Five Things Nele Noppe Said
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Five Things Nele Noppe Said |
| Interviewer: | Claudia Rebaza |
| Interviewee: | Nele Noppe |
| Date(s): | December 15, 2016 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | Five Things Nele Noppe Said |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Five Things Nele Noppe Said is a 2016 Q&A guest post, conducted by the Organization for Transformative Works' Communications Committee with OTW volunteer and Fanhackers lead Nele Noppe.
It was carried out as part of a series. See Five Things Said.
Excerpts
What brought you into the area of fan studies?
As a young Japanese Studies student, I asked a professor for permission to write a term paper on yaoi, my favorite kind of manga at the time. He needed the concept explained to him, and was so mortified that he said “yes” just to make me go away faster. Note that this was in the early 2000s, when there weren’t that many pop culture fans in Japanese Studies. Professors were much more easily shocked by fannish topics then.
I discovered that researching fan culture was as fun as taking part in it, and went on to do an MA thesis on yaoi/BL and a PhD on dojinshi (Japanese fanzines).
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I work to make fan studies more accessible for fans (and fan studies researchers) mainly by posting quotes from fan studies articles on the Fanhackers site (which has a Tumblr mirror). There’s a ton of fan studies research happening on every topic, and much of that research contains important, new, or just plain interesting ideas that should find their way back to fans. However, it’s not always easy for people to find their way to fan studies work. That’s where we try to make a small difference.
Take the many articles published every year in our academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC). TWC is an open access journal, meaning that the articles in it are open and free to read for everyone on the internet. However, it’s not because something is free to read that people will also find their way to it. They may not hear about the article at all, because it’s not linked to in the spaces where they hang out. They may not have time to read a full-size academic article, which is pretty damn long. The article may be a bit inaccessible in other ways, for example because it uses a lot of obscure terminology (although many fan studies researchers are very good at not overusing jargon, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that they’re often fans themselves).
Publishing bite-sized quotes from these articles in fannish spaces like Tumblr is a way to draw eyeballs to them, and make it more easy for fans to discover important ideas from fan studies research.