Episode 151: Teaching Fanfiction
In Episode 151, “Teaching Fanfiction,” Flourish and Elizabeth talk to Dr. Anne Jamison and PhD candidate Maria Alberto about teaching college courses on fanfiction. Topics discussed include how they approach fic in the classroom, the ethics of including fic in syllabi, and the difference between just enjoying fic and studying it from a critical perspective—and they also give advice for people who want to study fandom-related topics in academia.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:42] Some handy links:
Anne is featured in a French documentary on fic (mostly in English with French subtitles)
You can also download slides for two of Anne’s lectures, “Did Milton write bible fanfic?” and “What is canon and where did it come from?”
[00:07:04] Our interstitial music here and throughout is “Tech Toys” by Lee Rosevere, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:08:35]
[00:12:13]
[00:21:48] Anne catalogued her “Fifty Shades of Pop Culture Theory” class in a blog.
[00:37:23] On the “Queer Guardian Angel Aziraphale” front, Anne recommends the “Mr. Fell’s Bookshop” series by HolyCatsAndRabbits and “such surpassing brightness” by bibliocratic.
[00:38:58] If you aren’t familiar with TheoryOfFicGate, Fanlore has you covered.
[00:40:10] Maria shared two articles which have shaped her thinking on the ethics of teaching fanfic: “Attention Economy, Layered Publics and Research Ethics” by Kristina Busse and “Ethical and privacy considerations for research using online fandom data” by Brianna Dym and Casey Fiesler.
[00:41:49] “Sexy Times with Wangxian” is infamous, but if you haven’t learned of AO3’s most recently notorious fic, it’s covered on Fanlore.
[00:48:05] “Kraith” is one of those rare fanfiction things that has a proper Wikipedia article. Of course it’s also covered on Fanlore. You can read the full collection of stories online.
[00:54:14] The greatest Cruella of all, Young Elizabeth Minkel:
Finally, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, and you like anime, you can help Maria out with her ongoing research by taking a survey about changes in the anime con scene over the course of the pandemic!
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #151, “Teaching Fanfiction”!
FK: Yeah! Guess what it’s about? And, we have not one but two guests!
ELM: Right. It’s about teaching fanfiction? Did I get it right?
FK: Yeah, shocking.
ELM: [laughs] So we have two guests. The first one is Dr. Anne Jamison, who is a Professor of English at the University of Utah, and the second one is Maria Alberto, a PhD candidate, also at the University of Utah.
FK: I am really really excited to talk with them. I think that many people who listen to this podcast probably will be at least a little bit familiar with Anne’s work, because she wrote the book Fic, which was—I think a lot of people in fandom read it. It was a trade publication and it was about fanfic in this really cool way.
ELM: Yeah, so Fic came out in 2013 and I read it in 2014, and it was pretty important to me. It’s only partly written by Anne, and some other academics, and some other people in fandom—some people in Sherlock fandom, which is the fandom both Anne and I were in at the time, so that was an exciting element of it.
But it’s written in this way that’s like, it’s not super academic. It is accessible, but it is very smart and it takes fanfiction very seriously, and I read it at a time when I had just started to write about fandom in general, in the media, and it was pretty revelatory for me. I was like “Oh, oh, you could actually write about it this way. I didn’t realize. This is how I would like to write about fanfiction, from this lens, in this tone.”
So I think I sent her a Tumblr message, maybe a fanmail? Do you remember Tumblr’s fanmail feature, R.I.P.?
FK: I do, I do, I do remember that.
ELM: And then we became friends! And I know both, I didn’t know you at the time but the following year Anne taught a class at Princeton on fanfiction—just for the semester, she was at Princeton—and we were both guests there. So we had some exposure to her fanfiction classes way back then.
FK: Yeah, and that was really cool, because at the time I had been teaching classes at M.I.T. about fan studies, you know, fan culture. I’d never seen somebody teaching a class that was, like, just about fanfic, like in a literary way, you know what I mean?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: There’s a world of difference between those two things. And it was really cool! I was like “Wow! How does this even work? Show me!” [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I think that was one of the things that even appealed to me about the book, too, was I was just learning about fan studies and starting to read a lot of the stuff, and while I did also like you—we both did master’s work that intersected with…I always feel uncomfortable calling mine within fan studies, which is dumb, because I could just own it. [FK laughs] Cause I literally wrote my dissertation about fandom.
FK: It really was.
ELM: I don’t know, that’s silly. You know, a lot of stuff I encountered was stuff from other disciplines, and obviously I was coming from a different discipline for grad school, which was the digital humanities, and checking out all the media studies stuff—but like, I was an English major and first and foremost fandom for me is about fanfiction, and for decades of being a lurker it was literally just about the fanfiction. I didn’t want anything to do with the conversations with the fans, you know what I mean? So…
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: That really, I really dug that. So anyway. Anne is back at Utah and now teaching another class on fanfiction, and I believe Maria was the T.A.
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And taught part of this class. And so Maria is new to both of us, but I was really excited when Anne suggested she come on too, because she is a younger academic in a different position, and I know we get a lot of people who are coming into academia, or want to pursue an academic career, and I think that looks really different for someone from—Anne is Gen X, Maria is a Millennial, you know, it looks pretty different depending on when you came into the workforce in terms of what these structures even look like. So I’m really glad to have Maria’s perspective on this as well, just where she’s coming from in fandom and also approaching fandom as an academic in 2021.
FK: Absolutely. I am really really stoked to have her on. OK. Before we can get to that interview, however, I think that we need to talk about Patreon.
ELM: Oh, you want to do that first?
FK: Why not, right? Mix it up!
ELM: All right, get it out of the way! OK. Great. Patreon.com/fansplaining.
FK: Yeah! That’s—
ELM: The place where our Patreon is.
FK: Thanks, thanks for that, Elizabeth, you’re so erudite.
ELM: Thank you.
FK: As you guys know, we are funded solely by listeners and readers like you! So if you would like to support the work that we’re doing, go to patreon.com/fansplaining and pledge. There’s a lot of really great rewards you can get for that, including having your name in the credits, getting a little enamel pin, listening to special episodes of which there are many, and pretty soon we’re going to send out another Tiny Zine for people who are high pledgers. So you know, keep your eyes out for that.
ELM: Pretty soon we will also record another special episode. It’s been a few months.
FK: It’s true!
ELM: I think it’s time. The special episodes, I think, are our most popular reward. That’s our most popular tier, $3 a month. We’ve talked about media we’ve enjoyed, media we’ve had mixed feelings about, things like Succession, Watchmen, WandaVision, Schitt’s Creek, I can’t think of the other things. The Favourite starring Olivia Colman.
FK: That was great, that was great.
ELM: And then we also last year started doing a series called “Tropefest” where we really dig into particular fanfiction tropes and talk about the ways we feel they function, what works for us about them and what doesn’t. We talked about omegaverse, for example—
FK: Yeah!
ELM: —but also trapped together, enemies to lovers, OK, I get it, you like these tropes! Found family, hurt/comfort. So those were very popular last year and I think we want to make some more of them, because there are a lot of tropes under the sun.
FK: There are a lot of tropes. But but but! If you cannot afford to or don’t wish to give us any money, you can still support us, primarily by subscribing to this podcast on whatever podcatcher you use and telling people about the podcast, like, you know, saying “I liked this episode!” and sharing the information about it and so forth, and also by writing in and giving us your thoughts, comments, questions.
You can do that at fansplaining at gmail dot com, or give us a call at 1-401-526-FANS, or message us on Tumblr. We’ve also got a little form on our website, fansplaining.com, that you can use, or I guess in theory you could contact us on social media, but that won’t give you as much scope to talk, so you know, you might or might not wish to do that. But we’re fansplaining everywhere! So you know, get in touch!
ELM: Very cheerful!
FK: I feel cheerful. I feel cheerful about the idea of people getting in touch! Don’t you:?
ELM: Yeah, me too, me too!
FK: All right, OK. With that, do you think that we should get on with talking to Anne and Maria?
ELM: Let’s start this conference call!
FK: All right!
[Interstitial music]
FK: All right, I think it’s time to welcome Anne and Maria to the podcast! Welcome Anne, welcome Maria!
Anne Jamison: Hi! Thanks for having us!
Maria Alberto: Woo, so excited to be here!
ELM: OK, so, for reference, the first voice was Anne and the second voice was Maria. Do you think everyone can keep track of that? You’ll say different things, right?
AJ & MA: [unison] We say totally different things.
ELM: Yeah, yeah, great, you said the same thing, so that really bodes poorly, but that’s great! Cool. [all laugh] Yeah, like, is fanfiction good? And you’ll be like, “no.” “Yes, and no.” We’ll be like “Great, solved.” All right, cool. OK! Thank you very much for coming on, we’re so excited to have you. Congratulations on finishing the semester!
AJ: Thank you!
MA: It’s a relief, let me tell you.
ELM: OK, so one at a time, I wanna do like, our standard intro question, which is—usually “what’s your fannish background, origin story,” but also for people who professionally work with fans, on fans, whatever, also like—how did that come about and what are those intersections? So I don’t know who wants to go first. Anne.
AJ: Yes. Unlike almost every other profesor who studies fanfiction, I was not a fan first, unless you count like, following the Grateful Dead around or making punk zines or whatever. But not—
FK: That’s a fan!
ELM: Yeah, it’s a fan.
FK: But not that kind of fan.
AJ: But it wasn’t, you know, it—it has nothing to do with the fandom that I now study, or my entry point into fandom, and I didn’t see it as connected. So yes, it is; so was loving Spock when I was six or whatever. That, too, was fandom. But in terms of being involved a lot in internet fandom, or in fanfic writing, or any of this before I started studying it—that’s not how it happened for me.
I became interested in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [fandom] because I had to teach seven sections at a time of the same thing, and one week we were doing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and so I started searching it and found, like, fan forums, and found all these people saying smart things that helped me with my classes, and I became really interested in that, and I was scared of fanfiction, and I continued to be scared of fanfiction as I read some, because, you know… [laughs] When you first Google, like, stories, especially back then, you were not finding really excellent things. [all laugh]
But finally I found something that I loved and then I started talking to people and I kept getting more and more interested in it, and then I started writing stuff and I got more interested in it in a more fannish way, because by this point I had already become, like, heavily invested fannishly in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But it was a very different, that sort of online fandom and connected to lots of people I didn’t know, was really different from the way that I had experienced fandom before, where I was like, watching Twin Peaks with all of my friends and we would talk about it a lot, but I knew all those people. And it does seem to me to be really different, and it was a long time before I even connected those things.
And then I started teaching fanfic in a lot of my courses, just as a practice or as a way for students to engage differently or to go out and find their own things, and then it just sort of wound its way up into more and more of my courses until finally once I studied it, like, as its own thing, instead of as an adjunct. [laughs] I made it like a full professor in my classes. And that was so fabulous. It was so much fun, and so I’m still doing it.
ELM: And you wrote a book!
AJ: I did write a book!
ELM: About fanfiction.
AJ: [laughing] I did, called Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World. [all laugh] And I would say I wrote about a third of it, because much of the book is written by other fan studies scholars and fans themselves and other writers who aren’t fans and you know, actors who have had fanfic written about them, et cetera. I wanted to have all of these different voices, because I didn’t want to have—I had no interest in writing an academic book about fanfiction in which I would be the only person speaking. That seemed to me, at that time, not what was needed, so I didn’t do that. And then I wrote a book about Kafka.
ELM: Similar.
MA: As one does. [laughter]
ELM: Maybe it is similar! I haven’t read it, I’m sorry.
AJ: It’s not that similar? But there is kind of a Kafka fandom, and it’s a lot of Kafka fanfic, but like—when it gets published in The New Yorker you don’t call it that.
ELM: Sure.
FK: You know, my dad wrote Kafka fanfic, like, one of the only stories that I’ve ever read that my dad has written was Kafka fanfic.
AJ: That’s awesome.
FK: So there ya go.
AJ: A lot of 20th century literature is Kafka fanfic, in a way. It’s not being published on fanfic archives, and I’m not gonna get into this argument with you right now Elizabeth— [all laughing]
FK: Oh no oh no we might have to fight, Anne! We might have to fight about fanfic definitions!
ELM: It’s not just me! Flourish and I are on the same page on this. Anne will text me and be like, “With your small tent, how do you feel about this specific use case?” And I’m like “No, no, still not fanfiction.” [laughing]
AJ: That’s fine! I just feel perfectly happy with my big tent, small tent distinctions.
ELM: Yeah.
MA: I’ve seen fanfiction alignment charts, and I’m now going to Google that, because I feel that would add some interesting fuel to this fire.
ELM: Oh, I’ve seen the one you’re talking about—
FK: Oh yeah!
ELM: Yeah, yeah, the one where I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter is one of those squares?
MA: Yes!! I think so.
ELM: We are, I think we’re both like, true—true goods or something? Is that how it works? Lawful good. Lawful good.
AJ: Lawful good, yes.
FK: [laughing] “True good,” what the fuck are you talking about?
ELM: Sorry Flourish, we didn’t all name our companies after one of those little squares, so…
FK: [laughing] It’s not even my alignment!
MA: The one I’m thinking of is the one that goes, yeah, it’s like context purist, context neutral, context radical; medium purist, medium neutral, medium radical. I’m really invested in alignment charts, in case no one could tell. Let’s just say I’m gonna find this thing.
ELM: We are context and medium purists, I would say, but we acknowledge that there are other ways to be in the world. So.
MA: I like that answer. That’s awesome.
ELM: OK. That’s Anne’s origin story. Maria, how about you?
MA: Oh boy. OK. So how did I get from where I started to fanfiction alignment charts? Let me think. OK, so I did not have a lot of internet access growing up, so I was definitely doing things that were fannish—like, I was writing things that were fanfiction, I was shipping people in ways that were shipping—without really knowing that these were practices that people other than I did. And it wasn’t actually until I went to undergrad, and I had a journalism professor who was like, “All of you, all of you young and budding journalists, you need to create Tumblrs. This is how the kids today are promoting their journalism.” [all laugh]
ELM: Incredible.
MA: Reader, that is not how the journalists of today were promoting their journalism. But…
ELM: Wait wait wait, 2012? 2011?
MA: 2011. Yeah.
ELM: OK. Yes.
MA: So. And as you can probably guess from that date, I went and really, like, fed my fixation with BBC Sherlock on Tumblr, and the rest is really history from there. I, that kind of set my trajectory towards grad school. I actually went to the first 221B con that was in 2013. And I met Lori Morimoto, who was, you know, doing fan studies work there. And I was like, “Oh! This is actually a thing I could do! I could marry my own personal interest in BBC Sherlock with actual work?!” And you know, it’s kind of spiraled from there, but yeah. Really, really happy to be in this kind of field.
FK: So I really really love [laughs] I love that your two stories of how you got into fandom are so different from each other. Maria, you’re like the classic thing that I think everyone thinks about when you go into this, and Anne, you’re coming from “I discovered fandom second and academia first!” I guess I’m curious too, because I know that you guys both teach this class about fanfic, but—that’s also sort of not the standard class that you’d think of when people talk about “fan studies,” right? You’re not taking a fan studies approach to teaching fanfic, right? Could you talk a little bit more about that class that you guys are working on?
AJ: Sure. Well, I’m gonna start this one since I sort of started the class and was thrilled to have Maria join me this year. It’s evolved, but I take a pretty literary approach to fanfiction, which I want to clarify does not mean that I am saying that fanfiction is literature—meaning that is is like, “high” in some way. Those aren’t distinctions that I’m interested in. What I mean is more that I’m interested in how the texts relate to other texts and, like, how people author things, and how our ideas about authorship have changed over time, and how fanfiction as we experience it now would relate to earlier writing practices.
So, for example, in this class, we started with the Bible, and then went to Milton. Because that’s like, a rewriting. And so what I would say for you guys, who like a narrow definition of fanfiction: these are analogous, fanfiction-like practices. [all laugh]
ELM: Yeah!
AJ: But it doesn’t really make sense to call them fanfiction, because you don’t have, like, the copyright structure and the same understanding of ownership and like that. And so we go through a little bit of history and look at sort of how writing and publishing and ownership and thoughts about originality were working at different times, and that’s very interesting to me. And that’s one of the reasons that I like to have—and it makes it very apparent that there’s a continuum, and it makes it very apparent that fanfiction is connected to literary practices, like from the get-go. Like, I could start earlier than that. I don’t always start with Milton, but we were doing Good Omens, so it made sense to do some Bible and to do some Milton.
And then I do like, then I do Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek and a sort of more usual trajectory through prominent historical, contemporary, more modern sense of fanfiction fandom. But this year, we did it a little bit differently after that, in that we had two really long units: one really long unit on Good Omens from like, Good Omens’ sources to the novel to the adaptation to the fanfiction, and then Maria developed a wonderful unit on the Chinese webnovel and webseries and fanfiction of The Untamed, which probably people know it. And I would love it if Maria could say something about that.
MA: [laughs] Absolutely. So that one was really interesting to me, and I was really invested in doing a kind of literary approach to that, because as that show The Untamed has kind of like taken off, it seems that sometimes the discussions of the webnovel that it was adapted from, and all of the kinds of writing traditions that the webnovel was drawing from, this wasn’t discussed nearly as much as I was hoping for.
So for a lot of students in the class all of this was new, the show was new, the novel was new, the genres and the writing traditions were new, but even for the two students who’d seen the show, who knew about it, they were like taking it in from Tumblr, from everyone who’d eventually—falling down this rabbit hole, they were like, “Oh, there’s a webnovel? Oh, there’s all these traditions?” And yeah, they’re established texts, they’re established traditions, but we just didn’t have as much knowledge of them in the English-speaking fandom. And I really wanted to kind of counter that with what students were receiving in my part of the class, so.
FK: That’s really interesting cause it sounds like you’re really focused on the fanfic itself, and like, other—and other written—I mean obviously if you’re taking a literary approach that’s what you’re focused on, but it’s interesting to me cause like I was saying earlier, when I think of a fanfic class or a fan studies class, often it’s so much more like, sociological, or you know, focused on like, the ways that people are interacting more than it is, like—the fanfic is almost a secondary or tertiary thing, the actual content of what you’re doing is less important than the way that you’re doing it and so forth. That’s a really interesting approach to take to work in that more literary space.
AJ: As a literature professor it seems to be…
FK: [laughing] Obvious! I know, but I mean, well, OK, look—
AJ: It’s true, it’s absolutely true!—
FK: People don’t know the differences, right? Like…
AJ: And I would say that it is, that it is great that—one of the things that I really love about this era in fan studies is that there are all of these different approaches and all of them are so interesting and valid, like, for me to read about. I love reading about human-computer interaction, or people who—I’m interested in platforms. But I don’t have the understanding, really, to get them. So talking to somebody who really understands what an MP3 is, or really understands file formats—that’s fascinating to me. I couldn’t do that work.
ELM: Right.
AJ: But I’m very interested to understand. So it’s kind of like, the more different perspectives—it’s great to focus on different aspects of this sort of, what you might call an ecosystem, and I think it’s perfectly fine for us to focus on different parts, as long as we don’t start saying that they’re the only things to focus on.
MA: Exactly.
AJ: Right? Abigail DeKosnik wrote Rogue Archives, about the archival element, and it’s a lot about Archive of Our Own, and I think that’s very interesting. But it’s not a book like I could write.
One of the things that I do notice, in terms of people wanting to go on and do fan studies, is that they don’t really have an understanding of academic discipline. So a lot of people are doing it in library science, a lot of people are bringing it into communication, and writing and rhetoric, and to ESL. So those are worlds away from what I do, although I advise some of those projects and I learn a lot from them. If you want to study fanfiction, you have to—or if you want to study fandom, you have to think about how, and what discipline you wanna be in. Because there aren’t fan studies departments.
ELM: Right, sure. Do you find that any of your students are coming in with any expectations about that? I’m curious about your students and also I wanna say, for context, Anne, you started teaching fanfiction classes what, like 10 years ago, I wanna say? Is that right? A little later?
AJ: More. More than that.
ELM: Oh!
AJ: Longer ago. I mean, fanfic—well, dedicated fanfiction classes, I think the first one that was totally on fanfiction was 2015.
ELM: OK.
AJ: That one at Princeton. That was the first time I did it totally on fanfiction. The first time I did a really big unit was 2010.
ELM: Gotcha.
AJ: That was the one where I was doing “Twilight fanfiction—what is it” at the time that Fifty Shades of Grey was not Fifty Shades of Grey, it was Master of the Universe, and Beautiful Bastard was not Beautiful Bastard, you know. All of the things that got published, ultimately, as books by Simon and Schuster, whatever, you know, were my fanfiction class. [laughs] But it was really like, it was a class on pop culture theory, and our question was like, “is this a genre, or is this something else?” Because I really like it when students are doing original work that I don’t know the answer to. When I don’t know the answer to something, that is when it’s really interesting for me to teach. So that was a really cool experience, but it’s not like easily replicated.
ELM: So even from 2015, and we had a bit of exposure to your class—your Princeton class—and I’m curious to know, even from then, that’s six years ago, I think the general attitudes around fanfiction have changed from then to now. I’m curious about the students who are coming in—obviously we’re talking about different universities, different bodies of students, whatever.
But I’m just curious about the kind of students who take these classes. Are they fans? Do they read and write fic, or is this really foreign to them? Do they have ways of reading fic that—I got a lot of questions. Who are they?
FK: Cause I feel—I feel like when I see people online talking about fan studies, it’s always like “Wow, this is so cool, I could just do this thing all the time that I do!” Right? But is that, is that really, like, your audience? [all laugh]
AJ: Well, the answer to all of the questions that Elizabeth just asked is yes. [MA laughs]
ELM: They are fans. They read and write fanfiction.
AJ: And they don’t know anything about fanfiction, and they’ve never read a fic in their life.
ELM: Love it.
AJ: And they don’t even know what class they signed up for because they need the one that meets at this time and fulfills this requirement. This applies to a lot of our students. Here it’s a very different kind of university from Princeton. Maria, how many—what percentage do you think of our students were coming from fanfic fandom?
MA: Oh my goodness. That is…whoo. That’s difficult to say, because I had like a more limited contact with some of them, like, in certain parts of the semester. But I would say probably a third of the students that I really got to engage with were coming from fanfiction or from at least fandom contexts where they knew what fic was. Right?
But even within that kind of, that number, we had people who were reading on Wattpad and were so interested in Wattpad. We had people, we had people who were like “Yes, I’m sticking on fanfiction.net because I don’t like this, this and this about AO3.” And then we had the people who like, “We know all about AO3,” browsing AO3, using tags to kind of filter our experience, so—even within the answer to that question there are like three different sub-answers to that, which was really interesting to me, because…yeah, I wasn’t expecting that.
ELM: That’s interesting.
AJ: Yeah, and I always learn something that I don’t know about from my students, whether it was like this year there were a lot of them—or at least several of them—that were into the choose-your-own-adventure fanfics, and I don’t even, I didn’t—I’d not seen that before, so I learned a lot about that. And it’s very different.
I don’t teach off of Wattpad anymore, although I used to, just because I find it—A, I don’t really like having my students having to join Wattpad, because I don’t really fully, I don’t find it completely transparent what I’m setting them up for. But also it’s just difficult to manage, and I find so many of the people writing on it are young, and I try not to teach the writing of minors overall, just, I mean—if it’s G or something, yes, but like, teens write a lot of really disturbing things, and I prefer to read disturbing things by adults.
ELM: Sure!
AJ: As a matter of, as a matter of practice, you know? So I don’t teach off Wattpad anymore. But at the same time I’m always complaining that fan studies doesn’t do enough with Wattpad, cause it’s huge and it’s more international, and it’s so very interesting to me, the way that it blends fanfiction and original stories and stuff. At the same time, I understand why we read off AO3, because it’s transparent and it’s easy to use once you get the hang of it. It’s easy for us to find things, to filter things, to tell people how to filter things. It’s easier.
But I would say that for, yeah, a third of students coming out of someplace in fandom. Often, and because this is always true of fans, the people who are coming out of someplace in fandom think that that is fandom.
ELM: Yeah.
AJ: And think that they understand fanfiction because they have had this experience and they generalize to every—and this is the cause of any number of fan wars since forever. [all laugh] That’s just how it is. Then there’s like a third of students who have maybe, like, heard of fanfiction, or their roommate wrote fanfic, or maybe they wrote fanfic when they were 12 and they put it away, or their daughter or son wrote fanfic—because you get a lot of different ages in the class—and so I really love those, where a parent takes my class and suddenly is able to relate to their child in a more, in a different way.
And then I have people who know nothing and it is, I can just say: it is a real challenge. You don’t usually get in a class such a blend of people with intense passionate expert knowledge of something at the same time you get people who have no idea of what it is.
MA: A complete blank slate.
AJ: That’s a teaching challenge! [laughs] Put it that way. But I think more of the people, the more I teach, the more people there are in my classes that have more fannish background. It used to be that almost nobody had ever heard of it, when I started teaching, you know. “Who knew people were doing this?” And now everyone knows people are doing, it, practically. Not everyone, but 18 out of 20.
FK: Right. [MA laughs]
ELM: That’s really interesting. So I, you know, I’m curious about—I’m just imagining myself being, like, a teen, and having spent the last years prior reading a lot of Remus/Sirius fanfiction, and having pretty firm ideas of what that was at the time…being asked to, I mean, you know, for context too I think Anne knows this about me, Flourish definitely does, but like, I’m a fandom monogamist, and I really like to read in the thing that I’m really into actively at the moment. And I can’t really get that feeling about anything else, even stuff that I used to be in the fandom of.
And so for me that affect is important, and so obviously I feel like I could take your class. I could do it, you know? But it would just like—it would take away that element of what makes fanfiction fanfiction for me, to some degree, because the affect is important. And I’m curious if you have people who kind of struggle or come into it, you know, obviously people are coming into it with the assumption of the experiences they have…how you try to like, do people unlearn that? Or treat it as something different?
The books I read for pleasure in high school were very different than the books I had to read in my college English degree classes, you know? And I read them differently, because different things were being asked of me, even if it was Victorian literature before and Victorian literature after, do you know what I mean?
AJ: I do, and I think that you’re right—I mean, I think that affect and familiarity and investment are all really integral parts of fanfiction, as it is sort of intended to be and as most people experience it, and if you study it in a classroom, it is artificial necessarily. If you just so happen to be an intense fan of all of the things that we’re studying, it’s unlikely. And you may be a fan of none of them. And so in order for people to have that experience—and it’s especially important for the people coming in who don’t have any background in fanfiction—they have a journal where they need to find fanfiction for things that they are invested in, and then just write about it. So that they’ll have that, you know.
Because otherwise it is artificial. I mean, it’s like anything else. You don’t have to tell people—all English courses are like that. If you have always loved children’s literature and your favorite book is Alice in Wonderland, and you go into a class in children’s literature and you learn about Alice in Wonderland, that’s gonna be a bummer. [all laugh] For a whole lot of people. We’re not there to help people feel happier and more comfortable about the things that they already love.
And that is what a lot of people want in fanfiction. I would go so far as to say that’s what a lot of people want in fanfiction during a pandemic, and that might be why they’re taking the course, and my teaching is never about helping people feel more comfortable with the things they already love. It’s usually about complicating or, you know—complicating or showing, you know, a darker side, showing something you didn’t know, challenging your perception. A lot of times what I’ll ask is, “OK, so this isn’t for you, but could you now imagine what it would be like if it were. What would you be wanting if this was for you? What would that be like?”
Because if you’re a queer teen, and you assume that everyone in fanfiction is a queer teen, because that’s been your experience, and you assume that everyone is wanting to read queer stories, and that’s what fanfiction is, and then you encounter someone who is having a completely different experience and doesn’t ever want to read about sex at all, and avoids relationship fics entirely, and basically wants to read about battles—they’re like “Oh, but that isn’t even fanfiction.”
So it’s not always reading about the sex between characters that you don’t want to read about sex—although that is genuinely a challenge, I think for most people? Like, it’s kind of uncomfortable to read sex between people that you don’t want to be reading sex about. And that’s artificial, you know? Like— [all laugh] It feels really goofy!
FK: Yeah! Yeah!
AJ: Things that I read—and I do it all, I read this all the time because I need to know about more than the things that I’m invested in. So like, I’m super interested in the Omegaverse, and reading the Omegaverse, like, most stories make me literally gag. And I don’t mean that as any kind of judgment!
FK: Oh no! [laughs]
AJ: [laughing] And I’m fascinated by it! If I want to cozy myself up and comfort myself with hurt/comfort or something, it’s not the Omegaverse. It’s no A/B/O for me.
ELM: That’s really funny.
AJ: So it’s totally, I mean, it’s—Maria, was that like, strange for you? Having to make people read things that they didn’t want to read? Or is that just, since you’ve been teaching for awhile you’re just used to that?
MA: I was about to say, I’ve been teaching for long enough where that’s my daily life. That’s the grind. [laughs] So it’s, it’s different doing that in the context of what they were reading being fanfiction, and being like, work that delves into the intertextuality that’s kind of surrounding fanfiction. But the practice itself is unfortunately familiar.
FK: It does seem like it’s a bit different with fanfic because—like you were saying earlier, Anne—you’re asking people to actually get into a mindset of like, why someone would want to read this, why someone would love reading it. No one ever asked me that about, like, any of the things I was assigned that were, you know, quote “real literature,” right? No one ever wanted—
ELM: Wait, hold on Flourish, sorry, not to question, but of course, because you’re reading about the societal, the cultural, the historical context in which these works were written. So I absolutely think that—obviously if you had an extremely old-school close-reading kind of English education, then no one would—
FK: That’s fascinating, cause like I guess like as an affect thing, as centering that affect, I guess I didn’t—I mean…
ELM: Maybe not centering the affect…
FK: It may be a little extreme to say that, but like…
ELM: But I think that, maybe this is just—I don’t know, you guys are English professors so you tell me if this is weird, but in my English education we talked a lot about attitudes and mores of the various times in which these things were written to contextualize them, and I think that helps understand what people were getting out of them, by reading primary texts around those books. People’s reflections…
FK: Sure, I guess I just never thought about that as being about affect, you know what I mean?
ELM: Sure.
FK: I thought about that as like—but it is, I guess, it’s just…
AJ: Well, right now I can say that in literary studies, if you’re not thinking about affect, you’re barely in the profession. There isn’t anything more central right now than affect theory.
ELM: All right!
AJ: In a way, we’re at a good moment for fanfiction. [all laugh] You know?
FK: Yes, and the last time I took a class about literature was, I was in college and it was like 2005, maybe? So… [laughs]
ELM: Still, maybe you had some old school folks!
FK: Maybe!
ELM: I had some old school professors.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. Well, and then I guess also there’s a lot of like—I don’t know that, I don’t know how literature is taught in high school, but I doubt that…I think a lot of people who sort of approach, who come into college and so forth don’t really know the way literature is talked about or taught in college, because I feel like it’s very different. So there’s that.
AJ: It is. It does—
MA: I taught that class, and yes.
AJ: It is, it is different. And it is so different. At times—I’ve never asked any of my students in college to identify a theme in 25 years of teaching. [all laugh]
FK: Tell me, tell me about what the color red is doing here?
ELM: How will they understand the poem if they don’t know what the theme is!
FK: Red means fire?
ELM: Yeah!
AJ: Oh my God. Please stop. [laughing]
ELM: Or passion. Yeah.
AJ: Safeword!!! [all laughing]
MA: The flashbacks. Flashbacks to the war.
ELM: Yeah, I just had a very strong flashback. That was cool. Great. [laughter] Yeah, I mean, I guess I understand what you’re saying in the sense of: it feels different, right? You’re talking about Good Omens Omegaverse! Do they have Good Omens Omegaverse? They must.
FK: They must.
AJ: Of course they have it. [all laugh]
FK: There’s Omegaverse for everything. It’s Rule 34.
ELM: Is that popular in Good Omens fandom? I’m curious. I don’t actually know about the vibes of that body of fic.
AJ: I mean, there is like—for sure there is some. I don’t know, it’s not as, I would say, it’s not as popular, as disproportionately popular in Good Omens fandom as it is in other fandoms.
ELM: That was my question.
AJ: I would say that.
ELM: I believe that everything is in everything, obviously, so, yes.
AJ: Right. You know. But certainly that’s not where we were—when we got into Omegaverse to the extent that we did, there’s a final part of the class where people were studying by trope, and then people were in their individual fandom groups looking for tropes, so we did like, you know, they got to choose the trope. And then we got into the Omegaverse a little bit. But I didn’t make anyone read the Omegaverse this time. [laughter] I have sometimes. You know.
But I felt like, you know, I had already horrified some of my students enough for once by making them read angel/demon fic. Which I mean, in the sweetest possible way! We read, they were such sweet stories! But you know, that is a stretch for a lot of people.
ELM: That’s interesting.
AJ: Anytime, and one of the reasons that I wanted to do Good Omens in this particular, in our context in Utah, a lot of people are really engaged in, you know, religious ideas, whether they’re coming from inside the religion or whether they’re coming from having left it—very upset about how it was interacting with their queer identity or their gender or you know, any number of things. But they’re still very much—and that’s not just, it’s not just the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but also recovering Catholics and things like that. There’s a lot of investment in religion. That made Good Omens so interesting, because of my favorite trope.
ELM: What’s your favorite trope?
AJ: Queer guardian angels. Queer guardian angel Aziraphale, who comes and validates people’s pronouns.
MA: Yes!
ELM: Oh, you mean he’s the guardian angle of other people, not of Crowley.
AJ: No, the guardian angel of all queers.
ELM: Oh, all right. I was gonna say.
AJ: In history, doing various things…
ELM: I didn’t know if we were doing some kind of Sentinel thing here. [all laugh]
AJ: No, no. Often they are together, demon and angel guardians. But some of those stories are really interesting because they’re written as, like, academic papers.
MA: Love those!
AJ: With footnotes and everything, and they’ve gone and created the historical evidence for the strange saints or whatever, and there’s a number of those. And for me, that’s like catnip. [all laugh] There’s so many, there are so many academics in Good Omens fandom. And I can often tell, I’m like “Ooh, you’re an anthropologist.”
ELM: I have, not to bring the mood down, but I have a serious question. Can I ask it?
AJ: Sure.
MA: Let’s do it.
ELM: And this is kind of for both of you, one is more Anne, your historical perspective on this—historical. Having taught this before. And Maria, coming into it from fandom norms. But you know, I think one thing, when both of us came down to your class at Princeton at the time I remember talking to you about, there was a lot of angst swirling around Tumblr, et cetera, about the idea of you in particular—or other people—teaching fic in class without getting permission, or…
FK: TheoryOfFicGate, I believe, was one of the…
AJ: TheoryOfFicGate, yeah.
ELM: That was one too, but specifically people also said it about your class too. But TheoryOfFicGate, in case anyone doesn’t remember—I mean, everyone here clearly does, but…was, it was a student-run class, over January term I believe? At Berkeley? And they had them read fic and then leave critical comments on AO3 and so people were mad about that element. But a lot of people were mad about the fact that people were teaching a fanfiction class in general, that felt—and I remember at the time there was a lot of strife around academics in fandom, period, at least in the fandom I was in, that was a major point of discourse. Apparently the fandom the three of us were in that the time, so that’s cool.
AJ: Yep, there was a lot.
ELM: So, I’m just curious about how your…I know you have kind of strong party lines on the permission thing, Anne, and I’m also curious, Maria, about how this struck you coming into this. Because what you had thought before teaching with Anne—teaching for Anne? That sounds like performing some sort of weird task for her, so. [all laugh]
AJ: With! Teaching with Anne. Maria, would you like to wade into this [laughs] first?
MA: Oh boy. Well, this is really at the forefront of my mind, because I just gave a talk about this earlier today, and I think I ruffled some feathers with it. Oops!
FK: Ooh.
MA: Yeah. It’s OK! It had to be done, the ruffling and the talking, so what can you do. The simple version of my answer to this is not really simple at all. It’s complicated. It’s gonna depend on what types of fanfiction you’re looking at, who you’re gonna be showing them to, and what you are asking the person you’re showing that fanfiction to do, to do with that text.
So for example, thinking about the example of TheoryOfFicGate, the whole critical comments thing—that is not really a norm in fandom, in the community that that text is produced for, so why would you kind of introduce that? People weren’t expecting that, and it violated this kind of like unspoken norm. So that’s a big part of that. If you were asking someone to do critical comments, if you were asking someone to point out issues they had with the text, maybe fanfiction is not the text to be doing that particular exercise with. Maybe save that for peer review of some kind.
So there’s definitely that. But also, I think that the visibility of any particular fanfiction or text is gonna be a large part of how I’d recommend approaching it, cause engaging with a fanfiction that has like 200 hits, and it’s from a tiny fandom where there’s not more than 15 works in a tag for a specific pairing, that’s gonna be very different from being able to google—oh my God, I’m gonna say it—“Sexy Times With Wangxian” as an Untamed fic. [FK laughs]
ELM: How could you invoke that?!
MA: I can’t not. [laughing]
FK: It’s like “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.”
MA: But you’re gonna get, like, mainstream venues covering that. You’re gonna get people who are not fans already talking about that. So being able to bring that to people’s attention—I wouldn’t even try and approach that author to get permission, because other people already have. It’s a very different conversation you’re having from something that’s small and has a lot less exposure.
I’m not really giving a definitive answer that you can plunk in a textbook and say, “This is how you approach having people read fanfiction.” I’m saying it’s complicated and these are like, three of the many different things that I would consider when trying to answer that.
AJ: Yeah. Mostly, that is what—that’s been, just what Maria said has been my policy for teaching fandom for some time, but there are some negative consequences to that as well, in that very often when I teach and I’m picking the stories that I think are gonna have a bigger—are gonna have a bigger following and so a smaller impact if a bunch of people show up reading them…and that was something, I mean, to be honest, I never thought about the first few times that I taught fanfiction, because I didn’t know that you could see every read. So it didn’t occur to me. But plus they were relatively small classes, and you know, it just didn’t have the same…
And then, so, that skews the kinds of stories that are getting taught. So it’s less femslash, more mainstream, less marginalized, often fewer characters of color if you’re not in—obviously if you’re in a fandom where that’s centered, like The Untamed, that’s not an issue in the same way. But like, that is an issue. So I’ll often, for those kinds of stories I will ask permission, or at least discuss. Because I don’t want to, I don’t want to leave it all out.
But at the same time, asking…one of the reasons that I stopped asking, which I used to do, or at least informing and really engaging authors a lot, is…I mean, particularly at Princeton, and it might be much less at the University of Utah. But I found it had a disruptive effect within fandom, because people don’t really understand what it means to be on a literature syllabus, and so without implying any criticism to any of the wonderful authors whose work I taught, sometimes it was treated as kind of an ascension, you know? Like, “You have now been deemed valuable enough to be on this syllabus,” whereas that’s not how we make a syllabus. That has nothing to do with how we make a syllabus. And if it’s on my syllabus, it’s because I think it’s interesting. It could be interesting in this context, it could illuminate something, it’s not because of literary quality. And so for that reason I stopped making my syllabi public.
MA: Well and also, I notice with the syllabi that we had for this semester, the things that had like specific titles—they were like episode names, they were the fanfic from the ’60s and the ’70s, but nothing that we taught from our contemporary moment was included on the syllabus. It was given to students the week before or the week of, so.
ELM: Mm, that’s interesting.
AJ: And I had, when I’m doing—and it really varies how I teach what I’m trying to teach. So with Good Omens, I was trying to show the different kinds, you know, the different kinds of stories that different moments and different questions were producing. So everyone would read one story in common from what I called “queer theologies,” and guardian angel Aziraphale, they’d read one, and then they could read from a menu of other stories.
MA: Well, and also in this class, commenting was not required. Critical, author-facing criticism was not required, so.
AJ: No. And I have very specific rules for my students that they are not to comment as students on the stories. Like, they can comment as reading individuals, but they should not say “Hi! I’m in an English class where this fic was assigned.” Because I used to find that people used to really love that when that happened, but that was a different time, and I now find it—it’s disruptive. And so I don’t have them…but I encourage them to go write things that they like, but I ask them not to leave any kind of critical comments.
And to the extent that anyone says anything critical in class, which of course they need to be allowed to do, it’s what we’re doing—they need to not then go and repeat it, so that the fanfiction classroom has to be separate from the fanfiction ecosystem, cause we’re doing something really different.
MA: Mm-hmm.
AJ: So I try and I try to impress on them: this is not the same thing as when you go and you’re reading published novels, because published novels, they kind of signed on—theoretically—for being read in a classroom, and they’re not connected to their novels. They’re never gonna know. Joyce Carol Oates doesn’t know if I teach her novel, you know? [all laugh] She doesn’t—
ELM: She might, she’s real nosy.
FK: She’s real online, isn’t she?
ELM: Yeah, she’s extremely online, Anne.
FK: I will say this is interesting—
AJ: She was my writing teacher!
ELM: Ah!
FK: Oh!
ELM: Can you send her a little message from me about her extremely bad Mad Men takes? Cause they were quite bad.
AJ: I cannot send her any messages. [all laugh]
FK: But this is, it’s interesting to talk about this though, because for all of the idea of not creating a canon of fanfic that people read or whatever—yet by teaching anything, like, it kind of does that. When I think about, why have I read “The Weight” by Leslie Fish? It’s because it’s the thing in Textual Poachers, so then obviously I went out and I found “The Weight” and I read it, you know what I mean? And you kind of can’t avoid having some of these things—obviously you’re trying to avoid it a lot by having the class be less, you know—
ELM: Well, that feels very apples and oranges to me. That’s an extremely famous fic from a very different time with a much smaller body of work, right.
FK: That’s true.
ELM: I think that even if you’d never read Textual Poachers, if you had been interested in that era of—you know, there’s stories from different eras, especially when there was a lot less, that you would’ve heard of. Like, I read Cassie Claire’s fic too! Is that canon? You know?
AJ: Yeah, cause I want to establish—I always teach “Kraith,” and I will probably always teach “Kraith,” because there are certain things that I find so influential and intriguing and particular to their time that in a sense I want them to be canonical, in the sense that I want them to be part of the story. And that’s part of me as a critic. I’m a critic, and to a certain extent that means that I’m telling the story that I see as important. I’m not telling the only story, you know?
But that’s one of the issues, one of the big issues with Fic, and one of the discussions I had with my editor, was that I did not want to write a history. I was like, “This is not the history of fanfiction. This is a tiny bit of—I don’t know anime, I don’t know sports fandoms, I don’t know so much.” So we settled on “a selective history of media fandom,” and it should have been called “a selective history of Western media fanfiction.”
And I just want nothing more than for that story to be complicated, but when I’m teaching—at the same time—there’s certain things that I want to hit. I want people to know about Star Trek fandom, I want people to know about Sherlock Holmes fandom. But I think if you were to center something else, you could tell a completely different story about the history of fanfiction.
MA: We only have 16 weeks.
AJ: Right!
MA: Like, how do you get that in 16 weeks?!
AJ: You know, I mean, if they come away with the sense that there is a history, that would be great. And when somebody tells a history of sports fandom, it’s going to have a really different story. And I’m for all of the different stories. And one of the things that we were trying to also do in this course is, you know, make it less Western and white. I can’t very well go in and suddenly start teaching Japanese fandom, since I don’t know anything about Japan. [laughter] Except for, you know, my daughter was a Japanese major and I’ve read some novels and anime?
So I can’t just magically do that, but little by little—for somebody like me, with a really Western training—to start, you know, to try and include less Western perspectives, or to invite people in to talk about them, or to have Maria who is doing a lot of work because of dissertations and a book project! And a book project, Maria! So it was really wonderful—
ELM: Oh, what? What now?
FK: What now?
ELM: What’s the book project? I’m sorry, what now?
MA: All right, so I am currently working on a co-edited collection with Cathy Yue Wang from Shanghai Normal University, and it’s gonna be a collection of essays on The Untamed. So…
FK: Woo!
MA: We’re very excited about that. That’s still in its early stages, but with that collection we are hoping to get a lot of these kinds of conversations and information in front of people who are trying to consume that show and be interested in it and say interesting things about it, but are really lacking a lot of perspective, because we’re coming from a U.S.-centric viewpoint. So yeah! Thanks for the shout-out, Anne, I’m very excited about that. [laughter, clapping]
AJ: It’s a great project and I love, I was with a colleague the other night, and he said—we were talking, you know, and I’ve known him for a long time, and we were talking about our work, and he said “Oh, well, you know, I’ve been more interested in fanfiction recently, I have a student working on The Untamed.” And I was like, “I have a student who’s working on The Untamed!” And we were like, “Have you seen it?!” And we launched into this long conversation about the difference between the animated version and the live-action version, and all the scandals of the stars and stuff, and [laughs] it was not the direction that the conversation had been going in previous.
ELM: That’s really funny. That’s great.
MA: You got in a word for Word of Honor, right? That’s the important…
AJ: I did get in a word for Word of Honor, and that was funny because [laughs] my partner was like “What are you swearing to? What word of honor?” This is another series.
ELM: Oh, everyone is jumping ship from Untamed to Word of Honor on my feed, so. [FK laughs] Fickle, fickle people.
MA: I don’t wanna take sides because I love them both, but my God, Word of Honor just pushed all my buttons, let’s say. [laughter]
ELM: That’s what everyone I know who was previously on the first ship and is now on the second ship is saying.
MA: Yeah.
ELM: I’m really happy for all of you. [laughter]
MA: We’re really happy to be here, like, God.
AJ: We’re really happy to be here! [laughs]
ELM: Maria, what’s your dissertation about? Is it also about The Untamed?
MA: Oh my goodness. My dissertation is basically looking at how adaptations of fan-favorite fantasy texts, one of the ways I’m proposing we look at that is they’re exercises in creating new canons, right? So it’s not just about “we have to make this—” this is the simplified version. We don’t have to make this movie, like, faithful to every element of the book. We have to realize that the people who are gonna be watching this movie are going to be treating it as a related version, and are gonna be picking it apart for all the details and treating it as a canon separate from the book.
So I’m kind of tracing this from The Lord of the Rings to one of my other favorite shows, Critical Role, ending this week, can’t believe it! But basically looking at how the kind of filmic adaptations of those, they are being treated in this really specific way that we want them to be faithful to the book, but we also want them to be separate from the book, but we wanna be able to trace connections between them, and it all comes down to how we use the term “canon” or “canons.” So that’s my dissertation project, and…
FK: I wanna read it now!!
ELM: I wanna read it!!
MA: Well, I’ll get in touch when I… [laughs]
AJ: She has to write it first. [all laugh]
MA: That’s the problem, yeah.
FK: Anne coming in here with the bucket of cold water going “It hasn’t been written yet!”
AJ: I’m her dissertation director, encouraging her student to write the paper!
MA: I was gonna say, I need that though, so. [laughter]
ELM: OK, so you’re an adaptation expert, you know, you’re studying this, so I’m gonna need you to weigh in right now.
MA: Oh boy.
ELM: Those dalmatians that killed Cruella’s mom. [all laugh]
MA: Dear God, OK, OK, OK. So my answer is that if you wanna think about Amazon Prime’s version, Sauron’s mother was pushed off a cliff by three hobbits. That’s basically what we’re gonna see.
FK: Oh my God. [laughs]
MA: I’m stealing that from someone on Twitter, I can’t think of who it is at the moment. But I about died. Anyway.
FK: OK OK, but I have a serious question.
ELM: All right, fine.
FK: All right. As a person who’s currently in grad school for fanfic, basically, I know that’s probably not—OK, it is how you could say it.
ELM: Just raise the roof!
FK: Yeah, there was some raising of the roof that just happened there.
MA: Oh, totally. I wouldn’t say it maybe in other professional contexts, like, if someone [inaudible] asked me this, I went on an interview, I might not say that, but that’s what’s happening.
FK: Yeah, so I guess we sort of touched on this earlier, but one of the things that we get asked a lot, by people who seem to think that we’re academics [laughs] is how to get into studying fandom. And there’s a lot of people who are in high school or in college who maybe don’t know exactly what they want to do, but they’re really into fandom, they’re into fanfic, and they’re trying to figure out: how do I make this my academic career. I guess I’m curious about your advice, thoughts, you know, from the point that you’re at with this, cause I feel like there’s a lot of interest and not a lot of information out there for a lot of people.
MA: I feel like Flourish I should also say: that seems to be the case for grad school in general, a lot of interest and not a lot of information. [laughter] So I just gotta preface it by saying that.
So as you mentioned earlier, I’m working on my PhD right now, I finished a Master’s before this, and as I was kind of finishing up this previous program and moving into my current one, my mentor at the time—shoutout to Rachel Carnell at Cleveland State University!—what she told me is that: don’t go into a PhD expecting it to be a step into a job, or the term you’re using, an “academic career.” Don’t expect that. The oversaturation of the job market for this, and circumstances, and hiring freezes, and all that—and that was before COVID by the way! And so she was like: “Don’t consider a PhD a step, a guarantee, a surefire way of getting into this. Do it if you can’t imagine your life without having one.”
So that’s really been kind of like my mantra. That’s why I applied for PhD programs, that’s why I’m doing what I do—because I can’t imagine what my life would be without this. I really love this kind of work. So that would be my kind of first piece of my answer here.
And yeah, the second piece of my answer would be, as you say, echoing some of what we were talking about earlier: if you want to get into fan studies, it’s worth knowing that this is a truly interdisciplinary umbrella term that covers just about any aspect of fandom experience. So you have to kind of be aware: this is the part of fandom, or this is the way in which I want to engage with fandom. Like, do I want to think about fans as audiences? Then maybe a literary track is not for you. Do I want to think about fanfiction? Then maybe a literary program that focuses on close reading and this kind of theory, maybe that’s for you.
But think about what part of fandom you’re interested in engaging with really closely and really in prolonged ways, and then think about the kind of academic discipline that would best match that. It’s not like you’re gonna find a fan studies degree that can do a bit of everything. You kind of have to pick and choose a little bit more. So that’s what I would recommend.
AJ: And I would say that particularly just to amplify the understanding of discipline: also you have to know what other courses you’re going to be taking, what other work you’re going to be doing. So you might be interested in fanfiction and marketing, but do you want to do a marketing degree? Is that what you want to do? You might be interested in fanfiction and teaching, but do you want to do a teaching degree? Do you want to do an education degree?
So this is true for anyone in graduate school: you have to look at the department website. [laughter] You have to look at what kind of work the people are doing. You have to like—I always feel so bad, because people, you know, Fic, my book…it’s not an academic book. I know it’s a book by an academic, but it’s not an academic book. It couldn’t be an academic book. It includes lots of essays by people and perspectives of people that would be excluded from academia and wouldn’t be in an academic book, and so it was important for me to write that kind of a book. But that’s not what academic writing is usually like.
But people read that book and they say “Oh, I wanna go study, I wanna do this and I wanna go study with her,” and then they learn what fan studies is like, and so they propose, like, a sociology project or a communications project or whatever it is. I never even see those applications, and I feel like people must—they must experience rejection or whatever, but that’s just not the kind of work we do. That person would never be considered by a department. We wouldn’t consider somebody who wanted to study, like, biology, either. That’s just not what we do.
So in order to come and study with me, you have to know that most of your coursework is going to be in literature courses or increasingly you could maybe take something in gaming, in theory, in film—there are other options. But it’s criticism. We’re doing criticism. We’re not doing other kinds of research. I mean, we do historical research, but it’s critical, it’s argument-driven, it’s not presentational, we’re not going out and gathering data—for the most part. I mean, some people are. Things are changing. But we’re very often, the center of our work is not going around and interviewing people and making generalizations and collecting their data. We just, that’s not what we do.
So I think it’s hard for people outside of the academy, even if they’ve just gone through undergraduate, a lot of programs, they just don’t introduce you to what actual like, academic research is like. And certainly not so much the idea of discipline. So especially, the job market being what it is, which is that there aren’t jobs, before you go into doing this kind of program you should do a lot of research and soul-searching, like: is this something you could live without? [laughs] You know?
FK: Mm-hmm.
AJ: Cause otherwise, I think it just leads to a lot…and I wish that there were more understanding of this just in general, I wish there was more understanding about what all we’re doing here.
MA: Right. It wouldn’t have changed my mind, I still would’ve ended up here, but it also might’ve changed how I viewed my M.A. It might have changed how I did certain things along my path to get here.
And I mean, coming from the graduate student side, the way I hear it from Anne a lot is “you’re not going to get a job writing about fanfiction.” That’s never going to be your primary field. It’s just the way it works right now. So although you might want to work on that, keep in mind that you also need to have—this is what I’m actually going to be applying for jobs in.
AJ: So, and who knows, things could change! You might get that job. But you need to be anchored in something so that other people are gonna…like, you’re not gonna get a job in Johnlock studies, right? Like… [all laugh]
MA: Whoa!
AJ: Probably!
ELM: Why won’t you fund my Johnlock department?
AJ: If someone will endow a chair, that would be a great thing…
ELM: TJLD.
FK: Oh no. [laughing]
MA: Wow.
AJ: Endow a chair in Johnlock studies. Historical Johnlock studies. [laughing]
MA: I can think of different people, one for historical Johnlock studies, one for…
AJ: We’re not in the stage anymore where you can only write about books, right? Like, literature—we’re teaching genre, we’re teaching TV, we’re teaching digital humanities, all kinds of—there are many different things that you could talk about in, you know, getting a degree from an English department or a literature department. It’s not just literature anymore. But it does have to be something that people could, like, latch onto and know: “Oh, right, I know what Tolkien is.”
ELM: Right. Sure.
AJ: If it’s too arcane to what people—there’s a thing that happens where everybody thinks contemporary literature is the thing that was contemporary when they were in graduate school. [all laugh] And so you need to, like, prepare for that. As I tweeted the other day: if you’re teaching contemporary fiction, if you’re teaching commercially published novels, and you’re calling it “contemporary fiction,” that’s just inaccurate. Just call your class “commercially published novels,” that’s fine, but contemporary fiction is happening in a lot of different venues that are not commercially published so don’t, you know, don’t call it that. But literature departments have a ways to catch up on that, I think.
ELM: Yeah, my summation of what you guys are saying—it sounds like, Maria, if you were told tomorrow you couldn’t write about fanfiction in your work, you’d be like, sad, but you’d still be pursuing this degree. And I think sometimes when we see these queries, it’s like “I love fanfiction, how do I go to graduate school for that?” And it’s like, maybe you don’t and you just keep reading and writing a lot of fic, you know.
MA: I mean, so both of the projects I described—both my dissertation and the edited collection—both of those draw on fanfiction, but neither of them is primarily about fanfiction. So I think that the way you’ve just put that makes a lot of sense, yeah.
ELM: Right, right. And I mean, you know, I would say as a literary critic, obviously I’m influenced—you know, like, in a commercial sense. [laughs] I’m influenced by having read and written fanfiction, and how explicit that is varies in my writing. I mean obviously this is a little hypocritical because I do journalism directly about fans but whatever. You know what I mean!
MA: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: It’s part of who you are as a reader and a writer and a scholar, that reading background.
AJ: Something strange happens, though, when people apply to study, like, books for literature. You would never apply, again, to a degree in biology and make your application be “I love trees.” That’s not an application to graduate school.
ELM: [laughs] Turtles. Yeah!
AJ: And saying “I love trees and I want to keep loving them and love them with students, I love shade, they’re so pretty,” you know…
ELM: Nothin’ better! Sittin’ beneath one!
AJ: Yeah! It’s not what we do! And so you know, I mean, I can’t tell you, having been on a graduate committee: we get so many applications from people who just, like, talk about their love of literature, and we’re like “Yay! We love it that you love literature. What we need you to do is to tell us a specific project and people that you want to, the kind of work that you want to do, the kind of work that you’ve done, and who you wanna work with.”
ELM: Yeah.
AJ: So that we can make a judgment about whether or not you would be well-served in our program and whether you would be a good fit. If you just like reading, go read stuff! No biologist is going to say “that’s so weird you like trees, why do you like trees.” [laughing]
FK: This is such a metaphor.
AJ: You know, “if you’re not looking at chlorophyll, you’re not loving trees in the right way,” we love it that people are out there loving trees in all of the different ways! Maybe they’re painting them or like carving them or building a treehouse, but in biology class we’re doing something different. For some reason, when it comes to literature, people kind of lose their minds. Like, in so many ways.
They think it’s all a choice, they think it’s a moral choice, they think that if you’re teaching something, not only do you think it’s great literature but you also think it’s morally good.
MA: Morally defensible, yeah.
AJ: And you’re advocating for everything in the book, which like: I teach the Marquis de Sade, which… [laughs] is not what I’m advocating.
ELM: That’s your guidebook, yeah. [all laugh] That’s how you live your life. I know you.
AJ: [laughing] A lot of people, what they want in a literature course is “guide to beautiful works of literature that will improve your moral being.”
FK: Uh, I feel like this is an incredible direction and we could do an entire additional episode about this direction, Anne. [laughs] But I don’t think that we can at this point! You guys, this has been really great advice to people and really, I think, responds to the kinds of questions we get a lot.
ELM: Yeah, really appreciate that.
FK: Thank you guys so much for both giving that advice and also for coming on and talking with us in general.
ELM: Yeah, thank you so much guys!
AJ: Thank you!
MA: It has been a real pleasure talking with you.
AJ: Thanks for having us!
[Interstitial music]
FK: What a delight of a conversation.
ELM: Yeah, that was great.
FK: I am particularly—I mean, you said this at the beginning but I really particularly appreciated Maria’s perspective on doing grad school, becoming an academic, doing anything to do with fan studies or fanfiction.
ELM: I mean, I appreciated both their perspectives. It’s interesting to hear Anne talking about, you know, how applications to just study fans generally will—people will direct them to her, and they will never come to her, because she’s an English professor, and they are not proposing to do English things, right?
FK: Yeah yeah, yeah.
ELM: You know? It’s interesting. I mean, I have a lot of friends who are academics, and now that I’m in my mid-thirties, they are reaching a point where some of them have jobs and some of them don’t and it’s kind of an interesting inflection point. Maybe you have this too. You are also married to an academic of a different generation, like Anne.
FK: Yes.
ELM: So he’s in a different position, but it is interesting to see—I have friends with very niche interests, but to get a job they position themselves as someone who could, you know, say, be a Victorianist, because every English department is going to need that broad specialty, right? You know what I mean? Like—and that’s tricky with fandom, because I think sometimes you really, it can get very very granular, what you’re interested in, and that’s hard, because like they were saying: there are no fan studies department, let alone…I mean, I went to a college, like a liberal arts college. There was no media studies there!
FK: Yeah, no. Not in mine, either. That was not an option.
ELM: Yeah! I think that’s pretty common for small colleges, and I don’t know even what department a media studies class would be taught under. Like, maybe a pop culture class in English or something, you know?
FK: One of the, one of the many reasons I ended up being a religion major was that that was the department that did the most stuff that was close to media theory.
ELM: That’s very interesting.
FK: But I ended up writing what was essentially a media studies thesis in a religion department, weirdly enough.
ELM: Fascinating.
FK: No, you’re really right, and the other thing is that, as Anne, I think, was saying, right—one of the reasons that you get tenure is so that you can go work on whatever your obsession is, right?
ELM: Yeah, right.
FK: I don’t, uh, I don’t talk about my husband too much in this podcast—
ELM: Do it! Do it!
FK: —but that’s definitely been the case for him, which is that you get tenure and then you get to do the stuff that you want to do, and not the stuff that other people think you ought to do.
ELM: [laughs] The way you’re describing Nick’s work right now as “the stuff that he wants to do—”
FK: It is!
ELM: Because that is accurate. Yeah, yeah.
FK: It really is, you know?
ELM: It feels truly like the stuff he wants to do!
FK: No, trust me, there has never been anyone more fully self-actualized in doing the stuff that they wanna do, you know?
ELM: [laughs] He’ll never hear this. You can say whatever you want.
FK: This is a positive thing!
ELM: No, no, I admire it, sincerely.
FK: He’s also listening from the other room, so. [laughs]
ELM: The only time he’ll hear it is literally when you’re saying the words out loud.
FK: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I think the point being that, you know—I really really appreciated this stuff from Anne and Maria and I think that, you know, if you are looking into going into academia, and you are interested in this stuff, honestly like I think that one of the biggest mistakes people make in general is not reaching out and networking, right? It seems like both Anne and Maria were so “Hey! I want you to make good choices for yourself! Don’t just send me an application out of nowhere that isn’t right for my program,” you know?
ELM: Right, yeah.
FK: I feel like I’ve heard this from academic after academic, which is just like, “hey, reach out to us!” So if you are the kind of person who is interested in this stuff, and you would have been emailing me and Elizabeth, who are not academics and can’t help you, I think that the big takeaway from this is: find an academic whose work you’re interested in and like and email them instead and ask them! [laughs]
ELM: Yeah, I think I would also—my advice is a little bit askew of this, which is one of the things that really strikes me, even in this follow-up conversation but definitely in our conversation with them, is like: you may love something, but this job, this job that they have, is not necessarily just spending all your time thinking about the thing that you love, and I think that one of the things when people write to us, one of the relevant things is: if you wanna be a journalist who focuses on…no one’s gonna let you focus on, there are very few jobs where you can focus on fan culture. But if you ever wanna write about fan culture, you know.
FK: Right.
ELM: Maybe pop culture or culture desk or whatever, or if you wanna work in Hollywood studying fans, most of the time you’re gonna have to write about things or study things that maybe you don’t super care about in the first place. Which I think is pretty similar to academia, right?
FK: Yeah, it is.
ELM: So it’s like, they’re all jobs in some way, right? And it’s basically like, what job do you want. And I do think, I had lots of friends who considered being academics and then realized like, oh, just like learning stuff and maybe writing papers about stuff—that’s not the only way to continue acquiring knowledge in the world, right?
FK: Yeah, totally.
ELM: But then my friends who are academics? Absolutely love their work and it’s right for them. So I think that’s a tricky thing to sort out, especially when you’re coming out of college, when you’ve been enmeshed in the world of studying and producing work, to know that actually a lot of that you could probably do—you could do research at a tech company and be well-compensated and have some job security!
FK: Yeah yeah yeah!
ELM: You know what I mean? That’s just one example, right?
FK: Yeah, and I think part of it is also: what is the, what is the other stuff. If you were doing the stuff in the job for something you didn’t like, would you still want to do those things, right?
ELM: Yeah, yeah.
FK: So you know, being a journalist, do you like writing stuff in that particular context, in that particular way, with those deadlines and all of that stuff about things that you don’t like.
ELM: Being very formally constrained and knowing, especially depending on where you write, that if you have certain kinds of publications, certain kinds of media, say goodbye to your words, because you are just writing the rough draft, right? I mean, you also have this experience in Hollywood, but like…
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, but it’s different. Yeah.
ELM: Just get ready for your words to go away.
FK: Right, right.
ELM: Even saying you like writing, it’s very different unless you have that experience. If you enjoy writing words on a page, it’s not really the same as being a journalist, being edited as a journalist.
FK: Right. And by comparison, like, I feel like a lot of the work that I do is about sort of having the skills of being a consultant, being a person who comes into an organization and is the, you know, is a person who then enters into that organization’s politics, right.
ELM: Client services, yeah!
FK: Yeah! You know what I mean? And is actually—yeah, exactly. And so if you don’t like any of that, maybe you’re not going to like doing this kind of research in Hollywood or a corporate context, because there’s so much of that. And if you do like it, then you’ll probably enjoy those things even when you’re talking about, I don’t know, Tonka trucks or...some, like…sports team that you don’t care about.
ELM: [laughing] Did you have the big meeting about Tonka trucks last week?
FK: No, I didn’t, but it is completely something that I believe could land on my doorstep at any moment.
ELM: [laughing] “So we got the new Tonka partnership, let’s talk about it.”
FK: Yeah, genuinely, I am not even joking! I would not be surprised. I have had a lot of toy meetings, so you know, there we are.
ELM: I’m sorry, but Tonka trucks are like a next level. I’m just imagining the franchises you work on and how they would connect with little plastic trucks.
FK: They’re metal.
ELM: I’m imagining now like—oh they’re metal? Tonka trucks are metal!? [laughs]
FK: At least they were when I was a kid! You clearly did not play with enough Tonka trucks, my friend.
ELM: You’re right. One of my best friends when I was like five or six, David, was obsessed with backhoes. And now as I think about it, he had so many tiny little backhoes. Oh my God, and when we saw a backhoe in real life? It was like you fuckin’ saw Elvis. It was staggering.
FK: My Tonka truck memory is that when I was in preschool, there was a really big Tonka truck that like the school had, and there was a little hill, and so everybody would climb into the Tonka truck and sit on it and ride down the hill.
ELM: Whoa! That’s big.
FK: It was big! It was metal. I mean you didn’t really sit, you would sit on it more than in it. But anyway, you would ride down the hill, and it was very dangerous, and I don’t know why they didn’t stop us. I think they may have tried but failed because the only way to stop us would have been to take away the Tonka truck.
ELM: Did you ever have like a toddler’s, like, personal motor vehicle?
FK: No, I didn’t.
ELM: I was always pretty jealous of those folks.
FK: Yeah, me too. I wanted to ride around in my little car. All right, well, now we know about our childhoods.
ELM: Yeah, you know about David’s backhoe obsession.
FK: I do, I do.
ELM: Just like Nick, he’ll never hear this.
FK: Great.
ELM: He wouldn’t mind! That’s a noble obsession. That’s a great piece of construction equipment. [laughing]
FK: OK, I think we have wandered pretty far off the topic and that might be a sign it’s time to stop, Elizabeth.
ELM: Time to go! All right.
FK: All right. I’ll talk to you later.
ELM: Bye Flourish!
FK: Bye.
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]