robin_anne_reid | The first presentations I did on racism imbroglios in fandom

This pre-dated Racefail 09 -- I did two versions of this project -- the first laid out theory, background, and critical race methodology, and background on the history of racism imbroglios in offline/online fandom; the second built on that to do visual rhetorical analysis of anti-racist icons. The two will, if I can get time, be made into one essay. So while it predated my idea for Racefail Corpus, it's still part of the overall process/development of the project.

"'Harshin Ur Squeez': Racisms in LiveJournal Fandoms"

This project focuses on the rhetorics (written and visual) of race in debates that occurred in several online LiveJournal Fandoms during 2007. The conflicts involved two specific media fandom communities (StarGate: Atlantis and Dr. Who); one Harry Potter community (Daily_Deviants), and an annual gift exchange focusing on rare fandoms, Yuletide. The focus of the conflicts included racial and class stereotypes in fan fiction, racial stereotypes in the canon texts of the fandom, racist terminology (specifically the term "miscegenation") that embodied histories and etymology not widely known, and, finally, ignorance of a minority culture's religious practices. Additional conflicts occurred because of the international demographic of online fandom, with debates over the history and contemporary racial attitudes in the United States compared to the United Kingdom (Dr. Who is a British produced show), and disagreements on anti-racist strategies and practices.

In all cases, while a single event (a fic, a post, an announcement) initiated major debate, news of which rapidly moved outside the individual fandom communities because of posting in cross-fandom communities dedicated to posting news and linking to posts across fandoms, there was widespread agreement that the events were simply the latest in an on-going pattern of white privilege, including a range of racist behaviors that institutionalized marginalization and discrimination against fans (or fen, in fandom terminology) of color. Fans of color, and communities on LiveJournal (as well other weblogs) dedicated to anti-racist work, activism, education, and support, have been working for a number of years confronting racist attitudes.

I use "racism" to signify the institutionalized and ideological pattern of behaviors that have been established for generations in the United States and that affect all people born within the culture. While online fandoms are international in nature, the predominance of U.S. fans as well as my own situatedness in the U.S. culture leads me to focus primarily on the constructions of race in mainstream American culture.

My project works within the arguments of Wendy Chun's monograph, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Internet Optics. Many white fans still subscribe to the original false promise of a race free utopia on the internet and have discovered that, as Chun argues, what occurs is not truly freedom from discrimination, but the chance, if one wishes to pass as an unmarked white male. The claim that marked bodies are not be 'seen' (are invisible) in a text-only environment is based on the same essentialist belief that difference is carried only by and on the body, as opposed to a sociolinguist belief that culture is created and "embodied" in part through language.

THIS DOCUMENT IS A PROPOSAL/ABSTRACT DRAFT ONLY. BECAUSE OF MOST ACADEMIC JOURNAL'S POLICIES REGARDING 'PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED' MATERIAL, FULL DRAFTS OF ESSAYS WILL NOT BE POSTED HERE. EVENTUALLY, A RACEFAIL CORPUS WIKI OR EQUIVALENT WILL BE CREATED FOR SHARING DATA. EVENTUALLY, IN ACADEMIC TIME MEASUREMENT, MEANS PROBABLY THREE TO FIVE YEARS FROM NOW.

Selected Bibliography

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 2006.

Hall, Kim/ "White Feminists Doing critical Race Theory: Some Ethical and Political Considerations." APA Newsletters 98.2 (Spring 1999). Online. [http://www.apaonline.org/apa/archive/newsletters/v98n2/lawblack/hall.asp] Accessed February 2, 2008.

Hua, Anh. "Critical Race Feminism." Canadian Critical Race Conference 2003: Pedagogy and Practice. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. May 2-3, 2003. Online. [http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:7bYmKTvq8x8J:edocs.lib.sfu.ca/ccrc/html/CCRC_PDF/CriticalRaceFeminism(AnhHua).pdf+feminist+critical+race+work&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us] Accessed February 2, 2008.

Karlsson, Lena. "Desperately Seeking Sameness: The processes and pleasures of identification in women's diary blog reading." Feminist Media Studies Vol.7 No 2, 2007. 137-153.

Kennedy, Helen. "Beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research." New Media & Society 8.6 (Dec. 2006): 859-876.

Mojica, Martha Patricia Niño. "Imaginary cartographies: race and new world borders." Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 5.2 (2007): 119-129.

Parker, David, and Miri Song. "New ethnicities online: reflexive racialisation and the internet." Sociological Review 54.3 (Aug. 2006): 575-594.

Links Page with all Racefail Scholarship Entries.