One (of the many) things that fandom and academia share is the ability to have many things be true at the same time. Collectively, we write hundreds different versions of what goes through our characters’ minds during a given crucial scene, and we give ever new interpretations of Hamlet during his major soliloquy. We (well, many of us :) can simultaneously ship Tony/Steve, Steve/Bucky, and Bucky/Natasha, and there’s this great Bedford St. Martin’s series that presents a given literary text with about a dozen different theoretical approaches (like Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, queer readings of Heart of Darkness). And even as they are sometimes mutually exclusive, they are also ALL VALID. If our collection has had any conceptual impact, we hope it is that understanding of WIP not only for fandom and academia, but also for fan studies in particular. We are realizing that there are huge gaps in areas we have not paid enough attention to, such as critical race studies, transculturalism/transnationalism, and Marxist labor theory, to name just a few, and if the collection was ever supposed to be anything, it was a snapshot of that moment.
"Where Fandom Studies Came From: An Interview with Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, Part One" by Henry Jenkins
Two quick things: first of all THIS IS SO GOOD and I have a major acafen crush (I just typoed "acafemme," bahaha) on ALL THREE OF THEM, but probably especially KRISTINA ugh I love her work; and also? how I keep writing meta-ish things and bits of stuff tagged "phd research" and keep harping on ambivalence and ambiguity and juggling multiple balls? This is exactly what I'm talking about. No need to foreclose on interpretation, no need to prematurely stabilize signifiers that are inherently, definitionally (as slash is) unstable. (Just, you know, sometimes you need to read some fluff.)
