a con (or whatever) and "become their friend" and to participate in the fandom. I guess I like to think that fandom has a Field of Dreams quality to it, if you need it, you'll find it. These people aren't FANS. They read these stories, are titillated by the sexual content or want to paste their ideologies onto it, but deep down they don't give a rat's ass about the shows or the characters.

1994

So why do I have one impression of fan fiction while a serious researcher has another? Well, fans probably view me differently and are willing to give me more information or insight. When I approach fans with an idea for a Strange New Worlds article, I tell them that I’m a fan. When I’m at a convention, I don’t need to identify myself as a fan; I have a stack of zines in my arms and wear a button that says: Hello, I’m from the American Association for the Abolition of Acronym Abuse, Regional Group Headquarters (AAAAARGH!). From the title of the publication, fans can tell that the audience of Strange New Worlds is other media fans. As a result, I may get more information than a ethnographic anthropologist who approaches fandom as simply a curiosity to be studied.

An "us against them" attitude will always exist in fandom. This is not fan snobbery, but fan fear. Fans have created a unique community with valid forms of expression: fan art, fan fiction, filk music, and fan music videos. The possible results of academic studies of fandom include an influx of people who come to conventions in search of a world they’ve only read about.

They really don’t want to be a member of the fan community. They have no interest in the shows, nor the fans who enjoy them. Disinterested or uninvolved people may change the very nature of the community that Star Trek fans began to build over twenty years ago.

I've read a number of the articles, but none really stuck in my mind. I usually found something I agreed with, and something that I didn't in all of them. Real enlightening, huh? Actually, my main comment is that although I don't like the idea of someone who has no real fannish interest trying to write about fandom, I am delighted to see those who are involved finding a way to bring their personal passion into academia. It feels charmingly subversive to me, when I think of a fan in academic drag presenting their paper on slash or whatever, and other academes sitting in on one of the few sessions at the convention that may provide some entertainment. I have no doubt a particular paper or person could manage to either bore me to tears, or totally enrage me, but the phenomenon as a whole really tickles me.

Actually I find all this discussion of academics vs. fans kind of puzzling, because one of the first things I noticed about media fandom when I finally really got into it two years ago (after hovering on the fringes for ages) was that the typical fannish mindset is very similar to the basic mindset of academics. I'm talking about the ability to take a really passionate interest in an obscure subject, to study it backwards and forwards, read everything available (or consume information in other forms), and to develop and express one's own ideas on the beloved subject. I always thought that the capability for devotion to abstract knowledge was what made us academics weird and different from other people, so I was very happy to find that in fact that attitude or ability or whatever is quite widespread. Since getting into fandom I feel much more optimistic than I used to about the intellectual and artistic level of the general population. There is all kinds of talent where you might not expect it.

Autoethnography and Acafans

In his 2002 book Fan Cultures, Matt Hills uses the term autoethnography to call for a process that allows acafans to reflect upon their personal investments and roles in both fandom and academia. He describes how "the tastes, values, attachments, and investments of the fan and the academic-fan are placed under the microscope of cultural analysis" (72). Accordingly, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse use this method as a framework in their 2006 Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet

[W]e hope to shift the concerns from a dichotomy of academic and fannish identity to subject positions that are multiple and permit us to treat the academic and fannish parts as equally important. Our identities are neither separate nor separable. We rarely speak as fan or scholar; we rarely differentiate between an academic and fannish audience, except perhaps in formality of tone. We return again to the theme of this introduction: the act of performing fandom parallels the act of performing academia. Both rely on dialogue, community, and intertextuality. All of us are academics who have spent years training in the particular discourses established by our disciplines. All of us have learned modes of interaction and mediation and specific forms of analysis in fandom. We’ll continue to exist on the intersection of the two, trying not to aca-colonize fandom or lose our academic allegiance through our fannish one. But we also want to profit from this intersection and to use our academic and fannish tools and insights to give a more complex and multifaceted image of fandom and its communities. In fact, we contend that our self-definition as participants and observers does not hinder us from seeing but rather helps us to see a more comprehensive picture of fandom. (24-5)

An Explosion of Acafandom

[so many acafans now!]

Thank You to Acafans and Academic Fan Studies!

A fan in 1993 wrote:

The first time I read _about_ slash was quite awhile before that, in an old New Yorker article about Roberta Rogow. It briefly mentioned slash and the possibilities for B7 (the reigning passion of my life then as now) immediately leapt to mind. But I was so...innocent...ignorant...that the idea of fanzines for B7 didn't. I had no idea there were so many other people hooked on this obscure (so I thought) series. Then, in rapid succession, I read Bacon-Smith's article in the New York Times (by then several years old), and one of Penley's essays, and e-mail entered my life (a white knight in armor fashioned of e-shaped links. Never mind). I signed onto Strek-L. Somebody mentioned K/S...and B/A. When I regained consciousness, I posted a request for addresses (I'd already written to Datazine because of Penley's bibliography but received no answer). Several people answered. I mailed out my weight in SASEs. The first shipments of contraband arrived in December: Fire and Ice, Before and After, a few Resistances. I almost called into work the next day. I couldn't walk for a week.

So, I owe it all to e-mail, academics, and people who were willing to share information with me although we'd never met. I would never have found fandom, let alone slash, without them. Of course...I'd have a lot more money now if it wasn't for them...

Fan Commentary: 2000

I will jump in cold and defend fan fiction any time. I would laugh too, and then laud the virtues of treksmut through some brilliant statement of cultural theory, perhaps along the lines of: (Marxism) Treksmut turns the capitalist power structures that control the production of cultural artifacts on their head! (queer theory) Treksmut refigures the dominant sexual norms to celebrate transgressive possibilities! (semiotics) Treksmut creates entirely new ways of structuring text and meaning! In short, fan fiction is one of the last bastions of genuine resistance to the dastardly forces of global econo-social conformity and control, whereas pro-fic is just whoring yourself out to the Man!

Which one is cooler now, Mr. O?

I have come across only one scholarly paper about treksmut on the web, about a Borg boyslash zine (rather esoteric no?)--it's found at Slashing the Borg: Resistance is Fertile. I have yet to embark on any serious research into what's been written about fan fiction, but I know there is stuff out there--I'll get around to it sometime during my education. If I ever write any papers about treksmut, I'll let y'all know.

Fan Commentary: A 2014 Discussion

Some excerpts from a disscussion at Fail Fandomanon (see the entire discussion here; archive link:

My personal issue with aca-fans is that I find a lot of what they produce not very interesting, and a lot of the times fan meta has a more interesting take on the issue. Also, a lot of the aca-fan rhetoric comes off as an apologia for fandom, as if the purpose of academic study is to justify or elevate the subject of study (which it may be these days, who knows).

This isn't just an acafan thing: a lot of academic writing about "low" culture takes that form in any era. The first wave of academic writing about a non-prestigious topic usually takes the form of an apologia. It's only later waves that move on to a deeper analysis once the topic is established as a normal one for academic investigation.

Yeah, a lot of acafandom seems way behind most fan meta to me, and there's also this really self-congralatory delusional "We are legitimizing the queering of desire! We are beating up John Winchester with copies of Foucault!" which, LOL, no.

The idea that somehow slashfic is going to make the world a better place for queer people and women is kind of an insult to the people who are, you know, actually working to make the world a better place for queer people and women. And in the midst of all the apologia and rah-rah-fandom acafanning, there are legitimate criticisms getting lost in the shuffle. It's all well and good to talk about all the good reasons women get into slash, but there are uncomfortable topics that I think need the slightly more distant eye of academia. Fandom may already be discussing among itself issues with race and women (particularly canon female love interests) but those conversations rarely go anywhere, because we're all too close to it and people get defensive. It's an exhausting conversation to have, but it needs to be had, and I think at this point only an acafan really has the chance to make any headway on the issue. I'd want the person doing this to be more of a sociologist than a lit prof, though.

We are now in our third decade of academic fan studies (Jenkins's book was first published in 1992, and there are actually a couple of essays that precede that) with some great articles and many mediocre and some really horrid ones coming out every year (just like in any field).

...I get the impression that most fan studies research is about slash, for whatever reason. Is it that a lot of the non-fan academics came out of gay studies?

But luckily we've come a long way from then (and I haven't seen Cicione cited in a very long time). Personally I don't think Lamb&Veith and Russ are wrong, per se. Just too limited in their analysis and, of course, also dealing with a much smaller number of stories and narrower range of fiction. Still, if I never have to read the "heterosexual women" claim again, it'll be too soon. (My own personal moment of incredulity is Bacon Smith's assertion at the beginning of her H/C chapter that the hurt never occurs between the partners but always comes from the outside. Even in the nineties I had a long list of fics saved who belied that statement!) I'm not sure who the first acafan was (meaning someone who was as immersed in fandom as they were in academia rather than finding fandom and maybe becoming a fan via and through academia). Jenkins calls himself a fan in Textual Poachers, but he clearly got a lot second hand via Cynthia; both Camille and Penley became fannish AFTER their initial writings. I'd guess it's somewhere in the early 2000s, which is incidentally when Matt coined the term aca-fan (and the much less used but to me equally useful fan-scholar). Of course through the 2000s you still see interlopers and outsiders (I still cringe remembering that dreadful Oh Frodo essay, and Salmon and Symons should only ever be cited to show what not to do!), but for all that is bad or wrong or weak within the scholarship, much of it comes from positions of inside fandom (for better or worse!)

...I think it's important to look at both romance and porn in terms of what slash (or het NC17 for that matter) does and doesn't do, where it intersects and where it differs. I thought Driscoll's analysis of that was actually pretty good in laying out the field. I think we can all too easily fall into the default where we dismiss those who came before for what they failed to do rather than appreciate that they addressed something at all. (Not that I think you're doing that!) And yes, it's ironic that gay studies scholars didn't look at slash, but I'd argue the moment in scholarship we're talking about still was very much GAY rather than QUEER studies and the last thing they'd want to have focused on was supposedly het women (heck, they barely had the time of day for lesbians! And yes, I'm remembering some of my grad school classes and the gay studies praise of the mostly white gay cock bitterly). Cultural Studies, on the other hand, was all primed for Jenkins's (and Bacon-Smith's and Penley's) intervention. They dragged the resistance argument into the birth of fan studies until its much belated death. But again, that's something you don't see PFG talk about. The thing that bugs me most of acafan scholarship (and I don't exclude myself) is that we ignore the issue of participant observer and, when we don't, we reinvent the wheel. We also tend to play fast and loose with selection and examples. I guess that's a danger in all of cultural studies, but even when I have read every fic in a fandom and can in good conscience say that a certain type of story is predominant - how do I pick the one I then discuss.

To the extent that academic writing is disproportionately about slash, I would guess that it has more to do with the many different flavors of academic woo that can be written about this than with acafen having come from queer studies specifically. Women writing het isn't going to seem as anomalous to an outside audience, so there are fewer avenues for writing edgy articles and making yourself look like an exciting New Media scholar. (Guys and queer women liking f/f is also something that outsiders aren't going to think needs an explanation.) There's also the effect of scholars feeding off of previous scholarship, so if there is a bias towards slash, it may also just have to do with whatever was written first.

Fan Commentary: A 2023 Discussion

From a fan discussion in 2023:

It’s just really interesting to me to look back and see the ripple effects that major global events like this had on pop culture, even tiny, niche conclaves of Internet fandom culture. You can almost watch real-life history unfold from the perspective of a bunch of young teenage girls just by sifting through old fanfiction. It kind of makes me wonder why fandom history isn’t studied more—like, academically, not by bored weirdos like me on Reddit.

There are people, like Casey Fiesler, who are academically studying fandom, but I think (as has been mentioned elsewhere), it's hard to study the ephemeral internet, especially taking fandom purges and censorship into account. One thing that Fiesler has also mentioned (she's on Tumblr and probably other sites as well) is that fandom content is usually written for a specific audience of other fans, and the indulgent nature of fanworks makes people reluctant to talk publicly or academically about their own work or to anonymize findings. (Fanwork is of course posted where anyone can read it most of the time, but I do think it's responsible to treat it carefully as a researcher because it's easy to break trust with the community.) But I find it a super fascinating thing also.

I suspect part of the reason fandom history isn't studied so much is that nowadays, huge aspects of things end up being in private chats or deleted threads - they're not super accessible! Take the Homestuck fandom - you could do a fascinating deep dive on its evolution through time by using the MSPA Forums... but those are gone, forever, and there's no way to bring them back. The data is just gone. All we have now are screenshots of the Vriska Quarantine Threads. A lot of fandom history ends up becoming only word of mouth now in the advent of everything being online. ... though I do think a very very big part of it, too, is that fandom is very often considered something for both very young people and for women, both not exactly the most desirable traits to the kind of people I'd expect to do academic studies.

Further Reading/Meta

1968

• Joanna Russ: A 1968 Speech

1982

• The Romantic Myth and Transcendence: A Feminist Interpretation of the Kirk/Spock Bond by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith

1986

• Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith

2005

• Academia and Fandom: What is the Role of the Ivory Tower? (2005)

2008

• In Which Rolanni Flails About, ^{Archived version} archive link page 2 ("What seems not to be understood is that academics don't study and write articles in order to Validate the object of their study. Academics study and write articles in order to Validate themselves. As more and more people become academics, they must look further and further afield for subjects, and lo! suddenly Science Fiction isn't genre trash anymore; it's a way to secure tenure.") (2008)
• Albacon Wrap-up, ^{Archived version} ("Funny thing I've found-- when you cut the living dog into pieces, it never acts the same afterwards, even if you put the pieces back where you found them." -- "Hate to break it to you, but reading is "studying"—unless you forget each word as you read the next. Your comparison to butchering a dog is a false analogy—you're comparing apples and oranges." -- "Funny thing I've found--after I've studied a book, it's still all in one piece, the same as before.") (2008)

2010

• Fandom: The Academic Kiss of Death, OR My Ongoing Meta on OTW (2010)

2012

• On (Not) Hosting the Session that Killed the Term “Acafan” by Louisa Stein, posted March 18, 2011, accessed November 19, 2012
• Against Aca-Fandom: On Jason Mittell on Mad Men by Ian Bogost, posted July 29, 2010, July 29, 2010, accessed November 19, 2012

Not Dated

• Syllabi: List of fandom study class syllabi with additional reading resources
• Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins
• In 2002, Vehemently compiled an Annotated Bibliography of Academic Resources on Fandom and Fan Fiction.
• Transformative Works and Cultures editors Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse maintain an excellent bibliography here: Fan fiction: A bibliography of critical works, which has been adapted and is currently edited by Nele Noppe as a Zotero Index