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 would like that a lot, and I like Lamarre's idea of the machine as something that extends beyond the corporeal boundaries of the parts involved in it, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable going directly from otaku-centric scholarship to that sort of questioning-stuff, because then once again we still haven't talked about fujoshi. (And maybe they don't want to be talked about.)
I think too I tend to conflate fandoms, because I hang out in media fandom these days, which is majority-female and majority-queer, whereas I don't think strictly anime fandom has quite the same demographics. And when I read anime fandom stuff I'm trying to apply it to media fandom in my head, because I think that if what someone is saying about the one doesn't apply to the other that's a concern--and what Lamarre says about anime fans, I think, is broadly applicable outside anime fandom.
That said I think if we wanted to talk seriously about female fandom, Lamarre's discussion of sexuality and desire in Chobits is helpful in that he wrote it, but I think the first step towards actually engaging with media fandom as a legitimate phenomenon is to ditch Lacan and Saitou, because for them queer desire isn't and women aren't. And I'm making it sound like media fandom is full of cisgendered queer women, which isn't even the case, and fandom scholarship would have to take that seriously too. And it occurs to me that engaging seriously with fandom as it actually is--multi-gendered, multi-sexuality, multi-bodied--would go a long way towards avoiding gender-essentialist dichotomic conceptions of fans.
Re: Another of my patented Super-Long Comments
I would like that a lot, and I like Lamarre's idea of the machine as something that extends beyond the corporeal boundaries of the parts involved in it, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable going directly from otaku-centric scholarship to that sort of questioning-stuff, because then once again we still haven't talked about fujoshi. (And maybe they don't want to be talked about.)
I think too I tend to conflate fandoms, because I hang out in media fandom these days, which is majority-female and majority-queer, whereas I don't think strictly anime fandom has quite the same demographics. And when I read anime fandom stuff I'm trying to apply it to media fandom in my head, because I think that if what someone is saying about the one doesn't apply to the other that's a concern--and what Lamarre says about anime fans, I think, is broadly applicable outside anime fandom.
That said I think if we wanted to talk seriously about female fandom, Lamarre's discussion of sexuality and desire in Chobits is helpful in that he wrote it, but I think the first step towards actually engaging with media fandom as a legitimate phenomenon is to ditch Lacan and Saitou, because for them queer desire isn't and women aren't. And I'm making it sound like media fandom is full of cisgendered queer women, which isn't even the case, and fandom scholarship would have to take that seriously too. And it occurs to me that engaging seriously with fandom as it actually is--multi-gendered, multi-sexuality, multi-bodied--would go a long way towards avoiding gender-essentialist dichotomic conceptions of fans.
This is sort of disjointed. More coffee...