Tales of Tenure Terror; "She has a reputation as a lawnmower."
When I decided to do this subject weekly I thought it may be hard to come up with enough content. Don’t worry, academia is full of bad behavior. This is a situation that happened in the field of fan studies, a field already fraught with its members trying to legitimize the field, so much that there is little to no emphasis on the internal biases.
I will try to summarize this as best I can, but the situation is really best told by those involved (more links to them.) And, if you have other knowledge of this and I am getting it wrong, feel free to let me know.
The setting:
A fan studies academic listserv. These are common for almost all subfields. Dr. William Proctor published a message that somehow included a private email exchange between him and Henry Jenkins. (yes THE Henry Jenkins.) It must have been part of a forwarded message.
In the private email exchange, Proctor is discussing two female scholars of color, Dr. Rukmini Pande, and Dr. Samira Nadkarni and their “fit” to be editors of a curated blog focusing on diversity (widely defined). It’s really really horrible, stating that she “may still rail on social media” and he has heard from others about her “reputation as a lawn mower.” It was first shared with redacted names, but Dr. Nadkarni came forward to say it was about her.
This response is from Proctor, who, instead of simply apologizing to those he mentioned, explained his behavior as “writing in a state of distress brought on by autistic meltdown.”
This is pretty damn insulting to those with autism. I didn’t realize that a symptom of autism was ignorance and calling women of color “lawn mowers” who didn’t shut up when they were supposed to, to act grateful, and just let the boys talk about their fandom.
Dr. Nadkarni responded:
Henry Jenkins wrote a statement about the situation here. I don’t even want to bring up the “c” word (I mean cancel culture, you sickos) but Jenkins certainly had a more thought out and self-aware post that addressed some of the major issues at play.
So, back to Proctor. I do not consider myself any sort of expert on autism and its effects on behavior and “misunderstandings” about racial identity, so I tried to learn more about him and if this has been mentioned in the past. And ho boy, what a jackpot.
Proctor, ironically, was an editor of a special issue of the journal Participations about toxic Star Wars fandom. Which, is a good special issue to have, presumably to discuss how this affects identity and also poses a threat to their own field. In a twist that even Alanis Morissette would find ironic, Proctor publishes an article called “ ‘I’ve seen a lot of talk about the #blackstormtrooper outrage, but not a single example of anyone complaining’: The Force Awakens, canonical fidelity, and non-toxic fan practices.” [You can read it in full here, from a safe downloading source.]
For those of you that are tired of Star Wars discourse, bear with me, because what Proctor is arguing is that the racist tweeting about John Boyega was not because he was black, but because him being black was not in canon with Star Wars. In fact, it’s not racist because black stormtroopers were already a thing when Donald Faison did some parody a decade ago.
From the article:
In this article, I will show that the inclusion of a black Stormtrooper is less about race than it is about what I call canonical fidelity. For a fan minority, the Boyega sequence was viewed as a perceived violation that disrupted pre-established continuity, largely based on arguments relating to canonical Clone Troopers being genetic replications of Jango Fett, played in Attack of the Clones (2002) by the non-white Polynesian actor, Temuera Morrrison. From this perspective, I will demonstrate how these fan interpretations are ‘not “merely” or “simply” about race’ but, in the main, about issues related to canonical authenticity.
Translation: yea there’s racism but it’s about the AUTHENTICITY of the franchise. Sure, there is a discourse in how fandom is a combination of the two, but Proctor spends the article waxing about how we jumped to conclusions too fast that the toxic fandom was about JUST race and that we need to DO BETTER when examining this.
By the same token, should people turn to the Twitter echo chamber to join in the melange of anti-racist hate and criticism, even in the face of contrary evidence, then it behoves the academic community to wrestle with some important questions rather than contribute to the discursive binary constructed between the moral, ethical, politically progressive anti-racist ‘good’ fan and the appalling reactionary politics of racist ‘bad’ fans.
What he is doing here is sneaky. He is exploiting the idea that in academia, something is never about JUST ONE THING. Yes, that’s true, there are always many factors at play. Also, the bad/good fan dichotomy is a contested assumption in the field of fan studies. But to write a whole study downplaying the racism is….well, where was the peer review on this? How did it get published? Well,
(more in the thread).
I admit that I always recoiled at any fan studies work, which is not fair because there is some great work being done especially by scholars of color, but it seems to always bring out some of the same toxic behavior that is supposedly in fans.
Also, this is another reason to dismantle academic structures, including tenure, peer review, publishing, etc. etc. Although I am complicit in it right now as a voluntary part of academia, I would welcome it being reformed. I have the privileged stance of not wanting a tenured faculty job. At this point, I am surprised that anyone actually would.
What is this? A semi-regular newsletter about culture and academia and academic culture.