If sexuality, knowledge, and TV's texts and economics are mutually entrapped in the same insatiable closet, it should come as no surprise that there is something of this logic too in the procedures of television studies. That is, scholars like Doty grapple with the precarious question of whether meaning is located inside or outside the text, in representation or interpretation, and even as this programmatic binary is extensively rejected in favor of more complex, interactive models, it seems effectively impossible to dispense with these terms completely. Streeter and Wahl point out that the mutual constitution of gendered spheres and consumer economics is inseparable from analytic uncertainties about viewers: "The social fact and assumption of viewing in the domestic space... is one of the principle ways that the industry solves what Gitlin calls 'the problem of knowing,' that is, the difficulty of organizing centralized program production given an invisible and diverse broadcast audience" (248). As for the industry's critics, Joyrich notes that "disputes over the gendered subject -- women's place in the public and private spheres -- have been complemented by similar disputes over the subject of reception -- women's place within the discourses of and about television" (RR 5). The ideologically constructed femininity of media consumption is necessarily refracted through all facets of the project of televisual representation and inquiry, and academic work is certainly no exception.
The gratifications of TV viewing seem peculiarly unrepresentable in professional scholarship, a casualty of the devaluation of mass culture which is intimately tied to its ostensibly feminine appeal, and of methodological deficits that yoke public discourse (versus private enjoyment) to notions like rationality and objectivity. Charlotte Brunsdon's assessment is that, when it comes to "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" (114), "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). Our pleasure in television is the TV critic's love that dare not speak its name, our version of the open secret., which we allude to discreetly or allow to recede again as soon as it is acknowledged. So, the investigation of television characters who are "closeted" has subtly self-reflexive resonances at the level of analysis itself. Television studies has tentatively ventured further into the borderlands between critic and fan (along with so many others) than most other academic disciplines, a function of the way television itself continually puts this boundary transgression forward. In Joyrich's experience, "what had started off as two separate proceedings -- on the one hand, an intellectual concern with critical and cultural theory, and on the other, my own television viewing -- came to seem more and more intertwined. To some degree, this is symptomatic of the 'nature' of U.S. commercial television" (RR 14). If "current debates over the text and audience have made the intellectual's relationship to television a point of contention, thus demanding that critics place themselves in regard to their objects of study" (RR 14), this is all the more true of scholarship that takes the articulations between text and audience produced by fans as its object.
The fan studies community that has coalesced online has adopted the portmanteau "acafan" to name a position that merges intellectual and libidinal, professional and personal engagements with fandom. In their introduction to the watershed volume Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson acknowledge that it is "trend[s] in academic discourse... as well as the work that has gone before of well-known and well-regarded scholar-fans... [that] have permitted us to take a subject position that melds the fan and the academic" (24). In addition to this disciplinary heritage, acafan coextensivity is predicated on the formal harmonies of "fannish practice as a model for academic practice" (8), both of which, as collectively-authored "works in progress," "inhabit a fluid space that needs to be continually revised and reconsidered" (7). Their anthology has its genesis in "constant manipulation, renegotiation, commenting, and revising, all done electronically among a group of people, mostly women, intimately involved in the creation of fannish goods" (6). It is thus an artifact of what Busse, Lothian, and Reid elsewhere identify as a community of "vernacular theory" (109): the ongoing critical discourse that is ubiquitous within the particular subculture of self-aware slashers that has been the privileged object of much fan studies. While "meta" -- this tradition of informal self-reflexive analysis by and for fans -- does not originate or end with LiveJournal, it is LiveJournal's technological affordances, in particular, that allow the integration of academic and fan activities to come to fruition in the figure of the acafan. As Busse and Hellekson emphasize, "the threading, hypertextual nature of the blogosphere... replaces targeted content delivery with interpersonal interaction" (14), facilitating the decentralized interpenetration of variant identities, performances, and productions.
This is not to say, however, that this synthesis is effortless, untroubled, or immune to the swinging of the closet door, and what is recognizable as "work" and as "public" within these spheres remains gendered (it is not coincidental that Fan Fiction and Fan Community's contributors are "mostly women"). In a post on her professional (as distinguished from her locked and pseudonymous fannish) blog, Busse theorizes the "semi-public spaces" of fan interaction, where "many of us are quite comfortably hiding in plain sight," mobilizing danah boyd's term "layered public" for "an image of degrees, a continuum of public and private" (P3). The variable privacies of LiveJournal fandom, enabled by security features like friendslock, filters, and search engine blocking, are predominantly inhabited by women, and parallel the variable registers of identity and address that acafans must navigate in articulating their professional/fannish pursuits. Much of the anxiety about "privacy" here is tied to the pornographic dimension that often characterizes the fanworks at issue. In their co-written essay "'Yearning Void and Infinite Potential': Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space," Lothian, Busse, and Reid formulate a sort of "is she or isn't she?" provocation about fangirls in general, exploring the queer implications of the arousing intercourse between fans across texts. "Again and again," they report, "slash fans invoke narratives of closetedness, of coming out" (107) within an ongoing debate about if or how fannishness can be understood as an identity, perhaps even a "sexual orientation." I'd argue that the rhetoric of the so-called slash closet, wherein female fans may hide their online exploits from "real life" family, friends, and colleagues, is a meaningful symptom of the queer double binds that circumscribe women's activities as erotic producers, media consumers, and professionals (indeed, job security is often mentioned as a rationale for keeping dubious fan activities secret). Negotiating the contested boundary between critic and fan can be not only as treacherous as the one between straight and gay, public and private, or television and audience, but also insistently intertwined with them, ensnared in the same perpetually shifting closet architecture.
The gratifications of TV viewing seem peculiarly unrepresentable in professional scholarship, a casualty of the devaluation of mass culture which is intimately tied to its ostensibly feminine appeal, and of methodological deficits that yoke public discourse (versus private enjoyment) to notions like rationality and objectivity. Charlotte Brunsdon's assessment is that, when it comes to "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" (114), "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). Our pleasure in television is the TV critic's love that dare not speak its name, our version of the open secret., which we allude to discreetly or allow to recede again as soon as it is acknowledged. So, the investigation of television characters who are "closeted" has subtly self-reflexive resonances at the level of analysis itself. Television studies has tentatively ventured further into the borderlands between critic and fan (along with so many others) than most other academic disciplines, a function of the way television itself continually puts this boundary transgression forward. In Joyrich's experience, "what had started off as two separate proceedings -- on the one hand, an intellectual concern with critical and cultural theory, and on the other, my own television viewing -- came to seem more and more intertwined. To some degree, this is symptomatic of the 'nature' of U.S. commercial television" (RR 14). If "current debates over the text and audience have made the intellectual's relationship to television a point of contention, thus demanding that critics place themselves in regard to their objects of study" (RR 14), this is all the more true of scholarship that takes the articulations between text and audience produced by fans as its object.
The fan studies community that has coalesced online has adopted the portmanteau "acafan" to name a position that merges intellectual and libidinal, professional and personal engagements with fandom. In their introduction to the watershed volume Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson acknowledge that it is "trend[s] in academic discourse... as well as the work that has gone before of well-known and well-regarded scholar-fans... [that] have permitted us to take a subject position that melds the fan and the academic" (24). In addition to this disciplinary heritage, acafan coextensivity is predicated on the formal harmonies of "fannish practice as a model for academic practice" (8), both of which, as collectively-authored "works in progress," "inhabit a fluid space that needs to be continually revised and reconsidered" (7). Their anthology has its genesis in "constant manipulation, renegotiation, commenting, and revising, all done electronically among a group of people, mostly women, intimately involved in the creation of fannish goods" (6). It is thus an artifact of what Busse, Lothian, and Reid elsewhere identify as a community of "vernacular theory" (109): the ongoing critical discourse that is ubiquitous within the particular subculture of self-aware slashers that has been the privileged object of much fan studies. While "meta" -- this tradition of informal self-reflexive analysis by and for fans -- does not originate or end with LiveJournal, it is LiveJournal's technological affordances, in particular, that allow the integration of academic and fan activities to come to fruition in the figure of the acafan. As Busse and Hellekson emphasize, "the threading, hypertextual nature of the blogosphere... replaces targeted content delivery with interpersonal interaction" (14), facilitating the decentralized interpenetration of variant identities, performances, and productions.
This is not to say, however, that this synthesis is effortless, untroubled, or immune to the swinging of the closet door, and what is recognizable as "work" and as "public" within these spheres remains gendered (it is not coincidental that Fan Fiction and Fan Community's contributors are "mostly women"). In a post on her professional (as distinguished from her locked and pseudonymous fannish) blog, Busse theorizes the "semi-public spaces" of fan interaction, where "many of us are quite comfortably hiding in plain sight," mobilizing danah boyd's term "layered public" for "an image of degrees, a continuum of public and private" (P3). The variable privacies of LiveJournal fandom, enabled by security features like friendslock, filters, and search engine blocking, are predominantly inhabited by women, and parallel the variable registers of identity and address that acafans must navigate in articulating their professional/fannish pursuits. Much of the anxiety about "privacy" here is tied to the pornographic dimension that often characterizes the fanworks at issue. In their co-written essay "'Yearning Void and Infinite Potential': Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space," Lothian, Busse, and Reid formulate a sort of "is she or isn't she?" provocation about fangirls in general, exploring the queer implications of the arousing intercourse between fans across texts. "Again and again," they report, "slash fans invoke narratives of closetedness, of coming out" (107) within an ongoing debate about if or how fannishness can be understood as an identity, perhaps even a "sexual orientation." I'd argue that the rhetoric of the so-called slash closet, wherein female fans may hide their online exploits from "real life" family, friends, and colleagues, is a meaningful symptom of the queer double binds that circumscribe women's activities as erotic producers, media consumers, and professionals (indeed, job security is often mentioned as a rationale for keeping dubious fan activities secret). Negotiating the contested boundary between critic and fan can be not only as treacherous as the one between straight and gay, public and private, or television and audience, but also insistently intertwined with them, ensnared in the same perpetually shifting closet architecture.
