A little over two years ago, I presented at the first-annual Terror Camp conference, which I had helped organize alongside my fandom friends. My topic was “Finding Franklin’s Men: The Biographical Turn of Terror Fandom,” and I was excited to discuss the ways I had seen demonstrated that a fannish obsession, deployed in a certain direction, could be a hugely powerful tool in research.
I brought in existing scholarship about knowledge production, cult followings, and fandom, from scholars like Henry Jenkins, Abigail De Kosnik, and Umberto Eco, and finally I used the example of a quite minor archive discovery I had personally made about Henry Peglar’s beer hall, in order to conclude:
While they cannot go on archaeological expeditions to the wrecks, and are not specialized enough to contribute to cultural studies journals, Terror fans have unmistakably effected a biographical turn, driven initially by a fannish-affective impulse to know the characters better and to find inspiration and material for for transformative works.
Little did I know then that I would experience that triumphant feeling of archival discovery magnified a thousand times over this year, when investigating the relationship between Harry Pennell and E. L. Atkinson—driven, I’m wholly unafraid to confess, by a passion that I recognize in myself as fannish.
That first year of Terror Camp had about a hundred attendees, which I thought was incredible. This year, the third year of the conference, we had nearly a thousand RSVPs, and hundreds upon hundreds of people engaging on Zoom and Discord.
There were definitely things that could have gone better, things we could improve, and I’ll be the first to admit that—but this year’s conference was the best it’s been, I am pretty sure. People had a really great time! Hester Blum, one of my favorite polar researchers and someone I cite extensively in my own scholarship, went so far as to say that conferences like Terror Camp could save the humanities. Gosh!
If I ever end up re-doing my 2021 presentation with all the stuff I’ve learned since then, I would certainly include the “A Plaque For Hester” campaign, where a group of fans of the West End musical Operation Mincemeat banded together to uncover and publicize the forgotten biographical details of one of the musical’s main characters. I’d also include material from Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon Is Now, a captivating book which charts the relationship between amateurism and queer temporality, one which explains that “intimate longings—desires for authenticity, for origins, for meaning, for connection—motivate all turnings toward the past.”
And I would connect it to the larger issue of what we miss out on when we delegitimize or ignore work that emerges from subordinated cultural arenas like fandom, amateurism, and youth culture.
Andreas Huyssen in his 1986 essay “Mass Culture as Woman” describes the ways in which the nineteenth-century fear of pop culture and the fear of the enthusiastic crowd were definitely grouped and gendered:
“It is indeed striking to observe how the political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities.”
While Huyssen ends up concluding confidently that this pejorative gendering has declined thanks to the rise of feminism & the postmodern, and the elevation of women artists into higher cultural realms, we are still of course surrounded by cultural detritus left behind by this long-term association. Pop culture and mass enthusiasm are certainly now recognized as having power, but in their more outspoken and unusual forms they still frequently bear the twinned scarlet letters of femininity and immaturity.
In my own small realms (such as Terror Camp where all our panelists were women and/or queer), enthusiastic and desiring connections to history and culture generate endlessly engaging ideas and creative works, and lead people to new friendships, collaborations, and careers. I hope that this year’s increased attendance and attention leads, in the future, to even more folks joining the party, and realizing the potential in fannish ways of working.
A difficulty for me with popular culture is how intimately most of it is tied to Capitalist modes of production. Fandom for early Arctic exploration, on the other hand, or fandom for, say, space photography, is rather less so.
I would also perhaps contrast folk art and crafts with the increasingly Capitalist nature of high art. For instance, it’s hard to feel anything at all about one of Damien Hirst’s glorified tax dodges, but I love love watching independent woodworking and costume YouTubers.
Maybe one of the appealing things to me about literature is that even as exploitative as contemporary publishing may be, novels still end up being largely the work of individual artists and much more reflective of their individual preoccupations and quirks.