robin_anne_reid (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
robin_anne_reid) wrote2007-07-05 12:09 pm
robin_anne_reid) wrote2007-07-05 12:09 pm
Entry tags:
It will never happen I know, but...
Could the internet just sloooow down a bit? I realized, as I was backtracking through this journal (and I should start making use of tags from the start, really I should!), that my entry on "race"* in recent fandom debates (March! and it's now July) was still waiting to be finished. And now a whole new "race" debate has come along, on the handling of the character of Martha in Dr. Who.
ETA: Metafandom del.icio.us link page on race. Gotta learn to use that...program?
My thoughts about the debate kept growing, and I've now realized I will have to do more than write a LJ post. I plan to work on a presentation for a conference (I'll be submitting it to Slash Fiction Study Day 3), and an essay from that presentation. So consider what follows to be very much a work in progress, right at the brainstorming/freewriting stage of composition. I am a process oriented writer, and have discovered that LJ is the perfect place to post about projects in progress because I get feedback that is always useful and, to tell the truth, I love writing for an audience.
I realized two things the last few months: while there is some scholarship on "race" and the internet, first, there is little published (that I have been able to find) on "race" within fandom (here, I need to qualify that I mean academic scholarship--but even so, I think there is less fan scholarship on "race" than on gender and sexuality). I have known and worked with scholarship on constructions of "race" within media texts for some years (there are a number of excellent composition readers for use in first year writing classes in the U.S. on "race," and gender in popular culture). I've taught a number of multicultural literature and languages courses on both the introductory undergraduate and graduate level, so my academic background deals entirely with the U.S. literary and media studies. My personal background: I am a fourth-generation American, with primarily Welsh and Scottish ancestry, recently enough to maintain stories and recipes if not the native languages. As a white American, I have spent some years educating myself in order to be a better teacher because just as I believe that a canon excluding all women is not worth keeping or teaching, so too a canon excluding all people of color is not worth keeping or teaching. White participation in anti-racist work is important to me as an individual, a teacher, and a scholar, and my main venue for anti-racist work is the university where I work and the academic scholarship I produce. I am aware that both those venues are places of privilege.
Second, I need to learn more before I can do the essay. As it turns out in a lovely example of synchronicity, the monograph that is going to be the foundation text of my New Media Literacies course this fall is Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. I'll also need to get ahold some of the sociological scholarship that's out there as well.
I have decided (in a flagrant fannish steal of what I've seen Henry Jenkins do at his blog) to post about this project as I develop it, ending with a copy of the presentation posted after I give it next year. (This posting is also an example of what I call creative procrastination: I am procrastinating about work that is more currently due by working on work that is due later! It's an important method of procrastination if you're a procrastinator, like me, and work in academia.)
What I am tentatively thinking of at this moment, is focusing on the rhetorics of "race" debtates in fandom(s): I will not be writing about fan fiction. I will not be writing about the source texts for the fandom(s). I do not know much about the source texts for either SGA or DW--I saw the first StarGate movie (?) and so loathed it, I've never followed any of the later series (?). The only time I've seen an episode of DW is when Trek friends of mine dragged me into a late night showing of it at a conference sometime in...the late seventies. I do not recall the year. I was not impressed. I have tended to argue that a scholar writing about fan fiction must know the source text and, ideally, something about the fan community, but in this case, I am not sure that knowledge is necessary. I may be wrong in that belief, but I have realized as I write this post that I think knowledge on what I might call "the rhetorics of 'race'" is more important for this project than knowledge of the source texts. I am *not* going to be focusing on any one debate in any one fandom: it's much more important to cross fandom boundaries here. (And part of my analysis will be the extent to which U.S. constructions of "race" dominate the discussion, even in regard to shows from other cultures, i.e. the U.K. especially, and the extent to which fans from those other cultures/countries participate, or not!)
But influenced by Rhiannon Bury's monograph which I'm currently reading, in which she focused on fandom discussion posts rather than fanfiction, I think it might be possible and useful to analyze how "race" debates are constructed across fandoms (similarities and differences). At the moment, I've collected some URL's from fandom_wank (I may be cynical in assuming that major fandom debates over race are more likely than not to end up on fandom_wank) and metafandom, besides my own links I made in my fannish LJ at the time. I'll put together an IRB proposal in August/September to submit to my university's human subjects committee for review. I'll check Fanthropology and the Fanfic Symposium to see what's been done over there.
Since I plan to work primarily with fan meta (or in some cases, rants, though I admit the line between the two is sometimes hard to clearly see!) published in public posts, individual and LJ communities, especially those posts which were linked to by groups like fandom_wank and metafandom which are very much in the public spaces of fandom, I imagine that my project will be designated as not needing oversight (in a similar project. my university's IRB officer said that journalistic ethics were more applicable). (Bury's work was done with fans who chose to participate in specific discussion areas, so in that we'll differ.) I do not plan any sort of survey or questionnaire--just an analysis of publicly posted and debated meta pieces. Clearly, this paper and the later essay will be exploratory in many ways.
My original post from back in March:
This link leads to a discussion in the blog Hoyden About Town about recent debates in the "feminist blogosphere" concerning feminisms, theories, the default nature of "feminist" as white/American/middle-class/etc., the debates over conflicts among feminists (generational, "racial," class, political, etc.), etc.
I am struck by the similarities (in language and issues) between this debate and the debate over racism in fandoms that took place a while ago (and which seems to have dropped from ongoing discussion at least in the areas of LJ where I hang out in my fannish persona (which is, clearly, limited).
I'm going to cut for length here, and also note what I've realized is an interesting dilemma as I worked on this post: as an academic who is a fan and a feminist (at this point in history, I believe that any feminist philosophy must include an anti-racist stance) and who is writing about academia, fandom, and feminism (and all the intersections between them), I'm not quite sure what terms I will need to define.
I plan to link students in some of my future online courses to my LJs, and while a number of you all came from metafandom and my locked announcement in my fan journal, I think some also came from the blog debate over fan and gender...so I plan to define as much as I can, often through links, and will be happy to define further if anybody asks. But I know I suffer from the tendency to assume knowledge on the part of readers that may or may not always be there, especially on the internet!
The Stargate:Atlantis (SGA) race debate was being posted about in March, in a variety of fan communities and journals. It started in a fiction writing community, was soon featured in Fandom_wank (I lurk and read fandom_wank because it gives me a unique view into the conflicts among/between fans) and Metafandom. Metafandom collects and links to "meta" (analytical" posts about fandom by fans and is a wonderful resource, as many of you know.
The metafandom round up of some key posts is here.
A number of posts are linked there; two I was most impressed by are this one by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moxie_brown, and this entry by liviapenn.
The second post summarizes more of what was going on. Looking back at a variety of posts made at the time, I see something I hadn't ever thought of before--a discursive assumption that people know what is being talked about which makes perfect sense--the way most fans and perhaps most people use LJ is more like a daily notebook/journal than an academic type of essay--but when people come to it later, or from outside the communities and cultures, it can be confusing.
I cannot summarize the whole, admirable, post, but, briefly: she notes a pattern in SGA Alternate Universe (AU stories=a complex genre category in fanfiction, but basically, taking the characters from one story and putting them in a different universe--can be done in both fictional people fic and real people fic) that can be described as racist and to a certain extent sexist (using the terms not to talk about individual feelings of bigotry but unconscious assumptions/ideologies). In the case of SGA, this pattern is taking the female and/or minority characters from SGA into alternate universes and assigning them subservient/minor positions/authority that do not reflect their relative standing within the original group). Since most U.S./mainstream/media shows have white/male characters as the main characters, and (as thirty or more years of media studies, and feminist studies, and ethnic studies scholarship has shown) the shows reproduce many gender and ethnic stereotypes; since the majority of U.S. fans are majority white, the debates took in a range of issues reflecting contemporary and historical social attitudes.
And, yes, the international fans who are often overlooked in the default "American"-ization of the internet looked on with some bemusement and even amusement as this debate raged, or so I gather from a friend who is Canadian.
The fandom_wank links are below:
Fandom_wank the first post.
Fandom_wank the second post
An excellent discussion of the responsibilities of white fans in regard to anti-racist work can be found here, written byhederahelix.
The connection with academia--well, that goes to the necessity of finding scholars of color to participate in the discussions on Henry Jenkins' blog!
*I put "race" in quotation marks because of the deep impression one of the first academic collections on "race" and literature I read had upon me:
"Race," Writing, and Difference by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the scholars who changed contemporary critical/literary and literature departments and canons in the U.S. from fairly lily-white work to more inclusive--his achievements include, among other notable contributions, editing the Norton Anthology of African-American literature (Here is an excellent interview with him on the National Endowment for the Humanities Web Site).
It's been some years since I read the book, but as I recall the argument: the use of quotation marks around "race" is used to highlight the disavowal of the concept as "real" in any biological sense while examining how it exists as a social construct. To talk about different "races" is, Gates and others argue, to use racist speech. There is one human race. In the U.S., 19th century "scientists" created the idea of separate races (their work was also profoundly sexist) in a way that built on early discourses of racial segregation but involved a discourse of science and authority. The small number of "biological" markers (skin color, etc.) that were chosen to mark "racial difference" are completely arbitrary (and differ from culture to culture), and there's an ongoing need to deconstruct the term. Gates acknowledged at the time the difficulty of it (along with being very clear about the social reality of "race" and how it affects people). I began using the quotation marks then and have kept using them, just as I will often use some feminist usages ("hir" comes to mind).
ETA: Metafandom del.icio.us link page on race. Gotta learn to use that...program?
My thoughts about the debate kept growing, and I've now realized I will have to do more than write a LJ post. I plan to work on a presentation for a conference (I'll be submitting it to Slash Fiction Study Day 3), and an essay from that presentation. So consider what follows to be very much a work in progress, right at the brainstorming/freewriting stage of composition. I am a process oriented writer, and have discovered that LJ is the perfect place to post about projects in progress because I get feedback that is always useful and, to tell the truth, I love writing for an audience.
I realized two things the last few months: while there is some scholarship on "race" and the internet, first, there is little published (that I have been able to find) on "race" within fandom (here, I need to qualify that I mean academic scholarship--but even so, I think there is less fan scholarship on "race" than on gender and sexuality). I have known and worked with scholarship on constructions of "race" within media texts for some years (there are a number of excellent composition readers for use in first year writing classes in the U.S. on "race," and gender in popular culture). I've taught a number of multicultural literature and languages courses on both the introductory undergraduate and graduate level, so my academic background deals entirely with the U.S. literary and media studies. My personal background: I am a fourth-generation American, with primarily Welsh and Scottish ancestry, recently enough to maintain stories and recipes if not the native languages. As a white American, I have spent some years educating myself in order to be a better teacher because just as I believe that a canon excluding all women is not worth keeping or teaching, so too a canon excluding all people of color is not worth keeping or teaching. White participation in anti-racist work is important to me as an individual, a teacher, and a scholar, and my main venue for anti-racist work is the university where I work and the academic scholarship I produce. I am aware that both those venues are places of privilege.
Second, I need to learn more before I can do the essay. As it turns out in a lovely example of synchronicity, the monograph that is going to be the foundation text of my New Media Literacies course this fall is Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. I'll also need to get ahold some of the sociological scholarship that's out there as well.
I have decided (in a flagrant fannish steal of what I've seen Henry Jenkins do at his blog) to post about this project as I develop it, ending with a copy of the presentation posted after I give it next year. (This posting is also an example of what I call creative procrastination: I am procrastinating about work that is more currently due by working on work that is due later! It's an important method of procrastination if you're a procrastinator, like me, and work in academia.)
What I am tentatively thinking of at this moment, is focusing on the rhetorics of "race" debtates in fandom(s): I will not be writing about fan fiction. I will not be writing about the source texts for the fandom(s). I do not know much about the source texts for either SGA or DW--I saw the first StarGate movie (?) and so loathed it, I've never followed any of the later series (?). The only time I've seen an episode of DW is when Trek friends of mine dragged me into a late night showing of it at a conference sometime in...the late seventies. I do not recall the year. I was not impressed. I have tended to argue that a scholar writing about fan fiction must know the source text and, ideally, something about the fan community, but in this case, I am not sure that knowledge is necessary. I may be wrong in that belief, but I have realized as I write this post that I think knowledge on what I might call "the rhetorics of 'race'" is more important for this project than knowledge of the source texts. I am *not* going to be focusing on any one debate in any one fandom: it's much more important to cross fandom boundaries here. (And part of my analysis will be the extent to which U.S. constructions of "race" dominate the discussion, even in regard to shows from other cultures, i.e. the U.K. especially, and the extent to which fans from those other cultures/countries participate, or not!)
But influenced by Rhiannon Bury's monograph which I'm currently reading, in which she focused on fandom discussion posts rather than fanfiction, I think it might be possible and useful to analyze how "race" debates are constructed across fandoms (similarities and differences). At the moment, I've collected some URL's from fandom_wank (I may be cynical in assuming that major fandom debates over race are more likely than not to end up on fandom_wank) and metafandom, besides my own links I made in my fannish LJ at the time. I'll put together an IRB proposal in August/September to submit to my university's human subjects committee for review. I'll check Fanthropology and the Fanfic Symposium to see what's been done over there.
Since I plan to work primarily with fan meta (or in some cases, rants, though I admit the line between the two is sometimes hard to clearly see!) published in public posts, individual and LJ communities, especially those posts which were linked to by groups like fandom_wank and metafandom which are very much in the public spaces of fandom, I imagine that my project will be designated as not needing oversight (in a similar project. my university's IRB officer said that journalistic ethics were more applicable). (Bury's work was done with fans who chose to participate in specific discussion areas, so in that we'll differ.) I do not plan any sort of survey or questionnaire--just an analysis of publicly posted and debated meta pieces. Clearly, this paper and the later essay will be exploratory in many ways.
My original post from back in March:
This link leads to a discussion in the blog Hoyden About Town about recent debates in the "feminist blogosphere" concerning feminisms, theories, the default nature of "feminist" as white/American/middle-class/etc., the debates over conflicts among feminists (generational, "racial," class, political, etc.), etc.
I am struck by the similarities (in language and issues) between this debate and the debate over racism in fandoms that took place a while ago (and which seems to have dropped from ongoing discussion at least in the areas of LJ where I hang out in my fannish persona (which is, clearly, limited).
I'm going to cut for length here, and also note what I've realized is an interesting dilemma as I worked on this post: as an academic who is a fan and a feminist (at this point in history, I believe that any feminist philosophy must include an anti-racist stance) and who is writing about academia, fandom, and feminism (and all the intersections between them), I'm not quite sure what terms I will need to define.
I plan to link students in some of my future online courses to my LJs, and while a number of you all came from metafandom and my locked announcement in my fan journal, I think some also came from the blog debate over fan and gender...so I plan to define as much as I can, often through links, and will be happy to define further if anybody asks. But I know I suffer from the tendency to assume knowledge on the part of readers that may or may not always be there, especially on the internet!
The Stargate:Atlantis (SGA) race debate was being posted about in March, in a variety of fan communities and journals. It started in a fiction writing community, was soon featured in Fandom_wank (I lurk and read fandom_wank because it gives me a unique view into the conflicts among/between fans) and Metafandom. Metafandom collects and links to "meta" (analytical" posts about fandom by fans and is a wonderful resource, as many of you know.
The metafandom round up of some key posts is here.
A number of posts are linked there; two I was most impressed by are this one by
moxie_brown, and this entry by liviapenn. The second post summarizes more of what was going on. Looking back at a variety of posts made at the time, I see something I hadn't ever thought of before--a discursive assumption that people know what is being talked about which makes perfect sense--the way most fans and perhaps most people use LJ is more like a daily notebook/journal than an academic type of essay--but when people come to it later, or from outside the communities and cultures, it can be confusing.
I cannot summarize the whole, admirable, post, but, briefly: she notes a pattern in SGA Alternate Universe (AU stories=a complex genre category in fanfiction, but basically, taking the characters from one story and putting them in a different universe--can be done in both fictional people fic and real people fic) that can be described as racist and to a certain extent sexist (using the terms not to talk about individual feelings of bigotry but unconscious assumptions/ideologies). In the case of SGA, this pattern is taking the female and/or minority characters from SGA into alternate universes and assigning them subservient/minor positions/authority that do not reflect their relative standing within the original group). Since most U.S./mainstream/media shows have white/male characters as the main characters, and (as thirty or more years of media studies, and feminist studies, and ethnic studies scholarship has shown) the shows reproduce many gender and ethnic stereotypes; since the majority of U.S. fans are majority white, the debates took in a range of issues reflecting contemporary and historical social attitudes.
And, yes, the international fans who are often overlooked in the default "American"-ization of the internet looked on with some bemusement and even amusement as this debate raged, or so I gather from a friend who is Canadian.
The fandom_wank links are below:
Fandom_wank the first post.
Fandom_wank the second post
An excellent discussion of the responsibilities of white fans in regard to anti-racist work can be found here, written by
hederahelix.The connection with academia--well, that goes to the necessity of finding scholars of color to participate in the discussions on Henry Jenkins' blog!
*I put "race" in quotation marks because of the deep impression one of the first academic collections on "race" and literature I read had upon me:
"Race," Writing, and Difference by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the scholars who changed contemporary critical/literary and literature departments and canons in the U.S. from fairly lily-white work to more inclusive--his achievements include, among other notable contributions, editing the Norton Anthology of African-American literature (Here is an excellent interview with him on the National Endowment for the Humanities Web Site).
It's been some years since I read the book, but as I recall the argument: the use of quotation marks around "race" is used to highlight the disavowal of the concept as "real" in any biological sense while examining how it exists as a social construct. To talk about different "races" is, Gates and others argue, to use racist speech. There is one human race. In the U.S., 19th century "scientists" created the idea of separate races (their work was also profoundly sexist) in a way that built on early discourses of racial segregation but involved a discourse of science and authority. The small number of "biological" markers (skin color, etc.) that were chosen to mark "racial difference" are completely arbitrary (and differ from culture to culture), and there's an ongoing need to deconstruct the term. Gates acknowledged at the time the difficulty of it (along with being very clear about the social reality of "race" and how it affects people). I began using the quotation marks then and have kept using them, just as I will often use some feminist usages ("hir" comes to mind).