Just a quick thoughts for now about my project.

Having just returned from the Popular Culture Association and American Cultural Association (PCA/ACA) annual national conference in Washington D.C. this year, I have been inspired to do more writing about my engagement with paranormal literature, television, film, and culture.  I am often seeking recommendations about what to look at next and use blogs and the like to do that.  More importantly though, I have been feeling a need to share my thoughts on these things.

As a feminist academic who is deeply embedded in examining popular culture, I find myself frequently at odds with my own tastes and intellectual life.  The thing I frequently find strange in is the need to label or define self, reading habit, intellectual prowess, titles held, etc.  I mean I did it just a sentence ago.  The difficult piece of this tendency arises from the fact that those labels divide, usually arbitrarily.  If I consider myself a feminist or an academic or an administrator, or . . ., do those things exclude each other?  While all the diverging pieces make up who I am, I cannot every fully be all those things at once.  Working on a college campus, being in graduate programs over the years, even going to that bastion of theoretical openness of PCA has taught me that often we must chose which self to prioritize in the situation.

Yes, this was a moment of rambling, and yet I am building up to the following: in examining the concept of the paranormal in literature, television, film, and culture, I hope to be all over the proverbial place.  Even something as seemingly general as “paranormal” means diving into a multiplicity of genres and formats that will sometimes compliment and sometimes conflict.  As someone who reads for pleasure, I love romance, science-fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror; well, honestly, I just lover to immerse myself into other worlds–real, imagined, largely impossible, or just around the corner.  As an academic with degrees (or near-degrees–yes sadly even those) in English, political science, education, history, women’s and gender studies, and interdisciplinary arts (which is in and of itself a complicated issue), I also cannot avoid theory and postulation.

My goal is to create and engage in an already existing conversation about reading, watching, listening, participating in the world of paranormal literature and culture.  I will write my thoughts about the things I’m reading and writing and hope that others will engage me in a conversation.  For we most learn through challenge and support (that’s the student affairs professional in me)!