Kali DeDominicis

During my Master’s fieldwork, I asked an informant who writes both fic and original stories if this dual status gave her any particular insight into the conflicts that arise between fandom and the published writers who think their authorship gives them the right to ban fan-fiction of their work. She told me that while she understood those authors’ reticence to discover what would become of their ‘babies’ in the public domain, she herself felt that her work would be incomplete without fan input:

I love all my characters, but I will never understand some of them as well as my readers will, because I have not lived their lives. I am not, for example, a man. I’m not a mother, I’m not black, or English, or disabled, or a whole list of other things. I can empathise with all of those conditions, but they’re not something I know. My readers do, and I can only hope that I have written the things I don’t know accurately enough that they can…fill the gaps themselves, from their own experiences.

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Lois McMaster Bujold, who herself started out in Star Trek fandom, said something similar:

No two people, reading the same text, will create exactly the same reading experience in their heads, nor will the same person experience the same book identically at different times of their life. A book, the real book, the art as it takes place and makes its existence, requires two elements: the text on the page, and the mind that is processing or remembering that text. “The Book”, the thing I as a reader love or hate or remember for the rest of my life till the day I die, is the whole cascade of thought and emotion and experience that occurs as I run my eyes across the type. The mind without the text is un-moved, unawakened, blank; the text without the mind is dead, meaningless, senseless, no more than ink blotches on a bundle of paper. ("When Worlds Collide”).

( I don't want to clutter up the quotes, so this is going to be a short post... )

In addition to having one of the best covers in all of fan studies, Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins is one of the core texts in the discipline. There's a good reason for that; half the time, when I'm struggling to articulate an idea, I go back through the book and discover that he's already said what I wanted to - and more eloquently than I had been able to.

This passage was one of those times. I must have seen it before - I've read the whole book cover to cover - but it fit so perfectly with the things I was already thinking that I promptly forgot it wasn't entirely my idea to begin with. It was only when I was rereading Textual Poachers in preparation for starting this part of my research that I rediscovered the quote and realized that it said a lot of the things I had wanted to say. (And this is why we go back and re-read our sources. Because inadvertent plagiarism will still get you in a lot of trouble with the review board when it comes time to defend your thesis).

My original genius plan had been to use this quote as a springboard for explaining the technicalities of my methodology - what exactly I am going to be doing with this journal and how it is part of my research. But instead it seems to have to morphed into a sort of mission statement; a philosophy of my research rather than an explanation for it.

The technical post will come later, but for now, have this:

( Here's the quote )

( And here are my thoughts... )

I will do everything in my power to give people a chance to speak to themselves - even more than Jenkins', my work hinges on it, because what I'm studying is how fans speak for themselves. But there are limits to what I can do by myself. So I'm asking you - if this is important to you, or even just interesting, help me out. Link me your meta, link your friends to me, drop me a PM, ask me questions. Engage.

Thank you.