Well, of course someone can read the story under hermeneutic conditions other than the ones I'd like, just as I can read Frank Miller's scans as a ironic deconstruction. Texts don't speak with moral voices in and of themselves, and a resistant reading is always possible and legitimate.
But if we're left assuming that no feminist criticism of anything is possible, that there's no difference between what I'm doing or what Ari is doing or what Miller is doing simply because on a textual level they are similar, then I think we've gone wrong somewhere.
We know how the story functions in a certain community, and that it is part of a conversations. Beyond that, anybody could be reading it, but it's just speculation. But we can talk about representation and spectatorship within the community we have at hand, and as a part of which it was produced. We can talk about who responds in feedback, who recs the fic (and to whom), and how they go about doing so. Anybody with a search engine can read it, but it's a sociological fact that it was written from a position within fandom (which to me implies it was written for fandom).
My sociology class watched Triumphant of the Will as an example of--well, I forget what exactly, but some sociological principle gone. But the fact that we performed a subversive reading doesn't mean we can't talk about representation and spectatorship within Nazi communities.
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Date: 2007-03-29 01:31 pm (UTC)But if we're left assuming that no feminist criticism of anything is possible, that there's no difference between what I'm doing or what Ari is doing or what Miller is doing simply because on a textual level they are similar, then I think we've gone wrong somewhere.
We know how the story functions in a certain community, and that it is part of a conversations. Beyond that, anybody could be reading it, but it's just speculation. But we can talk about representation and spectatorship within the community we have at hand, and as a part of which it was produced. We can talk about who responds in feedback, who recs the fic (and to whom), and how they go about doing so. Anybody with a search engine can read it, but it's a sociological fact that it was written from a position within fandom (which to me implies it was written for fandom).
My sociology class watched Triumphant of the Will as an example of--well, I forget what exactly, but some sociological principle gone. But the fact that we performed a subversive reading doesn't mean we can't talk about representation and spectatorship within Nazi communities.