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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 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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Date: 2007-06-22 01:34 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-06-22 02:36 am (UTC)From:But also, yeah, that's interesting what you said above -- that what motivates you is in some sense holistic, that it's not any one character or any one thing about them, but how they fit into the fabric of canon. I can definitely see that, and I think it's an intersting way to deal with canon: not as having context, but as being made of context.