the heart

[hth]

I've been going over some meta stuff from earlier in the month that I only gave a cursory glance to the first time around, and particularly cesperanza's post on identification and "over"-identification with our characters (particularly as writers, but I think the dynamic is as visible with fans whose dominant discourse is criticism, as well as obviously visible with fic writers). I've known Ces for many years now, and I've always appreciated and admired her belief that joy and desire are both central to fannishness and deserve to be central to fannishness, requiring no excuses or outside validation -- but at the same time, I've never managed to become the beautiful hedonist that she is -- I blame my grim, schadenfreudian [tm!] Teutonic DNA. *g* Hence, I argue with her sometimes -- like now!



The original post is here. kassrachel commented:

One of the other things I did, when I was first getting into fandom, was clunkily write Blair as a kind of thinly-veiled Kass. I gave him my tics and my anachronistic phrasings, and I was totally hot for Jim the way he was hot for Jim. My fannishness matured, in a certain way, when I realized I was also hot for Blair when I saw him through Jim's eyes -- that I could inhabit both partners in the pairing, both sides of the dynamic. Not either/or but both/and.

Ces's responding comment was:

No, no, no, no== it's TOTALLY AT THE HEART OF WHAT WE DO!! OMG, was I not ironic enough??? Because--YES, it's what we're "supposed" to be embarrassed about, the idea that we make these guys like us, see ourselves in them, blah blah! But Kass--you know me--but if the choice is between the embarrassment of overidentification and the cold cold hell of distance: dude! Distance kills!

And, I mean, but.... Are those really my only choices?

Isn't there something sort of -- not just childish, but genuinely selfish and reductive, about an unqualified embrace of "identification" as our primary response -- the *heart* of what we do with/for/to these characters? It seems almost stuck in that mindset where people fall into one and only one of two categories: A) OMG, totally just like me!!!, ergo interesting and valuable, and B) not recognizeably like me, ergo invisible or free to be fixed-up until they *do* fit into A. In that way, the race issue isn't the exception to the rule at all -- it's just that these issues that got discussed in the original post in re: identifying up vs. down the power scale from yourself (and it was good stuff; you should go read some of those comment threads) make it so that white writers feel unable to apply the fix-it solution to the problem of B and largely default to the ignore solution.

Isn't there -- can't there be an option C, where we like and write characters *even though* they aren't us? Maybe find them interesting because of their alienness, or even, like Kass was saying, extend ourselves artistically and emotionally to the point where we can feel genuine love for a character not because we've managed to make Blair Sandburg a reflection of us, but just because he's potentially loveable as the person he is? Like, does Sheppard always HAVE to be a secret emo math nerd before we can love him as much as we love Our Own Kind, or can he be an adrenaline junkie where we're couch potatoes, a professional killer while we generally assume we'll never have to take a human life, a sports enthusiast where we're bored sick by sports, a laconic loner when our hobby is going on and on and on about our every thought with our four hundred closest internet friends? *g* If he really, truly is Not Us, can we like him, love him, want him anyway?

This is why I love fiction, you know? I'm not Dean, I'm not Scully, I'm not Fraser, I'm sure as hell not Ronon, not in any way, and I won't ever be any of those people that I'm not, but fiction makes me able to shift my boundaries so that I can temporarily be in their space and outside of my own, and I love that. That's what professional fiction gives me -- I may be betraying my genre roots here, but be that cause or effect, there it is. I love temporarily being the alien, because it gives this shot of multiplicity to my one single life. Hell, my first slash pairing, not only before I knew what slash was, but probably before I reliably knew what *sex* was, was Davidge and Jerry from Enemy Mine (yes, my first interracial OTP was human/lizard. Look, y'all have your kinks and I have mine.) I love the idea that, since all love is a leap into the unknown, the more unknown you can make yourself vulnerable to, the greater your powers of love. I love that as a story and as just a way to make sense out of life (which secretly I believe is a redundant sentence, but that's another topic for another time.)

And I love fandom and fanfiction with all my heart, and I hate to think there's no place for that there, because the type of writing that's always lionized is the type that replicates me endlessly, with a sometimes creepy subtext of "everyone worth your attention is you, or just like you." Which I know isn't Ces's intent, or presumably anyone's, but by placing that homogenizing function of fanfic as the HEART of the fannish experience, doesn't that give pride of place to an A-or-B worldview where people conform or disappear? And even if the worldview being replicated and its concerns aren't the same one that exists in the mainstream (our concerns so frequently include problematized bodies, complications of desire, outsiderness/queerness, all the other stuff that you can't leave fandom and reliably get), it's still at best sort of parochial and at worst inevitably marginalizing for other potential fans, for whom race or class are issues with as much heft as gender, or who simply don't relate to the prevailing romance-novel/rom-com tropes that shippy fic lifts from the middle-class heteronormative perceptions of love.

Comments

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it makes a difference that you and Ces are both acafans and live a lot of your waking hours under the pressures of those expectations -- that you practice "disinterested analysis" and emotional neutrality in expressing your likes and dislikes. I can see how it might seem extra, extra important to throw yourself into squee-space, and how there might be an urge to jealously guard your sometimes besieged right to squee -- and that's what you seem to be saying when you mention that the professionals among you seem to feel a particular need to defend squee.

I don't have any real interest in academia, which is why I'm not in grad school and not hoping to go to grad school; those cautious academic values aren't mine, and there's no one in my life insisting I adopt them or judging my work on the degree to which I adopt them. My world is saturated in fan-values, which privilege loyalty to the community and reward squee -- I've lost count of how many times in how many fandoms I've heard people who feel at odds with canon get told, "Well, if you don't like the show, then stop watching it" -- my fannishness happens in an environment where I'm aware that certain kinds of analysis are viewed as being a bad fan by an awful lot of my peers. So what I perceive to be out of whack or to need defending in discourse about fandom is wildly different from your perceptions, and that just makes sense, given the differences in our positions.

I'm not sure that the people who write Obi-Wan throwing his hairbrush across the room or Rodney sneaking off the city after "Trinity" because nobody loves him anymore -- I'm not sure those people *are* embracing what they write counterintuitively. That kind of emotive, hyper-identified, gut-level, revved-up melodrama isn't necessarily subversive for all of fandom, even though it probably seems subversive to people with a love of and attraction to academia. I think it's normative within fandom, not the exception, and so privileging it isn't neccessarily corrective the way you feel that it is.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

It may not be corrective within fandom, but it certainly is correctly against general reading and evaluative practices, isn't it? How often do we all justify fandom to outsiders by offering its aesthetic values? (Think back to the Tiptree debates!) I think we may value and reward squee within the community, but that community is embattled on all fronts...which I think was in part what Ces was talking about...

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

But then -- what's my option? If I want to say something critical about the community, or even just say that, hey, I have these other needs and desires that fandom often has trouble speaking to, what can I possibly say? Nothing, because fandom is too "embattled" to be able to deal with my dissent from the inside?

Lately my world seems full of people who want to pin fandom and fannishness down, to say this is what we do and this is how we do it -- in ways that, yes, sometimes are very reflective of me, but also sometimes are very not. And I want to be able to say, "Okay, that's a fair thing to say, but here's my stance, here's what I like and don't like about my interactions with the fan community." And I literally don't know how to do that anymore without pissing somebody off. Which I actually don't enjoy doing, and I'm so fucking exhausted with trying and failing miserably to interact with fandom in a way that guards my own needs at the same time that other fans don't feel as if I'm interfering with their needs.

I'm honestly -- I really need advice from someone. I don't know how to do this anymore. I know I'm not in the fannish mainstream and haven't been for many years now, but I don't mind being the loyal opposition, as long as I get to stay in the conversation. And obviously I need to learn some much better communicating skills. I really would take all advice under consideration at this point.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

But see...I really don't see you as not part of the conversations. You may have a slightly different conversation than other people, even a different conversation than the majority, but that's kind of like shipping minority pairings, I think.

I can only speak for myself, but just because you don't get exactly the same out of it or don't see it exactly the same way doesn't mean to me that you're not part of this space, just like you writing a different pairing doesn't mean that you're better or worse a fan but only that your interests are slightly off the mainstream...

I do think your post was a bit aggressive, and I understand where you're coming from...heck, I seem to especially collect people who dissent with what I'd consider mainstream, and I know how frustrated they often are (in general and with me :)

I do feel that Ces was simply pointing toward what she felt was special and unusual...not that everyone needed to engage that way. I think any statement like fandom is X clearly is excluding large numbers of people, but I never read these statements as seriously saying that not being or liking X makes one not a fan or not deserving of participating and engaging..

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

And I literally don't know how to do that anymore without pissing somebody off. Which I actually don't enjoy doing, and I'm so fucking exhausted with trying and failing miserably to interact with fandom in a way that guards my own needs at the same time that other fans don't feel as if I'm interfering with their needs.

You have several choices.

You can use a meta filter.

You can refuse engagement with anyone who decides their feelings are hurt when you point out their definition of fannishness defines you out.

You can wait and post things off cycle without reference to the original which sparked your discussion, i.e. posting about this two weeks after ces brought it up, but without namechecking ces.

You can make an enemies list and ignore comments from anyone who's on it.

You can approach discussion with the attitude that people are dumb and will misunderstand you, so you only speak to the people who are clever enough to get you.

You can post meta with your comments turned off (this will also stop metafandom from picking you up.)

You can post meta and not have the comments mailed to you, so you only deal with them when you have the energy and go look.

You can create a third journal (or convert the bettyp journal into the meta journal) and only use it when you feel like wrassling.

I'm not suggesting that you do any of the above, but those are the first options that I think of when I think of how to handle publishing fannish dissent without making yourself miserable.

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Why does that matter, if Hth is discussing the practices inside fandom? Cesperanza was clearly comparing community practice to outside practice, but Hth wasn't. Her audience was strictly internal in a way I'm not sure Ces' was.