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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 :)
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.