Girls who like Boys who like Boys – Ethnography of ... - Yuuyami.com

academic and the fan, rather than to exclude my figure or to veil its
complexity manifested in the various roles I had to take on.
In a recent interview for his university’s online journal of cult media
(Intensities, Cardiff University), Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins discussed a
plethora of contemporary issues in fan studies as well as each other’s works in
that area. 7 Bringing up the relationship theoretical framework has to field
research, Hills underlines that what “counts as the real will be different,”
depending on the researcher’s background, training and theoretical tendencies.
Not necessarily consciously, these factors will influence the researcher’s
perception of field data as it happens, or in Hills’ words:
[…] they would see different things: that person twitched
then, or they held their body in that way, or they spoke in
that way, they were excited about this, anxious about that,
they got that word muddled up … these things might matter
to a psychoanalytic “empiricist” but not to a certain type of
“empirical” sociologist. (Hills 2001)
Jenkins follows this line of thought by giving a practical example from his
Research Methods class: Using a video interview he did for Textual Poachers
in which he interviews a fan song writer about her fannish involvement, he
shows his class the two different levels at which the fan writer replies. Though
her initial answer regarding motivators is that she had started writing songs
because of her father’s death and the emotions involved in that, she also
discusses her involvement with the fan-community and the creation of songs
7 This interview was found online and was last accessed in Februay 2004, but is at the
moment unavailable due to a restructuring of the site. The site’s usual domain is
http://www.cult-media.com and houses Cardiff University’s online peer reviewed Journal of
Cult Media.
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