Dammit, nos' is making me feel guilty.

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Title: Dammit, nos' is making me feel guilty.
Creator: Jenavira
Date(s): July 27, 2005
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External Links: Dammit, nos' is making me feel guilty., Archived version
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Dammit, nos' is making me feel guilty. is a 2005 essay by Jenavira.

"nos'" is a reference to a post by nostalgia lj.

It was written in as part of the same discussion as Academia and Fandom: What is the Role of the Ivory Tower?.

Some Topics Discussed

The Essay

(It's the guilt of the well-off white person, yes.)

To recap (I think) (I am always very good at misrepresenting discussions in recap, do correct me if you know I'm wrong): Fandom is obsessed with sex above all else. Fandom is mostly made up of well-off white women, and so this is understandable, because sex/gender is one of the main issues for that particular demographic, but this only highlights how well fandom disguises its own economically underpriveliged members, especially when Womens' Studies/Lit majors go off in their own happy little world of literary jargon and obsession with discovering phallic symbols in things.

So, um, why does fandom never discuss things like race or economics, or even religion? (I expand beyond economic issues because I am not a Marxist and other things are important, too.) I pointed out that most canon never even covers these things, which definitely helps fandom continue skirt the issue. Seriously. Stargate never even gets into the issue of race when they're dealing with aliens, never mind Teal'c also happens to be black. Jeremiah was originally a comic book about post-apocalyptic race wars, and while that theme is still threaded through the show (there are a lot of white supremacists), Jeremiah never even mentions that Kurdy's black, even when they run into said white supremacists and it clearly becomes an issue. And Firefly has a grand total of one non-Caucasian person on the main cast, despite the huge Chinese influence on the culture. (Hell, I don't ever remember seeing Asiatic people in there at all. There's hints that Joss was going to get into this eventually, but still.)

Economics is even worse, as far as canon goes. Buffyverse tried to touch on class distinctions, with Xander not going to college with the rest of the Scoobies, but...okay, I kind of stopped watching around there, but I don't recall it ever being made a big thing of. Trek, of course, pretends that poor people is a problem that can be fixed. Babylon 5 has probably one of the best treatments of the issue, in that there are always poor people, and they're generally getting exploited by somebody or other (sometimes our main characters), and sometimes they actually come into serious contact with main characters, like in Walkabout or Born to the Purple. I'm trying to think of other canon (with comperable-to-the-modern-world situations; Firefly and Jeremiah don't really count) where money is even *thought* of as an issue, whether or not the fandom ever enters into said discussion, which they generally don't.

Religion? Hah. It's a little more understandable to me how there's practically no canon that addresses religion, because of the totally insane American state of mind on religion and the serious risk of losing money if you piss off the crazy people. (A phrase I use meaning no insult to non-crazy religious people or actual crazy people who might not appreciate being compared to Pat Robertson.) The new Battlestar Galactica is perhaps the one serious exception, and if anyone can point me to a good discussion, fandom or mass-media based, of religion in BSG I will love you forever. I'm not going to count B5 in this because, although religion was always an important element in the show, it was very rarely applied in such a way that it actually had much to say about religion in the world we actually live in. But Stargate fandom has the great potential to get into religion, which no one ever seems to be willing to do (and which it's probably too late to do now, at least until the show dies, because Stargate's kind of lost its potential to be deep lately).

All of which is really just whining, because there is a perfectly good reason why fandom is obsessed with sex: as mentioned above, it's the only issue that directly affects the lives of a great number of fen. But, probably more importantly, while many of us might live in places where talking seriously about sex/gender roles is just Not Done (like me, omg, I forget the conservatism of my family until I see them with small children yammering on about how Of Course girls naturally like to take care of babies more, look how Tyler never played with dolls and Lexi always does, We Never Taught Them That, never mind that they have a stay-at-home mom and so do their friends, and when they don't they're at female-run daycares, but I digress), the Internet is currently something like 90% porn and there's no way you can say that talking about sex and gender on the Internet is subversive. Sorry. It might be in your real life, but in fandom, it's just not. It's still an issue of people not really wanting to push the boundaries of what's acceptable.

To summarize: fandom is not really subversive at all, unless you yourself are willing to put the effort into it (please someone do because if I have to write all this myself I shall cry), or unless you bring your fandom wank into your real life, which I am willing to bet that most of you do not, because you probably feel the same way I do about explaining to your family at Thanksgiving dinner your theory on gender roles as based upon Jack/Daniel porn.

As usual, please tell me if I'm wrong.

Excerpts from Comments

going not gone: I think a large part of it is that people get into fandom for the fun of it. It's a hell of a lot more fun to focus on/write about/discuss/wank about sex than it is to address issues of money and race and class. Participation in fandom is 100% voluntary; most people don't choose to spend their spare time thinking about difficult issues.

People who are deeply concerned about and committed to confronting race and class and poverty and other real-life problems are busy volunteering and advocating while the rest of us are fucking around on the internet.

Canon--same thing. It's entertainment. Some of it occasionally deals with social issues (in one of the later BtVS seasons, Buffy had to get a crappy fast-food job to pay the bills), but for the most part, the goal is to keep the audience amused and happy so they keep coming back.

Market forces, if you will.

nostalgia lj: I think a large part of it is that people get into fandom for the fun of it. It's a hell of a lot more fun to focus on/write about/discuss/wank about sex than it is to address issues of money and race and class. Participation in fandom is 100% voluntary; most people don't choose to spend their spare time thinking about difficult issues.

I can go with that to an extent, but... sometimes gender and sexuality are depressing issues, but we still spend a huge amount of time talking about them in fandom. They're real life problems for a lot of us, but ones we're willing to talk about at vast length.

People who are deeply concerned about and committed to confronting race and class and poverty and other real-life problems are busy volunteering and advocating while the rest of us are fucking around on the internet.

I think you can be concerned and fuck about on the internet. Again, plenty of folks writing about gender in fandom are involved in things outside fandom.

going not gone: Yeah... my answer was a massive generalization, to which there are plenty of exceptions.

I think you can be socially committed and politically active and still write fanfic--but maybe some of the people who spend their days confronting those issues on a personal or professional level enjoy fanfic as a respite from that? A place where you can ignore uncomfortable issues? Perhaps.

What I suggested is just one of many possible reasons that fanfic is focused on sexuality/gender to the exclusion of other issues.

jenavira: True. On one level, the whole issue is kind of moot because...sex. Of course people are obsessed with sex. But on another level, sometimes fandom does get quite full of itself, yammering on about how writing gay porn for fictional characters is all subversive and stuff, so I don't feel it's really inappropriate to call ourselves on it from time to time. Same applies to canon, really. Yes, it's entertainment, but there's no reason it can't address serious issues, as well. Many TV shows/books/etc. do try to do this -- Neil Gaiman's Sandman in particular covers gender issues, and as I pointed out, B5 tries to do a realistic take on future economy.

going not gone: True enough. I'm not saying popular entertainment, or fanfiction, cannot or should not take on serious issues. I was just positing one likely reason why it happens rarely, if at all. I'm sure there are many other reasons, and many exceptions. Whether or not writing gay porn for fictional characters is subversive may depend on your starting point. If you were raised by conservative fundamentalists and are way outside the comfort zone you grew up with, perhaps. If you were raised by conservative fundamentalists and you are showing your gay vampire porn to your mother, definitely. ;-) But in most cases, probably not so much.

jenavira: ...the elitism argument of "you can't possibly know SO HOW CAN YOU WRITE ABOUT IT". Which is kind of nonsense when you consider that what you're writing is very frequently fantasy/sf based. I kind of feel that if such things got discussed more, they'd raise enough awareness so that people who don't have direct experience with, say, poverty can write it effectively. Whereas right now, it's so rare that if it does happen, it often happens badly, at which point someone'll get shouted down for it.

redstarrobot: I think [the Firefly character Inara] is very plainly and obviously not Caucasian. My first thought when I saw her was, "Oh, River and Simon are Asian, or at least mostly Asian, in a world heavily dominated by the Chinese - that's a really interesting implication about race and wealth in this society, given how privileged their background is". I was absolutely sure it was a statement about race being made. And at least in the episodes I saw, no explicit point was made making any other character's race an issue, either.

Granted, I do think that one's tendency to notice mixed race characters rests very heavily on one's regular exposure to mixed race people; something that someone writing out of LA, or any other city where they'd meet or see hundreds of Asians and dozens of mixed race people every day, might well take for granted, while in most towns in America, there probably only are a few handfuls of Asians and fewer still Eurasians. Most people without exposure to an ethnicity are bad at identifying it, so Indians look Arab, Eurasians just look sort of Italian, or maybe Mexican if they're south-east Asian - they see sort of what they're expecting to see, which is often as not sort of an exotic Caucasian. I suspect that in this case, there's a reading by the majority of the viewership which was unintended by the creator.

Joss may well have been trying to make a subtle point -- but if the point is so subtle that nobody gets it, that's not much of a point, is it?

But that's what I was saying - I don't think it is so subtle that nobody gets it. I don't even think it was subtle, I think it was clear. I also think there's a huge difference in how urban and suburban/rural audiences view that. That may have been a slip on his part, not seeing how it'd play out of urban areas, but when you have a character with a Chinese surname being played by an obviously Eurasian actress in a world with huge excplicit Chinese influence even in every fifth line of dialogue, how much bigger a point should one have to make? When does it become insulting to say "And by the way, she's multi-ethnic, you know", when you wouldn't say that for, say, Zoe, and when does the responsibility for interpretation pass to the viewer? Joss made the point, very plainly for a large part of his audience, even if perhaps not the majority. He's already given the entire cast Chinese dialogue, given her a Chinese surname, and cast an Asian actress. What's his further responsibility to people who don't recognize they're being presented with an Asian character?

I actually am very curious about that. I think there are vastly diverging views on how subtle or obvious that point is, and I'm not sure who's responsibility it is to bring a willingness to discuss race to the table. For my money, Joss Whedon did that, and his audience didn't (or more likely couldn't, due to simple misunderstanding of previous audience exposure to what was being brought up), but I do think it's very common in television for the audience to bring that to the table and not the creator, so that's entirely possible.

milkshake b: In House fandom, I have seen a number of discussions about the role of gender on the show--it's a frequent, constantly returned-to and often referred to debate. There are several posts that are about that exclusively.

There was one post, once, about chronic pain, but it was meandering and uncertain and back in the early days of February. It also doesn't get referenced at all anymore. Beyond that one highly inadequate post--which was actually fine as a beginning, but the fandom needed to go further, and never did--I have never seen even one post that's devoted to a lengthy and exclusive discussion of disability, what that is like, and how the show is portraying it. Despite the fact the main character is disabled, despite the fact it's a major element of the show, despite the fact that their portrayal is astoundingly unusual.

Not one.

Subversive? Fandom can't even manage to be on target.

jenavira: I had entirely forgotten about House fandom (mostly because your horror stories of it have scared me away); you're very right. Race, class, and religion scare people off because they're acknowledged topics of contention, but something like disability is so infrequently discussed by anyone ever that fandom can't even come to grips with it at all.

scrollgirl:

To summarize: fandom is not really subversive at all, unless you yourself are willing to put the effort into it (please someone do because if I have to write all this myself I shall cry), or unless you bring your fandom wank into your real life, which I am willing to bet that most of you do not, because you probably feel the same way I do about explaining to your family at Thanksgiving dinner your theory on gender roles as based upon Jack/Daniel porn.

This is where I tell you how Angel/Spike slashfic taught me about gay rights, and that as a result, I discuss/argue with my parents, my pastor, and fellow Christians about why we cannot use our religious beliefs to justify denying homosexuals the same rights and privileges that straight people enjoy. (Of course, I don't mention Jack/Daniel porn when I do.)

And having learnt to defend gay rights, I've tried to have discussions with my parents, pastor, etc., on why we can't dismiss economic disparity when talking about race, or racism when talking about politics, or politics and gender roles when we're talking about religion. It's all tied together. Not to say I'm an activist, because I am way, way too lazy for any of that. I'm guilty of talking a lot and not doing much. And not that fandom is the only reason I've learned more about these issues... But yeah.

I agree that talking about sex on the internet has become no big deal for most of us, and it's not subversive in fandom. But talking about sex (gay sex, especially) on the internet has definitely been subversive/educational/enlightening for me. Also? It's fun! Because I occasionally have a libido. Apparently ;)

Having said that, I think you're right that we're often so focused on sex that we'll ignore interesting tidbits about race and economics and religion. Or perhaps we're so wary of these issues, because they're so volatile, that we'd rather focus on sex, which can be volatile but has mostly become a given, a fun and safe conversation topic. I remember the heated arguments we had after "Get It Done" and "Lies My Parents Told Me" in Buffy fandom -- about race and morality, gender relations, etc. Those arguments were... somewhat enlightening. But mostly they were painful, intensely personal, very divisive, and left unresolved. No wonder I avoid serious meta these days!

jenavira: One thing I've always resented about Stargate was how religion is pretty much equated with ignorance, fanaticism, and/or evil.

See, this is why I think the fandom has such huge potential to deal with this well. There's a tendancy to assume that Jack is or was at least raised Catholic (which is so not borne out in canon, but that's beside the point), but no one ever brings up the comparison with them fighting and killing "gods" for a living. There's an obnoxious tendancy in the show to equate mythology with dead religions with actual history, while entirely ignoring the three main Book religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) -- sane on the part of the producers, but there's no reason fandom can't get into it. And I'm sorry, there is no way that anyone, however atheistic they themselves might be, could run into the whole aliens-pretended-to-be-gods thing and not wonder how it affected the religions *they're* familiar with. It's very possible to make fandom's portrayal of religion more nuanced than the show's, it just doesn't happen.

I do agree with you that fandom is subversive to the extent that it makes people aware of gay rights who would not otherwise give a damn -- myself included. The thing is, fandom already does that, by virtue of it existing in the state it does now. Writing more gay porn does not make it more subversive, just a bit larger. And it's wonderful that reading porn can make people more active, aware citizens and human beings, but I do think that maybe fandom can stop being quite so proud of that and look in a few different directions, as well.

anonymous: I work hard to be critical and subversive, but the price of that is that you can't actually be "in" fandom. If you tried, you would just be a focus of disapproval and ostracism for your actions. In short, the idea of "change from within" is a big self-deceptive joke. You have to be outside where you feel no pressure (such as threat of group dynamics turned against you) to conform to the rules of the group.

snipped

Yep, you can't enjoy the benefits while ranting about it. Perhaps from inside you can slowly and painfully gather enough cred to throw a big hissy fit and "tell fandom off" once and a while (someone just mentioned doing that on Nos's LJ). But putting in all that work seriously lessens the likelyhood of risking the investment by telling everyone off. Yay to those who go for it, though.

Ps. I like wanking, too (which is probably obvious), but my need to wank on the way groups operate slightly outweighs my need to wank on the canon details of my favorite show. Interesting how those paths turn out...

milkshake b: Perhaps from inside you can slowly and painfully gather enough cred to throw a big hissy fit and "tell fandom off" once and a while (someone just mentioned doing that on Nos's LJ).

O.o

Well, for one thing I certainly wouldn't have called that 'big'--it was only in my private journal, which means, for reasons I'll get to shortly, it was hardly noticed. Three people defriended me, there was some discussion, and that's... about all. If I'd wanted big, I'd have posted in the main House community, which is a pit of stupidity and inanity and would have turned into a raging fireball on contact. But contrary to what it may seem, I don't actually mean to be wanky, which doing that would have been... I'm just very, very angry.

For another... 'fandom cred'?

....

Well, I suppose from a certain point of view it might not look like I'm doing too badly, except.... For all that I write fic that is in the very least 'very good' and more often described as 'excellent' (or in one memorable review, 'BRILLIENT'--I don't know why people complain about one-word feedback; it's entertaining), do meta on topics and from points of view nobody else will touch, and am perfectly capable of having lengthy and intelligent discussion (I'm somewhat infamous for breaking the LJ comment character limits), Nos's linking of my rant gave me more friendings in a day than I'm accustomed to getting in a month.

Traditionally, whenever someone in fandom demands to know why they're not more popular, people will smirk down on them and make comments about how the reason is they're not worth being more popular--they're not doing things that are of high enough quality, or different enough, to make them stand out from the crowd and be worth paying attention to. This is even true in a bit cases, but it's a bit naive the way it's kind of applied across the board.

I honestly don't understand why so many people complain about BNFs attacking them, persecuting them, making nasty comments to/about them. Because that's hardly the most potent weapon they have, or even the easiest for them to use. Attacking a fan will always at least gain that person some exposure, and to a certain degree it's true that there is no negative publicity--fifty people might decide you're an ass because a BNF said so, but ten people will go, "Actually I quite like them," and all sixty of them are going to remember your name and keep an eye out for you.

No, the absolute worst thing the grand and vaunted names of fandom can do is ignore you. More potentially problematic voices of dissent have died smothered in silence than torn apart in flame wars.

So... the fandom cred I have is based upon doing things like telling the fandom off. Which isn't the way I would have wanted it, back when I first got involved in fandom, or even as little as six months ago, but eventually there's a limit to what you can take, to how much you can give and get so little in return, to how long you can play the good little fangirl when you see such examples of shining idiocy receiving praise and adoration all around you.

secondsilk: This is maybe the second real fandom-meta post I've read and replied to. And I don't have the head at the moment to read the other comments, so I apologise if I repeat things.

I do, occasionally, discuss what I've learnt about sexuality and feminine identity with a close friend. He's very good about listening quietly. But, like you, I don't feel comfortable explaining the issues of fandom with non-fans. I can discuss the advent of fanfic fine, but slash is pushing it. I think you're right in picking our blindness to race, economic and religious issues. I feel less comfortable talking about religion is real life because my views are so different from those of my friends; and while belief systems, race and social class can raised in Harry Potter fandom, it happens less in Remus/Sirius slash than discussions of sexual identity and all the possible interpretations of lycanthropy.

Race (and religion) is still an issue that is treated very carefully in mainstream culture. (In Australia, and I'm sure America, too.) Whereas both gender identity and sexual identity have come into mainstream academic culture much more strongly. The majority of fandom is considered to be educated, middle class, straight and female. This, given statistical breakdowns and the nature of language is no surprise. I certainly feel much less comfortable in discussions about socio-economic divides than gender identity, because it is something I should see and should be aware of in RL, and something which affects the real world in much more visible and less personal way than gender identity or sexuality.

jenavira: Yay, someone finally used the right words in the right combinations to make me realize something -- that fandom works very well in expanding the zones of comfort we already have (we're somewhat comfortable talking about sex; fandom talks about it more and makes us very comfortable talking about sex) but isn't so hot at creating new zones of comfort (we're freaked out talking about race; we never get around to it in fandom). Which is not to say that's how it should be, but it's a good description of how it is at the moment, and that's something. Which makes sense, really. As so many people have commented, fandom is supposed to be fun, and ekeing out entire new comfort zones for discussion is not exactly fun, though I do feel that it's something fandom could (and maybe even should) do.

mzcalypso: I"m only here for the pretty sailors.

No, seriously--there are elements of social issues in good fic and good fanfic (I'm thinking of Hornblower, where HH's poverty is a stong motivation for many of his decisions) or Sharpe, ditto (and one episode of Sharpe dealt with out-of-work soldiers being hired to suppress workers who were being exploited--men of their own class, working people--their own natural allies. But if you turn a story into a lecture, some readers are going to politely excuse themselves.

And, damn it, fandom is my playground. I find academic meta incredibly tedious, particularly when there are so many real-world fronts that desperately need people with intelligence and energy. Who gives a fuck about the economic conditions on Deep Space Nine when Congress just passed another treaty that will take jobs from our country and let people in other countries be exploited? Have any of the impassioned meta-philosophers written letters to Congress, or the paper, or put some of that energy where it will do some good? If so, I have no quarrel--if not, that seems to me the equivalent of anti-abortion protestors who have never adopted a crack baby.

I put my serious-issue energy where it'll do some good. When I want to play, I throw a couple of pretty sailors in bed together (or in a hammock, or a cupboard... )

I'm not saying this is the only appropriate fannish activity, or I am right and the academically inclined are wrong--I'm only saying my eyes start to glaze over when someone, preening her intellectual feathers, launches into a discourse on how X's behavior in episode Y parallels the hypothesis of her paper on whatsit-theory, published in the Journal of Academic Wankery. To each her own; I won't sneer at meta if I don't have to slog thru it--but I don't think the choice to write sexy fanfic in less stressful settings than our own means a person is incapable of deeper thought on serious issues. Saying one's fannish activity is the sole definition of one's depth of character is assuming a lot more knowledge about individuals than casual internet-fannish contact is likely to provide.

daegaer: So, um, why does fandom never discuss things like race or economics, or even religion?

Which fandom? That's a really important question. One of my fandoms (Good Omens) has a canon suffused with questions of religion and social class - less economics, but it's there. Quite a bit of fic and discussion in GO fandom is concerned with those matters, and I've beta-ed several stories where the US writer wanted to make sure they didn't confuse American social class structures with English ones. Another of my fandoms (the works of the 19th century writer, George Manville Fenn) again has canon that deals quite explicitly with class, gender, economics, imperialism, workers' rights and so on. The fic I've written for that fandom also deals with those issues.

Possibly some of the apparent invisibility of fandoms that deal with those issues is due to the common and regrettable confation of "fandom" with "fandoms based on US TV shows". As far as I can see, US TV shows are utterly bizarre when it comes to dealing with class and economics, and consistently confuse "class" with "money" - I'm thinking particularly of the scene in Veronica Mars where Keith Mars cooks steak after being paid and jokes that they're going to eat like the class to which they aspire, the lower middle class. Looking at Keith and Veronica from my cultural and class position, they were already middle class, had always been middle class, and were now living on less income than they had previously been used to. (While they may have less money than before, the Mars family is by no means poor - they can afford a fairly large flat, a large office, can run two cars, several phones - including several mobile phones - and never seem to have to wear shabby old clothes).

Non-US fandoms do address all the concerns you raise. Literary fandoms do as well. I don't mean to get on your case, but I think part of the problem is raised loud and clear in your post, when you start by talking about "fandom", and then make it clear you are referring to America (Religion? Hah. It's a little more understandable to me how there's practically no canon that addresses religion, because of the totally insane American state of mind on religion and the serious risk of losing money if you piss off the crazy people). Fandoms and fans are far more diverse than that, ethnically, socially, culturally and in levels of wealth.

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