robin_anne_reid | Dec. 3rd, 2010

Dec. 3rd, 2010

Racefail 09 as Corpus Stylistics Project will become (it's in earliest stages--see the pilot project post) a collaborative project in a lab setting in my home department. Plans also involve a wiki or other online space where data is published for other's use. Let me emphasize: all this is in early stages, and I'm currently working on developing a three-five year plan for grants, etc.

Corpus Stylistics is akin to Corpus Linguistics, but where CL works primarily with spoken collections, CS works with print texts.

Corpus Linguistics:
Wikipedia article

Links to some Linguistic and Corpora

Books about Linguistic Corpora

Stylistics (simply put) is application of linguistic methodology to literary texts, or other print texts.

Wikipedia definition of Stylistics

Corpus stylistics is fairly new:

Corpus Stylistics Organization
Stylistics: Corpus Approaches

Corpus Stylistics Google Books

Corpus Stylistics can also be understood as one of many forms of Digital Humanities

NEH Office of Digital Humanities

Links Page with all Racefail Scholarship Entries.

While fan studies has existed for at least two decades (and can be seen as a development or new direction in Reception Theory, few publications on constructions of race and ethnicity in fandom(s) exist at the current time. [There is a growing body of work in internet studies that deals with critical analysis of race; I'm preparing a bibliography on the topics for a grant. In fact, there's a growing body of work on internet communities and social networks and activities that has nothing to do with fan studies; I’m wondering how many of us in fan studies are aware of all the work being done in academic computer science and related fields.]

The work I have done so far (a handful of presentations delivered at a number of conferences) is solely in the Pilot project or proof of concept stage. It is exploratory. It is not meant to be final or authoritative (we may get somewhere in the next five years, if things work out).

I am working with faculty in psychology and sociology and linguistics on various parts of this project which might be described, broadly, as addressing a major gap in fan studies scholarship: the lack of analysis of interactions between minority group and majority group members in fandoms.

The text I have begun to analyze is a part of a large data-set gathered from online discussions (this methodology is opposed to the artificial method of surveys and interviews often used in social sciences).

Part of the text includes posts that were part of a three-month debate that took place from January through March in 2009 about cultural appropriation and racism in science fiction and fantasy fandoms and publishing, collectively known as Racefail 09. However, since I do not see that three-month discussion as a discrete event that began and ended in that year, the project could potentially draw on earlier and later internet discussions referenced during Racefail 09 and developing from Racefail 09.

I do not claim to be unbiased (I am influenced by recent work that argues no human being lacks bias, and that has critiqued the false objectivity of the academy). However, the methodology I am using draws primarily from sociology and linguistics (specifically, sociolinguistics, stylistics, and corpus work) and is designed to analyze patterns in what was actually written online rather than the intentions or motivations of the participants.

My analysis will not focus on individuals so much as pattern analysis of aggregated data, eventually from at least 100 posts and discussion threads.

What my work so far has done is to develop background on race discussions in fandoms, my theoretical and methodological framework, and cover the results of my first descriptive analysis of patterns in two posts. These pilot results will be retested and retooled in the larger data collection and analysis later on, especially in the lab project which will involve a number of people working with the data.

Links Page with all Racefail Scholarship Entries.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/34221.html

'What Do You Mean "Pleasure," White Man?': Complicating Empathic Identification and Self-Insertion in Online Fan Fiction." Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards an Erotics of Reception. University of Bristol, UK. 10 July 2010.

"The Rhetorics of Color-Blind Racism in Racefail 09" presented at the 31^st International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), Orlando, Florida, 17-21 March, 2010.

"'Harshin Ur Squeez': Visual Rhetorics of Anti-Racism in LiveJournal Online Fandoms," presented at the 29^th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), Orlando, Florida, 19-23 March 2008."'

Harshin Ur Squeez': Racisms in LiveJournal Online Fandoms," plenary presentation, Third Slash Fiction Study Day, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, 25 February, 2008.

web.tamu-commerce.edu/academics/cvSyllabi/cv/ReidRobin.pdf

Links Page with all Racefail Scholarship Entries.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/34357.html

The Rhetorics of Color-Blind Racism in Racefail 09

During the first six months of 2009, a number of intense, wide-reaching discussions about issues of cultural appropriation and racism in science fiction/fantasy took place on LiveJournal and on a number of science fiction blogs. This discussion differed from previous ones that occurred in media fandom because a number of professional writers and editors participated rather than the discussion remaining primarily within the fandom communities. Over 1000 posts concerned with the topic were compiled by Rydra Wong at:

http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/148996.html

My presentation will be a pilot for a larger project. I will be drawing on a methodology described by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2006). He blends sociological and linguistic methodologies to identify rhetorical structures that he argues reveal an ideology he calls color-blind racism, as opposed to Jim Crow racism. Color-blind racism has developed since the late 1960s in order to explain "contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics. Whereas Jim Crow racism explained blacks' social standing as the result of their biological and moral inferiority, color-blind racism avoids such facile arguments. Instead, whites rationalize minorities' contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomenon, and blacks' imputed cultural limitations" (2). This ideology accompanies "'New Racism' practices that are subtle, institutional, and apparently nonracial" (3).

Bonilla-Silva's work is not specific to fandom, but I believe his methods can be applied to rhetorical patterns found in postings by fans, writers, and editors.

I will capture and download text from selected LiveJournals and blogs, including discussion threads. Using a linguistics program, UAM Corpus Tool, I will work through large amounts of text and "mark" examples of the diction choices and rhetorical structures that Bonilla-Silva identifies (such as racial epithets, phrases such as "I'm not prejudiced, but" and "Some of my best friends are."). The results will be expressed in quantitative results, identifying key patterns in the data.

Handout for Conference Presentation robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/33624.html

Working Bibliography

Bear, Elizabeth. http://matociquala.livejournal.com/1544111.html

Bidisha. Guardian online. Blog Entry. January 25.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/25/science-fiction- diversity-gender

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Fanhistory. http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Race_wank#The_Cultural_Appropriation_ Discussion_of_Doom

Fanlore. http://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail_%2709

Feminist SF Wiki. http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=RaceFail_09

Henry, Liz. http://rydra- wong.dreamwidth.org/148996.html?view=2476804#cmt2476804

Metafilter's "A tempest" in LiveJournal January 19, 2009

http://www.metafilter.com/78433/Science-Fiction-LiveJournal-and-Magical- Negros (dated January 19, 2009);

Lake, Jay. http://jaylake.livejournal.com/1692287.html

Merrick, Helen. The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2009.

Rydra Wong's Comprehensive List:

http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/148996.html

Shapiro, Laura. White Privilege Icon.

Yeloson. “Educate me!” http://yeloson.livejournal.com/718724.html

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.

Links Page with all Racefail Scholarship Entries.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/34779.html

HANDOUT: Bonilla-Silva Rhetorical Patterns Adapted for UAM Corpus Tool

UAM Corpus Tool: http://www.wagsoft.com/CorpusTool/

robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/33475.html (Proposal Abstract for conference presentation)

Anything But Race

It's just human beings

It's class not race

None of them where we lived

Intentionality

Race doesn't matter to me

I am not a racist, but…

Projection

They're prejudiced

They keep to themselves

They are rude/dislike white people

Racial Epithets Jim Crow Racial Epithets Nigger

Spic

Chink

Other

Post Civil Rights Racial Epithets African American

Hispanic or Latino

Asian

American Indian

Other

Some of my Best Friends

Some of my best friends

My girlfriend/boyfriend

My spouse is

Taking All Sides

Good arguments on both sides, but

There was fail on both sides

Abstract Liberalism

Equal Opportunity Ignoring the past

I/my family had nothing to do with it

Force Not Used You cannot legislate morality

Work for change through education

Economic Liberalism It's their choice

Individualism (not groups)

Qualification/Standards Standards are neutral

Merit is all that counts

Naturalization

People gravitate toward likeness

It's just the way things are

They all do it (all human societies)

Self-segregation

Cultural Racism

It's Their Culture Culture of poverty

Family Structure (lack of)

Education (lack of)

Different values Laziness

Raised that way

Minimization of Racism

It's better now than in the past

They're just hypersensitive

They're playing the race card

They lack credentials

Use of diminutives (' a little bit')

HANDOUT: RACEFAIL 09 ADDITIONS

1. Racial Epithets: Orcs, Orcing, Trolling Hordes, Nithings

Rationale: "Canadian" used to mean "nigger" by Southern white racists

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/297666

http://www.slaw.ca/2008/01/18/the-friday-fillip-86/

2. Faux Demand for Education:

This rhetorical demand was noted by a number of participants, but the best analysis of it can be found in <lj user="yeloson">'s journal:

The two usual giveaways about it are:
a)An unwillingness to do research and effort on one's own - that is, if you point the person to books, websites, movies, historical events to research, they refuse to bother doing any effort on their own.
b)Any answers are met with more challenge-type questions, which almost always involve shifting the terms of debate, each time. It's not about more understanding, it's really just disguised versions of "I don't believe you, PROVE IT TO ME, AGAIN.", which repeats until you stop, at which point they can rest easy, because clearly you're wrong, the idea is bunk, because you couldn't summarize it in a half hour conversation or 3 email/comment exchanges. (para 2-3-4 http://yeloson.livejournal.com/718724.html)

Educate me Asks for information then does not follow-up

Answers met with challenge/demand for more proof

3. Aliens SF writer/creators deal with alien cultures all the time

I don't care if you're green, purple, or black…..

4. "If I don't know about it, it clearly does not exist!"

HANDOUT 4:: Basic File Statistics (UAM)

	BEAR	LAKE
Length
Words in text	28809	7331
Sentences in text	1991	463
Text Complexity
Av. Word Length	4.6	4.69
Av. Sentence Length	14.4	15.8
Lexical Density
Lexemes per sentence	7.58	8.36
Lexemes % of text	52.43	52.83
Reference Density (% of tokens
1 person Reference	4.0508	3.533
2 person Reference	1.2877	1.528
3 person Reference	3.1066	2.469

HANDOUT : Threads/Topics

Lake's Post

1. America multicultural; race is label (6)

2. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" (2)

3. Objectivity (no cultural appropriation) (18)

4. Gender (male authors/female characters; female authors/male characters) (2)

5. Own work (7)

6. Human rights vs. censorship, artistic truth (6)

Topics in Bear's Post

1. Guy Gavriel Kay (7)

2. Pattern Recognition (theory) (4)

3. Albinos in literature (18)

4. Historical Inequalities (fiction; SU, FBI) (14) BBC (4)

5. Ellen Klages (7)

6. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" (20)

7. Good characters not stereotype AXE (5) Af-Am Immigration Britain

8. Write autobiographical story and told it was bad (8)

9. Research "getting out more" (3)

10. WASP as Exotic; Europeans as OTHER/AU (8)

11. Furries, GLBT (12)

12. WASP/WHITE (62 total) lesbian separatism, Wicca

a. Major foci of disagreements in this thread Defends individual ally

b. In-jokes about 80s lesbians

13. Research 2 (asking people) (9)

14. Privilege (13) religion

15. UK not PC (8)

HANDOUT: Lake and Bear Stats

OP	# Com	# Agree	# Disagree	Both/And

Jay Lake	69	16	5	3
E Bear	305	34	1	4

Links Page with all Racefail Scholarship Entries.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/35021.html

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.

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.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/35089.html

NOTE: the reasons length of proposals differ widely is different conference guidelines! Some set short limits (250 words), some are less restrictive (1-2 pages), etc.

Racefail 09 Part N^th: Citizenship Fail

This presentation is part of a larger project that begins to address a major gap in fan studies scholarship: the lack of analysis of interactions between minority group and majority group members in fandoms. The focus of the larger work is the debate known as Racefail 09. The methodology is a corpus stylistics approach which uses a program to annotate text files in order to generate quantitative results. The methodology analyzes patterns in writing rather than intent, resulting in a pattern analysis of aggregated data. I am currently in the pilot stage, and this presentation will present background on race discussions in fandoms, the theoretical and methodological framework, and the results of a descriptive analysis of a recent post by Elizabeth Moon and the response to her post.

Moon's post, titled "Citizenship," began by musing on what makes a good citizen in the U.S. and then turned to accusations about "Muslims" and/or "immigrants" who did not assimilate properly. Over 500 responses were posted before Moon deleted them all. Screen captures of the responses were saved and re-posted. My analysis of the responses to Moon's post will focus on an issue raised by K. Tempest Bradford: the claims that anti-racists in fandom "attack" white authors/editors/fans who do not intend to be racist. My analysis will focus on quantifying categorizing agreement/disagreement and patterns of "name calling" and any other type of verbal abuse in contrast to developed counter-arguments. I expect to find that, despite white male authors/critics' claims to the contrary, that the vast majority of posts made by identified anti-racists are neither abusive nor limited to name-calling.

Relevant Links

http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/335480.html

http://tempest.fluidartist.com/you-know-what-i-wish/#comments

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/reason-anger/

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/open-letter-to-elizabeth-moon/

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/09/open-letter-to-elizabeth-moon/#comment-15769

Public/Private/Local/Global:

Rhetorics of Social Justice Debates in Anonymous Fan Memes Online

This presentation considers the extent to which the pre-internet social definitions of private and public, global and local, have changed on the internet. Some perceive the internet as a utopian space that can enable unprecedented forms of participatory democracy (Henry Jenkins). Jenkins has argued, in Convergence Culture, for the usefulness of studies of online science fiction/fantasy fandoms because so many in those groups were early adopters of new technologies and because of what their interactions and communities can show about the larger issues of people accessing new technologies to participate in media production and, potentially, political actions.

Fans who participate in social justice discussions state their intent of trying to change the dynamics of "fandom" (offline and online), framing sff fandom as a type of local community despite the international demographics. My rhetorical analysis of some critiques of social justice debates will focus on a single community. This community originated with fans who perceived their ability to speak freely about social justice issues as being limited by the ways some Big Name Fans (BNF) can send groups of people to harass anyone who disagrees with them. They see the need for the freedom of anonymity because of power hierarchies in fandom. The critiques and controversies include: whether posting about social justice issues online is useful (compared to offline volunteer or activist activities in a local community); how the dominance of American fans has led to marginalization of fans from other countries and, in social justice discussions, how American assumptions continue marginalization; whether an individual's own journal or blog is private or public (this question is made more complex by the fact that the LiveJournal and Dreamwidth platforms allow a user to control access to posts made in their journals, and thus to discussion) compared to community discussions (which may also be locked down). The study of this community certainly speaks to the issue of how some forms of rhetoric can affect aspects of social justice.

Background: Many science fiction/fantasy fans who are active in online media fandom in a variety of social networks/platforms publish their work under fannish pseudonyms rather than the legal names. While outsider dismiss this choice as cowardly, many fans have good reasons to separate their public fannish activities from their public or professional activities conducted under their legal names. Since some areas of online fandom are predominantly female (including those producing stories and videos, some of which are controversial in content), and since research shows women are more likely to be harassed on (and off)-line, the choice of fannish pseudonyms in internet fandom is understood by many as a commonplace safety choice. The fannish pseudonym ("fan pseud") is not seen as the same thing as being anonymous because a fan can have years of history and production and interaction under her pseudonym. Many "reserve" their pseudonyms on new social networks even if they do not intend to make use of them, simply to make sure they control the name. In contrast to fans who participate in fandom under a pseudonym, there are those who participate anonymously (of course, some do both).

One type of event that has caused controversy over the years is the "anonomeme." There are two basic categories: a named fan can start an "anonymous" thread in her journal, with the program set to allow anonymous posting and with IP tracking turned off. These are often either "hate" or "love" threads that invite fans to express their emotions about other fans anonymously. Another category is the anonymous community: fans operating under pseudonyms that are not their primary ones will start a community which is established solely to allow people to post anonymously. These are controversial because some of the posts are simple attacks on other, named (pseudonymous) fans; however, there are also spaces in the communities where many fans have the opportunity to post anonymously what they do not dare to post under their fan pseuds, exploring ideas and positions that are perceived to be dangerous to express in fandom or that have led to so much controversy in the past that discussion is seen as impossible outside an anonymous space.

This presentation proposes to examine the major rhetorical patterns in a recent anonymous community (started July 5, 2010) called "Fail_Fandomanon." This community originated in the frustration many fans experienced with a controversy in fandom concerning disabilities issues and access issues in a small vidding con (VividCon). The controversy connects to a larger project I am working on relating to race/racism in online media fandom, a controversy that is often discussed in Fail_Fandomanon.

Part of the rhetorical framing of the community is that a small (or large) group of fans who are actively posting about social justice issues (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, but rarely class) have created an environment in which many fans are afraid to speak about any issues because of the chance of "dogpiling" (a term which describes a lot of people a fan does not know showing up to fight/argue/call names in private/personal journals). The participants distinguish their own interests in social justice from the exaggerated and hyperbolic behaviors of a specific group (described as American, white, middle-class women, college educated, and on occasion "acafans" -- fans who are also academics who publish about fandom). This group is referred to as the "SJ" group or "SJ LJ or DW" group (referring to Livejournal and Dreamwidth, two social networking sites). This group, perceived as having negative influences on online media fandom through recurring and public and large "fails" (a three-month debate about racism in 2009 is called "Racefail 09) is the focus of the anonymous communities desire to "blow off steam" (community profile) without public controversy.

The Fail Fandom community is active: since its founding in July 2010, there have been 19 entries; while that may not seem like much, each entry has approximately 5100 comments (while a LJ discussion may have up to 10,000 comments, that amount loads very slowly, so the moderators (mods) start a new entry/page when the discussion hits 5000 comments. The purpose of an entry is simply to give a new space for discussion: in a little over five months, the community has logged about 95,000 comments.

The anonymity means that it is impossible to track how many different people post, but my methodology does not require a study of people: I am doing a rhetorical analysis of the community involving a basic count of the top level threads (LJ has a threaded-discussion format), and then developing closer readings of the threads which focus primarily on SJ fandom as a whole, or individual SJ fans, to see what types of arguments exist in this anonymous space.

Works Cited:

Fail_Fandonanon. http://community.livejournal.com/fail_fandomanon/profile.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York U P. 2006.

BOTH DOCUMENTS ARE PROPOSAL/ABSTRACT DRAFTs 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.

Link page for racefail scholarship

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/35579.html

'White privilege: [I'm] Soaking in It': White Queer Female Aca-Fan Doing Scholarship on RaceFail 09

In her monograph Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics Wendy Chun argues that, despite the early utopian marketing promises, people participating in online communities do not leave their races (or racisms) behind. The utopian promise of the internet was that users "escape" from the problems (of race, of flesh, of gender, of age, of handicap). As Chun argues, what was being sold was not truly freedom from discrimination, but the chance, if one wished, to pass as an unmarked white male. The claim that marked bodies could not be "seen" (would be invisible) in a text-only environment was 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. The text-only internet has changed to a graphics-heavy environment, but more important than even the issue of visual representations online is the refusal of fans of color to "pass," and to allow unchallenged racist assumptions, attitudes, language, and behaviors to pass in fandom(s).

Most earlier fan scholarship has been published by white academics. Fan studies, as well as the predominantly female community of media fandom, has been immediately and centrally concerned with questions of gender from the start, constructions of sexuality, race and ethnicity, and class have not yet become as important a focus. The internet which has falsely promised to 'mask' identity, by claiming identities are shown only by bodies, has only added to the complexities of who identifies as a fan and in what spaces.

The title of this paper is a remix of the title of an icon created by two LiveJournal anti-racist fans, Jonquil & Laurashapiro. The text of the title itself is a remix, building on the old Palmolive commercials in which a manicurist, Madge (a white woman), told (white) customers that they were soaking in Palmolive, a dishwashing soap. It is one of many icons that anti-racist online media fans have created to comment on discussions of race and racisms in online fandoms. The phrase "white privilege' occurs in a number of anti-racist discussions, drawn from academic and feminist discussions of racial privilege, specifically from a much recommended article by Peggy McIntosh on "White Privilege." This icon was made by Laurashapiro based on an anti-racist post by Jonquil. The concept of white privilege is presented as a bath, and the icon directly addresses a reader who is not aware of her white privilege; the original text read "You're soaking in it."

I propose to examine the ethical issues raised as a result of my work as a white queer female aca-fan on Racefail 09. Racefail 09 is the umbrella term for a three-month debate that took place online from January through March in 2009 about cultural appropriation and racism in science fiction and fantasy fandoms and publishing. However, the fact that the date is given reflects the reality that fans of color and white allies have been discussing racisms in fandom for decades in both online and offline fandom spaces.

This work requires me to acknowledge that my white privilege, which is not trumped by my lack of privilege as a queer woman, is inescapably part of my academic work; as a result, ethical and political issues exist in addition to the ones I always have to fandom as a member of the community, as well as an academic. Not only must I work to avoid harming anyone, I have the additional responsibility of doing all I can to avoid oppressing or exploiting fans of color while realizing there is unavoidable situational exploitation when any white academic presents scholarship about the work done by people of color. I hope to undercut the idea of a unbodied and unraced or objective scholarship and to draw attention to the marginalization and invisibility of men and women of color in academic discourse in general, not only in areas of fan and audience studies, rather than center myself in inappropriate ways due to white privilege.

I do not expect my work on Racefail 09 or this paper to be the definitive or final word on the topic(s), nor can I claim I am 'originating' this work. Rather, I hope to encourage more scholarship by beginning a dialogue in academic spaces about the work already being done in fan spaces. Fan writers, artists, and meta writers (fans who write fan scholarship) have been engaged in anti-racist and social justice work in fandom for decades. Academic scholarship has not yet begun to deal with race and racisms in fandom space, or the ways in which an aca-fan's identity might be complicated by racial constructions and attitudes: we cannot be all fans together in a utopian space whether online or offline.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/35784.html

I began this journal to talk about my move to teaching online -- since I decided to teach online primarily because of my fandom experiences, it made sense to keep the work inside LiveJournal. The thing I discovered was that moving all sorts of courses to online teaching cut into my fan and aca-fan activities online -- and I wasn't posting much in this journal.

I have begun in the last couple of years to work on scholarship on racism imbroglios and colorblind racism in online media fandom(s), and while I talk generally about it under my fan pseudonym, and post more stuff locked to my friends list/reading circle, I've been struggling with the ethics of open access, the need to not keep the scholarship in the vacuum. Fandom has always been quite happy to analyze and critique academics who are analyzing fandom, and that's important.

I've realized that while I cannot post the actual drafts in progress openly online (I did a quick and dirty survey of academic journal editors of fantastic journals on whether they would publish a completed essay that grew from, say, a presentation that was posted openly online, and their answers varied, but it seems that there are additional pressures (economic, databases, etc.) on editors to print only "original" (never previously published, even online) material. But I decided that I can post abstracts, and the occasional handout, of the pilot project data analysis, and that my academic DW/LJ would be an appropriate place to do so.

I'm currently working on a digital humanities grant, and the importance of open access is clear in all U.S. federal agencies these days: open access in this context means that if US taxpayers are paying to support research, they should have open access to it (without having to go through for profit and locked down databases/journals). Part of my grant proposal will be a wiki or equivalent online space for the Racefail Corpora that will make the material available for others to analyze (no material that is not publicly available on the internet will be in the corpora). The corpus stylistics project I'm working on demands a group/collaborative effort. Now, academic time being what it is, we're talking several years down the road *even if* the first grant application is funded (they rarely are).

This space, therefore, will be my public discussion space during these early stages of the process.

A few notes:

1. Identity, naming, pseudonyms

While I have the privilege of being able to be fairly open among fans and academics about linking my offline name and my online fan pseudonym, I prefer not to post the two together, publicly, on the same page. So I will not use my fan pseud in this space or in any other public posts or comments. I cannot control what others do, and I have been outed before. It happens. However, I will moderate comments to be sure that no outing (connecting of offline name and fan pseudonym) is done in this space, and anybody who outs anybody in the comments will be banned.

2. Comment moderation, anonymous comments, deletion policy

I have set both journals to allow anonymous comments, and comments both at LJ and DW, but for now, I am screening all comments from registered users who are not on my flist/access list as well as anonymous comments. We'll see how things work out over time.

I am tracking IP addresses on all comments, registered users or anonymous.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/36252.html

I think I may swear off the rich text format in DW/LJ forever. Whatever I did today managed to bollix up the crosspost links (we're close to LJ going down for that hour or maintenance, but that's probably not the reason).

Well, I will try to work on solving it this weekend!