Fanfic Forensics

I spent the last couple of weeks fine-tuning a grant application. Everything hinges on this one three-page text: one wrong word or fuzzy sentence and bam, the application goes straight in the bin. That means reading and rereading and spell-checking and putting in more jargon ad nauseam, and soon advisors start giving contradictory advice as to what should be in there, the page limit becomes a nightmare, and by the deadline you're quite ready to ritually burn the monster and dump the ashes in the cat box.

Next month I'm going to Sweden for the symposium 'Textual Echoes: Fan Fiction and Sexualities' (program and abstracts), where I'll be making a case for 'The 'open work' as a framework for the interpretation of fan fiction'. For those who are interested in seeing a coherent argument emerge slowly from a morass of disconnected gibberish, I'm constructing the presentation here. Abstract:

A new Australian law could impose penalties on anyone who views slash fic or other (fan) media that feature fictional minors in a sexual situation. This isn't throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it's also throwing out the bath, the parents, the dog, and a couple of people who were just walking past the house.

Some final notes and observations following "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics" in Kyoto. I had a great time, learned a lot, and was quite impressed in general. The amount of fail was surprisingly small for an academic gathering (a few people excepted), and several presentations gave me some very helpful pointers and new ideas.

I'm having a great time in Kyoto at "Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale", the first international conference on manga/comics research at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, organised by Kyoto Seika University. Met a ton of interesting people with very interesting ideas that I'll write about in length later.

Yesterday I gave a presentation on copyright issues related to dojinshi and fan culture for the first-year students at the Japanese Studies department of the Catholic University of Leuven. It was based on the conference presentation I'll be giving next week in Kyoto, with more introductory material such as what dojinshi are. The conference version will have fewer cute pictures and more long pretentious words.

Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Scholarship on a Global Scale will take place from 18 to 20 December at the International Manga Museum in Kyoto. I'll be doing a short presentation in Japanese on the 18th on the topic of what exactly "global comics studies" might study. First, the aims of the conference:

Three months just got sucked into the vortex of cultural week organisation hell. Now it's over and done, and I managed to submit art for Snapely Holidays and Snarry Holidays a day before the November 16 deadlines too, so I can finally focus on research again.

All right. I'd been meaning to do a write-up of all the ethics questions relevant to my research project for quite a while, but the Surveyfail trainwreck suddenly makes the need for a write-up feel a lot more pressing. Fortunately, others have written quite extensively on how to study fandom while not being offensive and using a sound methodology.

I'm still working through the batch of over a hundred new Snape-as-a-main-character Harry Potter dojinshi I bought in July, but once more, it seems all of them are yaoi. Now, I didn't do this on purpose. Really. I specifically went looking for het HP dojinshi with Snape in them in Toranoana and other shops that cater to a male clientele, because I know there are het HP dojinshi out there. I've seen them on the net. They weren't in the shops. Not anymore, the friendly sales clerks said. The female-oriented shops still had shelves and shelves of HP dojinshi, the vast majority of them yaoi.