This week, Kristina Busse discusses what it means to be an aca-fan, addressing the unique subjectivity sometimes required to walk in both worlds.

Online Salons: Fannish Meta Conversations as Ephemeral Traces

Defining Acafans
One of the inherent characteristics of both academics and fans is their tendency to collect and organize—things and, more importantly, information. And yet, as Matt Hills reminds us in his introduction to Fan Cultures (2002), we shouldn’t hastily equate fan and academic cultures or use similar behavior to conclude that they are generated by the same motivations and for the same reasons. Hills argues that representing fans as miniaturised academics is only “a compliment within a value system that particularly or most reliably pertains to intellectuals who have internalized these ideals” (10-11). In other words, being a good academic may be important to other academics but not necessarily to other fans.

One of the greatest challenges for acafans, then, is to represent and analyze fannish communities and their creative products while neither completely othering them nor molding them into familiar academic forms. Fannish interaction must not be subsumed into academic engagement even as it is shaped by and responds to academic discussions: many fans are academically trained in the particular disciplines acafans employ and even more fans read widely around these issues, including acafan works themselves. We thus face a dilemma: how can we respect and encourage the academic aspects of fan writing while still maintain fan meta as a distinct and separate discourse.[1]

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