They're Letting You Write Your Thesis About That?
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| Title: | They're Letting You Write Your Thesis About That? |
| Creator: | Kelly Rowett |
| Date(s): | October 1998 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | Xena: Warrior Princess |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | They're Letting You Write Your Thesis About That?, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
They're Letting You Write Your Thesis About That? is an essay by Kelly Rowett.
It was posted to Whoosh! #25 in 1998.
Topics
- Prologue
- A Stomach of One's Own
- Okay, But Why the Stomach?
- A Stomach Totem
- Epilogue
- References
- Biography
Excerpts
In Fall 1998, I will be completing my thesis on online fandom and Xena: Warrior Princess (XWP) fan fiction. You mean, Xena, the TV show? What do you mean, fan fiction? They write stories about the show? What kinds of stories? They are letting you write your thesis about that?!
Even if it were easy to talk about the different practices of a large group of people, or if it were simplicity itself to address the relationship between online communities and offline behavior, and even if we knew definitively why hundreds of individuals from around the world dial into their internet service providers to discuss a syndicated television show set in the "time of the ancient gods", academia would still find a way to confuse the issues. Yet, fandom has recently come into ivy wall vogue. Fans may fill the seats in a subculture (assuring us that there is only one culture from which all others descend), or serve as the key/index of a greater implement/impediment to our understanding of human nature.
An odd collection of pop culture theorists from Dick Hebdige to Jennifer Robertson have mounted a war against high culture elitists, who are looking to guard their perceived power, and cultural critics, who see a capitalist society creating passive consumers. While we may applaud their efforts to give theoretical depth to the misunderstood masses, we might also be a little unnerved that they all return with the same strategies, over and over: resistance (of authority), ambivalence (toward society), and negotiation (with The Powers That Be). If these qualities characterize fandom and fan activities, what differentiates fan behavior from anything else that humans do?
Forgive them. The game is rigged. Contemporary theorists have embraced the metaphor of geography for items as diverse as cyberspace, mini-malls, and the brain. Even Janet H. Murray [Hamlet On The Holodeck (New York: The Fress Press, 1997)] and Espen J."arseth [Cybertext: Perspectives On Ergodic Literature (John Hopkins University Press, 1997)], whose works have challenged long-held notions about writing and culture, describe fiction on the internet as potentially shaped by geometry ("multiformal" for Murray, "labyrinthine" for"arseth). Such an approach provides us with inanimate objects and inarticulate spaces for our pondering.
However, fandom has possibilities that do not depend on fixed places. Rather it moves relentlessly as a phenomenon and a practice. Fandom has functioning parts that require the continuing operation of each other. It is an entity, alive. True, the "body" has been used and abused before by scholars. This paper does not mean to suggest that fandom carries with it all of our earthly carnality in one handy package, nor that online exchanges necessarily have the same force or qualities as embodied interaction, though it certainly could be. On the contrary, it proposes that fandom exhibits a fierce desire to engage, to create, and to share. So, for the moment, let us consider fandom as a living body, as a fleshy anatomy we can explore. Let us call fan fiction the stomach, the craving center space, of this organism.
The stomach has a process. It works through hunger. There are different types of hunger and different responses to hunger. As Missy Good notes in her "From the Bard's Quill" entry, "because there are as many flavors of fanfic [fanfiction] as there are species of insects, you can almost always find what you want in the wide array presented". Most fanfic works within the "Xenaverse" created by TPTB. Some fanfic directly addresses a specific episode, altering an event or changing a detail (e.g., a retelling of RETURN OF CALLISTO [29/205] in which Callisto does not kill Perdicas). Murray's model of the "multiform" story seems to make much sense here: a story that asks, "what if" or "why not". This invites tales of parallel universes and second chances, and much of the fanfic out there in cyberspace, from all of the different fandoms, poses alternate possibilities to the show's "bible".
In "Uber-Xena" stories, the question answered is not "what if", but "what could be beyond". Uber-Xena fiction goes beyond the character dislocation story, allowing writers to strip away all but the essential character components. Consider the shape-shifting characters in Tammy's futuristic "Forests of Eyulf: Instincts of Blue":
- "You know me, Brielle; look into my eyes," the large woman projected. Zya pushed her long ebony hair off of her chest and crooned her request to the woman's mind once more.
- "Yes, that's it; relax..... you know my eyes, Brielle , don't you?" Zya said aloud as she lowered her naked frame to the edge of the pelts.
But do XWP fanfic writers bite off more than they should? By Henry Jenkins' figuring in Textual Poachers (New York: Routledge, 1992), fan artists are already outlaws of a sort, profiting by pilfering from another's work. This suggests that a show comes to us, through our television screens, as a complete offering with established edges. However, XWP maintains an uneasy balance between a serial drama and an episodic adventure show. Do the show's writers employ the Hurt/Comfort motif, in which one character's life or well-being is endangered in order to elicit certain emotional reactions, all too familiar to regular readers of fanfic? You bet. Satire? Yes. Is there Uber-Xena? Definitely. One might see the television show itself as a series of fanfic stories (uber-fanfic?).
Fanfic writers digest the televised episodes in order to create something else out of them. "Digest" does not equal "consume" in this instance. The notion of the consumer has long been mired in Marxism, and it places most of us at the end of the receiving line, disempowered and faceless. With writers dialing in from all over the world it is presumptuous, if not totally misguided, to believe that we share the same socio-economic environment that Marx described. Neither does "digest" mean one has to swallow something whole. Fanfic writers, as well as the rest of us, tend to be an intelligent lot, capable of criticizing and enjoying, debating and cheering. By invoking digestion as a variation on consumption (as, perhaps, fanfic is a variation on the show's texts), the conversation about fandom and fan fiction can be re-started, away from the pathologizing strains of most cultural theory and towards a non-psychological, organic perspective.