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Many people other than myself have dealt extensively with the daily_deviant incident, and I assume you're not hearing about it here for the first time and you don't need a rundown or anything. I have very little to add, except to extend my sympathies to zvi, who will obviously never, ever get the rather numerous apologies she so richly deserves from some of her fellow fen; I'm sure she knows that as well as anyone, but I don't imagine it ever gets a lot easier.
(If it helps, I'm not in the littlest, tiniest bit offended -- not even an *iota* offended -- by the word "honky." And since the logic seems to go that if you know POCs who aren't offended by X, Y, or Z, then X, Y, or Z can't *really* be racist, then zvi, please feel free to tell people your White Friend has informed you that white people who think "honky" is a horrid racial slur are big whiners, so it must be true!)
Anyway, having nothing substantive to add to the specifics of this case; what I really want to say is more of a personal thing about fandom in general, and my relationship with fandom in particular.
I was saying to Mary just a day or two ago that the big ongoing challenge for me in re: my fannishness has always been letting go of my -- I don't know whether to say illusions or expectations, which connotation is more fair -- but my, let's say expectations about what Fandom is. Eleven years ago, when the internet still had that new, shiny smell on it for me and I found out there was this thing called "slash" which lured me into paying attention to this thing called "fandom" in the first place, I really thought I knew...you know, what it was. Who we were and what we did and the basic rules of the game, as it were. I even, in my wild naivete, thought there was a "we" that could speak, some kind of mostly-coherent community values and ideology and sense of obligation to one another.
That is not, in fact, the case. Fandom turns out to be basically just a giant bunch of people whose interests happen to intersect at a couple of different points -- often for madly different reasons, with different stakes, and for different purposes. In some cases, that realization has been highly broadening, even liberating for me -- I've learned so much from people who were just a very different *kind* of fan from me, and I've adopted a lot of habits and ideas and whatnot that I didn't know I even needed to be exposed to. I've even *sort of* learned how to have a sense of humor, which God knows is a skill I've had to work at, but that inasmuch as I've succeeded, I learned from fandom, just like I learned to write largely from fandom.
In other cases, discovering that there was this vast space between the Fandom I thought I was signing on for and the Fandom that actually exists...has been painful and cynicism-producing. I've had to question everything that I was once most passionately convinced that fandom Stood For and everything that I initially thought made fandom a real force for truth and goodness and righteousness in a corrupt world. It turns out that we're righteous and corrupt all at the same time, exactly like the rest of the world...and that isn't an indictment, or shouldn't be. We're people; we act like people. Sometimes it's easy for me to love people in all their bruised beauty, and sometimes it's not. In fandom a lot of the time it's not, just because I retain that vestigial sense of myself at 20 and the way I really believed that this was different, that this was *better.* That's one of those silly things you believe in when you're 20 -- in the Big Answer, in utopian schemes and untrammeled idealism. It's normal and fair and even useful to move away from that, but I don't know that it's suppposed to be easy. It hasn't been for me, at least.
There are a couple of Big Things that I used to think fandom was about, but the Biggest Thing was that fandom was about a passionate love of pluralism. I guess I believed that mass media, being expensive to produce and facing a lot of competition to survive, was boxed into certain kinds of stories and certain lenses through which to view those stories because of a need to maximize the people who found it appealing while minimizing the people who were freaked out or bored or whatever else by it. So TPTB went, not unreasonably, with the Tried and True, safe roads, familiar stories acted out by familiar faces. But I also believed that people had some kind of natural and native hunger for, I don't know, more than that. That deep down, we wanted to be surprised and confused and amazed and confronted with stuff we'd never dreamed of -- that (and is it coincidence that my first fandom was XF?) we wanted to believe the world was much, much bigger and wilder than the men in smoke-filled rooms said it was, and that our imaginations were not ready for primetime. A crucial manifestation of that basic belief, for me, was that we were engaged in telling stories largely in a voice that was almost totally banned from mass media at that time -- the queer perspective, the voice of characters for whom safe, marital or marital-like heterosexual lifebondings were not the defining centerpieces of their emotional lives. I thought -- if we can tell this story, and we want so *badly* to tell this story, what can't we tell? What possible limits are there to the way we can open up these finite narratives and turn them into carnivals of potentiality?
And don't mistake me, I found what I was looking for. I stay in fandom because I did find that -- the ability of some of the most amazing, creative, talented, daring people in the universe to blow the top of my fucking head off, to make me see old things in whole new ways. I did find that; I do find that. But at the same time, I had to deal with the fact that I share fandom with a lot of other people, some of whom don't give a fuck about any of that, some of whom are having other needs entirely filled by their fannishness and don't have any stake in mine. Other people are sometimes not like me! It's so radical, it just might be true!
But diversity is hard work, even for those of us who love diversity. I love it with my whole soul, but it can be *hard work,* especially when the particular aspect of difference you're confronted with is one that defines itself oppositionally, that mistrusts the very thing you adore. There are certain parts and pieces of Other People's Fandom that I keep smacking into like I'm a fucking bird flying into a glass door, every time: the OTP, the cult of the happy ending, the people who need you to label X so they shan't ever, ever, ever have to deal with X getting accidentally stuck in their brain, the mysteriously vanishing supporting characters that we never liked anyway, so we'll just pretend there's no such person. The people who continue to shrug and say that it's just a matter of personal taste if they don't like women and don't want to read or write about any women ever, because women are like artichoke hearts, in a way, and it doesn't mean anything to dislike them and want their voice to be absent from the narrative as much as it's in your power to make that happen. The people who don't give a flying fuck that 99.8% of fanfiction is about snowy white men and (sometimes) women, because the world doesn't seem lopsided or empty or too-quiet or just fucking weird without those voices, and who are quite cross when somebody suggests that a worldview where people of color are an optional adornment to real life is ipso facto a racist worldview.
Ideas like that freak me out, not because they all hold equivalent weight or real-world significance, but because they all strike in small or large but still fundamental ways at my expectation that it's fandom's *job* to add more and more and go further and further. The truth is, that's not fandom's job. That's just what I *wish* fandom's job was. There are a lot of other people out there who never signed on for that, and letting go of my anger at those people for not sharing my agenda has, like I said, been a long process with some good sides and some bad sides for me.
More to the point, I guess, is that it's been hard for me to accept the fact that other people don't share my agenda, while at the same time staying passionate about and committed to that agenda myself. Because a lot of the time, I just want to go, oh, fuck it, why am I knocking myself out to do this fucking crazy thing that nobody even gives a damn about or wants in any way to read? Why don't I just either write the stuff I know someone actually *will* want to read, or chuck the whole thing and take up yoga instead?
One reason I don't do that is that I have![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marythefan, who is, if you can believe it, even more committed to the outre and the fringe and the cracktastic than I am -- the weirder my ideas get, the more likely I know she is to be all about them, and that certainly helps in the moral support department. The other reason is that I'm getting a lot better at recognizing my own drama-queeny swanning about when it kicks in, and the rational part of the brain can remember that, you know, I'm lying when I say *nobody* but me cares about this, that I'm only talking to myself. Just because I've learned that ALL of fandom doesn't agree with me about what the Prime Good of Fandom is does not therefore mean that I am Alone, Alone, O Woe, Alone.
I once had this thing I kicked around, this kind of mental game of "casting" my favorite fanfic writers as popstars -- if fandom were the radio, who would we all be? Like, X person was Usher (okay, this was a few years back *g*), because her stuff was just this ridiculously strong, solid, tight, hit machine, the perfect blend of production, musicianship, and just being in the gestalt and knowing what people love -- while Z person was No Doubt, because her stuff was just that much unlike what everyone else did, and yet people found it so easy to embrace and it swept the Grammys every year (Mary and I used to watch awards shows and joke, "You know how you can tell No Doubt is going to win this category? Because they were *nominated* in it."), so that it was thoroughly mainstream and yet was impossible to confuse with anyone else's sound. And the popstar I decided I aspired to be was Tori Amos -- because, you know, she's just so fucking weird, and she's one of those people whose career you can't wholly grok in terms of numbers and chart positions, but at the same time, there are moments when the stuff Tori does intersects with what people are interested in at that time, and you get a Little Earthquakes or an Under the Pink. And the rest of the time she's being utterly ignored by most of the world, but there she is, making Scarlet's Walk and the Beekeeper and American Doll Posse, and by some standards Tori Amos really, really hasn't mattered at all since at least 1999, and a lot of what she does is kind of a mess anyway, but there's nobody else like her, and I admire that. I don't think I'm really enough of a mad genius (mad enough or genius enough) to be the fanfic Tori Amos, but I sort of hold her in my head sometimes when I write, and I think, yeah, the way I love her for when she gets it right and for the way she's willing to get it wrong, too -- that's what I want people to feel, that's the place I want to try to write up to. She has a voice that I feel like I would be that much poorer if I'd never heard. That's what I want someone to say about me -- partially out of my own sense of ambition, and partially because of that way that I really care about having *more* voices, even just *one more* voice that brings something unique to the table.
Anyway, you know, that's something to strive for, but at the same time, I'm proud of where I already am, and of what I think I've brought that other people didn't or hadn't or wouldn't bring in the same way -- that one of my first stories was Scully slash at a time when we had to double-check and see if f/f slash was allowed on the slash lists because no one had tried it before, that I was associated with Bindlestitch, which was a list that, for all its faults, was overtly about the idea that it was okay, even awesome, to cultivate weirdness in fandom, that I've gotten away with writing weird pairings and peripheral characters and crossovers and stories with unclear endings that evoke mixed feelings and stories that can't easily be contained within any one pairing label -- that I've gotten away with all that and even been rewarded for it. Fandom has been amazing to me for the last eleven years, no matter what batshit thing I decide I just can't live without doing.
But at the same time, you know, I've just fallen into that trap all over again -- as if there was a "fandom" that had one opinion of me or that I have one relationship with. The reality, of course, is that A) fandom has been amazing to me and has kept me endlessly amazed, B) fandom breaks my heart and infuriates me with its misogyny, its racism, its narcissism, its endless appetite for the comfortable cliches of middle-class, heteronormative narrative structures like the soap opera, the bodice-ripper and the romantic comedy, C) I usually haven't the faintest idea what's happening in fandom, and fandom usually has even less idea what I'm up to, D) all of the above.
Race has become the locus of a lot of my thinking along these lines lately, because it all just seems so crystallized there, writ large and unavoidable. Is fandom racist? No more than everywhere else I go is racist; maybe somewhat less, but not enough to justify a whole lot of patting ourselves on the back. My beloved, once-upon-a-time faith in fandom as a place that would *never tolerate* keeping anyone marginalized because of how we all cared about telling the stories of people whose stories never get told -- I don't have that anymore. Too many of us tolerate it; too fucking many of us barely even notice it unless there's someone jumping up and down *screaming* about it so that we can't click on past. It turns out we're just a bunch of people, and we don't *all* care about any one thing, not even this. I hope enough of us decide we care about pluralism and diversity to actually have an effect on "the fandom" as a whole -- Christ, there are 421 prompts at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
choc_fic right now, and I feel absolutely certain that if, oh, say, 100 of them get claimed and written and appear on people's flists in the same month, then at least for a month, the face of fandom will look radically different. Hell, maybe we'll decide we like the way it looks after all, and we'll start to wonder why it hasn't always been that way, and we'll go inwards and outwards at the same time -- we'll start to confront and question the entrenched structures of racism and how they operate in fandom, and we'll be so horrified at all the great opportunities for fic that we've been missing out on that we'll start seeking out and finding and creating stories hand over fist that have racial and cultural diversity to them.
That's a little utopian, I know, but it could happen.
(If it helps, I'm not in the littlest, tiniest bit offended -- not even an *iota* offended -- by the word "honky." And since the logic seems to go that if you know POCs who aren't offended by X, Y, or Z, then X, Y, or Z can't *really* be racist, then zvi, please feel free to tell people your White Friend has informed you that white people who think "honky" is a horrid racial slur are big whiners, so it must be true!)
Anyway, having nothing substantive to add to the specifics of this case; what I really want to say is more of a personal thing about fandom in general, and my relationship with fandom in particular.
I was saying to Mary just a day or two ago that the big ongoing challenge for me in re: my fannishness has always been letting go of my -- I don't know whether to say illusions or expectations, which connotation is more fair -- but my, let's say expectations about what Fandom is. Eleven years ago, when the internet still had that new, shiny smell on it for me and I found out there was this thing called "slash" which lured me into paying attention to this thing called "fandom" in the first place, I really thought I knew...you know, what it was. Who we were and what we did and the basic rules of the game, as it were. I even, in my wild naivete, thought there was a "we" that could speak, some kind of mostly-coherent community values and ideology and sense of obligation to one another.
That is not, in fact, the case. Fandom turns out to be basically just a giant bunch of people whose interests happen to intersect at a couple of different points -- often for madly different reasons, with different stakes, and for different purposes. In some cases, that realization has been highly broadening, even liberating for me -- I've learned so much from people who were just a very different *kind* of fan from me, and I've adopted a lot of habits and ideas and whatnot that I didn't know I even needed to be exposed to. I've even *sort of* learned how to have a sense of humor, which God knows is a skill I've had to work at, but that inasmuch as I've succeeded, I learned from fandom, just like I learned to write largely from fandom.
In other cases, discovering that there was this vast space between the Fandom I thought I was signing on for and the Fandom that actually exists...has been painful and cynicism-producing. I've had to question everything that I was once most passionately convinced that fandom Stood For and everything that I initially thought made fandom a real force for truth and goodness and righteousness in a corrupt world. It turns out that we're righteous and corrupt all at the same time, exactly like the rest of the world...and that isn't an indictment, or shouldn't be. We're people; we act like people. Sometimes it's easy for me to love people in all their bruised beauty, and sometimes it's not. In fandom a lot of the time it's not, just because I retain that vestigial sense of myself at 20 and the way I really believed that this was different, that this was *better.* That's one of those silly things you believe in when you're 20 -- in the Big Answer, in utopian schemes and untrammeled idealism. It's normal and fair and even useful to move away from that, but I don't know that it's suppposed to be easy. It hasn't been for me, at least.
There are a couple of Big Things that I used to think fandom was about, but the Biggest Thing was that fandom was about a passionate love of pluralism. I guess I believed that mass media, being expensive to produce and facing a lot of competition to survive, was boxed into certain kinds of stories and certain lenses through which to view those stories because of a need to maximize the people who found it appealing while minimizing the people who were freaked out or bored or whatever else by it. So TPTB went, not unreasonably, with the Tried and True, safe roads, familiar stories acted out by familiar faces. But I also believed that people had some kind of natural and native hunger for, I don't know, more than that. That deep down, we wanted to be surprised and confused and amazed and confronted with stuff we'd never dreamed of -- that (and is it coincidence that my first fandom was XF?) we wanted to believe the world was much, much bigger and wilder than the men in smoke-filled rooms said it was, and that our imaginations were not ready for primetime. A crucial manifestation of that basic belief, for me, was that we were engaged in telling stories largely in a voice that was almost totally banned from mass media at that time -- the queer perspective, the voice of characters for whom safe, marital or marital-like heterosexual lifebondings were not the defining centerpieces of their emotional lives. I thought -- if we can tell this story, and we want so *badly* to tell this story, what can't we tell? What possible limits are there to the way we can open up these finite narratives and turn them into carnivals of potentiality?
And don't mistake me, I found what I was looking for. I stay in fandom because I did find that -- the ability of some of the most amazing, creative, talented, daring people in the universe to blow the top of my fucking head off, to make me see old things in whole new ways. I did find that; I do find that. But at the same time, I had to deal with the fact that I share fandom with a lot of other people, some of whom don't give a fuck about any of that, some of whom are having other needs entirely filled by their fannishness and don't have any stake in mine. Other people are sometimes not like me! It's so radical, it just might be true!
But diversity is hard work, even for those of us who love diversity. I love it with my whole soul, but it can be *hard work,* especially when the particular aspect of difference you're confronted with is one that defines itself oppositionally, that mistrusts the very thing you adore. There are certain parts and pieces of Other People's Fandom that I keep smacking into like I'm a fucking bird flying into a glass door, every time: the OTP, the cult of the happy ending, the people who need you to label X so they shan't ever, ever, ever have to deal with X getting accidentally stuck in their brain, the mysteriously vanishing supporting characters that we never liked anyway, so we'll just pretend there's no such person. The people who continue to shrug and say that it's just a matter of personal taste if they don't like women and don't want to read or write about any women ever, because women are like artichoke hearts, in a way, and it doesn't mean anything to dislike them and want their voice to be absent from the narrative as much as it's in your power to make that happen. The people who don't give a flying fuck that 99.8% of fanfiction is about snowy white men and (sometimes) women, because the world doesn't seem lopsided or empty or too-quiet or just fucking weird without those voices, and who are quite cross when somebody suggests that a worldview where people of color are an optional adornment to real life is ipso facto a racist worldview.
Ideas like that freak me out, not because they all hold equivalent weight or real-world significance, but because they all strike in small or large but still fundamental ways at my expectation that it's fandom's *job* to add more and more and go further and further. The truth is, that's not fandom's job. That's just what I *wish* fandom's job was. There are a lot of other people out there who never signed on for that, and letting go of my anger at those people for not sharing my agenda has, like I said, been a long process with some good sides and some bad sides for me.
More to the point, I guess, is that it's been hard for me to accept the fact that other people don't share my agenda, while at the same time staying passionate about and committed to that agenda myself. Because a lot of the time, I just want to go, oh, fuck it, why am I knocking myself out to do this fucking crazy thing that nobody even gives a damn about or wants in any way to read? Why don't I just either write the stuff I know someone actually *will* want to read, or chuck the whole thing and take up yoga instead?
One reason I don't do that is that I have
marythefan, who is, if you can believe it, even more committed to the outre and the fringe and the cracktastic than I am -- the weirder my ideas get, the more likely I know she is to be all about them, and that certainly helps in the moral support department. The other reason is that I'm getting a lot better at recognizing my own drama-queeny swanning about when it kicks in, and the rational part of the brain can remember that, you know, I'm lying when I say *nobody* but me cares about this, that I'm only talking to myself. Just because I've learned that ALL of fandom doesn't agree with me about what the Prime Good of Fandom is does not therefore mean that I am Alone, Alone, O Woe, Alone.I once had this thing I kicked around, this kind of mental game of "casting" my favorite fanfic writers as popstars -- if fandom were the radio, who would we all be? Like, X person was Usher (okay, this was a few years back *g*), because her stuff was just this ridiculously strong, solid, tight, hit machine, the perfect blend of production, musicianship, and just being in the gestalt and knowing what people love -- while Z person was No Doubt, because her stuff was just that much unlike what everyone else did, and yet people found it so easy to embrace and it swept the Grammys every year (Mary and I used to watch awards shows and joke, "You know how you can tell No Doubt is going to win this category? Because they were *nominated* in it."), so that it was thoroughly mainstream and yet was impossible to confuse with anyone else's sound. And the popstar I decided I aspired to be was Tori Amos -- because, you know, she's just so fucking weird, and she's one of those people whose career you can't wholly grok in terms of numbers and chart positions, but at the same time, there are moments when the stuff Tori does intersects with what people are interested in at that time, and you get a Little Earthquakes or an Under the Pink. And the rest of the time she's being utterly ignored by most of the world, but there she is, making Scarlet's Walk and the Beekeeper and American Doll Posse, and by some standards Tori Amos really, really hasn't mattered at all since at least 1999, and a lot of what she does is kind of a mess anyway, but there's nobody else like her, and I admire that. I don't think I'm really enough of a mad genius (mad enough or genius enough) to be the fanfic Tori Amos, but I sort of hold her in my head sometimes when I write, and I think, yeah, the way I love her for when she gets it right and for the way she's willing to get it wrong, too -- that's what I want people to feel, that's the place I want to try to write up to. She has a voice that I feel like I would be that much poorer if I'd never heard. That's what I want someone to say about me -- partially out of my own sense of ambition, and partially because of that way that I really care about having *more* voices, even just *one more* voice that brings something unique to the table.
Anyway, you know, that's something to strive for, but at the same time, I'm proud of where I already am, and of what I think I've brought that other people didn't or hadn't or wouldn't bring in the same way -- that one of my first stories was Scully slash at a time when we had to double-check and see if f/f slash was allowed on the slash lists because no one had tried it before, that I was associated with Bindlestitch, which was a list that, for all its faults, was overtly about the idea that it was okay, even awesome, to cultivate weirdness in fandom, that I've gotten away with writing weird pairings and peripheral characters and crossovers and stories with unclear endings that evoke mixed feelings and stories that can't easily be contained within any one pairing label -- that I've gotten away with all that and even been rewarded for it. Fandom has been amazing to me for the last eleven years, no matter what batshit thing I decide I just can't live without doing.
But at the same time, you know, I've just fallen into that trap all over again -- as if there was a "fandom" that had one opinion of me or that I have one relationship with. The reality, of course, is that A) fandom has been amazing to me and has kept me endlessly amazed, B) fandom breaks my heart and infuriates me with its misogyny, its racism, its narcissism, its endless appetite for the comfortable cliches of middle-class, heteronormative narrative structures like the soap opera, the bodice-ripper and the romantic comedy, C) I usually haven't the faintest idea what's happening in fandom, and fandom usually has even less idea what I'm up to, D) all of the above.
Race has become the locus of a lot of my thinking along these lines lately, because it all just seems so crystallized there, writ large and unavoidable. Is fandom racist? No more than everywhere else I go is racist; maybe somewhat less, but not enough to justify a whole lot of patting ourselves on the back. My beloved, once-upon-a-time faith in fandom as a place that would *never tolerate* keeping anyone marginalized because of how we all cared about telling the stories of people whose stories never get told -- I don't have that anymore. Too many of us tolerate it; too fucking many of us barely even notice it unless there's someone jumping up and down *screaming* about it so that we can't click on past. It turns out we're just a bunch of people, and we don't *all* care about any one thing, not even this. I hope enough of us decide we care about pluralism and diversity to actually have an effect on "the fandom" as a whole -- Christ, there are 421 prompts at
choc_fic right now, and I feel absolutely certain that if, oh, say, 100 of them get claimed and written and appear on people's flists in the same month, then at least for a month, the face of fandom will look radically different. Hell, maybe we'll decide we like the way it looks after all, and we'll start to wonder why it hasn't always been that way, and we'll go inwards and outwards at the same time -- we'll start to confront and question the entrenched structures of racism and how they operate in fandom, and we'll be so horrified at all the great opportunities for fic that we've been missing out on that we'll start seeking out and finding and creating stories hand over fist that have racial and cultural diversity to them.That's a little utopian, I know, but it could happen.
