Fandom has been rather badly served by academic studies, particularly those looking at the female presence. What there is tends to concentrate fairly heavily on slash, or you get Camile Bacon-Smith's ghastly 'GCSE in stating the obvious' book, based on a very shoddy ethnographical study at a con.

I think there is a conflict between academics studying the field and aca-fans. Rather too many of the latter want to tell their war stories. Which may be OK as far as it goes, but the accounts often lack critical rigor and an ability to stand back and reflect critically.

I was not at all impressed by a paper at a conference some years ago when one of the supposed names in the field (who, at the time, was lecturing at a uni) produced a paper which was presumably written on the back of a fag packet the night before and then played for cheap laughs. Her book was scarcely better and lacked any academic rigor - it's what a colleague calls 'commonsense theorising'.