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

I was baffled. What could she possibly mean by that? I thought to
myself that after all the care I took in attempting to map out the many
activities online fans engage or do not engage in, this was certainly not the
message I wanted to bring across to the reader. Surely, Red who has read this
manuscript at every stage of its production, had given me support, and had, in
the end, been seduced by slash, could not have misunderstood my intentions.
Therefore it had to be my own writing, which had failed. She went on to
explain that the main message of the paragraphs was not about what a fan is.
At this point I started to hyperventilate.
No no no, she exclaimed, when she saw the look of terror on my face,
that was not what she had meant. Red went on to tell me that all of the fans
described in this piece did something “higher” with it. Gesticulating, she
painted the picture of an ordinary American girl liking the TV-show Angel,
and watching it every time it is on TV. This girl could be called a “fan.” But
the fans, I was working with and writing about, including myself, had “made
it part of identity” to such a degree that we thought about it outside of the
times shown on TV, to the extent that “being a fan” pervaded other aspects of
our lives.
There it was; concise and to the point, Red had summarized the
underlying keynote of my text. This text is, essentially, an ethnography of
what it means to be an online fan. In order to underline what I wanted to
translate, I would have had to offer a moment of ethnography alien enough,
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