Unlike Visweswaran who identifies with the shuttling inherent in claiming the hyphen in Indian-American (or Asian-American, or any of a host of other hyphens), I feel giddy at my rejection of the hyphen. I also have an Illinois birth certificate (mother: Indian; father: white) that could give me claim to the kind of fractured, oscillating identity that Visweswaran and several other women in the essay “Identifying Ethnography” contend with. But I’m not of Visweswaran’s generation, and I ended up the child of an “Indian” mother and “white” father by a very different route, in a different generation under different circumstances. The hyphen is too static (even with all its vibrations) and too sad for me to identify with.
A different contextual hyphen that I do claim is “scholar-fan” when writing about online fandom communities. Busse and Hellekson (2006) argue that scholar-fans “merge fan and academic discourses, but it does so not by placing fans’ quotes and voices next to our analyses, but rather by gathering together fans who are already academics and academics who are already fans (p. 24).” Personal engagement in fandom practices does not mean sacrificing rigor in research, but does mean involving “informant-fans” in the process of meaning-making. Lothian, Busse & Reid (2007) used the online platform LiveJournal.com as a discussion space between fans and scholar-fans to construct an analysis of online slash fandom as a queer female space. The essay is more of a roundtable discussion than a reiteration of an informant and researcher dialogue. Women discuss the bonds and relationships they have developed over years of participating in various slash fandoms. Quotes are not abstracted to simply prove some point about women who flirt with other women over stories about men having sex with other men. Instead, the piece reenacts the texture of conversations I’ve somehow heard before and been a participant in, when no researchers are watching.
It is in researching fandom communities where I feel I have the most to lose in terms of identity. I am quite easily “Indian” in a room full of non-minorities, or “white” when I go to Trinidad, or “Trinidadian” when I take the time to actually explain my mother’s ancestors’ complicated estrangement from India. Negotiating these identities doesn’t strike me as a problem. Unlike Visweswaran, I went to school with other Indian children who couldn’t speak Hindi (my mother can’t either, in any case). My best friend growing up had a Pakistani father and a white mother, but that wasn’t at all why we were best friends. We were best friends because we would watch X-Files until 1am and go to the arcade and beat grown men at Tekken 3 to watch the embarrassment on their faces. My friends in high school shared interests in anime and Doctor Who. They would read the racy stories I wrote while we were all still virgins. In a comfortable, multi-ethnic, middle-class society, it was our media habits that bound us together, rather than the fact I was “Indian,” Laura was “Taiwanese,” and Matt and Andrew were “white.”
Like Visweswaran, who states that her coming to India to research as a hyphenated identity was not accidental, neither is my coming to fandom and my rejection of questions of ethnicity regarding fandom practices. Yep, I’m also a little too tall and a little too fair and I have my father’s pointy nose with a little bump right in the center instead of the broad, flat nose of my mother and brother. But I’m also a little bit of an outsider now approaching Tumblr users; I’m a little too old and I don’t get Homestuck references and damn, I remember the days when we had to wait weeks to get translations of that year’s best anime series on VHS instead of it being subtitled and online an hour after it has aired in Japan. Visweswaran doesn’t quite speak Tamil in a way she will ever be accepted and likewise I don’t speak the particular code of in-jokes and references that I did ten years ago. The scholar- now precedes my engagement as –fan. This is my “continual process of coming into being as a researcher” (p. 139).
It may seem petty and superficial compared to the kinds of ethnography we have been reading and will continue to read; maybe it is. But I would not be here today if not for the way internet fandom communities shaped my childhood and continue to occupy my time. For good or ill, it was part of the community I acquired made me blissfully happy and let me know hundreds of people would read my silly stories and dozens would tell me how they loved them. It’s the community that let Julie Campbell break my heart when I was 16 and got me detention because I “dressed oddly.” There were “real world” consequences for my “online” life. It’s important to me, and more than anything I wish to do it justice in my research.
Busse, K., & Hellekson, K. (2006). Introduction: Work in progress. In K. Busse, & K. Hellekson (Eds.), Fan fiction and fan communities in the age of the internet: New essays (pp. 5-32). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Lothian, A., Busse, K., & Reid, R. A. (2007). ``Yearning void and infinite potential'': Online slash fandom as queer female space. English Language Notes, 45(2), 103-111.
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