As I was, after too long a delay, reading pieces to update the Fedwren Project, I looked at a chapter of Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher’s Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture, “Genre Sociality Online and in Person.” I’ve got a summary of the chapter here, so I’ll not repeat it, but it is the case, as with much of what I’ve read to work on the Project, that there’s more to be said than just a summary. My contribution to that is below.
There’s a lot in the chapter I appreciate, so much so that I am seriously considering buying the book. One thing that attracted my particular attention, however, was the section “Conventions and the Importance of Being There.” Again, I’ve already written a summary and so won’t recapitulate it here, but I will note that I found myself in mind of my own experience as part of a fandom (see here). The issue the authors raise about concerns of being participant-observers is one I have considered at times as I have worked on the Project and on my Hobb reread, as well as on some of the other work I’ve done (for example, this).
There remains, certainly in popular conception, an idea that making knowledge about a thing requires a distance from that thing, that engagement and its concomitant emotional investment in a thing skews the knowledge to be made about that thing to an extent that it becomes unusable. (I do not agree with the position, as such, but I do not have to agree with it to recognize its existence or its effects–which all too often are rejection of the knowledge made.) It tends to be voiced disingenuously, of course, and rarely outside the context of academic research (and, more narrowly, the academic humanities, but one more way in which prevailing discourse devalues consideration of what it is and means to be human); a current or former baseball player, for example, will be taken more seriously when discussing the game because of experience playing the game than will a researcher who has never thrown a pitch, but a con-goer who writes about cons has to foreground that attendance and apologize (or nearly so) for the subjectivity of reporting.
As if all reporting is not subjective, at least to some degree. After all, selecting what details to convey is a choice, and it will necessarily reflect biases, inherent and otherwise.
I want to make clear that I do not fault the authors for this. As noted, I find much of value in what I’ve read of theirs, and I want to read more of theirs. They’re not to blame for gesturing towards a problem that preexists them–and, to be honest if pessimistic, will likely last long after they, and I, and you are dust and ash. It is a problem, though, and one with which I have some experience, hence my attentions. And if that is yet another example of my affective reading…well, again, it’s not faulted in readers in other areas than mine, so that I think there’s something else going on with it in those areas.
I’m still happy to do this kind of writing–and many others–for you. If you’d like me to do so, please fill out the form below, and we’ll get started!
Elliott RWI 