burning at the centre of time

First off, happy birthday, Dreamwidth! And a happy May Day to everyone.

Right, so as a massive cultural studies geek...lots of you wanted me to write about fandom and cultural studies. So I am writing about that, because I can't think of anything to write about British/US American cultural differences that wouldn't sound trite at the moment.

Please note: the below is my interpretation of cultural studies and is not by any means definitive. It's a combination of how I learned the field and my own interpretations since. (Your mileage may vary. This is actually quite fitting, as you will see in a couple of paragraphs.)

First, a bit of background: Cultural studies is a bit of a newcomer to academics, and as such is often slagged off as being not academic enough...as most things that don't fall into the historically traditional (read: white Western) subject matter are.

This is because it studies everything within a culture as artefacts or texts of that culture, including popular culture and things that are not privileged with status therein, or things not imbued with value by the hegemony. Also, cultural studies takes as a credo the postmodern idea that everything is interpretable, and that there is no absolute truth or true narrative. You can take that as 'everything is true in some way' or 'nothing is true at all'; personally I lean towards the former. One doesn't want to dismiss any point of view out of hand, though the dominant and hegemonic point of view is considered only at the side because it's already been focused on in that 'historically traditional' narrative. Not entirely dismissed, because it's true, but only to the people who are enfranchised. If you catch my drift.

Cultural studies is about what communities of people do and why they do it, and what that means in the bigger picture of the world.

So, because it's not particularly quantifiable, because it focuses on the agency and history of people outside the hegemony, and because it asserts things like authorial intent alongside reader interpretation, cultural studies gets kicked quite a bit by the traditional academic. But it does police itself, to a certain extent--I can't just claim that Barney the purple dinosaur is an example of the dominant US narrative of giving respect only to those who meet your value system. If I were writing about it in an academic paper, I would need to back that up.

It's not perfect, by any means (for a start, it's still looking at things from Western theory), but deconstructing that isn't really part of the scope of this project.

There are lots of different ways to do cultural studies, and I generally go at it from a feminist/queer/restoring agency perspective, with as little Marxism as possible except when it comes to disenfranchisement, because I find it to be oversimplification. Semiotics comes into play a bit, because I was taught Dick Hebdige when I was impressionable, and because subcultures are cool. Like Stetsons and fezzes.

So, essentially, what I do/have done in academic projects is look at fandom groups--most particularly, online transformative works fandom and SJ fandom, so when I say 'fandom' from hereon out, assume that's what I mean--as communities or subcultures of their own accord, because they fulfil¹ the specifications of subcultures. They have texts and language and are reactive to the existing cultures from which the canons originate without being entirely apart.

And fandom, frankly, is the oppressed (or the subaltern, though I hesitate to use that word because for some it is a specific referent--see Spivak) when it comes to reacting to texts/canon. Fic and vids and meta examining social justice issues are all devalued both by the dominant culture and even within fandom itself, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

So that is WHY I look at it from a cultural studies perspective, because for me it provides the best possible academic framework for discussing this, where everything can be read and accepted as a text, while holding the creators of the texts accountable, and because I want to understand...or try to understand...why we do what we do and how that helps us process our understanding of bigger cultures.

Questions are entirely welcome, by the way.

Later, or tomorrow, or whenever I get around to writing it: fandom, culture, and the devaluing of fanworks/transformative works.

¹ Actually, this would be a good starting place for a post on 'why the hell does fulfil only have two Ls in BritE'. Other words that have come up in writing this post--artefact and me refusing to put a dash in postmodern.