I’ve argued that the text/audience nexus is a pivotal site of ambivalence in television studies, one which inevitably becomes intertwined with questions of lesbian representability in the mass media. I’d now like to point toward another opposition that seems to lurk within it: that of the critic and the fan. If the fruitful challenges of audience studies push for ever greater accommodation of specificity and contingency, if the interactive relation between textuality and reception becomes the primary terrain of investigation, than the critic’s own interface with television, a privileged point of access on both counts, should obviously emerge as valuable avenue of analysis. In reality, though, there is little academic work that concertedly engages the critic/fan boundary; Charlotte Brunsdon is one of the few to explicitly study this topic. In an essay that explores feminist positions in particular, she muses that “the characters who are specific to feminist television criticism: the feminist television critic and the female viewer... and the drama of their identity and difference, seem one of the most interesting productions of feminist television criticism” (114). According to her taxonomy, the most common geometry for the correlation between these two figures is “profoundly ambivalent” (118), and one often gets the sense that “It is almost as if the researcher must prove herself not too competent within the sphere of popular culture to retain credibility within the sphere of analysis” (119). This tendency perhaps reflects a predictable anxiety about violating academic disciplinary traditions that insist on the distance between the subject and the object of study, and between the intellectual and the popular.
Brunsdon does note that the influential feminist principle ‘the personal is political’ (and, we might say, academic as well) has contributed to the validation of an autobiographical turn in some scholarship (120; Joyrich RR 13-14), but I find that there are still huge hurdles to be overcome in developing methodologies to rigorously and productively acknowledge in intellectual work the rather obvious proposition that the television critic and the television fan are more often than not one and the same. Incidentally, in defining her typology of criticism, Brunsdon shifts her attention from her original characters the “feminist television critic” and “female viewer” to “feminist” and “woman” more broadly, so there is in the end little examination here of the relationship between the former. While I am unprepared to offer a complete cartography for navigating what admittedly remains a very treacherous terrain, I am committed to placing my decidedly subjective investments in my intellectual object at the center of my analysis in this paper. Not least because enforced delicacy about fannish pleasures can only further cloud the tremendous conundrums that structure our efforts to model text/audience/metatext relations by sidestepping the most immediate encounter with these interactions — that is, one’s own.
