Race, Class, and Fannish Engagement: A Ramble

[alixtii]

I've been thinking about my race hang-ups, and how much they're really about class.

In general, I'm looking for self-inserts in fanfic, preferably ones that are pretty and female (don't ask me why). Race in and of itself isn't a barrier to identification (I don't think so), but class really can be. I'll read a fic on my flist which is about a character whose experiences are outside my own, and enjoy being challenged, but as a general rule that's not what I'm looking to write. I find it problematic on a political level that there are fewer self-inserts possible to people who don't ascribe to the dominant white culture, but I'd like them to arise naturally. Which they won't do for as long as there is systemic racism, of which the lack of self-inserts is part . . . and we have a vicious circle. (This is why we have affirmative action and political correctness, right? To prioritize the disenfranchised voices until equilibrium is reached?)

I mean, Buffy's a girl who, during high school, routinely would reference Arthur Miller or Samuel Beckett or Jean-Paul Sartre, and she was hardly painted as the most studious of the group. The privileged world of Sunnydale is one to which I can relate and one in which I am (very) interested in interacting with the characters, regardless of their race. The street warrens of Gunn's gang? Not so much, at least not if they are going for gritty realism. (A more idealized lower-class setting, like in Dark Angel, I can get into, and identify with all the characters equally regardless of race.)

Looking at the few instances where race doesn't intersect with class, I seem to be relatively free of hang-ups. I don't respond to Zoe because she's not a character type I'm interested in; I don't get all excited about, say, Starbuck either. Although I'd be more interested in reading pr0n about Kara and that's not a colorblind judgment.

I'm really not playing fair, because if I found the character/actress very attractive I would probably be pushed over into liking the character and wanting to read/write her--and I do think my standards of beauty are in some ways racist. Once I get to know someone in RL it really doesn't make a difference, because I start to judge them on who they are more than what they look like--but when responding to a fictional visual text whether I start out finding the character attractive tends to be more determinative of my future interaction with her (because characters aren't as complex and dynamic as real people?). Although originally I found River attractive and not Summer, which applies my standards of fictional beauty involve more than just the image. (Then I watched some interviews with Summer and now Summer Glau makes me go guh.)

Characters of color who inhabit the milieu I'm interested naturally don't ping me any less that white characters of equal attractiveness (by my standards), I don't think--but I can't think of any examples, at least not of passionate fannish engagement. I like Jackie (from VMArs) and Boomer and Dee (from BSG) but, you know, I'm sort of crazy about Gia Goodman and Madison Sinclair and Specialist Cally. (Mac requires no explanation, because Tina Majorino is teh awesome.) I think the "teh prettiness" factor covers a lot of this, but how big a loophole am I going to let it get before it becomes way problematic?

Caridad I'm uncomfortable with because of the way her race is fetishized in the source text, which makes me uncomfortable using her in my fic as an object of desire. *makes note to write Caridad gen fic* Kennedy--one of my very favorite characters, and probably the hottest character on Buffy--passed as white for me on the show, but the actress is inarguably Latina and I've been wondering how much "my" Kennedy is Latina. (I think "my" Kennedy is half-Latina, but I can't decide if it was her mother or her father who was Latina, whether her half-sister is full-, half-, or not-at-all-Latina, or whether Kennedy identifies with the ethnicity at all, since there's no indication of it on the show.)

And it's not just about class, but about subculture and intelligence and other factors, so that a show like Arrested Development which is about white Americans doesn't ping me at all 'cept when they're talking about incest, because their way of life is far more different than my own than, say, two African-American college professors who are married with children.

But then when I say "when race doesn't intersect with class" isn't that just a prettier way of saying "when non-white characters act white"? And I really don't know. Is Zoe "acting white"? Is Jackie acting white, or just acting upper-class? Are Boomer and Dee acting white?

Also, I'm not sure to what degree race itself acts as a class marker, creating something of a vicious cycle. Are there really any indications in the text of, say, Rona's class?

But I think it all comes back to who I think is pretty (apparently I am very shallow), and . . . yeah.

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

But if we turn to Firefly-fangirls-who-like-blokes, it's hard to think of Jayne as a member of the upper crust, but he's very popular and oft-fancied, and Wash (who I think of as skilled-working-class or lower middle class) also has a following, and many if not most of the fangirls of my acquaintance are at least mid-middle class and a lot of them are academics or have managerial or professional jobs. For that matter, Mal gets lots of lurv but seldom for his petit bourgeois class origins.

(Just for you: my het icon!)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't want to talk about other people's motives, especially since I'm talking about racism, but I can say that I don't reallly understand the Jayne love. Kaylee is probably the analogue in my own fannish life, but she's not so much a point of identification for me as an object of desire, and it's painful sometimes to put those ain't's and don't never's in there. (Hell, it hurts sometimes to make Dawn strand her prepositions and use "who" instead of "whom." Writing Moriarty was a blast.) (While in Buffy I tend to identify not at all with most of the male characters other than Giles, in Firefly I identify about equally with the male and female characters. Mal and Simon are huge points of identification wrt: desiring Kaylee.) Then again, speech patterns notwithstanding, it's difficult to make statements of class about her. Her lack of formal education, while frustrating for someone like me who very much sees the world through the lenses given me by academic, is counterbalanced somewhat by her position as a skilled technician (a lower middle-class, send-your-kids-to-college job) and everything we can say about class is problematized by the fact that they live on a spaceship in their own mini-society and are criminals and rebels.

[glacierscout.livejournal.com]

I don't get the fangirling about any particular character, but then, I'm not a big reader of fanfic anyway. In terms of the self-identification with individuals in fiction, media or real life, i see it working on three axes, not just two. They are race, class and intelligence/education.

An ordinary racist just can't get past race as a means of identifying with people. A racist will also conflate class and education with race as well. I live in one of the most racially-segregated towns in the United States. The two dominant subgroups in town are urban, inner-city blacks and white Appalachians. They each look down on each other, due to the race issues, but they also enforce class and education standards on members of their own group. Black kids get beat up and insulted as "too white" if they seek a good education". White kids (especially girls) are also shunned for trying to get educated, if they delay marriage or childbirth, or if they seek something other than a blue-collar job.

For those of us like me who live in the suburbs, or are middle to upper class residents of the center city, we find class and education to be the stronger identifications. My Episcopal church is integrated, but the 10% of the church who are black are generally first or second generation African or West Indian immigrants, who are just as uncomfortable with black urban culture as I am. The former pastor of the church that sponsors our Scout troop is black, and so is a Scout leader who recently joined our troop. Both of them have little in common with the "black culture", and most of their friends and associates are middle-class, educated whites.

[gloss]

But then when I say "when race doesn't intersect with class" isn't that just a prettier way of saying "when non-white characters act white"?
God, I hope not.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, I hope not too. But it sits a little too close to the myth of colorblindness (where "why can't we all act the same?" means "why can't we all act like me") for me to be completely comfortable with it.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I never wrote it, but I'd love to see fics where Gunn and Principal Wood interact because that would be a pure example of class differences.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

What sort of interaction are you thinking of? Most post-"Chosen" fics that don't ignore Wood completely have him interacting with Giles in some capacity, with liz_marcs' "Living History" being the first to come to mind.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Awww, I'm a big ol' slasher so that's my first reaction for a lot of guy dyads, but Gunn and Wood could also be an initially-wary-then-Beautiful-Friendship kind of thing.

In the BtVS/Friday Night Lights fic I'm working on, Wood gets to use his expertise as the new principal after the Hellmouth moves to Dillon and his predecessor gets devoured by Panther-possessed students...

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

It's posts like this that really bring home to me how very different US culture is from ours.

What the heck does "act white" mean, for example? Am I "acting white"? How could I tell? I mean, I am about as white as it's possible to get, what with all my ancestors for at least the last 500 years (probably closer to 1000, but the records for non-artistocracy don't go back farther than about the early 1500s) coming from two relatively small areas in Sweden and Norway. But how's that supposed to affect the way I act?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, "act white" means something along the lines of "act in accordance with the dominant culture" with, you know, the understanding that the dominant culture is not really a nice culture and does a lot to keep all different types of people down, with people of color and queers and women at the front of the line. It's really an understanding that US culture isn't a melting pot, and the people who want to make it that way usually presuppose the result would be everyone acting just the way they--that is, god-fearing white people--act. In other words, erasing difference rather than embracing it.

Is that any clearer?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

I think I understand. It's not really supposed to apply outside the US, is it?

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I . . . can't say. I suppose it applies outside the U.S. insofar as systemic racism and white privilege exist outside the U.S.?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

I get the feeling that the term needs not only that, but systemic inequalities that work in the same way as yours do. And I can't think of any other country that has a population composition that's anything close to that of the USA.

For example, I don't think we have racism the way you do. We have congruent inequalities, of course, but it's far more based on ethnicity than on physical appearance, and ethnicity is way more diverse and complex than skin colour is. Another huge difference is that large-scale immigration here started in the late 1960s, so that entire class of problem is still really new. So "act white" doesn't work here, since "white" is not a recognizable group. That would put, for example, Swedes and Finns in the same group, and that just doesn't work. A Swede and a Finn may look the same, but the Finn will have a harder time getting a job. Unless, to make the example more complicated, he's got the specific accent of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, in which case he is one of Us™ and considered all right. And to this day, if he's Romani with a Finnish-sounding name there are some shops that won't let him in, since Everybody Knows™ that all of Them™ are thieves.

That was actually a bit jarring the first time I saw Buffy. They treated Jenny Calendar's Romani background as something basically exotic and cool, while all my baggage from childhood have them pegged as the lowest of the low (well, all right, "Kalderash" doesn't sound Finnish, so it's not quite the lowest possible).

I think this entire class of problem is very hard to understand if you didn't grow up in it. I've had serious relationships with English women twice, but I've never been able to quite figure out their class system. It seems to be totally intuitive to them, and completely opaque to me.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

It would certainly be applicable in, say, Britain and France, where there's been a lot of people wanting immigrants to assimilate and integrate into the society without fundamentally changing it and immigrants who refuse to change their way of life just to suit the dominant culture.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Not at all true. Your post doesn't ring true to me at all. Race, class, nationality (and regionality for those of us that hang onto our local accents) and indeed religion are very different things in terms of how people divide up over here to what you've described. I certainly find it easier to write characters who have something in common with people I've known, but I've known such a diverse mix of people (lived with and worked with/for everyone from inhabitants of an ex-mining village with high unemployment to the Duchess of Devonshire) that it hardly resticts me at all, except when I want to ask a particular individual about something and am no longer in contact with them.

One of the problems in the back of my mind when writing someone like Taj of my Taj-and-Susan novel is finding the intersection between Cosmic as I knew him in Edinburgh (more Brummie-via-London than Brum-Asian in both accent and outlook) and the Sikhs I went to school with in Sheffield, because I need to figure out the process by which someone would move away from the culture they were brought up in and what they in particular would hang onto. I suspect Cosmic was a product of the state school system, although I never asked, which again diverges from how I write Taj.

comment of extreme length part 1

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

Interesting. As a Brit who lives in the US and is interested in the construction of race both here and there, I've been thinking about this since you posted. The differing constructions of race and class between the US and Europe, specifically the UK and different parts of the UK, is something I spend a lot of tine mulling over... I understand where the comments pointing out the contingency of the construction of race your post alludes to are coming from, and I also understand, I think, the background that leads to that construction. These are my thoughts, and I don't claim any kind of authority for them; I'm just pointing out a couple of places where your post made me go 'but what about...?'

Buffy's a girl who, during high school, routinely would reference Arthur Miller or Samuel Beckett or Jean-Paul Sartre, and she was hardly painted as the most studious of the group. The privileged world of Sunnydale is one to which I can relate and one in which I am (very) interested in interacting with the characters, regardless of their race.

Okay, certainly Sunnydale is an immensely privileged world. But is that *class* privilege best signified by Buffy's ability to quote Sartre, dead white man though he be? Class does not equal education. Education may be a route to a change in class status, and education and access to education provides cultural capital which enables class mobility, and cultural capital of the kind Buffy demonstrates is certainly structured to further a white and economically privileged perception of the world... But reading and being able to quote is not in itself a signifier of class, nor is it "acting white" when a person of color does it. Class (and this is from my European perspective) intersects with education, but it doesn't equal education: it is also about economics, about work, about ownership, and about identity. In Britain, university-educated homeowning professionals will identify as working-class; I am never sure what to do with my own class status because I grew up living on benefits and my family has no economic cushion, but everyone is hyperliterate and can quote Sartre at the drop of a hat. Which is not to say that American-class-on-TV is as complex as that, because it clearly isn't, and Sunnydale is a ridiculous white-middle-class monoculture. But I did feel that they explored some class issues with Xander post-highschool, and when Buffy was being investigated for her fitness to look after Dawn.

when I say "when race doesn't intersect with class" isn't that just a prettier way of saying "when non-white characters act white"?

Let me see now... no. I mean, I understand what you're saying about the colourblindness of race-on-TV where characters of color are only allowed to be on screen if they are completely assimilated in a sea of whiteness that surrounds them; certainly US TV seems to be pretty terrified of cultural difference and only capable of representing it in an offensively fetishised way (even Veronica Mars, which started out so well, ended up with Weevil on display as the objectified raced/classed Other for a roomful of college students). BUT calling education or even participation in dominant-culture ideologies "acting white" is enormously problematic, I think. One of the things about the dominance of white culture is that everyone has access to lots of aspects of it, because it's dominant, but because it's "white" it is seen as some kind of traitorship for people of color to participate––and that is not okay, in my opinion. So I'd be REALLY wary of talking about anything as 'acting white.'

comment of extreme length part 2

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

As for the rest... I think you have to remember (and I think that you *are* but maybe not taking the next step into being critical of it?) that neither the representation of racialised characters on TV nor your own desires are innocent here, both having been formed in a racist culture (and that goes for non-Americans too; in fact, being the US with its heightened awareness of race issues has raised my awareness about many aspects of racial and post-imperial politics in the UK which the country's self-perception and obsession with class had blinded me to before). We don't just *happen* to be drawn to characters who are white, middle-class etc; those are the characters who get the interesting portrayals, storylines, the best writing because there is such fear of giving such prominence to a character of color, a fear which probably comes about partly through an awareness that the majority of white viewers will not be willing or able to identify with a character who is not 'like them'. Vicious circle.

Some of this comes out of my awareness of critical race theory and some of it, I dare say, comes out of my ass. I'll let you/posterity be the judge of which parts...

Re: comment of extreme length part 2

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I think you have to remember (and I think that you *are* but maybe not taking the next step into being critical of it?) that neither the representation of racialised characters on TV nor your own desires are innocent here, both having been formed in a racist culture. [. . .] We don't just *happen* to be drawn to characters who are white, middle-class etc; those are the characters who get the interesting portrayals, storylines, the best writing

Buffy in particular, and the Jossverse in general, pretty much sucks in its representations of persons of color. I was taking that much for granted because it's been discussed to death already, most people on my flist acknowledge it as a fact without any argument, and there's not much anybody can say about it that hasn't been said or, for that matter, do about it. Sometimes I think the very fact of its suckiness is supposed to be a statement on race (Sunnydale as a priveleged white community does make sense to me), but even if so it's not really an effective one. It can be read either way, I think.

As for my own desires, that's what I was trying to interrogate in this post. Out of the few female characters of color, I don't fangirl any of them as strongly as I do white (minor) characters such as Kennedy (reading her as white), Amanda, Vi, Amy, etc. I find that problematic, as I discuss in the post.

Re: comment of extreme length part 2

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

As for my own desires, that's what I was trying to interrogate in this post.

I get that. I don't want to put you on the defensive. And I may not be in Jossverse fandom per se, but I am aware of the conversations around its representations of race. What I was trying to say was that I see you saying 'these are the race/class limits that structure my interest and desire' but I don't see you saying 'how might I think about this differently?' I confess that it's partly a personal academic bugbear of mine about work that looks at something and says "this is problematic" and then skate lightly over to the next thing without making any suggestion for how the problematic stuff can be addressed; it's something I have been as guilty of myself as the next person, and looking at your post again I don't actually think you're doing it, since you are talking about writing fic about different characters and so on... So I guess I retract that part, but not the rest of the stuff I raised! On which, long tortuous reply shortly. ;)

Re: comment of extreme length part 2

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

There are things I can do to modify my interests and desire--although some them work better in theory in practice when one doesn't have access to diverse real-world environments--but I do think the most important thing is to just understand how my interests and desires are structured by race/class limits. I don't feel particularly guilty about the way this is the case--I, like everyone else, have been abused by the patriarchy--but I find it important that I don't perpetuate these structures, or let them control my behavior in places where my behavior has effects on other people. If I find White Woman X more attractive than Black Woman Y, fine, but if I'm in charge of hiring or some such I need to hyperaware of how my biases may be prejudicing me in ways that would be invisible without intense scrutiny.

Pr0n is particularly complicated in this regard, as it effects are relatively subtle. It seems silly to say that I--even in my privileged position--should be writing pr0n I don't find hot, after all. In general my response to "not enough X" isn't to tell the producers of Y they should be making X but to find a way to privelege the disenfranchised (often disenfranchised by their not being enough X to begin with, thus vicious circle) voices which are producing X. What a fannish affirmative action program would look like I have no idea, though.

The mere act of writing pr0n doesn't give me the get out of jail free card I'd give to queer and/or female writers, though, since the fact that my gender/sexuality hasn't been exactly timid in getting what it wants in the area means it's not automatically a subversive act in the same way.

As for everything else, I think we agree far more than we disagree, if we even actually disagree at all.

and incidentally

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

It speaks interestingly to my US focus in matters of race that I always spell 'people of color' without a u, but colour in other informal contexts (I spell American in my formal writing for a US audience)? Because 'of colour' isn't a formulation that's really used in the UK, I always associate it with the American spelling...

Re: comment of extreme length part 1

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

But is that *class* privilege best signified by Buffy's ability to quote Sartre, dead white man though he be? Class does not equal education. Education may be a route to a change in class status, and education and access to education provides cultural capital which enables class mobility, and cultural capital of the kind Buffy demonstrates is certainly structured to further a white and economically privileged perception of the world... But reading and being able to quote is not in itself a signifier of class

Erm . . . isn't it? I certainly consider, even upon reflection, those things to be signifiers of class, often more important than other signifiers of class (including income). And certainly Buffy's allusiveness derives less from education in the formal sense than from her inculturation in a class culture.

I understand what you're saying about the colourblindness of race-on-TV where characters of color are only allowed to be on screen if they are completely assimilated in a sea of whiteness that surrounds them;

Well, it's not just on TV--in the "real world" persons of color are just as forced to leave behind the social markers of their racial heritage (other than the skin itself, of course, which they're stuck with) and subcultures in order to ascend to positions to power. It's "folksy" when Pres. Bush uses bad grammar and signs of dialect, but just watch someone try to run for office who speaks Vernacular Black English ("ebonics").

One of the things about the dominance of white culture is that everyone has access to lots of aspects of it, because it's dominant, but because it's "white" it is seen as some kind of traitorship for people of color to participate––and that is not okay, in my opinion.

I agree that it's problematic to attack the actions of an individual, just as it's not okay for a deluded "feminist" to attack a woman for taking her husband's name, staying home, and raising children. But just as a trend of that sort can be problematic, the trend wherein persons of color do have to turn their backs on the subcultures they came from in order to rise to power is both real and problematic--and very likely (as I understand it) to be seen as a betrayal on the part of those who remain within the subculture. It's certainly problematic for American culture and its diversity itself if aspects of those subcultures are being killed off as individuals are forced to integrate and assimilate.

Re: comment of extreme length part 1

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I think that the way you experience cultural capital as synonymous with class and the way I experience it as part of class but insufficient to account for it is a signifier of how differently discourses of class function in the UK and in Europe. Something that's maybe telling is that the UK's equivalent of affirmative action is to try to get more "working-class" students into higher education – and they don't stop being "working-class" when they get there. In the US, class is experienced as mobile: you get educated, you become middle class. In the UK, class is experienced as written and performed in the body: you keep your class background as an identity marker throughout your life, even as your economic status changes. Personally, I think that it's most usefully accounted for as somewhere in between those two: neither assuming that one's experience doesn't change as one moves through different social milieus, nor assuming that one can completely abandon one's roots. Also, I think class is situated less in what you know than in what uses you make of it: if you've spent half your life reading Sartre but you have to work three minimum-wage jobs in order to survive, does that make you middle-class? I would say no; sounds like you would say yes, and that is perhaps the difference in our personal experiences of the way 'class' narratives are constructed.

I have a bit of a problem with calling racial formations "subcultures." To me, subculture implies a formation around cultural production that comes together through choice of some kind, a community built by consensus rather than birth. Fandom is a subculture, the queer community may be a subculture depending on how one experiences it, there are lots of different subcultures within communities of color; but racialised identity does not subcultural participation make. This is my academic cultural studies background speaking, I think; for what you are describing, I think I would be inclined to say something like "natal community". Nitpick nitpick mcnitpick.

It's "folksy" when Pres. Bush uses bad grammar and signs of dialect, but just watch someone try to run for office who speaks Vernacular Black English ("ebonics").

Yes, and this fact demonstrates the systemic racism of the US. But not every African American person in the US speaks AAVE as their native dialect, and they are not "less black" if they don't.

The trend wherein persons of color do have to turn their backs on the subcultures they came from in order to rise to power is both real and problematic--and very likely (as I understand it) to be seen as a betrayal on the part of those who remain within the subculture.

Yes, but again, being of color does not mean being a member of a particular subculture, in that there are multiple subcultures/communities and multiple class formations within any racial formation. And just because people can be seen as betraying their communities by taking certain actions doesn't mean they *are* betraying them. I really don't mean to sound assimilationist; what I'm trying to suggest is that assimilation is not the only narrative for what happens when the resources of the dominant culture are taken up by those who don't belong to it. Mapping race onto class so simply leaves race-betrayal as the only narrative available for those who don't follow the class-paths ascribed by their racial roots, and I don't think that's okay, even if there are times when it may not be wholly inappropriate. It doesn't leave any space for moving between what you call subcultures and I call communities in order to work for social change, for example, or for participation in multiple communities. What I left unsaid in my post was that POC often have competence in dominant AND in marginalised cultures: to read the capacity for the former as a betrayal of the latter doesn't make sense to me, from whichever side the critique is coming.

Re: comment of extreme length part 1

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

But not every African American person in the US speaks AAVE as their native dialect, and they are not "less black" if they don't.

My impulse is to treat race as I do gender: as a complicated interaction between self-identity, behavior, and social interpellation. Is there anything obvious wrong with this? (Thinking aloud as I re-read my post.)

Re: comment of extreme length part 1

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Okay, certainly Sunnydale is an immensely privileged world. But is that *class* privilege best signified by Buffy's ability to quote Sartre, dead white man though he be?

Buffy's Sartre-quoting was less the best signifier of Buffy's class culture as it was the best example of the elements in Buffy's class culture which pinged me, and which might be absent from other class cultures, thus explaining in part why Dawn Summers would be my favorite character while Alonna Gunn (an African-American character from the L.A. warrens) held my interest not a whit.

Re: comment of extreme length part 1

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

BUT calling education or even participation in dominant-culture ideologies "acting white" is enormously problematic, I think.

Looking back, I think I was deliberately using the most problematic phrasing possible in order to underscore the potential problematizability of my thought process.

In addition, in at least one case--that of Kennedy--a character played by an actress of color passed as white to me in part no doubt because of her participation in dominant culture ideologies (she was painted as, if anything, upper class, with a summer house in some upscale location or other).