robin_anne_reid | Entries tagged with racefail

Some links:

Repurposing my Academic Journal

Racefail 09 as Pilot Project

Info on corpus linguistics, corpus stylistics, digital humanities

Selected presentations on racism imbroglios in fandom

First presentations I did on racism imbroglios in fandom (predated Racefail 09).

Color Blind Racism in Racefail 09

Proposal/Abstract for Conference Presentation

Handout for Conference Presentation Remember: Pilot Project

Two proposals being considered for 2011 conferences

~~Chapter proposal for collection (has been accepted): White Privilege: I'm Soaking in it~~ ETA: While the proposal was accepted, the editorial changes required started to take the work into a whole new direction requiring more work, and so I withdrew it from consideration.

Abstract and Handouts for "What do you mean 'pleasure', white man?" (given at University of Bristol conference):

What do you mean "pleasure" White Man?
Pleasure Table 1-2-3
Pleasure Table 4
Pleasure Table 5

There has been major growth in fan studies (and even more in internet studies--a much larger field of study) in the last few years. It's been a while since I did searches, so I've been doing some, and here are the results.

Caveat #1: I haven't read all these. I won't read them all. I will find some that look relevant to my areas of interest and read them.

Caveat #2: Mostly peer-reviewed scholarship. Just as "art" does not mean "good" or "literature," "ditto," the same is true here.

Part I: Overview of Peer-Reviewed scholarship on Fan Studies

March 6, 2011 search in Academic Search Review.

Part II: Overview of Peer-Reviewed Scholarship on Fan Studies.

Mostly MLA, mostly focusing on fan fiction and the vidding scholarship small as it currently is.

Part III: Overview of Peer-Reviewed Scholarship on Related Topics

Social sciences databases, Internet Communities and Participatory Culture.

March 2011 Presentation (Writing Democracy)

Working Draft: Pilot STudy (Public/Private/Local/Global)

Table One: Alphabetical List of TOpics

Table Two: TOpics

Table Three: Comments

May 1, 2017

This journal has been inactive for a number of years for various reasons (primarily some health problems I have been having as well as the aftermath of a tornado which hit our house in April 2014 (nobody hurt since it was a glancing blow).

I am hoping to start being more active here and on my fan account. I realized that I should have updated this entry with the two publications that are related to my work on Racefail:

"Bending Culture: Racebending.com's Protests against Media Whitewashing."
Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction. Ed. Isiah Lavender III. Jackson, MI: U of Mississippi P., 2017. 189-203.

"The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In": Reflexive Racialisation in Online Science Fiction Fandom." Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction. Ed. Isiah Lavender III. Jackson, MI: U of Mississippi P., 2014. 225-240.

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/35900.html

'What Do You Mean "Pleasure," White Man?:'

Complicating Empathic Identification and Self-Insertion in Online Fan Fiction

This presentation is based on the premise that that all fan created productions create complex relationships between creators and audiences that center on various pleasures relating to empathetic identification, the desire to identify with and enter into the world of a text(s) (whether book, film, television, game, or graphic novel). As a result, all fan created productions rely to different degrees upon some form of self-insertion.

While I focus on fan fiction, I would argue this discussion could apply to fan vids, art, cosplay, and filk. However, empathetic identification and self-insertion are complicated when the fans being considered are not positioned as privileged within the dominant system of race. My work is based upon the social constructions of race current in the United States, and I focus of the fans (who are probably not all American) of two American shows.

In this presentation, I start to explore how the question of how fans of color might experience the pleasures and pains of empathetic identification and of self-insertion in a capitalist, corporate media culture which has a history of excluding, marginalizing, whitewashing, and stereotyping people of color. My focus is primarily on online media fandoms which consist of more diverse populations than offline/con and 'zine based fandom or academics doing fan scholarship have acknowledged. The perception that sff readers and fans are primarily white is as flawed as were earlier stereotype of sff readers and fans as primarily male. Similar work needs to be done along the axes of gender, class, sexuality, and ability, but due to time constraints, I am unable to do so in this project.

I use queer and critical race theory to begin to create an intersectional approach to explore communities in online fandoms constructed around two currently running television shows: Psych (USA, about to begin Season Five in July 2010) and House, M.D. (Fox, beginning seventh season in 2010). Both are popular shows; both have a significant fandom presence on the internet; both fit the pattern established by the 1970s shows from which slash originated. Shows such as Star Trek, Blakes 7, The Professionals, the Man form Uncle, Starsky and Hutch) (Pugh) predominantly featured male protagonists, often partners, in action genres. While House is medical show, it is widely known to be based on Sherlock Holmes, and the action is dramatically presented medical diagnostics. While the show has a larger cast than Psych and, arguably, more than two protagonists, House interacts with other individual characters to create different story arcs and conflicts.

While fanfiction studies has been immediately and centrally concerned with questions of gender from the start because of the dominance of white women writing fan fiction, constructions of sexuality, race and ethnicity, and class have not yet become as important a focus. With few exceptions, such as Sarah L. Gatson and Abigail De Kosnik, fan scholars fail to deal critically with race as well as gender in their work on fan productions.^{^[i]} I do not expect this paper to be the definitive or final word on the topic(s); rather, I am hoping to encourage more scholarship by beginning a dialogue in academic spaces about the work already being done in fan spaces.

I agree with Helen Merrick's argument in The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms concerning the important work being done on critical race theories and sf by women of color in fan spaces: in her last chapter, Merrick argues that the "twenty-first century sf feminisms" will incorporate the 20^th century feminism with queer theory and postcolonial feminisms. My work draws on those traditions to point to the work done in online media fandom by fans of color who are in Ika Willis' terms "reorienting" and supplementing (in Brecht's meaning of the word) canonical texts as well as "negotiating the 'painful gaps' left in the encounter between a reader's 'felt desire' and the read text" (155; 158; 166) in multiple ways online. In the context of my project, "the read text" must be understood as applying not only to the source texts (television shows) but also the fan fiction produced by fans in the fandoms. So the "gaps" become multiplied: there are the readers of the (source) text, the writers of the (fan) text, the readers of the fan (text) who may also be writers. There can even be readers of the (fan) text who did not read the (source) text. Many fan texts are written to fill in gaps that the writer perceives in the source text, but of course the fan texts can have, must have, their own gaps. One of the most predominant gaps in texts concerns constructions of race (beyond whiteness).

Selected Bibliography

Chun, Wendy. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. MIT Press, 2006.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. New York: Routledge.

Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fanfiction in a Literary Context. Seren Press, 2005.

Willis, Ika. "Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts" In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, 153-70. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.

http://community.livejournal.com/foreman_house/profile

http://community.livejournal.com/house_wilson/profile

http://community.livejournal.com/shawn_gus/profile

http://community.livejournal.com/shawn_lassiter/

http://community.livejournal.com/psych_slash/profile

http://community.livejournal.com/choc_fic/

[i] Some scholarship on race and the internet/online communities does exist, primarily from sociological, psychological, media studies. Lena Karlsson, "Desperately Seeking Sameness: The processes and pleasures of identification in women's diary blog reading," from Feminist Media Studies. Two articles on "nerdness" and race are of interest because of the extent to which fans self-identify as nerds (with gender differences acknowledged between male and female nerds): "Race, Sex and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian-American hipsters," Dr. Ron Eglash in Social Text (sociology? check) analyzes the cultural intersections of race and "nerd," to critique "reversing" stereotypes. Eglash incorporates gender analysis. Mary Bucholz, a linguistic anthropologist, presents patterns of self-identification around race and language among self-identified nerds in one high school: "The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology: case study, students self-identify, defines nerdness as language and other practices, not essential identity. No gender analysis though not all the nerds were male.

Tables:

robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/35955.html Tables 1-2-3

robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/36327.html Table 4

http://robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/36412.html Table 5

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/37545.html

Table 5: Average Entries and Comments by Member

LJ COMMUNITY AV ENT/MEM

Shawn and Gus 0.54

Shawn_Lassiter 1.02

Psych Slash 1.28

House_Slash 1.64

House_Chase 1.68

Foreman_House 2.08

House_Wilson 3.29

LJ COMMUNITY AV COM/MEM (NOTE: Commenting is not restricted only to posting members.)

Foreman_House 0.68

Shawn and Gus 2.19

Shawn_Lassiter 3.09

House_Slash 6.49

House_Chase 8.49

Psych Slash 10.2

House_Wilson 42.49

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/37269.html

Table 4: Chronology, Size, Comparison points

LJ COMMUNITY	CREATED
House_Slash	3/2/2005
House_Wilson	4/11/2005
House_Chase	5/6/2005
Psych Slash	7/17/2006
Shawn_Lassiter	8/28/2006
Shawn and Gus	12/23/2007
Foreman_House	4/1/2008

LJ COMMUNITY	MEMBERSHIP
Foreman_House	57
Shawn and Gus	238
Shawn_Lassiter	841
House_Chase	1254
Psych Slash	1404
House_Slash	2170
House_Wilson	4619

LJ COMMUNITY	ENTRIES	AV/MO	AV/MEM
Foreman_House	119	4.76	2.08
Shawn and Gus	130	4.48	0.54
Shawn_Lassiter	862	19.15	1.02
Psych Slash	1807	41.06	1.28
House_Chase	2122	84.81	1.68
House_Slash	3578	57	1.64
House_Wilson	15,222	249.54	3.29


LJ COMMUNITY	COMMENTS	AV/MO	AV/MEM

Foreman_House	39	1.56	0.68
Shawn and Gus	522	18	2.19
Shawn_Lassiter	2606	57.91	3.09
House_Chase	10,633	177.21	8.49
House_Slash	14,097	223.76	6.49
Psych Slash	14,323	325.52	10.2
House_Wilson	196,303	3210.08	42.49

Crossposts: http://robin-anne-reid.livejournal.com/37085.html

TABLE 1: Comparison Fanfiction.net, LiveJournal, Archive of Our Own

		SITE
PAIRING	Fanfiction.net	LiveJournal	Archive of Our Own

Psych (total)	1729	50,400	149

Shawn/Gus	888 \| 51%	4070 \| 8%	80 \| 53%
Gus/Shawn	442	3640

Shawn/Lassiter	455 \| 26%	5710 \| 11%	72 \| 48%
Lassiter/Shawn	241	2580

House, M.D. (total)	17,805	113,000	988

Foreman/House	226 \| 12%	7549 \| 6%	165 \| 16%
House/Foreman	225	7670

House/Wilson	3856 \| 22%	19,200 \| 17%	701 \| 71%
Wilson/house	3856	13,700

House/Chase	1092 \| 61%	12,300 \| 10%	227 \| 23%
Chase/House	1090	11,800

Table 2: LiveJournal Community Data

LJ COMMUNITY	CREATED	MEMBERSHIP	WATCHED BY	ENTRIES	COMMENTS

Foreman_House	4/1/2008	57	57	119	39

House_Wilson	4/11/2005	4619	3619	15,222	196,303

House_Chase	5/6/2005	1254	1004	2122	10,633

House_Slash	3/2/2005	2170	1626	3578	14,097

Shawn and Gus	12/23/2007	238	235	130	522

Shawn_Lassiter	8/28/2006	841	not given	862	2606

Psych Slash	7/17/2006	1404	not given	1807	14,323

LJ COMMUNITY	AGE COM	AV ENT/MO	AV ENT/MEM	AV COM/MO	AV COM/MEM

Foreman_House	25 months	4.76	2.08	1.56	0.68

House_Wilson	61 months	249.54	3.29	3210.08	42.49

House_Chase	60 months	84.81	1.68	177.21	8.49

House_Slash	63 months	57.00	1.64	223.76	6.49

Shawn and Gus	29 months	4.48	0.54	18	2.19

Shawn_Lassiter	45 months	19.15	1.02	57.91	3.09

Psych Slash	44 months	41.06	1.28	325.52	10.2

Table 3 Comparison of Memories (pairings) in all-fandom (HOUSE AND PSYCH SLASH)

	PSYCH-SLASH		HOUSE-SLASH
MEMORIES	Pairing	Number	Pairing	Number

	Gus/Other	16	Chase/Foreman	30
	Lassiter/Other	7	House/Chase	99
	Lassiter/Shawn	534	House/Foreman	6
	Shawn/Gus	87	House/Wilson	472
	Shawn/Other	15	Wilson/Chase	26
	Other Pairings	17	Wilson/Foreman	1
		676		634

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

'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

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.

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

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

Links Page with all Racefail Scholarship Entries.

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

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

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.