what a lot of meanness

weren't those last two entries mean?
i will shape up.

insert some thesis work cheer to get rid of that sour taste...

the chapter went off to the supes this week, we met yesterday and she was happy. i was happy. it was a happy meeting. we agreed that i am both clever and somewhat random-and-spasmodic.

random and spasmodic in that i know a lot about my topic, i'm saying a lot, i've got too much to say, even, and i need some unifying theme.
so we bashed one out.
it wasn't that difficult - there are some things that keep coming up, some ideas i can't shake. and they're the ones you keep.
so now i'm all about fan studies, still, and i'm looking at how swingers - as fans - perform their fandom. fandom, for swingers (and most other fans) is necessarily communitarian, or consensual, in that you don't do it alone. you do it with others. so all their fan activities, their media use, is - at some point - focussed on interacting with other people. can't swing alone, baby.
i'm also interested in the way this 'performance' of fandom is necessarily transitory - the fan experiences is intangible, and so a moment in time that can't be captured. so you have to keep doing it, over and over again, to be a swinger. can't be a swinger if you don't dance.
so swingers are not only about performance, they're also all about reperformance. which i like. i like thinking about how swingers will get together and dance the same damn routine over and over, will listen to the same songs, over and over - and still get bucketsfull of pleasure. in fact, it's the actual repetition that swingers get off on. participating in this reperformance - repetition - is a good way of signalling your community membership, and also your fan-knowledge.
"oh, i know this stroll - i'll jump in".

i also like the notion of reperformance, because of the way it applies to things like a/v media - swingers will watch a video/sequence of clips/film over and over again, and as they do so, the narrative ceases to have meaning, and the text becomes a combination of little pieces of texts, or event texts in themselves. lucky swingers aren't big on narrative anyway (unlike buffy fans, etc). then swingers take these little bits of text and share them with other people, recombine them with other texts, learn the steps/routine and dance those little texts - performa those little bits - themselves. for their own pleasure, but also for those dancers watching, who recognise the little text (from their own obsessive viewing) and get pleasure out of not only the aesthetics of it, but also out of their own knowledge. like getting the joke, or figuring out who did it in a crime novel. this knowledge - fan knowledge - is what gives swingers status. or from which they gain community status.

there.
that's my new thing.

so my thesis will now (tentatively) be ordered around the notion of performance. my chapters are all illustrations of the ways in which swingers are into performance. or perform their fandom:
- the dance act
- costume and fashion
- music/djing
- film and visual clips
- camps and exchanges.

there.

the paper goes ok - i've written it twice now, and am getting closer. will spend some of it talking about my thesis overall - my big ideas - then talk about how djing (or more specifically, gender and identity in djing) illustrate these big ideas.

it's all good.