I too am neither fish nor fowl - I am academic in some very obvious ways, but I haven't spent my life at universities, nor am I a lit-crit person. I have one foot in science, which many lit-crit people detest. (Massively.) I do a bit in philosophy, which is unfamiliar to a lot of lit-crit people as well. So more detestation, and failure to share common language and approaches.
But at the same time, I've had one foot in cultural studies since ...oh, decades; since before it became "cultural studies" and got trendy. I've seen theories come and go, and come around again, with AllNewJargon! and cult-figure authors who make OTP ship-wars look tame. This makes me a tad skeptical, which along with being 20 yrs older than some of the more zealous (because new) aca-fans, can lead to some difficult exchanges. Finally, while I am strong in much of the feminist theory and such-like that are (rightly) influential in current text-based criticism -- I can drop names and fan Foucault with the best of them -- I like my theory grounded in the world, not detached completely to go spinning merrily along in its own little cocktail-party circuit of self-propelling intellectual incest and academic status wars (they're like ship wars, only more vicious and they last for years).
But I'm not a non-acafan either. Probably never have been, not even when I was a teen falling into my first fandoms way back when. Like Grimmhill says so beautifully, "analytical thinking is the way my mind works most of the time. And I don't think it's only because I survived graduate school; in contrast I would argue that I made it to graduate school because my cognitive patterns already favored that approach." (Although for myself, I would say "critical" or "reflective" thinking, 'cos analytic can get too hung up on notions of "objectivity" and universal "validity" to do what I need for work.)
But see, I'm not a standard aca-fan either; I don't work in the lit and humanities and media departments that are home turf for those who know Henry Jenkins. I find the jargon depressingly pretentious and annoyingly unanchored in what I'd call reality -- the world, the environment we live on, and the millions of humans for whom clever discussions of literary style are *not* the yellow brick road to employment and local fame.
I was so grateful for your PDF of the first TWC issue, Elf -- but I read only small bits of it before setting it aside. I saw a lot of writing too wrapped up in itself to bother communicating - "too sexy for my fandom." Yeah right; the hell with that. Their fandom is apparently a circle of ... oh, I'd guess about 50? And that includes the student wanna-bes.
(Seriously. I go to fandom panels at academic conferences; it's all preaching to the choir. Yes, I've seen the claim that this is because aca-fans have been looked down on in academe, so they're all clannish now and giving the cold-shoulder back. The disparagement is true, but fan studies are hardly the only discipline that gets mocked. Get over it.)
When I get in a fandom that's non-stop boi-squee, or "teen talk" or - to be very frank - "mommy talk", I'm equally turned off. That jargon may be just as obscure in its insider-ness, just as likely to make outsiders wonder if the group-think goal is simply to put them down, and just as likely to be aimed at exactly that. HP is in general a welcoming fandom (though others are too, and more), but there are areas of HP on LJ that are simply Not Nice to new folks. You fall in or else.
So where does this leave me in the acafan-nonacafan discussion?