celebrity gossip, academic style

I suppose this is the point when I tell you why I would attempt what I’ve long feared as a form of narcissism. First, I can’t imagine how this will feed any more narcissism than my Facebook page or Twitter account. Indeed, here I at least hope to open up the conversation to a bit less about me and my actions and a bit more about currents in the larger field of star studies, celebrity gossip, and ‘smut’ in its general form.

Second, I’ve encountered two separate ‘texts’ that have inspired me to do so. The first, “Gender in the Media Studies Blogosphere,” by Melissa Click and Nina Huntemann, is found in FlowTV‘s recent special issue on Social Media, examining why female media scholars blog less, and less ‘academically,’ than their male counterparts. My own observations certainly support this finding: while I aggregate an approximately equal amount of male and female authored media studies blogs through Google Reader, those maintained by men boast more frequent posts, not to mention more substantial traffic and commenting. Of course, there are are myriad reasons for this discrepancy, as the authors readily enumerate: some women feel the blog is too risky, others feel that the benefits of it (especially amidst the push to publish) fail to outweigh the amount of time necessary to maintain a blog, and others simply cite the demands of motherhood and family. (My co-editor at Flow, Jacqueline Vickery, provides a thoughtful analysis of her own difficulty with maintaining a personal/academic blog here.)

Click and Huntemann end their column with a call to action, proclaiming “We would like to create additional spaces; safe places for scholars to develop ideas, build networks, accommodate busy schedules, and feel protected by a supportive community that allow everyone to contribute to the development of our field and shape the technologies scholars might use to truly be public intellectuals.” This blog is thus, at least in part, a response to that very call.

The second ‘inspiring’ text came in the form a Lion’s Share Podcast — part of the fantastic project of Media Commons — in which Tim Anderson (Old Dominion University) interviewed Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Pomona College) on her forthcoming book on the future of academic publishing. In their discussion of the rapidly changing landscape of academic publishing (both in journals and in monographs), they effectively convinced me that while I may end up with a book at the end of my tenure quest, it’s time to start thinking about other ways in which to vet my work, perform scholarship collaboratively, and generally participate in the move to shift the ways in which we think of accomplishment and scholarship writ large within the field. While Fitzpatrick points to the need for senior scholars to change long-held notions of what does and does not qualify as tenure-able writing (including a fascinating analysis of the history of peer-review, which started as a means of surveilling and disciplining very, very early scholarship), I also think that junior scholars (including, and especially, graduate students like myself) need to practice what we preach. In other words, make our own ambivalence about old fashioned publishing manifest — whether in the form of developing Twitter communities, blogging, or working with sites like FlowTV and Media Commons to further the agenda.

While graduate students may not be vying for tenure, we will be vying very shortly for jobs — and with the market as is, we all need to think about how we choose to market ourselves. Will I be devoted to getting a piece in Cinema Journal and other ‘old-fashioned’ peer-reviewed, print journals? Will I focus on blog maintenance? Or can I do both?

At this point, As a young, family-less, tremendously hungry grad student, I can afford to at least attempt to do both.

Thus this blog. I plan to focus primarily on my subject of research — celebrity gossip in its past and present manifestations — but will also obviously stray from the path. The banner image above is taken from a particularly rich cover of Confidential Magazine, one of my favorite old gossip rags — and, in my opinion, the publication that altered the landscape of Hollywood gossip forever, a point I’m sure I’ll elaborate on in posts to come. In the meantime, enjoy the Navy’s Answer to the V.D. Menace.