#personal field note

I’ve been studying various sociality, selfie and identity related phenomena through a NSFW community on Tumblr since 2011 (I think, idk, sometimes it feels like a lifetime), and sometimes I get this clinking thought that I should perhaps stop. 

Granted, this thought mostly comes at my ‘peak selfie-scholar’ moments (like submitting the dissertation in 2015), so has more to do with me tiring of thinking about selfies, and less with the continual submersion in what is, for all intents and purposes, a fantabulously rich corpus (and incredible participants who keep allowing me to go back for more). I mean, I’ve strayed from the path here and there, done (and still doing) a couple of projects based on Instagram, some thinking on methods and ethics, and some on social media and political participation (the publication based on which just became available).  

But today I spent all day honing an argument I want to make about activation and deactivation of friendship norms (for AOIR). The observations that have lead to this argument are from this same NSFW Tumblr community. And while I started the day kind of twitchy with anxiety about a ridiculous to-do list some lunatic has built in my calendar app, it totally took over and lit up my brain. 

Three years ago when I started with my PhD, I kept running into people's approach to impression management as if it was somehow a discreet and separate practice from constructing or performing the self in a discursively rich environment.

It seemed that the dystopian approaches to human connections in social media veered towards interpreting everything via impression management, as if that somehow validates seeing the things we do online as shallow, narcissistic, unauthentic and transitory.  And the more utopian (or if you're an optimist, the less panic-addled) approaches were more constructivist, seeing the people, the practices and the performances one partakes in online as constitutive.

Not sure, if it's a sign of my expanding horizons or just one of the rigorous academic life having softened my brain, but by now I'm pretty sure they can't be separated. They're kind of the same thing. Or at least  one (impression management)  for sure leads to the other (internalizing it into our self-project).

Fake it till you make it, right? Or if you don't like Alcoholics Anonymous with your aca, then Aristotle's supposedly offered a similar nugget of his own *mumble mumble* acting virtuous will make you virtuous.

... having promised to write three book chapters and an article , which  all have deadlines in December, is that you run out of that extra potent stuff needed for starting new tasks.

#1 (on image related conflicts and concurrent boundary work) is drafted and just needs to be formatted and edited;

#2 (on self-shooting as a 'transitioning culture' (from a youth research POV, we're writing this with my supervisor) has bits that can definitely be worked with;

the article (on gender and LGBT equality - yes, I know it has nothing to do with my dissertation; no, I have no idea why I promised I'd write it) has a theory bit and the results bit, the latter of which just needs to be formulated into sentences.

But #3 (exploration of visual narrative analysis as an awesome method for finding out interesting things), well #3 has been presented at a conference and I have a very thick stack of notes (my new strategic approach to academic writing that I've been meaning to blog about) of Important Thoughts. I know what I want to say. I know what things that other people before me have said I want to reference while doing so. It all exists in my head. *cue  music*  In my heeeeeaaaaad, in my heeeeead *stop music*

But I am out of the starting juice. I just want to lie in a pile of blankets and pillows staring at a little patch of sky I can see from the window and never type another word. Or talk to anyone. Or move.

I guess I'll have to try my secret technique I've developed for 'fiction-with-a-deadline' projects - write the bit that comes, even if it's the last bit or that weird bit in the middle, you didn't even know was going to be in the story before it apparently wrote itself, using you as a sock puppet.

Horny Fanfiction

You know how everyone in academia has that (those) other project(s) they  also want to work on, things they NEED to know? But they can't,  at least not before they've defended their dissertation or the grant project is finished or whatever. So it kind of lingers in your head as you watch other people whose focus it is now do things with it. Some things awesome, some things less so.  And are conflicted between just shoving your research question at someone and greedily clutching it to your chest in hopes that one day you'll get to work on it yourself.

Yeah? You know?  Good.

Because I'd really like to do some work on erotic fanfiction, but not from the perspective of community creation or maintenance, social identity, lingo or what reading slash does to a mindset of someone from a hetero-normative background (which is probably a good thing because other people are already doing that).

Writing fanfiction seems like the ultimate produsage experience - in the  macro sense the term was coined for, but also in the deeper, more micro sense of every writer, in the act of writing simultaneously using the character / actor (RPS) while producing a cultural artifact. Kind of 'Eating the Other' (actually 'fucking the other' is more correct in this sense). The other here being the fictional world / character of a film / book / TV show / Hollywood life of it's star. Okay ... that is straightforward enough ... I mean ... escapism, right?

And it seems to me that infatuation serves like inspiration here. The same hypomanic state of 'first love' seems to characterize the feeling of being a fan. But it's so much better than the 'first love' stuff, because there is no way to try and slip a love note to the boy you like to then be bitterly disappointed. But you do take that same buzzing energy and create stuff (that then takes on a whole social life of it's own and community and identity and performance and blah blah) and in that practice you get to fuck the Other (which is probably also why writing fanfiction is a drawn out affair of chapters spreading a long period of time often, yeah?)

Is this how it works? I WANT TO KNOW.

What is the process?  I mean you cannot endlessly be infatuated. Assuming you don't go bonkers and start sending your underwear to the stars, what happens? You get over it? Isn't the 'high' addictive? Won't you miss it? Will you then just hop targets? From Edward to Sam and Dean  to Dumbledore to ...? What does it do to your life? The creative impulses are good, I suppose. What about your significant offline others? What about your brain chemistry? Is being a fan an infliction that only gets certain people? With a certain brain chemistry? Or is it enough for you to find that one character that really pushes your buttons and you then are hooked on the high?

Why is most of the smut fic between the characters of the show / crossovers between shows / crossovers between characters and actors but almost never between the writer's Me character and the Dean / Sam /J2 /Bella /Edward / Spike / Harry? If the place it comes from is desire. Why aren't these worlds meshed? Will it take away from the experience? Why?

Why does angst go so well with smut?

So yes ... questions. Clutched tight to the chest.

okay ... okay ... so.

this spring is shaping up to be insane. again.

Applied to IAMCR - got accepted. They want a full paper by May 28. And IAMCR is June 25-29.

Applied to Console-ing Passions - got accepted. They luckily don't want a full paper. That is June 23-25.

Wrote a project to get money to go to both of these. Sent it off yesterday, dunno when I'll know if it was accepted.

We put together a panel with a group of amazing people for Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture (8th Global conf) - got accepted.  They want a full paper May 10.  That is July 18-20. Must also write a project to try and get money.

Applied with an abstract for a special issue on Polyamory by the Journal für Psychologie, got accepted. They want that paper by June 15.

My advisor and I submitted an abstract for a book chapter. Dunno if it's been accepted yet or when's the deadline.

I'm also now working half-time as a academic assistant on the NYRIS conference + a book for Cambridge Press we want to do.

And I have the class I teach plus the three I've registered for (am contemplating dropping one of mine).

Plus there are two more conferences, one I've applied for (ESA) and one where we want to do two panels (IR) and the deadline is March 14, but it's my most favorite conference evah, so that needs to be done and done well.

Oh and then there's the article on selfies I'm writing with Edgar and that one is about ... half done?

*headdesk*

*inject coffee into vein*

*but happy too*

Abstracting season.

It seems that January / February are abstracting season, so many deadlines for conferences that I (think) I would like to attend.  I think I wrote 3 abstracts last week, all of which said 'embodied' and 'Foucault' a LOT. And three more this week.  With a very very stuffy head and less Foucault.

I decided to be *normal* and write all of my abstracts from the same conceptual framework / empirical data that I am currently submerged in - i.e. self-images, body, identity, construction control stuff. 

Because last year I was still the n00b, who thought every abstract has to be completely different from every other one and become a full blown academic journal article. *rolls eyes at n00b-self in a wise and resigned manner suitable for a more seasoned PhD student*

Anyway - last week I submitted IAMCR (popular culture,  'Reflexivity as a new form – aesthetics and genre'), wrote one for a possible panel with some lovely peeps for this and ... can't remember what the third one was for. Then this week I did two for ESA (they allow two, so I hope to submit one for qualitative methods and one for sexuality) and then drafted two ideas (which I have to choose one from) for the IR14 panel we're proposing with a very, very kickass crowd. 

Still have to think if and what I'd submit separately for IR14 as they allow one panel, one separate.  And what to do with ICWSM.  They want a full paper. :/