The Glacial Pace of Academic Scholarship

So I am finishing up my bib entries and "further readings" for the last few authors, and cannot find any academic publication (scholarship in a peer-reviewed journal) on either Diane Duane or Elizabeth Lynn except for my first published essay (1994, wow, feeling old a moment). This essay grew from work I was doing in my doctoral program, thrashing around trying to pull together my first gender theory and my beloved sf/f while being grumpy that academic feminist scholarship (the sort I was reading in my classes, and that got referenced a lot) seemed to mostly exclude sf/f (except for Donna Haraway). I hadn't yet found most of the feminist academics doing sf/f, most notably Veronica Hollinger and Wendy Pearson, although I'd read Marleen Barr's first book (she was my first inspiration and model for putting feminist theory and sf together--I'm writing her entry for the encyclopedia, via editorial fiat--I remember reading the introduction to the book where she talks about the two horses of feminist theory and sf, and going, wow, I can do this stuff too!).

Lynn was doing amazing stuff with gay, lesbian, bisexual characters during the seventies; she has one novel with a practicing sadist that is SF (most of her work is fantasy), so she was like one of the first. (And for some of my friends from fandom: consensual brother incest is canon in The Dancers of Arun).

Duane has published in an amazing number of different storyverses (some of her own, some tie-in novels, which she always makes fantastic), but she won my heart with her "Tale of Five" series (not yet complete, sad sigh) with an alternate fantasy world (tinges of Tolkien!) where bisexuality is the *norm*! And her Young Wizard series is also pretty darned amazing (if you want to show any younglings you know that girls can be the protagonists of wizarding fantasy novels, hand 'em Duane's series. Cats too--cat wizards!).

(Fannish enthusiasm or academic passion? What is the difference? I've never been able to figure it out.)

I know one basic reason: not enough academics doing work on the fantastic (and a lot of the stuff on the fantastic is scholarship on sf/f in new media which is cool, I do some of it myself, but still--Duane! Lynn! other authors!). Luckily both of these are authors I plan to deal with in my Slashing the Fathers project, so yet another reason to re-read their books (which I mostly have in somewhat battered paperback in original copies!)

( bib info on my article and some links to sites about Lynn and Duane are behind the cut )