Journal of Fandom Studies, The - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2016

Scholars of online fan studies have engaged with fanfiction since at least the publication of Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers in 1992, and our access to it has only increased and improved with the explosion of online fan communities and with the development of massive, easily searchable online archives like fanfiction.net and archiveofourown. org. Much of this academic research and analysis, however, has taken place with no involvement or even knowledge on the part of the fan author. This unfortunate lack of engagement ignores the ways in which fan author practice is different from that of published authors due to the nature of fanworks and fan authorship, as well as intrafandom codes of ethics and the inherent power dynamics of researcher and research subject. Using direct input from fan authors and readers, this article proposes a more multifaceted take on best practices for fan studies researchers.

Accountability to participants is a topic of some debate within fan studies. Whilst working with people requires informed consent, it may be legally defensible to freely quote any fan work found online. Reflecting on my research experience, this article argues for a responsibility to ask permission from fan creators before sharing their work in academic and other contexts. An ethics of transparency is beneficial not only to fans, I argue, but to the development of fan studies and its continued dialogue with fandoms.

This article proposes an ethical framework to fan studies based on Honneth’s model of recognition, the ontological ethics by Løgstrup, the ethnographic conscience and the ethical stances of apathy, sympathy and empathy.

This article relates the personal experiences of changes required when a scholar trained in text-based literary studies began engaging in scholarship on fanfiction after a return to active online fandom. The changes required considering ethical issues in scholarship and self-education in the requirements of American Institutional Review Boards. The importance of the work done by the Association of Internet Research (AOIR) and the discussions in fandom are cited as valuable resources in the process.

The field of audience studies has undergone something of a change in the last twenty years. From considering film and television viewers to be passive consumers, scholars now recognize the active role that audiences play in the construction and reception of texts. Similarly, understandings of the need to look beyond the fan to the non-fan and anti-fan have also changed the ways we view the text and its audiences. This work has been fuelled, at least in part, by the development of fan studies, with academics like Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills and Jonathan Gray arguing that fans actively work with a text to change its meaning, or uncover hidden meanings, through fan cultural production. The emergence of Web 2.0 has further changed the nature of audience interaction, with fannish activities like fan fiction no longer the preserve of paper ‘zines. The growth of social media sites along with the shifting interest in analysing fans and their engagement with texts raises complex ethical questions about how scholars negotiate the study of fandom, but the ethics of how we engage with anti-fans and analyse anti-fannish response to a text has thus far been ignored. Fan studies, as a relatively new area of scholarship, has traditionally adopted two different means of dealing with fans. The first, drawing on the literary studies tradition, prioritizes the text. In this mode, texts are properly cited to ensure that others can find them and it may not occur to scholars to not point to the source. The second, however, arises from the social sciences in which human subjects are worked with and ethical considerations come above and beyond the research. In this mode, fans’ privacy is respected and permission obtained in order to cite fannish works. In this article I examine the ethics of approaching anti-fans. Is it enough to approach them in the same way as we approach fans or are there other factors to consider? Is it appropriate to use anti-fan texts without the authors’ consent? Where do the power structures lie in analysing anti-fans as opposed to fans? And should fan studies scholars even be asking for consent from anti-fans in an increasingly open media space?

One of the strengths of the field of fan studies is its interdisciplinary nature, which brings a diversity of insights and perspectives to the field. The ethical manner in which to study fandom, however, is complicated by those multiple perspectives. Questions about defining the subject of study, prioritizing ethical issues of privacy and consent or representativeness and authenticity, and the appropriate stance of the researcher continue to be debated within this complex ethical landscape.

This article takes as its focus the strategies by which ethical stances are established and legitimized in fan studies writing. It argues that, as a matter of ethics, such stances should always be placed under interrogation. This can be achieved by disrupting the entities that are often invoked in claims about what constitutes ethical practice in research – ones that may otherwise quickly become naturalized points of reference. Using as an exemplar Busse and Hellekson’s articulation of the ‘fans first’ principle, the article considers how ethical positions become sedimented and normalized within academic fields of practice. In doing so, the article develops some counter-principles for an ethical destabilization and (where necessary) dismantling of received ethical subjectivities in fan studies research.

The essay frames the ways in which fan artefacts can be ethically used in a university classroom setting. By offering ways to invite students to connect scholarship around fan studies and adaptation with fan materials, we lay the foundation for student understanding of fan spaces and fan works. The remix composition classroom positions fan artefacts in similar ways to academic conversations, and welcomes students to participate in multiple conversations.