>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.)
Yes, but the problem is how to talk about fujoshi without replicating the same strategies that have been used to talk about otaku. Personally, I don't want to do the "universalizing objective (psycho)analysis" thing. But doing a more personal, semi-autobio style of writing, as is popular among feminist and fan ethnographers, means revealing things about myself and my sexuality that I'd rather not have just anyone read. (Closeted much? Yes I am.) So that's the dilemma, at least for this fujoshi aca-fan.
>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.
Welp, from my results, the anglophone anime fandom is slightly majority-female (61%) and possibly-but-probably-not majority-queer. (Only 15% identified as queer, but only 40% identified as straight; the majority 45% chose not to identify either way.) Demographics-wise, I think there's an overlap between media and anime fandoms in the West that makes a lot of the writing on either applicable to both. I'm really curious to see what the Japanese demographics will bring, though.
>...but I think the first step towards actually engaging with media fandom as a legitimate phenomenon is to ditch Lacan and Saitou >... 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'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.)
Yes, but the problem is how to talk about fujoshi without replicating the same strategies that have been used to talk about otaku. Personally, I don't want to do the "universalizing objective (psycho)analysis" thing. But doing a more personal, semi-autobio style of writing, as is popular among feminist and fan ethnographers, means revealing things about myself and my sexuality that I'd rather not have just anyone read. (Closeted much? Yes I am.) So that's the dilemma, at least for this fujoshi aca-fan.
>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.
Welp, from my results, the anglophone anime fandom is slightly majority-female (61%) and possibly-but-probably-not majority-queer. (Only 15% identified as queer, but only 40% identified as straight; the majority 45% chose not to identify either way.) Demographics-wise, I think there's an overlap between media and anime fandoms in the West that makes a lot of the writing on either applicable to both. I'm really curious to see what the Japanese demographics will bring, though.
>...but I think the first step towards actually engaging with media fandom as a legitimate phenomenon is to ditch Lacan and Saitou
>... 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.
Amen to that!