Thanks for the nod! And thanks for posting fuller thoughts on The Anime Machine. It definitely deserves to be widely read and further engaged with.
As you can probably guess, I agree with your critiques re. the reliance on Lacan and the general overlooking of fujoshi in this book. But I'm not sure we as female fans need to write our way "to the center." I don't want to end up with any kind of reverse-Saitouism that replaces an overarching male-based model with an overarching female-based model, no matter how carefully anti-essentialist.
I'm starting to think we should approach gender in fandom the way Lamarre does anime itself: as a machine, an assemblage that includes multiple material practices (a.k.a. "bodies"), images, social spaces, and emotional experiences. Instead of just saying "fujoshi are ignored, therefore they should be talked about," maybe we ought to question the male/otaku female/fujoshi dichotomies themselves, precisely because they are so strong. I was in Akiba today, and I felt completely at home in the BL section of Animate, where other female shoppers were happy to talk to me and give me advice about titles. But I couldn't bring myself to step into one of the bright, tiny gal-game shops, even out of ethnographic curiosity: just standing in the doorway, I felt myself to be both trespasser and an object of the male clientel's gaze. Is this the way it should be?
Well, I'm not saying "anime fans of the world unite," here. I'm just wondering how you would expand on Lamarre to talk more about female fandom.
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regna
Another of my patented Super-Long Comments
Date: 2010-06-27 14:18 (UTC)As you can probably guess, I agree with your critiques re. the reliance on Lacan and the general overlooking of fujoshi in this book. But I'm not sure we as female fans need to write our way "to the center." I don't want to end up with any kind of reverse-Saitouism that replaces an overarching male-based model with an overarching female-based model, no matter how carefully anti-essentialist.
I'm starting to think we should approach gender in fandom the way Lamarre does anime itself: as a machine, an assemblage that includes multiple material practices (a.k.a. "bodies"), images, social spaces, and emotional experiences. Instead of just saying "fujoshi are ignored, therefore they should be talked about," maybe we ought to question the male/otaku female/fujoshi dichotomies themselves, precisely because they are so strong. I was in Akiba today, and I felt completely at home in the BL section of Animate, where other female shoppers were happy to talk to me and give me advice about titles. But I couldn't bring myself to step into one of the bright, tiny gal-game shops, even out of ethnographic curiosity: just standing in the doorway, I felt myself to be both trespasser and an object of the male clientel's gaze. Is this the way it should be?
Well, I'm not saying "anime fans of the world unite," here. I'm just wondering how you would expand on Lamarre to talk more about female fandom.