Wasn't Debra Doyle's Q&A great? Now that we've wet your appetites, here is the next in our series of guest Q&A's. Dr. Busse is our resident acafan, taking the study of fandom, fanfiction and fan communities to the next level. Read more about online fandom academic journals, her feelings on fandom as an academic discipline and how it all began with Buffy.

Kristina Busse Q&A

What was your first fandom?

I was an avid Buffy watcher starting late in the second season and began looking for the episodes I’d missed (that was in 1999, the stone ages of dial up access :). One site had all the transcripts up, but that summer during hiatus I got curious and stumbled onto the Fan Fiction link on that site. And I was lost. Like most fans who weren’t initiated by an experienced fan, I started with a lot of fairly bad fic. I read fanfiction.net and anything I could found on Sonja Marie’s link site at the time. And then I soon found various mailing lists, both for my ship pairing (I was a pretty rabid shipper there for a while) and the UnConventional Shipper List (UCSL), which, if I recall correctly at that point still had things like Buffy/Spike, because it wasn’t canon yet, and also was my first introduction to slash.

What first sparked your interest in fandom as an academic subject?

A few months into my beginning to read fan fiction, two of my colleagues were writing on fan fiction but neither one of them was reading it. So I became their de facto go-to girl. I whined a bit that I might as well write my own essay, and they included me in their panel for a composition and rhetoric conference. Within weeks of giving that paper, Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery put out their Call for Papers (CfP) for a Buffy essay collection. I sent my presentation, which was included in Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (2002).

But at that point I wasn’t yet interested in fandom in and of itself, or in fan fiction as a genre of its own. I read through many more fandoms as a lurker until some years later I came upon a CfP on fan fiction topics. I submitted, met some other fans, and they invited me to get on LiveJournal (LJ). I’d previously followed different people there but was pretty much a complete lurker after Buffy. It was getting my own journal and starting to give some long overdue feedback, becoming part of the fannish community and engaging directly with other fans, that I started thinking more about fandom and fan fiction as an academic subject.

Click "read more" below to read more of Dr. Busse's fantastic interview.

How did you come up with the concept for Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet?

I didn’t. Or rather, a bunch of us came up with it together. I know many of us had been to academic conferences and been encountering other fans there saying really smart things. Meanwhile, the actual published work often didn’t move much beyond Jenkins and his by then almost fifteen-year old ideas. It felt like the discipline was most implementing his ideas and playing it out in various fandoms but wasn’t moving (much) beyond it theoretically. Moreover, we wanted to make it very clear that our subject position as scholars wasn’t outside but rather inside fandom. Here’s a quote from our introduction that illustrates this sentiment that was central to our project:

Our identities are neither separate nor separable. We rarely speak as fan or scholar; we rarely differentiate between an academic and fannish audience, except perhaps in formality of tone. … We’ll continue to exist on the intersection of the two, trying not to aca-colonize fandom or lose our academic allegiance through our fannish one. But we also want to profit from this intersection and to use our academic and fannish tools and insights to give a more complex and multifaceted image of fandom and its communities. In fact, we contend that our self-definition as participants and observers does not hinder us from seeing but rather helps us to see a more comprehensive picture of fandom. (Fan Fiction and Fan Communities, 25)

My co-editor Karen Hellekson had been asked to write a book and she suggested an essay collection on fandom and fan works. We had met at academic conferences a few times and started emailing and I got excited and ended up becoming co-editor. We worked well together with my job more on the ‘soliciting and engaging with authors’ side and hers more on the ‘production and rear-end’ spectrum (she’s a professional copyeditor). We put out a general CfP and directly asked many of the friends we’d made within fandom and whom we knew to be academics, and the book ended up becoming a mix of both.

Even as we were putting it together, we understood it to be a stepping stone only. Our entire introduction—and, for that matter, the entire volume itself—is conceived as a work-in-progress: we suggest that fandom just like academia works as huge texts to which all its participants respond and contribute. Just like any new story tends to engage with other stories, meta, and conversations, so fan studies engages with the existing body of knowledge. As such, we knew that there could never be a definitive volume on fan cultures, because both the subject and the scholarship continue to grow.

What can you tell us about Transformative Works and Cultures?

It is here that we are so excited to be able to continue our work with TWC (Transformative Works and Cultures; http://journal.transformativeworks.org), the academic, peer-reviewed journal supported by the OTW (Organization of Transformative Works; http://www.transformativeworks.org/). The journal continues the project of the book to offer important contributions to fan studies and fan cultures by and for members of either or both communities by publishing articles about popular media, fan communities, and transformative works. This includes many of the areas we traditionally connect with media fan cultures (fan fiction, vidding, fan art, gaming, comics, etc), including fan productions and surrounding communities, as well as transformative works and uses of fan models that might not be as immediately obvious such as political parties and fandom, female crafts as fan works, or other transformative works such as musical remixing.

Neither Karen nor I are affiliated with a university and thus are very committed to Open Access to allow all readers, whether university affiliated or not, to be able to read the journal. TWC is Open Access as is the journaling software we decided to use. All essays are Creative Commons copyrighted, so that everyone can replicate (and transform) the content as long as it’s noncommercial and attributed. Moreover, in conjunction with the OTW’s legal council we decided to push fair use in our publication policies so that we allow embedded images, audios, and videos.

While some of the essays are traditionally peer-reviewed academic papers, we consciously created a section entitled Symposium (paying homage to Lucy Cereta’s fan meta site of the same name) that collects shorter meta pieces. These editorially reviewed essays allow fans and academics to share ideas that may not expand into full research essays yet are important nonetheless. We’re hoping to bridge the academic/fan divide by inviting “just” fans to both read and contribute.

We alternate general and special issues. Our first issue (fall 2008) covered a range of essays addressing fan concerns, from the political to the literary and the pedagogical, from close readings of specific stories to genre discussion of fannish communities and historical overviews. The second issue veered away some from what we think of as media fandom by focusing on games as transformative works (spring 2009). In so doing, it ranged from fannish creations like machinima and chip tunes to analyses of tabletop, computer, and Live role-playing games as well as discussions of the use of games for military recruitment. Future volumes will include special issues on Supernatural (spring 2010) and fannish history/history of fandom (spring 2011) and race and fandom.

How did you get involved with OTW and why do you think it’s important?

I got involved through the initial post on LiveJournal in response to FanLib. Personally, I’d just written my critique of fan studies and gender, “The Women Men Don’t See” (http://kbusse.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/mit5-review/), which was an angry response to what I felt was a systemic gender imbalance in fan studies and the way it had played out at various conferences. A female fannish call for autonomy was exactly what I wanted and needed at that moment. We’d spoken before of writing our own history (which became the wiki FanLore; http://fanlore.org/), of owning our own servers (the goal of the Archive of Our Own; http://archiveofourown.org/), and of creating our own journal, but it was the right time for these things to take shape. Enough people both had the energy and the know-how, were willing to donate the time and the intelligence to make this project happen.

I find the OTW important because at a time where user-generated content has become a commonplace trope and media convergence tries to monetize (and control) fan-like behavior, it is important to create a public presence and awareness about fandom and fan works. While there are clearly dangers to presented “one” face to fandom, I think it’s important to have a face rather than be completely ignored in favor of much younger (often male) fannish engagements or to be represented randomly by whatever story a journalist might come across. Fanlore and the archive will hopefully allow outsiders to get a more comprehensive sense of fandom and the journal contextualizes and explains in order to make fannish activities and creations more accessible to nonfans.

Moreover, the OTW is a nonprofit organization for and by fans, which means that fans are writing the source code for the fan fiction archive (often learning to code) and fans are donating their time to build and run the wiki as well as to contribute to it. Likewise, the journal is completely run by volunteers, from the editors and reviewers to the production staff. The journal, in fact, exemplifies the ethos central to the OTW and its members: as I describe above, Open Access, Creative Commons copyright, and a fair use interpretation that allows actual engagement with media texts and scholarship on fan works are as central to our journal as they are to the OTW in general.

How do you think “fandom” fits into the world of academic study?

I’m not sure fandom needs to fit into academia or academia into fandom. In fact, Matt Hills in Fan Cultures (2002) intelligently warns against acafans’ propensity to try to read fandom through an academic lens by making the two alike. I think of them as valid and valuable discourses that exist side by side and can inform one another. Moreover, as our collection has shown (and as I’m reminded when I look at my friendslist every day), many of us are already both.

In terms of fan studies as one (or many) disciplines, I think that audience studies is an important field in television and media studies and, in fact, deserves more attention in my home discipline of literary studies. Fans are often regarded as exemplary audiences and while I quibble with that definition at times, I do find it useful for certain purposes. Fans are particularly vocal and engaged audiences, but recent fan studies has expanded by looking at other audience segments such as anti-fans, which is an interesting and fertile direction. For me, personally, there’s no need to justify fan studies by making it useful to media studies or to the media industry—I think we’re worthy of studying ourselves just because!

What would you consider “your” fandom?

For quite a while after I left Buffy and moved through fandom after fandom, central archive after central archive, reading fairly indiscriminately (yet also fairly comprehensively), I always thought of fandom itself as my fandom. I wasn’t as invested in any particular show, and I followed writers into new fandoms where sometimes I only vaguely knew the source text if at all. Probably popslash was the most extreme of my fandom-first fandoms, even as it ultimately became one of my most pleasant fannish experiences, both with the people I met there as well as with the academic thoughts it gave me. I ended up writing three essays that were directly connected to my popslash experiences.

At the moment I feel a bit between fandoms. I watch a lot of TV but probably feel most strongly at the moment about The Sarah Connor Chronicles (SCC) and Supernatural (SPN)—especially since Battlestar Galactica’s underwhelming finale and Stargate Atlantis (SGA) getting replaced by its younger and supposedly hipper cousin. I’m mostly reading some SGA, a lot of SPN and J2, some SCC, and watch vids. With the launch of the new journaling site Dreamwidth.com I feel like it almost has become my current fandom; in general I’ve gotten a little more relaxed and am less anxious when I’m not feeling all that strongly about anything. I know now that it comes in waves and being less intense means I have some time to go back to old favorites or just watch some TV without being too emotionally involved. And in the end, I still have all my friends with whom I shared a fandom years ago or even those I never shared fandoms with but whom I met through meta or just because their journals were interesting. So in the end, fandom itself remains my fandom even when no specific show holds that place at that moment.

What prompted you to accept the invitation to Writercon?

I love meeting other fans and I talking about fandom and fan works. Writercon sounded like a perfect combination of both!

Kristina Busse, Ph.D.: Dr. Busse is co-author of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, and co-creator of the online academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Visit Dr. Busse's website for more information about her work.