I ran out of time before I fully addressed the questions this writer raised and so I wanted to add a few additional thoughts. First, I wanted to publically endorse the work Andrea is proposing to do as at least an important and fruitful question. As I wrote her privately, I think what is at the heart of her question is the ambiguious status of performers and characters on television. (Jeremy, are you reading this? I would love your thoughts here.) It seems to me that we know characters only television only through their embodiment by particular actors (i.e. only William Shatner has played Kirk) while we often know the actors only through their impersonation of particular characters (i.e. William Shatner will remain Kirk, even when we see him on his RESCUE program or think of all of the tv stars who had only one series in them.) When fans try to write these characters, it is hard to seperate them totally from the actors who played them and so there is often a blurring of the boundaries and often a conscious debate about where those boundaries lie. Fan artists assert that their works depict the characters, not the actors, as do most fan writers. I take them at their word as reflecting their understanding of these characters. But on another level, how can anyone seperate the two so readily? Isn't that still a likeness of Patrick Stewart on the cover of my book even though Jean Kluge is using it to represent Jean-Luc Picard as King Arthur? So, what Andrea is proposing to do is not to over-stress fan identification of stars but to ask about what role our knowledge of actors plays in our fannish interpretations of those characters (in letterzine writing, net chat, con talk, etc.) and what role it plays in the fictional reconstruction of those characters in zine fiction. Now, I wanted to more generally address the questions posed by the academy's relationship to fandom. I think it is a very complex relationship which I try to explore in the book's introduction. But, it reflects an important generational shift in the nature of media studies. Let me paint in broad strokes here: some of the earliest writing in this country on popular culture came from the Frankfort School tradition, alienated intellectuals who came from Germany in the wake of the perceived failure of the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of nazism. They had little cultural background on American pop culture and wrote about it from a perspective totally outside the experience of fans and consumers. The fan/consumer was an Other who could be constructed as an object of their worst nightmares about mass conformity, etc. and, as many people have suggested now, the audience was seen as a female object of a profound male dread. A second generation of writing on popular culture reflects the need Academics had to legitimize their research on film by treating it as equivalent with traditional high art. Their cultural capital was in the art cinema. Their models for writing came from literary studies,etc. and we had to create a clear seperation of art/non-art in which most works of popular cultural have to be dismissed from serious consideration so that the few select, cannonical texts and auteurs can be cherished. A third generation came to popular culture primarily with a political agenda and in so far as they write about fans (and many of them do), they write about them as an oppositional subculture. Often, fans are discussed (a la Fiske) as a theoretical abstraction, "the people," because these writers had little direct contact with the fan community. Just as the earlier writers had seen fans as blind consumers, these writers saw fans as nascent activists. This is how I read comments about reading politics into fandom. I see myself as representing a fourth generation in writing about popular culture and fandom. I have been part of fandom for 15 years. My fannish interests are part of which motivated me to become an academic working in Media Studies. Popular culture is not other, alien to me nor is it erzaz high art. I grew up with the mass media; we were raised by and on television and so we write about it in different ways. We are struggling to find the terms to discuss it. In writing my book, I invited fans to participate in that process, to further break down the boundaries between fan and academic and so I welcome feedback to my work, positive or negative, from fans. Many of the graduate students I have talked to who are interested in writing about fandom share this same background. They are academic/fans in the truest sense of the word. So do many of the better young writers on popular culture. I might point to someone like Lynn Spigel who is not a fan in the sense we are using it here but who is a true enthusiast about many forms of popular culture and it represents a central aspect of her cultural experience. I am therefore excited by what I see as a potential chance to re-invent the academy, to create a situation where academics are not learning about fans or even writing about fans but learning from fans and writing as fans. I did not stop becoming a fan when I became an academic. I think we as academic can make contributions to the fan community in the same way that fan writers contribute to the group's culture but only if we get rid of some of our intellectual pretentions and institutional privledges. Anyway, enough soap box. I welcome responses from others since this question is much larger than how we write about fan culture, an interest of limited interest to the group as a whole. What I am asking is how we conceptualize our own relationship to popular culture? How our personal, private experience of popular culture shapes how we write and teach? --Henry