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

academic audience might find such an interactive text perhaps too
experimental. Two things happened that caused me to reconsider. The first
was when I went over a copy of Interview with Henry Jenkins, and found my
notions affirmed to a heavy degree. Discussing the tendency of academia to
deal with audiences as passive, Jenkins jokingly explains:
It’s a problem, I think, for the field: we need, to some
degree, an audience that shuts up so that we can tell them
what a text means! […] This is the academic privilege: we
assert ourselves in the middle of this relationship between
texts, producers and audiences, and in order to define our
own role have a need, I think, to keep silencing the
audience in some way, or to marginalize it, trivialize it,
even when we’re talking about it as active. (Hills 2001)
Further on Jenkins discusses both of his texts mentioned in section C, Textual
Poachers (1992) and “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking” (1998) in
terms of the dialogue the first incited in fandom communities and the second
incorporated in the text. Mentioning the process of circulating the manuscript
for Textual Poachers in fandom circles for feedback, he explains that:
What I regret now is that I rendered a lot of that [the
process of circulating the manuscript and receiving
feedback] invisible. It would have been much more
interesting to integrate the back-and-forth dialogue within
the text itself, but there are only a couple of places where I
acknowledge that process. Since then I’ve really looked at
how to create a dialogic text that reflects a plurality of
voices, and “Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking”
(1998) was a model of a dialogic text, and yes, I do have a
piece in there because I was part of the fan community that
I was drawing on, but I don’t label it as somehow distinct
from the other fan voices there. (Ibid.)
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