![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbr(separated out as a tangent from Old school fandom: Can we fix it?)
There's a difference between "here are some flaws in X group"/"Here are some awesome things about my group" (both of which are valid) and "Let's think about the differences between X and my group. Well.. X has all these flaws. And my group is awesome. Because we are awesome people, and they are flawed people (apart from the ones who eventually realise how awesome we are and change sides)."
There is a jump from "there is an undertone of misogyny to some slash"/"There is an undertone of homophobia to some non-slashers behaviour" to "slashers are misogynistic"/"non-slashers are homophobic" to "If you really cared you'd write (fem)slash"(*).
One of things which made me feel excluded from fanfic fandom for years was this attitude that "A lot of fanfic works this way"->"This is What Fanfic Is"->"Everything that is not This sucks and is probably written and enjoyed by misogynistic and/or dull men". Yes, a lot of fanfic takes canon characters and puts them into a romance, but that doesn't mean that I'm Missing The Point of fanfic if I take the setting and write gen about some original characters. And the fact that male dominated fandom tends to be sexist and dismissive of fanfic doesn't mean there's a direct correlation between having tastes in line with conventional fandom and being sexist/narrowminded. Acting this way means female fans with "male" tastes get treated badly in both fandoms.
I'm not sure I've ever seen any "Let's compare stuff from fanfic fandom to equivalent stuff made by people outside" meta that didn't spend every second paragraph talking about how much more awesome and creative and feminist and postmodern "our" stuff is.
One of the things about online fandom (especially on lj) is it's much bigger and more finely delineated which makes it easier to avoid really obnoxious people and create your own space but also makes it easy forget that your like-minded friendslist is not all there is to fandom. When I see a comment like Ursula LeGuin fans could demonstrate a little of the progressive social values of Stargate:Atlantis fans I have to wonder if they count all the fans in mainstream male dominated fandom who think Teyla is hot and enjoy the explosions or whatever. And if they don't count, why don't I get to redefine "Ursula LeGuin" fans the same way? (And here I start shading into my next post :))
nb: I realise one of things fanfic meta does is tend to focus exclusively on fanfic (and specifically, boyslash) to the exclusion of other sorts of fannish creativity and I've kind of done that here. I guess I can't break out of the very mindset I'm criticising!
(*)These arguments annoyed me a lot less once I wrote some femslash, since now I'm one irrational-smug-moral-superiority level above the smug m/m slash writers :)
There's a difference between "here are some flaws in X group"/"Here are some awesome things about my group" (both of which are valid) and "Let's think about the differences between X and my group. Well.. X has all these flaws. And my group is awesome. Because we are awesome people, and they are flawed people (apart from the ones who eventually realise how awesome we are and change sides)."
There is a jump from "there is an undertone of misogyny to some slash"/"There is an undertone of homophobia to some non-slashers behaviour" to "slashers are misogynistic"/"non-slashers are homophobic" to "If you really cared you'd write (fem)slash"(*).
One of things which made me feel excluded from fanfic fandom for years was this attitude that "A lot of fanfic works this way"->"This is What Fanfic Is"->"Everything that is not This sucks and is probably written and enjoyed by misogynistic and/or dull men". Yes, a lot of fanfic takes canon characters and puts them into a romance, but that doesn't mean that I'm Missing The Point of fanfic if I take the setting and write gen about some original characters. And the fact that male dominated fandom tends to be sexist and dismissive of fanfic doesn't mean there's a direct correlation between having tastes in line with conventional fandom and being sexist/narrowminded. Acting this way means female fans with "male" tastes get treated badly in both fandoms.
I'm not sure I've ever seen any "Let's compare stuff from fanfic fandom to equivalent stuff made by people outside" meta that didn't spend every second paragraph talking about how much more awesome and creative and feminist and postmodern "our" stuff is.
One of the things about online fandom (especially on lj) is it's much bigger and more finely delineated which makes it easier to avoid really obnoxious people and create your own space but also makes it easy forget that your like-minded friendslist is not all there is to fandom. When I see a comment like Ursula LeGuin fans could demonstrate a little of the progressive social values of Stargate:Atlantis fans I have to wonder if they count all the fans in mainstream male dominated fandom who think Teyla is hot and enjoy the explosions or whatever. And if they don't count, why don't I get to redefine "Ursula LeGuin" fans the same way? (And here I start shading into my next post :))
nb: I realise one of things fanfic meta does is tend to focus exclusively on fanfic (and specifically, boyslash) to the exclusion of other sorts of fannish creativity and I've kind of done that here. I guess I can't break out of the very mindset I'm criticising!
(*)These arguments annoyed me a lot less once I wrote some femslash, since now I'm one irrational-smug-moral-superiority level above the smug m/m slash writers :)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-10 04:24 am (UTC)Anyway, because I have noticed this thing about slash being the true fanfic, or least near the core of fanfic, I had to think about it in relation to myself. Now I don't read much fic, and I don't write any. Of the stuff I've read, slash does not do anything more for me than het or gen (I've not read femslash enough to have an opinion on it). While I've never actually written fanfic, I'm very sympathetic to it (particularly the feminist issues) because I realised at some point that when I was a child, nearly every book I read that I engaged with that didn't have a strong female character, I'd invent one and rework the story in my head to include her. In other words, I think I was creating Mary Sue fanfic that never got written down.
And I think I'm sort of reluctant to actually write fanfic as an adult, because that childhood experience gives me a reasonably good view of what kind of Id Vortex I'm going to be spiralling around, and Mary Sue has an incredibly bad rep in fandom. Whereas slash, which is the (to my mind) other obvious option for getting some strong emotional/romantic/sexual charge into stories that only have strong male characters, is near the core of fandom and takes itself perhaps a bit too seriously.
What if the feminist aspect of fanfic is the female id trying to deal with the fact that too much "approved mainstream" storytelling doesn't have strong female characters to identify with? What if some women respond by identifying with the strong male characters and writing slash, and others of us respond by inventing strong female characters and getting laughed at for writing Mary Sues? What if the approval of slash and disapproval of Mary Sues is a kind of internal sexist self-policing of fandom, as in 'we can't let this notion get too far out of hand and start thinking women actually deserve strong female characters to identify with'? (or, 'unless "approved mainstream" storytelling actually gives us those strong female characters').
This has been brought on also by I think truepenny recently writing about how all her really interesting characters are male because somehow she's learnt that female characters aren't interesting, and I thought both: "that's so sad" and "that actually makes a lot of sense (but only if you weren't the kind of girl who automatically invented strong female characters for all the stories that didn't have them)".
And doesn't this just serve to maintain the hegemony that men are interesting and women can safely be ignored as characters, when even some published women authors find themselves reluctant to write female characters? And to the extent that authors learn by writing fanfic, and women in general consume fanfic, isn't it problematic that we now have a fanfic culture that tends to enforce the writing of male characters by preference? (Let alone how all this affects all those boys who are never exposed to strong female characters because it'd stunt their manly growth or something - note I don't believe this but I get the impression the movie and publishing industries do.)
Actually, I can map this back to race, in the sense that while I on the one hand don't feel I have a specially strong female gender identity (defined as "I'd be very surprised if I woke up physically male tomorrow but I think I'd cope and wouldn't be desperate for surgery to change me back") it's clear that for me, female characters have always been tremendously important, so I figure they are for a lot of other women as well, and I imagine a lot of PoC would like more PoC characters in exactly the same way. (Actually, I don't just imagine, I know based on how PoC have written about watching Uhura on TV in the 1960s and reading about Ged in the 1970s (Wizard of Earthsea).) And if there are PoC writing disproportionately white characters because they've absorbed the idea that white characters are more interesting (or get to survive!), it becomes all the more important for white authors to write PoC characters, if we're going to have any chance of changing any of this anytime remotely soonish.
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 02:12 am (UTC)There are fandoms which are predominantly slash, there are also those who are not, and have gen and het, either along with slash or predominantly. Yes, Virginia, there are. They're not in lj, which is probably why most lj meta doesn't take them into account (though lj meta tends to ignore the parts they should know about, like the fact that HP fandom has the same amount of het than of slash--or near enough of the same amount that we would've to do a study to discover which one predominates.)
Mary Sues are kind of... I don't want to be insulting to the writers, but story telling wise, kinda immature. Which is why you find so many young people writing them. And they are only immature because they piss people off, for different in and out story reasons. But they're not, I think, most of any fandom I know. (Perhaps there's a fandom out there with a majority of Mary Sue fic, what do I know? But I haven't met any.)
So the dichotomy is false, I think.
Slash is not what fanfic is about, necessarily.
I think that fanfic is about retaking the narrative, not for any particularly revolutionary reasons, but because narrating is fun and educative, and entertaining, and a awesome way to create and strengthen communities.
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 03:34 am (UTC)Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 04:17 am (UTC)I do get nervous because the analysis will be way off base if people don't take into account the whole of fandom, or they will have to reduce their conclusions to apply to a tiny tiny minority of the real thing.
I just... it really depends on the fandom. There are ones where the one to introduce the concept of Mary Sueism was me (or any of the two or three openly multi-fandom people), so it def wasn't applied to any fic--in a fandom with predominantly feminine povs. Just as an example. (And there isn't any accusation similar, either, just so you know I'm not being intellectually dishonest about it.)
I don't claim to know about all fandoms. There are ones, even, though I very well know they exist and I know nothing about them. So I'm hesitant to generalize, specially when already in the few I know, the rules aren't really working.
But I don't want to terribly misunderstand anyone. I promise that if you explain again, I will make more of an effort, (after I come back tomorrow from my final).
I am interested in having this discussion, too, as you have more theoretical tools than I have, I think, and thus I want to get it.
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 04:28 am (UTC)Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 03:54 am (UTC)So: what I took aquaeri to be saying is that she would be perceived as writing a Mary Sue if she wrote the sort of fic she'd be drawn to, and that female centered fic is often accused of being a Mary Sue.
Of course it's possible you wouldn't agree with this either, and I don't feel I have a broad enough feel for the way the various fanfic fandoms behave to argue in favour of it very strongly (and I don't know what fandom(s) she would hypothetically be writing in)
Sidenote: based on your and other people's comments in this latest round of meta I've started to realise that I do tend to think of sff based fanfic fandom as the "main" fanfic fandom, which is clearly untrue and unfair. I need to poke at my assumptions some more, I think. EDIT: And thus me passing uncritically past "slash is at the core of fandom". I think that statement is true if you take "fandom" to mean "the particular part of fanfic fandom which writes the sort of meta the post is complaining about", but one of the main issues is that that does NOT go without saying.
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 04:25 am (UTC)I do have a lot of troubles with considering any fandom 'main' fandom (even for me personally!) so I confess I'm taking an issue, perhaps, where context should have made it clear to me it was a more particular definition.
I had a discussion about this before in another lj--where there was people who argued that. I don't think so, but of course there are no statistics. I think there are less male OC Mary Sues, simply because there are less male writers, and thus, yes, female OC Mary Sues are reported more, but that doesn't mean anything about female centred texts, as canon female characters povs don't get called Mary Sues, except in extreme cases, as male ones do (I'm talking about the fandoms I'm most in, which would be HP, and Austen).
It could be true for other fandoms, though.
Now I leave it here and I apologize if it's completely gibberish, because it's 1:30 am and I have to go sleep. Damn final.
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 05:33 am (UTC)Some of that may be because the feminists in fandom are going to be attracted to meta-ing male-dominated books and shows that have fandoms (?) and meta-ing fanfic is just a corner of that.
Oh and if there's a whole feminist meta about Jane Austen fanfic, I'd be really interested in seeing what it's about. Or another female character dominated canon that has a lot of fanfic.
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-15 11:48 pm (UTC)Uhm, I actually don't know. I know that in sci-fi, and HP the percentage is actually more even than in Jane Austen fandom, for example, but
I don't know if it's the elephant in the room, in the sense that I everyone is quite aware of that fact, in all fandoms I'm in. It's not clear why that is, of course, that's the thing everyone discusses. Why fanfic? Why slash? Why het? Why UST? Why, why, why? There are no easy answers, and my feeling is that I've far too little information to say anything about it.
JA fandom has a lot of feminist meta about the books themselves, but not all online. (Some of it quite... wacky.) JA fandom in particular has a very strong (and old!) canon discussion only branches.
If you are interested, I will ask a friend that always has the links on hand and pass them along. :D
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-13 05:44 am (UTC)One of the things meta writers from the part of sff fanfic fandom that THINKS it's the main fandom do is make all these unstated assumptions and then when called on it go "Oh, yeah, I was just talking about slash/scifi/tv/america etc, I thought that was clear from context". And this irritates the heck out of me, so you're totally justified in calling me out on it for doing so myself, it's even on topic for this post :)
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 05:24 am (UTC)Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 02:13 am (UTC)Everything up to the first paragraph: But at the same time, I write female characters, and femslash, because it's what I feel like writing, and if part of the power of fanfic is writing what you feel like then I can understand those who feel like writing male characters doing so. And I can't get too smug: though I try to fight against it, all my fantasy/period stuff tends to focus on the upper classes because those are the stories that appeal to me.
Also: come write femslash! Or gen! I find they're much less prone to and criticised for Mary Sues than het and slash. *waves little gen and femslash flags*
Final paragraph: A bit of a sidenote, but I felt the same way about my gender identity until I went to a trans-issues workshop which amongst other things got us to imagine all the physical changes that would take place in transitioning and I had this amazing sense of body horror at, of all things, the idea of my shoulders getting broad and muscular. YMMV but I found it really interesting.
Anyway: yes. Though I think it's also important to promote POC depictions of POC characters since we white authors are never going to get it quite right, especially if we base our depictions on those done by other white people.
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-12 06:03 am (UTC)I agree completely that people write fanfic about whatever moves them to write fanfic, and I'm not (honest!) criticising anyone's choices so much as trying to look at the patterns formed by all those individual choices. And elephant in room: mostly women write fanfic. Whatever fanfic is "about" must at least partly be about some male-female difference, and I personally refuse to believe it's "biological" so it must be cultural.
And so I looked at myself, and thought about how while I've never been moved to write fanfic, I was moved to do something as a child that looks kinda like the raw material fanfic comes from if the urge doesn't go away. And I'm a woman (check) and I had that urge because so much canon is male character dominated (cultural - check).
So it seemed a pretty obvious leap to me that a significant driver of fanfic, the urge to write more and different stories about canon, is because the canon has some stuff that appeals strongly, but also some flaws from the "consumer's" point of view and fanfic is partly trying to "fix" those flaws, and there are a lot of women in fanfic because the canon our culture gives us is more a mixture of really good stuff and flaws, to us, than to men.
I'm very flattered by your invitation to write fanfic, but I'm going to turn you down. To the extent that I get captivated by canon which is both fabulous and flawed and I want to fix flaws (which is the kind of strong motivation I think people need, at least to get started) my response is more in the science/explanation direction. I.e. I don't feel as strong an urge to create more fiction, and I happen (because I've been a scientist too long and I am now brainwashed) to think science/explanation/meta is just as much a creative response, even if it doesn't look like what people think of as a creative response. (Note that I also regard lecturing at university as a branch of the performing arts so I am aware that my definition of art and creativity is not "normal". And you've subscribed to intertwined already.)
And I can do more worthwhile stuff (for my definition of worthwhile) in the science/explanation corner because I already have heaps of background knowledge and skills. And one of the values for me of fanfic and the social structure around it is developing writerly skills, and while it's clear from the last week or so that my writerly skills could use some improvement, the thing I really want to improve is my ability to communicate complex ideas and explain stuff, not my ability to do good characterisation or describe fictional scenes.
If I ever were to write fiction, I think the kind of fiction that is closest to what I want to express is something like Borges - again not exactly profound characterisation, but it's (to me) exploding with ideas and metaphors and stuff. And I don't think it'd be fanfic in the normal sense because I don't feel much need to re-use the existing characters in written description. (Now vidding attracts me somewhat more and if we ever get a computer with the right kinds of speeds and get the right kind of time I can set aside, - but I'm not sure that's the best use of my time in terms of, again, what I want to do that's "worthwhile" in fandom.
(and it'll be very long if I have to explain that further).
Re: no race, but I think I'm allowed here
Date: 2009-06-13 05:53 am (UTC)The invitation was somewhat facetious, I assumed that if you wanted to write fic you would already be doing so :)
I've written fic with entirely original characters or with more theory and ideas than characterisation, as with any creative endeavor there's no obligation to stick with convention. I tried vids but they are HARD.
But anyway: I agree that meta etc can be just as creative, and obviously you should do whatever you feel like. One of the other attitudes I find really annoying in fanfic fandom is the idea that Real Fans write (or at least read) fic, it's as stupid as the idea that Real Fans go to cons etc.
(*)I've heard several people say this but have never stumbled on any myself. Apparently Dr Who fic in the 80s was one example.
trans issues
Date: 2009-06-12 06:27 am (UTC)And also it occurs to me that I find the photos of Thomas Beattie while pregnant to be beautiful and natural, and it actually requires me to pay attention to notice just how much revulsion and look-at-the-freak-show there is in most of what's been written about him, because I just see him there and it all makes sense to me.
And the men I've cared about most have all been bisexual or capable of setting off my gaydar (my husband when he's really dressed up to express his personality sets off my gaydar strongly - I keep thinking I should write to Rudd and explain to him that whatever he's trying to prevent by not allowing same-sex marriage, it isn't working already) and I had a gay friend for a while who thought it was a real shame I'm female because he could really have gone for me otherwise and I'm flattered and honoured and I get what he meant exactly.
And the first time I went to a place the toilets were maked "men" and "ladies" I felt genuine confusion, genuine "they didn't think of me", and now I feel like I just have to shrug and go into the "ladies" but dammit That's Not Me.
I had a jokey self-description for a while which is possibly offensive to trans people, that I'm a gay man in a woman's body who has chosen not to transition because I think I can do more damage to social stereotypes as a woman than as a gay man.
And anyway, I'm very confused about the transgender thing. I don't think I'm the thing described by "real" transgender people, but I'm not convinced I'm what they describe as cisgender either. Not that I don't deny I get cisgender privilege, but that's been hard for me to accept because like I said, I think the humanity of transgender is so obvious I can miss the social lack of acceptance.
Re: trans issues
Date: 2009-06-13 06:11 am (UTC)I also want to make it clear (to you but also to any trans men who might come across this) that I don't find the idea of trans men, women with broad shoulders, "female" bodies gaining broader shoulders etc at all horrifying or wrong in general. As long as it's not my body. (It is I suppose an example of the same general principle as "I think Sophia is a perfectly nice name, but it's not my name")
I have certain masculine/ungendered aspects to my identity myself which is why I found the sudden awareness of my own cis-femaleness so jarring. I think it can be difficult when you're in the grey area, where you're still in the privileged group but have some things in common with the less privileged one, and want to explore those differences and similarities without being appropriative. I'd say I'm more unambiguously cisgendered than you, but while I'm straight there are fuzzy edges to my sexuality I have trouble figuring out and I'm never sure how to do that without stepping on the toes of actual biexuals etc.
This isn't something I know much about and may not be helpful, but: reading your description I am reminded of what little I know about the idea of being genderqueer, which may give you another way to think about it without feeling like you're stepping on the toes of trans people.