I was stumped on the "canon whore" question since it seemed counterintuitive to say that a "canon prude" or "canon virgin" was, well, someone who took reckless liberties with canon.
Exactly! Which was why I was thinking canon slut, which seemed to better fit the reckless liberties, but wasn't semantically removed far enough from "whore." Despite my acknowledgement above that "I do suppose whores have more discipline, so to speak, than sluts." And there does seem to be something problematic about using both sex workers and the sexually promiscuous in our terminology.
Well, the concept of canon whoredom requires, if not a single privileged meaning (which the authorial intent people of course have, or at least claim to have), than a set of priveleged meanings which exclude a set of other meanings. One can see me working towards this in some of my earlier meta in which I try to perform a conceptual analysis of what makes something AU. Making Tara a robot doesn't make a fic AU, because we don't know she isn't, but...
...but what? If you take it far enough, there really isn't anything that can't be reconciled with canon with enough fanwanking, even if it seems like a fairly straightfoward objective claim like what was written on Buffy's tombstone. The text becomes radically manipulatable, and there are no priveleged meanings--which is pretty much where I am now. A Wittgensteinian response would probably be to recognize that within a group of socially positioned readers, certain meanings would emerge as more central than others, in the way that a microwave oven is less "oven"-y than a toaster oven, but would resist the notion that we could ever systematize that spectrum, since to do so would require a position outside of language. That is, to the Wittgensteinian, what is important is that it "feels right," which is I think what we go for in fanfic over and above technical accuracy. So we end up with an approach that actually priveleges fanon over canon.
Anyway, I do think that the impulse, which I manifested as a baby fan, to delineate a set of acceptable meanings is a gendered one, especially insofar as it seeks to ally the gendered subject with a system of Authority against the violator. These issues have been brought up in fandebate, but the best example might have been that guy in fanficrants who claimed that all the people who were writing SPN/BtVS should a) use comics canon, b) use the "right" interpretation of canon, in which Willow's level of power in comparison to that which they've seen in the Winchester's universe was X. Bargining in and telling the women how to write their stories. Not to mention how it fits into the fanboy stereotype of knowing all of the exact technical specs of the Enterprise. All the focus on facts and dates and measurements, and relatively little on character--my (previously-held) notion of canon-whoredom/AU-ness just sort of shrugged and swept that into a separate category of OOCness, and then ignored it.
no subject
Exactly! Which was why I was thinking canon slut, which seemed to better fit the reckless liberties, but wasn't semantically removed far enough from "whore." Despite my acknowledgement above that "I do suppose whores have more discipline, so to speak, than sluts." And there does seem to be something problematic about using both sex workers and the sexually promiscuous in our terminology.
Well, the concept of canon whoredom requires, if not a single privileged meaning (which the authorial intent people of course have, or at least claim to have), than a set of priveleged meanings which exclude a set of other meanings. One can see me working towards this in some of my earlier meta in which I try to perform a conceptual analysis of what makes something AU. Making Tara a robot doesn't make a fic AU, because we don't know she isn't, but...
...but what? If you take it far enough, there really isn't anything that can't be reconciled with canon with enough fanwanking, even if it seems like a fairly straightfoward objective claim like what was written on Buffy's tombstone. The text becomes radically manipulatable, and there are no priveleged meanings--which is pretty much where I am now. A Wittgensteinian response would probably be to recognize that within a group of socially positioned readers, certain meanings would emerge as more central than others, in the way that a microwave oven is less "oven"-y than a toaster oven, but would resist the notion that we could ever systematize that spectrum, since to do so would require a position outside of language. That is, to the Wittgensteinian, what is important is that it "feels right," which is I think what we go for in fanfic over and above technical accuracy. So we end up with an approach that actually priveleges fanon over canon.
Anyway, I do think that the impulse, which I manifested as a baby fan, to delineate a set of acceptable meanings is a gendered one, especially insofar as it seeks to ally the gendered subject with a system of Authority against the violator. These issues have been brought up in