Thursday 22 April 2010

Matt Hills: Fan Culture


The Focus on this reading is the ethnographies of fandom, the difference between knowledge and justification boom in fan studies.

Fan Ethnography: emphasising the knowledgeable fan
The ethnographic process of ‘asking the audience’ – although useful can also be a ‘reductive’ approach. Analysing fandom in terms of language and discourse to produce discursive justification. Fans knowledge is relied upon heavily, and their own media consumption. Further problems are that fan communities use narrative conventions from popular fiction.


Autoethnogrpahy: Narratives of the fan, narratives of the self
After reading an insightful quote from Gramsci in this section, if fan ethnography has been limited by its view of ‘the real’ or its one sided accounts of fandom either as a social coping mechanism. Autoethnography does not simply indicate that the personal is political, instead the personal indemnity as one performs is always borrowed or alien.
Narcissistic is a word freely used in this section, which he implies that my wiritng validate my own past.


Self-imaginings: Autoethnogrpahy as an escape from singular fan culture

All of which sets up the ground which my own autoethnography must traverse. Through the preceding discussions I have established four key principles for
autoethnography:
1 Autoethnography must constantly seek to unsettle the moral dualisms which are thrown up by the narcissism of ‘common sense’ and its narrative closures. This
requires the constant use of self-reflexive questioning.
2 Autoethnography must constantly seek to unsettle the use of theory as a disguise for personal attachments and investments; good autoethnography does not simply
validate the self and its fandoms by twisting theory to fit the preferences of the self. Again, this requires the constant use of self-reflexive questioning.
3 Self-reflexivity cannot legitimate autoethnography as an exercise. The concepts of ‘intellectual rigour’ and heroic reflexivity act as another form of academic ‘common
sense’ which sustains the critical ‘us’ versus the duped ‘them’. When self-reflexivity is subjected to ‘self-reflexive’ critique then it becomes apparent that this term
supports a fantasy of academic power and a fantasy of the idealist transformation of society. At this point, self-reflexivity acts as part of academia’s ‘critical
industry’.
4 Autoethnography should treat self and other identically, using the same theoretical terms and attributions of agency to describe both.

Summary
• Fan-ethnographies have been limited by a number of recurring problems such as the narrative structures that they have used, and the moral dualisms

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