I Aim to Misbehave

[alixtii]

You know what what? In some ways, I think I miss the days when everyone in fandom thought fanfic was illegal. (I say this is as someone who entered fandom in 2004, so I'm not sure if there has exactly been a sea-change, but it sure feels like it to me.) Because now everyone's on about what we can do to look like fine upstanding citizens, and at least when we thought we were criminals we were more genuinely subversive. When we thought we were all committing copyright infringement, other things which may have been illegal but ethical, like providing porn to teenagers, didn't seem like such a big deal. But now the "fanfic is legal" zeitgesit is taking over, and everyone's calling for us to clean up our acts, and I have to wonder what exactly we're losing out on.

The specific post that got me to post this is this one, "Looking Ahead as Fen," but it's nothing new and mirrors conversations I've been seeing going on all through the FanLib and Strikethrough07 discussions.

I don't like disclaimers (and for the most part don't use them), don't like warnings (and only warn for rape), don't like ratings (I've switched to just using "Work Safe" and "NWS," and am thinking about a "Maybe Work Safe" option). I refuse to flock a post just because it contains adult content (even if that content is incest or cross-gen). I've ranted about most of these issues (often in metafandom-linked posts) before, and the idea that we have to start doing these things (making our art and literature fit into cookie-cutter boxes) to make ourselves acceptable to the Man just sort of makes me retch.

Let's be bad guys?

Comments

deleted from wrong place in thread and reposted (I hope)

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

I'm not really sure I see your point. When I was in Trek fandom in the seventies, I never heard about slash (still grumpy), learned about it through academic presentations.

The disclaimer, warnings, issues, was well in place when I came back to fandom in 2003 (meaning online LJ LOTR fandom), with all sorts of kerfuffles if people didn't "warn" for x, y, or z (heck, in some lotr spaces, "hobbit/man interspecies" was supposed to be a warning for those people too upset with hobbit/man sex (which apparently on some of ye olden days listservs was equated with pedophilia, driving the interspecies folks early into LJ to set up their own comms).

Having read some great posts (think one was by cesperanza, I'm about to cut the disclaimers (except at least one comm I just joined, pirategasm requires disclaimers (and this isn't new, they're like 2K members, been around since the first pirate movie, probably set up within a day of it if not sometime before).

Warnings--eh, I warn for the darker things. I'd rather be over-warning than trigger somebody.

But where's all this other stuff coming? I lock down my more personal stuff to my flist but all my fan meta and adult/nonworksafe fics are posted openly (and after a request from a fan in China--where they apparently have moved to block all citizen access to LJ!!!!--I have allowed Google spiders and opened up my entries to RSS feed). I've set up a professional real life journal and will be (soon) coming out. I spent a couple of hours last night writing my application to astolat for volunteering to help out with fanarchive. I haven't seen a call to "clean up our acts."

What's recently happened has been building ever since fandom went public on the internet (even with some of the locked comms and such, a lot of what we do is there).

Good point: a lot of people found us and joined us (a lot of the slashers I've known found the LOTR slash while just googling characters' or actors' names).

Bad point: the media can write about us (some well, some pretty badly--and I suspect some of the better articles come from people who are also fans). Academia, ditto (*points at self and a bunch of friends*).

When I compare being in Star Trek fandom, in an Outpost, attending conferences, interacting with other fans for something like four-five years and *never learn of slash* because it was under the table, locked down, and I never met the criteria to be told versus being on LJ and have people in China, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Canada, reading my stuff, and me reading theirs, and us talking and getting together--well, it's better, that's all I can say.

I don't consider either the media nor academia give fandom validation--but in today's world, it's not possible to hide out either (even back then, I remember an Outpost members' Star Trek themed wedding getting featured on a Seattle news station to be pointed at and mocked).

I'll go read the post you link to--but you know, saying that fandom was always wild and free and unfettered sort of ignores all the demands for conformity w/in fandom, all the exclusions and marginalizations (*eek get those furries outta my comm*), etc.

Becuase I am a queer woman, and because I tend to interpret everything in my terms, as we all tend to do, I see these latest events (the latest wave in a long movement of the tide, so to speak) as coming out of the closet. That's a very long and complex and messy process, and every individual will do it differently, and there's no right set of rules for everybody.

But it's coming--and I think it's more than time.

Very nice to glory in being all illegal and such (and you know that's not going away--*lots* of people cannot come out publicly by their real name!), but there are problems with it as well.

I may be misunderstanding your post entirely--but I can only say that on my flist and comms and such, I've seen no such sentiments expressed.

*goes to read link*

Re: deleted from wrong place in thread and reposted (I hope)

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

*shrugs*

That fan is living in another universe than I do.

As far as I know the mainstream media has discovered fandom way back when and periodically covers it.

Nor is there a single msm that we can interact with to preserve our image--and this call for unity! Wow.

I already have offline interactions with fans in my community--granted, mostly at academic conferences, because, whoa Texas! rural Texas! (actually one of my former students is now on my flist--there aren't that many fans around here).

The standardizing ratings--whoa boy, let's not even go there--and some of the other stuff--totally unrealistic.

I guess I just cannot take that sort of thing seriously, nor, I suspect, will much of fandom.