The Feminine Tendencies of Fandom

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Title:	The Feminine Tendencies of Fandom (A mercifully brief opinion)
Creator:	Fialka
Date(s):	2000
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	The Feminine Tendencies of Fandom, Archived version
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The Feminine Tendencies of Fandom has the subtitle "(A mercifully brief opinion)." It is by Fialka.

The essay was first posted to The Annotated X-Files Study Guide and is at Fialka's Candybox.

Later, it was reposted:

Sadly, when the old NBCI server went the way of so many really cool, free things on the net, I never could find another free site with enough space to house the whole Study Guide, and it didn't get enough traffic to warrant paying for 250mb on a server somewhere. Not to mention, I no longer have as much time on my hands as I did back then, so like the UFOs...well, it is another UFO. Some of it still appears to be here, if you can wade your way through all the advertising on FortuneCity. I sure won't be insulted if you don't. These essays are from the original site, and appear here unchanged. Unlinked titles got abducted by aliens somewhere along the way. If you find them wandering dazed by the side of the road, could you be so kind as to send them home?

"Many of these essays first appeared as discussions on OBSSE, Scullyfic and/or ATXA."

Excerpt

General spectatorship theory postulates that men do not engage with the text in the same way that women do; that they are more likely to respect "authorial voice" (ie not to go beyond the limits of what is written, or in this case, shown) and that women are more likely to interact with the characters on a personalised level. That's a GROSS oversimplification, but for the moment it will do.

Since fanfic is, on its most basic level, a refusal to accept authorial voice as final, it makes sense to me that more women would write fanfic than men. Perhaps we're just also less concerned with the 'legitimacy' aspects (is this real creativity, is this real writing) because so much of the work we do in the world has been marginalised and/or devalued by the larger society, that we've become used to assigning our own values to it. In other words, we're less likely to give a shit that fanfic isn't viewed by the outside world as 'real writing' and concentrate on the pleasurable aspects -- since the internet, that especially means interpersonal relations, using these stories and these characters as a way of making connections to new people and to new ideas.

To me, it kind of goes hand-in-hand with the way women will ask for directions when they're lost, and men generally won't.

General psych theory will tell you that this follows right along the lines of the way we're gender socialised, and women in any fandom who are over 30 (most of the original Trek fans) were socialised as young children before the whole women's movement, part II took off. We were socialised in the 60s with the values of the 50s and at a time when there was great upheaval going on all around us. Regardless of how far we've moved from that since, we were taught as children that women were the interactors, women were the hearth, and the peacemakers and the handlers of All Things Emotional. So the general idea that women interact with text in a more visceral, more personal way than men seems to make sense given our early socialisation, though it may not hold true for the generation now finishing high school.

Those of us who went to university and many who didn't have since learned to interact with a text in the accepted 'male' sense -- stand back and analyse. We've seen quite a bit of these two POVs of late right here -- some analysing Scully's lack of response through personal, psychological insight (the traditionally feminine, personal, subjective analysis) and some through criticism of the actual writing (the traditionally male, impersonal, objective analysis). For my zwei pfennig, neither is de facto better than the other, and most of us employ both techniques at different times.