[Flourish] Klink: Your story about the band member makes me think about fans' reactions to the academic articles they themselves are in. That's a productive comparison, I think - "fans are to acafen the way that band members are to RPF writers" - because I think it opens the door to discussing the competing ethical responsibilities we have. Part of defining oneself as an 'acafan,' I think, is about making an ethical commitment to the fan community, yes?

When Paul Cornell wrote in Licence Denied that 'Thomas Noonan was the first New Fanboy' to use lit crit readings and terminologies, tracking fans' 'Analysis' of the show made sense, but by 2013 multiple generations of New Fanboys, Fangirls, acafans and fan-scholars have got in on the act, making such analysis far more dispersed, diverse and differentiated.

Furthermore, this chapter calls for an acknowledgment of differences among groups of fans, especially between “acafen”—more advanced in age, highly educated, and dedicated to TV series as well as genres of popular literature—and “feral” fans like those engaged in harem fics derived from manga and anime.

In addition to author-fans, who use fiction to generate critiques and justify their fictions, there are acafans, whose work may return to earlier literary periods to show how the mechanisms of reading or writing fan fiction can illuminate classic texts.

Much as Jenkins positions himself as an 'academic fan' in his 1992 work on Star Trek fandom, I too consider myself an acafan in my study of slash.

Recognition of our status as ‘acafen’ permits us to interrogate how and why we create such intimate affective bonds with the past. It also enables us to consider the moment in which we write in terms of its own historicity, namely what is at stake in our academic criticism, including the structures, biases, and concerns which most influence us. Read as a work of acafandom, Holy Feast’s central organizational and ideological thrust comes more fully to light: an effort to ‘redeem the past, with its institutions, beliefs, and stories, for feminists’.

Acafan

Meaning

Noun

Synonyms