mechademia slides 2013

Aca-Fan Service:Strategies of Scholarly Seduction in

Ghost in the Shell: SAC and Ergo Proxy

By Dr. Sandra Annett! Really?!

Name-dropping Kawai Kenji? Talk about otaku!

“academia is bounded by its own imagined subjectivity,” in which “the ‘good subject’ of the ‘duly informed’ academic is a resolutely rational subject devoted to argumentation and persuasion” (Hills, 3)

Now she’s quoting a book. Like a teacher or something!

Aca-Fan Service

Shh, she’s finally starting! I’m outta here!

-a specialized form of fan service that references not texts, but modes of interpretation.-Three key elements:• Intertextuality and allusion• Fan service• The aca-fan

Allusion and Intertextuality

• intertextuality describes both shows that make references to other texts and an interpretive practice where audiences actively make meaning by making associations.

• a process of encoding and decoding information

Three Intertextual Strategies

1) Parodic allusion 2)Creative appropriation 3) Self-reflexive reference

• Overall, intertextuality “allow[s] viewers to exercise specialized knowledge and to mark their membership in particular

cultures” (Ott & Walter, 440).

The Deleuzian Tachikoma

Look, it’s me! No, it’s me!

Fan Service (yer lookin’ at it!)

… O.O

Fan Service

• “the random and gratuitous display of a series of anticipated gestures common in Manga and Anime. These gestures include such things as panty shots, leg spreads, and glimpses of breasts” (Russell, 107)

• Fan service gives the viewer a “glimpse” of a “free, and uncontested, visual space” (108)

“While simply living in a particular physical place may no longer furnish the sense of community and self that it once did, the media provide resources for building coherent, if mutable, identities” (Ott and Walter, 440)

The Aca-Fan

Don’t forget BwOs! What is it with you and BwOs?

• Intertextual references and intellectually-justified fan service risk becoming proxies, stand-ins that restructure our unspoken motivations for studying anime.

• Solutions: -Avoid moral dualisms -Draw on situated knowledges

The Aca-Fan

Bye bye! Aw, already?!

• Is there any part of your fan experience

that you censor?• Do you use theory to express (or

mask) emotional investments in anime?

• Do you manage to speak in different voices at once?

• Contact me at: sannett@wlu.ca

References

Gotta have the references. Source! Source!

Haraway, Donna. “"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–599 Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Ott, Brian and Cameron Walter. “Intertextuality: Interpretive

practice and textual strategy.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17.4 (2000): 429-446. Russell, Keith. “The Glimpse and Fan Service: New Media, New

Aesthetics.” The International Journal of the Humanities 6.5 (2008): 105-110.