All month long, we’re unveiling the FSNNA24 headliners and the special plenary roundtables they’ve curated. On Friday, Oct. 18, we are pleased to welcome the voices behind the Fansplaining podcast, Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel, for a discussion on Studying Fans Outside the Academy.
Fansplaining—the podcast by, for, and about fandom—put out biweekly episodes from 2015 to this past spring (currently on hiatus!). Co-hosts Flourish Klink and Elizabeth Minkel met on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015; Klink was working in Hollywood, explaining fans to networks and studios, while Elizabeth was covering fan culture as a journalist at a moment when fans had been thrust into a mainstream spotlight. The podcast was meant to talk across these intersections: to industry-side professionals, to members of the media, and from within and about fandom. It also was meant to talk between fan studies practitioners and fans: while both Klink and Minkel had studied fandom at the graduate level, neither were pursuing an academic career, and the podcast was an opportunity to follow the continuing trends of fan studies, and highlight emerging voices in the field.
Over the course of the podcast’s near-decade-long run, Fansplaining hosted dozens of academic guests from fan studies and beyond—but also welcomed a large range of guests who study fandom outside the academy. These conversations revealed different framings and definitions of fans and fan behaviors, and different goals and outcomes for analyzing fandom. From Hollywood, those perspectives came from people like Everybody At Once’s Kenyatta Cheese or screenwriter Javier Grillo-Marxuach; from the media, journalists like Aja Romano, Keidra Chaney, Stitch, or Gavia Baker-Whitelaw; and from fandom itself, the stats work of DestinationToast, or Tiffo from the Renegade fanbinding collective, or the hundreds of listeners of different ages, backgrounds, and corners of fandom who wrote in with smart, nuanced perspectives on the ever-shifting dynamics of fan culture.
This panel will draw on the contributions of Fansplaining’s many guests to look at those different framings. What are the metrics and ethical boundaries for fandom analysis in the entertainment industry? How do fan-journalists balance fandom and non-fandom audiences? When fans turn inward, what questions are they asking about fannishness—and how are their studies of fandom inherently fanworks themselves? And how can people who study fandom outside the academy work better with those who study fandom within it?
Check back next Thursday, Aug. 22 for our next MONSTER OF FANDOM!