OTW Guest Post: Catherine Coker
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | OTW Guest Post: Catherine Coker |
| Interviewer: | Angelique Jurd |
| Interviewee: | Catherine Coker |
| Date(s): | 19 November 2017 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | |
| External Links: | "OTW Guest Post: Catherine Coker". Archived from the original on 2019-04-05. |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
OTW Guest Post: Catherine Coker is a 2017 interview done as part of a series. See OTW Guest Post.
Some Topics Discussed
- Fandom and fannish activities
- Acafandom
- Book history and women's writing
Some Excerpts
How did you first get into fandom and fanworks?
I was a teenager back in the 1990s when the Internet was becoming more widely available, and I came across a book on sale at Walmart (I was a kid in a small town, what can I say?) called Net Trek, which was a guide to Star Trek sites and listservs online….with a whole chapter dedicated to fan fiction (and even a little bit about K/S slash!). A few months later I got my first computer (and the Internet) and immediately started looking for fan fiction for all of my favorite shows, and soon after started writing stories myself. It was all downhill from there!
What first made you interested in book history?
Fast-forward fifteen years and I’m an academic librarian, and one of my duties at the time was teaching book history classes. I had gotten through my entire academic life without ever even hearing about it, and I had to immediately brush up on the basics of the field and learn how to use and teach with the presses kept in the library’s workshop.
What struck me fairly early on was that there was no mention of women at all in the bulk of the scholarship, which led me to go back to school for my doctorate (currently in progress) in order to, apparently, argue with an entire discipline. Along the way I co-founded the Women in Book History Bibliography with my friend and colleague Kate Ozment, because it turns out there is quite a bit of scholarship on the topic, but it’s widely disparate and not always even labelled as such.
But when you look at the bulk of the reference books for book history, what becomes painfully apparent very quickly is the focus on Anglo-European print culture as a massive default; the words “women,” “gender,” and “race” don’t even appear as encyclopedia entries. And as I mention in my article, the academic study of non-European book history is so neglected that it is literally easier to find scholarship on the history of K/S than it is to find articles on, say, women papermakers in China! How does that even work? And there’s a small and growing body of work in the field on the digital age, but nothing on fan writing and fanzine production despite the vast, vast quantities of it! So I’m fascinated at what can be learned when you make disciplines talk to one another, and bring the separate methodologies together.
What fandom things have inspired you the most?
I think fandom’s intersections with social justice and social activism always inspire me the most—and at the same time, when fandom screws up, it always scalds my soul the worst, because it takes away from fans’ safe space. I know so many people who came to accept their own queerness through fandom, and I think that’s incredibly important, but it’s also clear how far we have to go in so many directions: I’m thinking of Racefail here, and how it’s been almost a decade but we still see the ramifications of it in so many different ways. Fandom pushing back against the status quo is and always has been so important—you see it in fan writing going all the way back to the 1930s!—and I think acafandom is starting to get there too.
Rukmini Pande’s Decolonizing Fan Studies Bibliography collects and signalboosts a lot of important scholarship to make a (much-needed) intervention in the field, and there’s a growing number of other studies to look at fandom as a problematic space as often as a utopic one! Using fandom and fan scholarship to literally change the world? That’s as awesome as it gets!