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I'm sure it's been said many times...but the difference this time is, I get to talk about me. Like I'm gonna pass *that* up.
Short version: because people are apparently going to be talking about us either way, so we might as well be in on the conversation.
Long version: Up until very recently, I dated my involvement in fandom to the spring of 1996. I had just turned 21 and dropped out of college; I had a lot of time on my hands and a computer with internet access in my apartment, and I had just discovered the wonderful world of...dear God, however it was we did searches before Google. I think Yahoo was involved somehow? Anyway, I had figured out that you could type two *apparently unrelated* terms in the search field, and the magical, magical internet would deliver you to things where the two interacted, or at the very least to people who cared about both of those things. At the time, what I cared about was sf/f and queerness. (Not that much has changed.) Magical, magical internet --> queer-content Star Trek sites --> Star Trek slash --> slash about something I actually cared about, which was the X-Files. In fact, I cared SO MUCH about the X-Files that I had already annoyed my friends to fucking death with the subject, and it just seemed amazing to me that in one fell swoop, I had uncovered lots of other people who were obssessed with the X-Files, a place where my shiny new Collegiate Bisexual Identity could exist in the same place at the same time as my long-standing Geekdom, *tons of porn* that actually turned me on, and this whole crazy atmosphere where people, *even people who were really great writers* were telling me that I could just sit down and write something, for fun, and people would want to read it. Any one of these things individually would have been a big deal for me at that time, but all four of them together were like mainlining something *really fucking addictive.* And lo, here I am.
That's my usual Origin Story -- but not long ago, I realized that it isn't entirely true. That was just the first time I encountered a fandom that called itself Fandom and placed itself within a broader tradition -- the same tradition OTW is primarily interested in, which is the 30-odd years of self-aware Media Fandom.
Before I dropped out of school, I wasted at least a year of my life in the dorm computer labs, mainly posting on a Mercedes Lackey listserv. What I did in that year, in retrospect, was *clearly* fandom -- picking apart texts, comparing them to each other, predicting upcoming metaplot revalations, fantasy-casting the movie versions, squeeing, passionately arguing unwinnable contests of taste, etc. etc. There was no fanfiction at that time in that environment; Lackey herself is crazily anti-fanfic, and it was just something I didn't even have more than the faintest glimmer of an idea it was even possible to do. I certainly had no blueprints to follow, in the way that my early XF fic came out of me trying desperately to do what torch and and Te and Anna S. could do. The idea of a Transformative Work was just absent from my brain at that point in time.
And yet, the relevant thing was, that I *knew* that the ML books that I loved needed to be transformed. After discovering them in high school and falling in love with what I thought of as Strong Female Characters and Positive Gay Depictions -- I went off and had a couple of women's studies classes and had sex with some women and started to think of myself as a queer feminist and ask some (at 19, 20, anyway...) *really hard* questions about what that was going to mean for the rest of my life. And these books were something that meant something to me -- were, although I didn't have this word in my vocabulary, *my fandom.* And I cared so much about the conversation I was having with them and about them, and the people all over the world who cared about the same conversation.
The thing was, it didn't take me all that long of really looking at the texts, and of having other, better works to compare to them, that these books, and this writer's worldview, were inherently *broken,* from where I was standing. (A nicer way to put it would be that they didn't do and say what I wanted them to do and say, but...I think "broken" is equally honest in this case.) There was a deep, deep bedrock sexism to them that lavished praise on *one* specific type of woman and wreaked bloody vengeance on what the books presumed to be "normal" women, who were non-heroic and basically despicable in almost every way. They depicted male desire as largely predatory and only condoned heterosexual relationships where the men were carefully depicted as homely, humble, and sometimes even literally ill or crippled -- someone who was incapable of being a true threat to the fabulous fantasy women. Their "positive gay" characters began to read to me as existing in order to be beautiful and sexy for the sake of the author and the female readers, in such a way that their beauty and sexuality was all pleasure and no danger to the female characters...so that "gay" quickly became one more addition to the arsenal of ways to neutralize male characters, right along with "homely" and "crippled" -- only this time, we got to use them for their pleasure value as well. Queer female characters were entirely absent from the main action, along with most female relationships that weren't wholly about how superior the main characters were to all other women. On deep reading, on a *fannish* level of investigation, I found that the books disappointed me in almost every way in which I'd pinned my hopes for a progressive, women- and sex- and queer-positive revolution in fantasy.
I didn't create any Transformative Works. I didn't know you could. But I talked and I talked and I struggled to use my two semesters of women's studies to explain why this didn't look to me anymore like it had once looked, and why I felt so oddly betrayed. And people listened and talked with me, and I became more sure that I was right, that what I was seeing was fucked up. That what I needed was *more than this,* more than what I'd been given, deeper, truer, jucier, more complicated, more compassionate, more whole.
I didn't create any Transformative Works in ML-fandom. I doubt now that I'd ever go back and do it, even now that I know how; when I split with that writer and that world, it was with too much bitterness compounded on bitterness ever to go back. But I wish I'd done it then. I wish *so much* that one of the kinds of conversation I'd been able to have, one of the coping mechanisms that had been available to me throughout all of that, was the belief that I had the power to give *myself* and my friends on the ML-listserv the story we were promised, the story we deserved. I thought at the time that the only way to get those stories was to hope someone else saw the light and wrote them, or that maybe, someday, I would grow up and become a better writer and publish my own books.
I still hope, on a daily fucking basis, that the various PTB will wake the fuck up and write the stories we deserve. I still hope, someday, to write my own books for my own reasons. But those aren't my only two options anymore. And as a reader, the stories that I've been given that challenged me and made me think over the last twelve years have largely been Transformative, not Original fiction -- I assume it has to do with the risks that people can take when there's no money or career involved, and with the undeniable fact that only people who don't have to be scared of the consequences of speaking can ever really speak honestly.
I'm not really of the opinion that anyone can "take fandom away" -- it just doesn't work like that. People who want to speak and tell stories, inspired by whatever, haring off in whatever direction, will always find a way to do it, and once the barn door's been opened and the horse is gone, it's not like you're going to reasonably raise another generation of young fangeeks who were like I was, who *didn't know* that you can do this.
But the thing is, people are talking about the fannish tradition of Transformative Works now. All over the place. And some of them are calling it a crime, some of them are calling it merely in poor taste or of low quality, some of them are as spiteful and condescending as you can possibly be about the practice. Even the ones with good intentions are often unintentionally dismissive, in the way that academic language can suck the juice out of lived experience so very easily. If people are going to be out there talking about it, it's imperative that we don't let anyone *tell us* what our stories mean, why we do it, whether it matters, how we *should* do it. It's imperative that we don't let anyone but *us* set themselves up as an authority on what only we have experienced. The very second you let someone else speak for you, you will never be heard again.
Fandom is about a lot of things, but one of the biggest I think is the right to choose what we want to say, and the right to be heard. I learned that here. I learned when to listen to the Professionals, the Authorities, and when to tell them to fuck right on off, because my way is better, our way is *better,* and we need it, and we deserve it, and to stand around and let the Professionals and Authorities declare what it's worth and who we are is to submit to something terrible being done to the most human part of us, the part that gives a shit about art -- about our own lives.
The OTW is organized in such a way as to be a voice that gets heard, in an arena where normally only Professionals and Credentialed Authorities ever have their voices heard. The people involved with it will never entirely speak for me, in the sense that nobody can ever entirely speak for someone else, but I know them well enough and have enough faith in them to know that they'll speak from a position of integrity, that they'll do everything possible to speak truth to power, and that in this case their truth is mine: that this matters, that we are good at it, that we need it and deserve it and can do extraordinary things with it.
Anything else is a lie, and the lie is being told often and at high volume. Any megaphone we can get to dispute it is a blessing. And that's why I support the OTW.
Short version: because people are apparently going to be talking about us either way, so we might as well be in on the conversation.
Long version: Up until very recently, I dated my involvement in fandom to the spring of 1996. I had just turned 21 and dropped out of college; I had a lot of time on my hands and a computer with internet access in my apartment, and I had just discovered the wonderful world of...dear God, however it was we did searches before Google. I think Yahoo was involved somehow? Anyway, I had figured out that you could type two *apparently unrelated* terms in the search field, and the magical, magical internet would deliver you to things where the two interacted, or at the very least to people who cared about both of those things. At the time, what I cared about was sf/f and queerness. (Not that much has changed.) Magical, magical internet --> queer-content Star Trek sites --> Star Trek slash --> slash about something I actually cared about, which was the X-Files. In fact, I cared SO MUCH about the X-Files that I had already annoyed my friends to fucking death with the subject, and it just seemed amazing to me that in one fell swoop, I had uncovered lots of other people who were obssessed with the X-Files, a place where my shiny new Collegiate Bisexual Identity could exist in the same place at the same time as my long-standing Geekdom, *tons of porn* that actually turned me on, and this whole crazy atmosphere where people, *even people who were really great writers* were telling me that I could just sit down and write something, for fun, and people would want to read it. Any one of these things individually would have been a big deal for me at that time, but all four of them together were like mainlining something *really fucking addictive.* And lo, here I am.
That's my usual Origin Story -- but not long ago, I realized that it isn't entirely true. That was just the first time I encountered a fandom that called itself Fandom and placed itself within a broader tradition -- the same tradition OTW is primarily interested in, which is the 30-odd years of self-aware Media Fandom.
Before I dropped out of school, I wasted at least a year of my life in the dorm computer labs, mainly posting on a Mercedes Lackey listserv. What I did in that year, in retrospect, was *clearly* fandom -- picking apart texts, comparing them to each other, predicting upcoming metaplot revalations, fantasy-casting the movie versions, squeeing, passionately arguing unwinnable contests of taste, etc. etc. There was no fanfiction at that time in that environment; Lackey herself is crazily anti-fanfic, and it was just something I didn't even have more than the faintest glimmer of an idea it was even possible to do. I certainly had no blueprints to follow, in the way that my early XF fic came out of me trying desperately to do what torch and and Te and Anna S. could do. The idea of a Transformative Work was just absent from my brain at that point in time.
And yet, the relevant thing was, that I *knew* that the ML books that I loved needed to be transformed. After discovering them in high school and falling in love with what I thought of as Strong Female Characters and Positive Gay Depictions -- I went off and had a couple of women's studies classes and had sex with some women and started to think of myself as a queer feminist and ask some (at 19, 20, anyway...) *really hard* questions about what that was going to mean for the rest of my life. And these books were something that meant something to me -- were, although I didn't have this word in my vocabulary, *my fandom.* And I cared so much about the conversation I was having with them and about them, and the people all over the world who cared about the same conversation.
The thing was, it didn't take me all that long of really looking at the texts, and of having other, better works to compare to them, that these books, and this writer's worldview, were inherently *broken,* from where I was standing. (A nicer way to put it would be that they didn't do and say what I wanted them to do and say, but...I think "broken" is equally honest in this case.) There was a deep, deep bedrock sexism to them that lavished praise on *one* specific type of woman and wreaked bloody vengeance on what the books presumed to be "normal" women, who were non-heroic and basically despicable in almost every way. They depicted male desire as largely predatory and only condoned heterosexual relationships where the men were carefully depicted as homely, humble, and sometimes even literally ill or crippled -- someone who was incapable of being a true threat to the fabulous fantasy women. Their "positive gay" characters began to read to me as existing in order to be beautiful and sexy for the sake of the author and the female readers, in such a way that their beauty and sexuality was all pleasure and no danger to the female characters...so that "gay" quickly became one more addition to the arsenal of ways to neutralize male characters, right along with "homely" and "crippled" -- only this time, we got to use them for their pleasure value as well. Queer female characters were entirely absent from the main action, along with most female relationships that weren't wholly about how superior the main characters were to all other women. On deep reading, on a *fannish* level of investigation, I found that the books disappointed me in almost every way in which I'd pinned my hopes for a progressive, women- and sex- and queer-positive revolution in fantasy.
I didn't create any Transformative Works. I didn't know you could. But I talked and I talked and I struggled to use my two semesters of women's studies to explain why this didn't look to me anymore like it had once looked, and why I felt so oddly betrayed. And people listened and talked with me, and I became more sure that I was right, that what I was seeing was fucked up. That what I needed was *more than this,* more than what I'd been given, deeper, truer, jucier, more complicated, more compassionate, more whole.
I didn't create any Transformative Works in ML-fandom. I doubt now that I'd ever go back and do it, even now that I know how; when I split with that writer and that world, it was with too much bitterness compounded on bitterness ever to go back. But I wish I'd done it then. I wish *so much* that one of the kinds of conversation I'd been able to have, one of the coping mechanisms that had been available to me throughout all of that, was the belief that I had the power to give *myself* and my friends on the ML-listserv the story we were promised, the story we deserved. I thought at the time that the only way to get those stories was to hope someone else saw the light and wrote them, or that maybe, someday, I would grow up and become a better writer and publish my own books.
I still hope, on a daily fucking basis, that the various PTB will wake the fuck up and write the stories we deserve. I still hope, someday, to write my own books for my own reasons. But those aren't my only two options anymore. And as a reader, the stories that I've been given that challenged me and made me think over the last twelve years have largely been Transformative, not Original fiction -- I assume it has to do with the risks that people can take when there's no money or career involved, and with the undeniable fact that only people who don't have to be scared of the consequences of speaking can ever really speak honestly.
I'm not really of the opinion that anyone can "take fandom away" -- it just doesn't work like that. People who want to speak and tell stories, inspired by whatever, haring off in whatever direction, will always find a way to do it, and once the barn door's been opened and the horse is gone, it's not like you're going to reasonably raise another generation of young fangeeks who were like I was, who *didn't know* that you can do this.
But the thing is, people are talking about the fannish tradition of Transformative Works now. All over the place. And some of them are calling it a crime, some of them are calling it merely in poor taste or of low quality, some of them are as spiteful and condescending as you can possibly be about the practice. Even the ones with good intentions are often unintentionally dismissive, in the way that academic language can suck the juice out of lived experience so very easily. If people are going to be out there talking about it, it's imperative that we don't let anyone *tell us* what our stories mean, why we do it, whether it matters, how we *should* do it. It's imperative that we don't let anyone but *us* set themselves up as an authority on what only we have experienced. The very second you let someone else speak for you, you will never be heard again.
Fandom is about a lot of things, but one of the biggest I think is the right to choose what we want to say, and the right to be heard. I learned that here. I learned when to listen to the Professionals, the Authorities, and when to tell them to fuck right on off, because my way is better, our way is *better,* and we need it, and we deserve it, and to stand around and let the Professionals and Authorities declare what it's worth and who we are is to submit to something terrible being done to the most human part of us, the part that gives a shit about art -- about our own lives.
The OTW is organized in such a way as to be a voice that gets heard, in an arena where normally only Professionals and Credentialed Authorities ever have their voices heard. The people involved with it will never entirely speak for me, in the sense that nobody can ever entirely speak for someone else, but I know them well enough and have enough faith in them to know that they'll speak from a position of integrity, that they'll do everything possible to speak truth to power, and that in this case their truth is mine: that this matters, that we are good at it, that we need it and deserve it and can do extraordinary things with it.
Anything else is a lie, and the lie is being told often and at high volume. Any megaphone we can get to dispute it is a blessing. And that's why I support the OTW.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-13 10:45 pm (UTC)From:This whole paragraph *rocks so hard*. I knew there was something about the ML books that just ... grated, but had never pinned it down. This is exactly it -- and it explains why I so *loathed* the Vanyel books, even though I'd been wanting to read Vanyel's story from the opening scene of the very first herald book. I suspect it explains some of my issues with MZB, too...
I like my guys (gay bi or straight) to be strong, competent people with vulnerabilites/fragilities. I like my women to be strong, competent people period. (Strength in this case has more to do with will/intellect/personality than physical nummyness, though that can be nice too :-))
Thank you.
And the rest of the post? Word. Word word word word.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 09:34 pm (UTC)From:I just like my characters to act like people: most people are very competent at the handful of things they happen to be good at and very vulnerable when confronted with the things they are not good at. I mean, it's not rocket science! The world doesn't really fall into "strong, heroic people," "strong, villainous people," and "weak, boring, ordinary people," the way second-rate fantasy novels suggest that it does.