WORKSHOP: Fraught Fandoms: Navigating Aca/Fan Identities and Structural Racism
Fandom has a racism problem. Over the last year, multiple flashpoints – from KPop, to My Little Pony, to transformative fandom spaces like the AO3 (Archive of Our Own) – are illustrative of the vital need to interrogate structural racism within them, especially with regard to anti-Blackness. While each of these flashpoints are located within specific national, cultural, linguistic, and geographical contexts, it is also vital to highlight their commonalities, especially in the ways that they operationalize techniques of deflection and disavowal (Wanzo 2015, Pande 2018, Woo 2017). These techniques most often target critical voices, both within and outside specific fandom spaces, seeking to undermine and delegitimize them. The figure of the Aca/Fan is also increasingly enmeshed in these flashpoints. The identity of the Aca/Fan has long been the subject of debate in fan studies and the binary positioning of the distanced and objective researcher versus the passive fan subject has been vigorously questioned. However, what these larger debates have failed to register is the particular dynamics faced by fan scholars and commentators working on issues of structural racism in fandom spaces. In that, scholars working on these issues are often framed as both too enmeshed in “identity politics” to be objective researchers, as well as too critical of fandom spaces to claim true belonging within them. Also, in the case of non-white scholars working on race/ism, their qualifications and research often work against them in larger fandom discourse, marking them out to be “too elite” to be representative. This workshop aims to bring Aca/Fans positioned in a range of traditional academic and non-academic spaces together to discuss the ways in which they deal with these dynamics while continuing to highlight systemic racism in fandom. Crucially, it will encapsulate the issues that such scholars face within institutional spaces like academia, as well as in fandom-facing public engagement.
Facilitators: Rukmini Pande (O.P. Jindal Global University), Keidra Chaney (Independent Scholar), Zina Hutton (Independent Scholar), Miranda Larsen (University of Tokyo)
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