That word might not mean what we think it means.

[logovo]

Reading some stuff today I saw several people talking about aca-fans (acafans? AcaFans?) and I'm starting to wonder if they mean the same thing I'm thinking when I hear acafans, as in actual people in academia, writing, publishing, teaching or fanlore's entry. Are people now using that word interchangeably with fans who are just into meta? Anyone else getting that impression?

Also, I still haven't watched SPN and I'm trying not to read spoilers but I'M FAILING SO BAD. Because I'm weak and impatient.

Comments

Via metafandom - too lazy to login, sorry

[(Anonymous)]

To me, "acafan" is associated with "fans who follow Marxist Critical Theory and label fans who follow Enlightenment Scientific Theory as 'anti-intellectual' and 'privileged'".

The following are quotes from Carl Freedman “Science Fiction and Critical Theory” _Science Fiction Studies_, Volume 14 (1987):

"Such speculation, and the concomitant “transformative activity associated with critical thinking” of which Horkheimer writes, is the telos of critical theory: the elaborate and powerful demystifying apparatus of Marxist (and Freudian) thought exist, ultimately to clear space upon which positive alternatives to the existent can be constructed."

"But the conservatism of canon-formation, whose first and most decisively conservative phase is to separate the literary from the non-literary, is, if to some degree necessary, also something which critical theory must be wary and skeptical of. The procedure is intrinsically repressive, and, given the inevitable hegemony of pre-critical thought in class society, the repressions involved are by no means unselective."

And there are just pages and pages of "let's discredit U.S. values and extol the European Marxist theories as superior" by this and other academically trained critics.

Re: Via metafandom - too lazy to login, sorry

[logovo]

Wow. This has to be the among the weirdest comments I have ever recieved in my LJ/DW accounts. Thanks?

Re: Via metafandom - too lazy to login, sorry

[robin_arede]

Ahahahaha.

I kow Carl.

He'd probably freak out (like every other male academic doing work on sff that i know) if anybody associated him with fandom in any way.

Not to mention, everybody knows it's the critical race and queer theory aca-fen who are destroying the US AKA western civilization--the European Marxists hardly have a shot at it!