Classism and Working-Class Characters in Fandom

[alixtii]

This post by kattahj made me think about the intersection of racism and classism in deciding who gets written in fanfiction. Now, of course I think it is silly to say that "it is really just about class" or "it's really just about race"; the two work intersectionally in complicated ways. But if we agree with kattahj that CoC's are more likely to get written if they aren't coded as working class (and I've come to this conclusion about my own writing already long ago) then it'd be interesting to see if we tend not to write working-class white characters in the same way.

I'm not including the crew of Serenity at all in this analysis, since they exist within a completely constructed fictional socio-economic system created precisely for the purpose of making the main cast's lives seem interesting, but I think we certainly do respond differently to Simon than, say, Jayne (in my part, with identification with the former and almost complete disinterest with the latter). The Weasley family, were I even to know enough Harry Potter canon to speak intelligently about them, would probably be set apart under the same logic. Similarly, I'm not including vampires or other characters that are unable to participate in the normal socioeconomic structures because they are set apart as nonhuman.

I don't tend to watch shows with a lot of working-class characters, since they are less likely to provide me the type of wish-fulfillment I'm looking for in my entertainment (which is precisely the kind of dynamic I'm talking about here), so, um . . . it's a rather short list. Please help me add to it!

Notes
By "class" I mean the sociological something-or-other (I'm much less versed in class theory than I am in gender, queer, or even race theory) which is the cumulative result of economic status and a complex system of social markers (occupation, neighborhood of residence, accent, speech patterns, education, circle of friends, etc.). I'm assuming that fandom could[n't] care less what Rupert Giles' salary as a Watcher was, but that his education and breadth of knowledge make him attractive to write; Buffy's ability to quote Sartre and Arthur Miller seemingly without effort disqualifies her from being working-class. (And yes, this assumption is itself classist in fascinating and disturbing ways, ways which I wish I knew enough class theory to be able to problematize further.)

I'm taking it for granted that our source canons deal horribly with class issues (as they do with racial ones), but that there are objectively interesting working-class characters in our canons (in the way that there are interesting female characters and interesting characters of color).

Nonwhite racial cultures are (almost?) automatically coded as working-class. I feel this is important to mention despite the fact that since all of these characters are white, it doesn't apply to any of them. But this is a reason why even if classism seems a sufficient explanation for why working-class characters of color get written less, that classism would still in all probability be racially-motivated. The way we construct the class structure is itself racist.

Feel free to criticize any of my assumptions in the comments; I'm in over my head here.

Okay, now let's get to the list. . . .

Faith
It certainly cannot be argued that Faith does not get written in Buffy fandom, especially concerning her status as only being a recurring character to has nowhere near the screentime of an Anya or Tara. Now part of this just down to Eliza Dushku being Eliza Dushku. But if we look at her character, what do we see? A character whose working-class coding and Slayerness are so caught up in each other that they interact in interesting ways. While at the beginning of her arc Faith is living her life in a run-down motel, her Slaying provides her an outlet to escape from the very beginning, as she manifests the "want, take, have" mentality (she is effectively able to rely on her Slayer capabilities to produce cultural capital), and the overall structure of her story is ultimately one of upward mobility; by "Chosen" she is still coded as working-class in terms of social markers, but she is relatively free of economic concerns and so those social markers are able to be fetishized without playing any meaningful part in the actual life of the character.

Xander Harris
Like Faith, Xander gets a lot of fic. Not much written by me, but in m/m slash fandom I know he's commonly paired with Spike. Angel, and other men.

Now Xander's family is coded as poor and in some ways working-class (and this is uniformly portrayed as a negative), but I'd argue that while Xander is made to materially feel the effect of his family lower economic status, he is always coded as firmly middle-class in terms of social markers. As a geek figure, he is an easy and deliberate audience identification figure, and speaks a language which is coded in many ways as middle-class white male. Note also that like Faith he is upwardly mobile; by the end of the series he is, however implausible, solidly middle-class in terms of not only social but also economic indices.

Cindy Mackenzie
When Mac was introduced, her class issues dominated her character: she was the perpetrator of an elaborate con in an attempt to get back at the rich kids and to get money for a new car which she desperately needed. Then the show itself went on to seriously drop the ball on these issues, never bringing up money in regard to Mac again, focusing only on her solidly-coded-middle-class computer skills, having her date an 09er, and show up at college without a word as to how she was paying for it. Mac gets a decent amount of fic, being involved in several popular het and femslash pairings.

Veronica Mars
Everything above for Mac goes double for Veronica. Veronica was never meaningfully coded as lower-class, as she spent her childhood as a honorary 02er. As the eponymous character, she features in a large share of VMars fic.

Rose Tyler
Obviously, there is a whole lot of Rose fic, by virtue of her being the female lead of the first two seasons of new Who. Just as obviously, Rose is freed from the constraints of her working-class life when the Doctor rescues her from the shop where she works while retaining several of the relevant social markers (her accent being the most obvious, I believe? British culture is not my specialty).

Jackie Tyler
I don't know how the fic writers respond to Jackie, who unlike Rose maintains her class identification until the very very end (when she and alt!Pete get together). Obviously she is written less than Rose, but exactly how much so I have no clue.

Dean and Sam Winchester
I don't watch this show, and thus don't know anything about them (except that Sam makes a really hot girl--I do read the genderswap). I know, of course, that there's a massive amount of fic written about them.

Kendra, Normal, Sketchy, and Other Dark Angel Characters
Do these even get written at all? I'm not really familiar with the fandom, but my impression that the main white characters to get written were Logan--obviously not working-class--and Jensen's character (who probably falls under the nonhuman exemption). Lydeker's not exactly working-class either (although his coding is rather complicated).

Conclusion (tentative since the preliminary sample size is so small)
There does seem to be some interest in working with characters who still carry the social markers of a working-class identity, as in the cases of Faith and Rose Tyler. (How deep and accurate these social markers are, both in the source text and in fic, is a question I am not qualified to answer, although I think there are meaningful ways that both characters do begin to act in accord with a middle-class ideal as they become upwardly mobile economically.) Re-reading the comments to my March 2007 post linked above, it seems fandom is perfectly willing to play with characters who are coded as working-class in what heyiya calls a UK discourse of class, in which "class is experienced as written and performed in the body," but less eager to do so according to what she calls the American discourse in which class is more closely linked to cultural capacity and thus "is experienced as mobile: you get educated, you become middle class." (I'm condensing a lot of thought here; heyiya, is there something crucial I've missed or misrepresented?)

I do think that fandom is less likely to write working-class characters, in general, than middle-class (and upper-class) characters. My intellectual and emotional responses to how problematic this is are somewhat in contradiction.

Even if the true nature of their working-class status is in dispute, it does seem that enough working-class white characters do get written to be able to say that they get written more often than working-class characters of color, and thus classism in fandom is not a sufficient explanation for why working-class characters of color are not written as much as one would otherwise expect. This conclusion shocks approximately no one.

Comments

[thete1.livejournal.com]

I stopped watching the show in first season, just to put that out there, but... hmm. I don't think when people speak about misogyny on SPN they're saying "OMG DEAN IS A MISOGYNIST" as opposed to saying "Oh, fucking hell, they're making Dean sound like a misogynist/the things he's saying are misogynistic and interfere with my otherwise positive feelings about the character."

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, but...the people I grew up around who talk like Sam and Dean are not misogynists, and I'm suspicious of the motives of people who are obviously not working-class Southerners who judge them because they don't talk like middle-class people who have gone to college and taken gender studies, queer theory and racial studies? Particularly Dean--Sam probably did take some of that stuff as an occasional elective and he stares at Dean sometimes the way I sometimes stare at my first husband who is still my friend (married at 19 divorced at 21, ain't West Virginia grand?) but also not a misogynist.

The people I grew up around who talk like my brother (who is in fact a misogynist as well as a racist and a homophobe), are misogynists. I'm not sure I can completely quantify the difference, but I might give it a shot sometime if I don't have to do it from a defensive position. (I really hate the way serious and potentially illuminating discussions get hostile and turn into wank in fandom.)

[thete1.livejournal.com]

I think what it comes down to, for me, is the fact that it's entirely possible for a well-meaning but ignorant person to say things that are racist, homophobic, anti-semitic, misogynistic and/or all those other nasty things without being a bigot. On the other side of it -- the fact that X character/person might not be a bigot doesn't free them from having to deal with the consequences of having said a bigoted thing. In terms of SPN fandom...

Well, honestly, *that* means that people who interrogate the text and bring up the very real problematic aspects of Dean's vocabulary have every right to do so and are not, necessarily, passing judgment on what we're supposed to view as being Dean's class as a whole. They're passing judgment on the deeply problematic vocabulary, and on the ways the show chooses to have Dean use it. The fact that he doesn't show misogynistic behavior in other ways (I'm assuming, as I've yet to hear differently) does not let him off the hook for speaking like a misogynist.

The fact that you have difficulty expressing the subtleties of why you feel that's not so... well, honestly, if it's all that subtle -- and all sorts of fans of different races, classes, ethnicities, levels of education, political focus, etc., etc., etc. just aren't seeing it -- then maybe the writers ought to think more deeply about the choices they make for Dean's dialogue.

It sucks to feel like you have to go on the defensive, it really does. But what, exactly, are you defending?

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I suppose I feel it would be unrealistic for Dean to talk like he's had queer theory in college (which he didn't go to) and that if the writers chose only language that aca-fans would like, he wouldn't come off as working-class at all.

I suppose I think the reason I feel the writers are (mostly) doing okay--there've been a few recent episodes where Dean felt "off"--is because the people who object to what Dean says are people who do not seem to come from his background. The fans I know whose backgrounds are closer to Dean's generally feel that he rings true and doesn't come off misogynist. If there are people from Southern or lower Midwestern working-class backgrounds who think Dean's talking like a misogynist, I don't know who they are.

One of the things about classism is that it often manifests itself as a standard of polite discourse that you can't possibly hope to meet if you don't have that kind of education, you know? This is similar to the "tone" criticism often levelled at people of colour in which your argument is not addressed, only the way you went about making it.

I think part of the reason I am having a hard time quantifying these nuances is that I have to switch registers to do it. There's the language I used when I was getting my master's degree, the language I use when I talk to my friends back home in West Virginia and Kentucky and Maryland, and the language I use to talk to friends here in California. They're not exactly the same and while the English words have all the same dictionary meanings, they're definitely taken in different ways by different groups of people and class is a factor there. There are things that I would be very offended by if a man said them to me at the university where I work, but not if a man said them to me at a barbecue in a relative's back yard, because they would just feel so different.

Of course, part of my understanding of the world is that different groups of people use the same language differently and that there's a fair amount of miscommunication that happens as a result of this. I have to admit that I've always, academic-wise, been a lot more interested in theories of communication and linguistics and dialects than I have been in race/gender theory, so that's the lens I'm looking through. There's body language that goes along with what Dean says that lets you know how seriously to take what he says. Jensen Ackles is very Southern, so even though Dean's supposed to be from Kansas he reads Southern to me sometimes.

There probably is some truth on both sides of this argument. There usually is. But I want to defend Dean because I empathise with his confusion about how to talk to people who aren't from the world he comes from and don't know the whole code for what he means--especially lately in fandom.

[thete1.livejournal.com]

I was raised working-class by southern working-class people. I'm not White, *but*. The thing is? This makes perfect sense to me:

I think part of the reason I am having a hard time quantifying these nuances is that I have to switch registers to do it. There's the language I used when I was getting my master's degree, the language I use when I talk to my friends back home in West Virginia and Kentucky and Maryland, and the language I use to talk to friends here in California. They're not exactly the same and while the English words have all the same dictionary meanings, they're definitely taken in different ways by different groups of people and class is a factor there. There are things that I would be very offended by if a man said them to me at the university where I work, but not if a man said them to me at a barbecue in a relative's back yard, because they would just feel so different.

Absolutely yes. Just -- absolutely. The *difference* I'm seeing is that I have no problem saying to myself -- and to the people in question -- that the things being said *are* bigoted in one way or another, and that they should never be said at all. It doesn't matter that 'that's the way it's always been' if the way it's always been is *wrong*.

But I want to defend Dean because I empathise with his confusion about how to talk to people who aren't from the world he comes from and don't know the whole code for what he means--especially lately in fandom.

I can understand that, too... but honestly, I really wonder if the discussion would come up as much as it does if the *show* questioned Dean's vocabulary, if there were people who flat-out told him that he was speaking like an ass, and to explain himself for doing so. Instead, the show just lets him talk like that, and never questions it, and Dean's not allowed to *grow* as a character. Add that to the fact that he *didn't* talk like that in earlier seasons and you've got a real, *growing* problem.

I believe that a lot of things are fucked up in this country, and that a lot of well-meaning, otherwise intelligent people say stupid-ass things and need to be *corrected* for them. Ignorance is, after all, forgiveable -- right up until it stops being cluelessness and starts being a stubborn refusal to let go of the mistakes of the past and move forward. That's the lens *I'm* looking through, and yeah, it colors everything I do. And I'm okay with that, because I'm pretty sure I've got the right idea. ;-)

part 1

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

Absolutely yes. Just -- absolutely. The *difference* I'm seeing is that I have no problem saying to myself -- and to the people in question -- that the things being said *are* bigoted in one way or another, and that they should never be said at all. It doesn't matter that 'that's the way it's always been' if the way it's always been is *wrong*.

Sometimes I think that's true, but not always.

There are, first of all, people I won't correct because it's not my place (like my grandmother, when she was alive--it's ageist to say some people won't change because they're old, but when it's family, sometimes it's also realistic). Also, when I do correct people, it's over a specific phrase or turn of phrase, and when I do it, I say something like "I wish you wouldn't say (x), because it hurts me/hurts (people who are Y, and incidentally that includes people you claim to care about) and here's why." I'm not going to tell them how to talk otherwise--they need to learn to sound like themselves, not like me (after all, I left and moved to California and all that).

At the same time sometimes I look at debates that arise in fandom where someone's been criticised for a particular turn of phrase and I don't actually always agree that they were wrong, because if the person who's offended doesn't know what that phrase actually means, then it may be a complete misunderstanding. (Examples: I thought the people who were using 'miscegenation' as a kink were out of their minds and racist racist racist, even though they didn't mean to be; but I also thought the girl who said 'in a coon's age' had no idea how that would sound outside of places where nobody shortens the word 'raccoon' because they don't have them getting in their garbage all the time--although even in San Francisco I once lived across the street from one, and I had a certain amount of sympathy for her. I've heard that phrase many times and it never occurred to me that anyone who knew it well enough to use it would be referring to a person, although in the area where we grew up we usually said 'in a dog's age' instead--which may be why--I've always understood that in the construction 'in an X's age', X is always nonhuman.)

Re: part 1

[thete1.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to tell them how to talk otherwise--they need to learn to sound like themselves, not like me (after all, I left and moved to California and all that).

I think there's a difference between not imposing your belief system on someone and simply not allowing bigoted speech to stand uncorrected. Then again, I'm one of those people who didn't let *my* grandmother get away with anything, no matter how old she was.

but I also thought the girl who said 'in a coon's age' had no idea how that would sound outside of places where nobody shortens the word 'raccoon' because they don't have them getting in their garbage all the time--although even in San Francisco I once lived across the street from one, and I had a certain amount of sympathy for her. I've heard that phrase many times and it never occurred to me that anyone who knew it well enough to use it would be referring to a person, although in the area where we grew up we usually said 'in a dog's age' instead--which may be why--I've always understood that in the construction 'in an X's age', X is always nonhuman.)

Well, frankly, 'X is always nonhuman' has been used as a reason to use that phrase to refer to Black people -- who have often been considered far, far less than human. I wasn't part of the discussion -- I was probably offline -- when it happened, but, well... I don't have to be polite to you -- general you -- when you say something offensive. I may *choose* to give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't *mean* to be offensive, or I may not. In the end, you're the one who did/said the problematic thing.

part 2

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I can understand that, too... but honestly, I really wonder if the discussion would come up as much as it does if the *show* questioned Dean's vocabulary, if there were people who flat-out told him that he was speaking like an ass, and to explain himself for doing so. Instead, the show just lets him talk like that, and never questions it, and Dean's not allowed to *grow* as a character. Add that to the fact that he *didn't* talk like that in earlier seasons and you've got a real, *growing* problem.

Dean said some things that made me wince in earlier seasons, but Sam (who went to Stanford) always glared at him when he said them. I think we were meant to understand that there was a long-running disagreement there. I also think it's wearying to continually fight over stuff like that with someone you have to live with and if I had to live with my brother (who is a misogynist, racist and everything else-ist, unlike Dean) I would probably get tired of verbally or physically slapping him every time he said something stupid, and let's not even go there with what it would be like to have to do that if we had to cover each other's backs in mortal danger every day of every week. :/

So the criticism is going to have to come from people who realistically would see it as a problem and the problem is, Dean doesn't say most of these things to people who would. I would have a problem with it if he showed his ass in a big way to someone I would expect to slap him down for it and that didn't happen. But I have a hard time thinking of situations where that hasn't happened and sometimes he DOES get called on being an asshat.

A lot of the criticisms about Dean being misogynist in S3, though, have to do with things that he has said to Ruby. And Ruby is a demon. I understand that in SGA, even though Ronon and Teyla are nonhuman aliens, their colour matters to the humans they interact with and the way those people treat them may be evidence of racism, but I don't think Ruby's gender matters to Dean, because Dean sees demons as different from people and is never unaware that whatever body they may be using isn't really theirs.

I don't think things that Dean says to Ruby count as misogynist, because even though we think of her as a woman because she's played by one, Dean does not think of demons as human. Dean treats Ruby the way he's treated other demons--he's still trying to kill her occasionally--and does not treat other women the way he treats her. Only in the last two episodes has Dean been aware that Ruby used to be human.

So while I wish Dean wouldn't say 'skank' unless he's going to use it on both sexes, I do think it matters that he doesn't say it about women who are not Ruby.

A lot of the rage also came up with reference to the "Malleus Maleficarum" episode and I frankly don't get that because in a universe where demons, hell, devils, pacts with the devil, selling your soul, evil pagan gods that demand blood sacrifice, &c are all real, of course witchcraft is bad--the women in that ep were not practising Wicca! (Oddly, hoodoo has been presented as a GOOD thing, and pentagrams are not always bad--it's not totally Christian-centric...) That was also the episode where it was revealed that Ruby used to be human about five hundred years ago and where Dean found out that HE was going to become a demon, and I think they're doing a good job with the mental reorganisation that is following on to that.

I also wonder how much of the poor writing in S3 has to do with the writer's strike and how many of these eps got less editing than they would have done otherwise, but...we'll see next year I guess.

(this is getting teal deerish; I apologise for that)

Re: part 2

[thete1.livejournal.com]

So the criticism is going to have to come from people who realistically would see it as a problem and the problem is, Dean doesn't say most of these things to people who would.

I think it's the show's *responsibility* to put Dean in situations where he is, at the very least, questioned for his language. I agree with you that it can't always be Sam -- that would bog down the narrative at the very least -- but, well, if they want Dean to talk like that, then they need to show the consequences of it -- unless they want to hear words like 'misogynistic' bandied about.

I don't think things that Dean says to Ruby count as misogynist, because even though we think of her as a woman because she's played by one, Dean does not think of demons as human. Dean treats Ruby the way he's treated other demons--he's still trying to kill her occasionally--and does not treat other women the way he treats her. Only in the last two episodes has Dean been aware that Ruby used to be human.

To this, I would argue that there need to be a lot more situations in which Dean interacts with non-demonic women to better highlight the difference you find so easy to see. It's another part of the show's responsibility.

And, well, I'll admit it -- I'm uncomfortable with the idea of 'artistic responsibility.' I write a lot of dark, disturbing things, and the only thing I do to ease that is put vaguely-worded warnings on my stories, and I will fight *hard* against anyone who tells me that I ought to show more care. BUT -- I'm also not spewing out bigoted rhetoric, even when I throw bad guys into the mix. When you have a *television* show aimed, at least in part, at young people, you need to have a bit more of a conscience.

part 3

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I believe that a lot of things are fucked up in this country, and that a lot of well-meaning, otherwise intelligent people say stupid-ass things and need to be *corrected* for them. Ignorance is, after all, forgiveable -- right up until it stops being cluelessness and starts being a stubborn refusal to let go of the mistakes of the past and move forward.

I agree with that (in real life and in fandom alike--fandom is a very large part of my real life after all), although I'm disturbed at the way arguments online turn vicious so fast and people are sometimes dismissed as being stubborn because they don't turn round on an issue in seconds and because they don't immediately give up the beliefs they've had all their lives the first time they hear new ideas from complete strangers.

At the same time when we get to criticising fiction, I sometimes have the impression that there is a significant portion of fandom that wants the main characters in all the TV shows, books, movies and comics that they love to be perfect role models who never say anything that they consider wrong, despite the fact that there's considerable disagreement in our society about what's right and what's wrong and the characters they love may not come from a background that's the same as theirs. I don't think that it means the writers, the show or even the character are misogynist if the character occasionally says a dumbass thing that someone with that character's background might believably say. There's history here; I've written a number of pieces of original fiction and a number of fanfics where I've given a character a very different background, stance on issues, politics or religious views from my own, and been attacked by people whose views I agreed with or praised by people whose views scared me because they assumed that I agreed with the things my character was saying. On one hand I'm kind of glad I got that viewpoint right, but I wish people would not conflate my characters' viewpoints with mine. (I will never write for the HP fandom again.)

I like SPN because for the most part the characters seem real to me. I want to defend them because for the most part I think their behaviour (though some of their verbiage is questionable) shows them to have their hearts in the right places. And I'd like to think that if I wrote an SPN fic and people were offended by something a character said in it they'd at least consider the possibility that the words in the character's mouth represent what I think that character would say in that situation, not my own point of view.

Er. This was all over the place. Sorry.

Re: part 3

[thete1.livejournal.com]

At the same time when we get to criticising fiction, I sometimes have the impression that there is a significant portion of fandom that wants the main characters in all the TV shows, books, movies and comics that they love to be perfect role models who never say anything that they consider wrong, despite the fact that there's considerable disagreement in our society about what's right and what's wrong and the characters they love may not come from a background that's the same as theirs.

And I think there's something to be said for having characters who are presented as heroes *act like heroes*. And think like heroes, and everything else. I think there's a *lot* to be said and done with occasions when the heroes screw up in one way or another -- it's one of my favorite things to write about -- but I also think that it's important to show these characters, these supposed-to-be-heroes learning from their mistakes and behaving better once they do so.

It would be one thing if we were talking about a show like Oz, in which there was not one hero to be seen, but we're *not*. Like it or not, we are supposed to view Sam and Dean as intrepid heroes fighting for the good of the world, and *that* means that, if they don't act like it, there better be a damned good explanation *or* the acknowledgment that they're not really heroes, at all.

This is what I think people are asking for when they interrogate the SPN text so fervently, and I don't see any problem with that, at all.

[sabonasi.livejournal.com]

What you say is really interesting. I'm from a [white] Southern (Florida) with a lower-middle-class/working-class upbringing, and while Dean's language often irritates me, it isn't my biggest gripe with the show. Because there's more to misogyny/non-misogyny (homophobia/non-homophobia, racisim/non-racisim) than, as you put it, "a standard of polite discourse". (Especially since I've seen plenty of sexism/racism/homophobia/etc conducted under "a standard of polite discourse".)

So I'm more bothered by the various female characters who exist only to die tragically to provide motivation/angst for the male characters and by the mishandling of Jo & Bela's characters than I am by Dean's language. And I like that many of the one-shot female characters are quite capable, that Dean never rescues women with the expectation that they're going to hit the sheets, that Ruby is a series-regular queer female character who's queerness was introduced in a non-Very-Special-Episode non-male-gaze manner. So I can definitely see what you mean about the focus on language.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely right that polite discourse is often a veneer for racism, sexism, homophobia and most importantly classism (because the standards for politeness are often set by elites). Dean's language can be irritating but it's his behaviour I focus on.

I'm not so much bothered by the female characters who exist to die tragically to provide motivation (for Sam, especially--Dean has motivation covered, and his girlfriends don't die, even though his mother did) because the boys are straight, and if I were a demon who wanted to turn Sam evil, I'd kill his girlfriends, too. (There are after all factors other than politics that go into stories, like plot, and I think some of the people who criticise SPN do forget that...)

The handling of Jo pissed me off--first that she was created to be a Love Interest, second that she was shitcanned when that didn't work and she grew out of her role--if they made her to be so much like Dean I have no idea why they were surprised she wanted more from life than being his GF...? The handling of Ellen even more so--apparently Samantha Ferris is not 'shaggable' enough so she had to be replaced. That is TPTB at the CW at work and Kripke himself has complained about it.

Ruby I love, Bela not so much, but I can never decide whether the Bela thing is because of TPTB, the writers or just the fact that the character is meant to be irritating. Tell me your thoughts on it, I'm interested.

[sabonasi.livejournal.com]

Dean's language can be irritating but it's his behaviour I focus on.

*nods* Of course, there are two questions at play. "Is Dean sexist?" and "Is the show sexist?" I care more about the latter, but even with the former, there's shit like what I mentioned above with the women whom Dean sleeps with always being bystanders rather than rescued innocents. I hate it when a male character rescues a female character and the subtext is that it's the male character right to sleep with the female character and/or the female character is obliged to fall in love with the male character. It's the owing that's damn skeevey.

I'm not so much bothered by the female characters who exist to die tragically to provide motivation (for Sam, especially--Dean has motivation covered, and his girlfriends don't die, even though his mother did) because the boys are straight, and if I were a demon who wanted to turn Sam evil, I'd kill his girlfriends, too. (There are after all factors other than politics that go into stories, like plot, and I think some of the people who criticise SPN do forget that...)

I don't think "Character introduced solely to be slaughtered to motivate main character" is in itself bad, but I dislike how constantly gendered it is, on a macro level. So it goes beyond Supernatural. I will say, though, that it appears that Mary - and, I'm guessing, Jessica - do in fact have more to their stories than their deaths. They still fit the trope, but it's at least something different.

The handling of Ellen even more so--apparently Samantha Ferris is not 'shaggable' enough so she had to be replaced.

I hadn't heard that. I was under the impression that while Ellen was still a part of the story, abiet offscreen at the moment, and was going to show up later in season three. (Kripke said in an interview that they kept trying to work in some exposition about Ellen but that it never felt natural, which is why nothing had been mentioned.)

Ruby I love, Bela not so much, but I can never decide whether the Bela thing is because of TPTB, the writers or just the fact that the character is meant to be irritating. Tell me your thoughts on it, I'm interested.

Well, to start, it seems like Bela was a one-shot character the networks pushed to make series regular. And while I like that the show has two new series regular female characters instead of one, it seems like the writers strugged with fitting Bela into the story as a result.

The biggest problem is that they wrote Bela as a antagonist and then didn't have Dean & Sam react in an organic manner to that, the biggest problems being in "Red Sky at Dawn" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me". However, now that Bela has STOLEN THE COLT, it appears that she's in full-fledged antagonist manner. Personally, I'm pulling for Bela to be in league with Lilith. It fits with the idea that the new demonic female character is an ally (no matter how ambiguous) and the new human female character is an antagonist.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

series-regular queer female character who's queerness was introduced in a non-Very-Special-Episode non-male-gaze manner.

Ruby introduced herself by flirting with Sam and then revealed her "queerness" by coming on in a seductive manner to a female demon in a manner so explicitly framed by the male gaze that it was interrupted by Dean shooting Sam an amazed horndog look complete with tongue action in the middle.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with you here.

I'm not impressed by Ruby as queer because she's a demon and that's not exactly a positive image! What does impress me about SPN are the number of people who've casually dropped references to same sex partners without it being remarked upon as weird, even though they're not regular characters.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Hmm, of the people I went to middle school with who used racist (and sexist and homophobic) language constantly, only a small percentage of them held any real antagonism to people of color, I believe. (That's the percentage which is now causing problems as my home town becomes more integrated.) But I don't think the language that was nonetheless being used should be in any way condoned (nor did I condone it, which helped to fuel my own alienation from the peers during that period, before I left for a private high school) as simply being the manifestation of a classed characteristic.

Since the race and gender theory studied by the middle-class people with college educations locates much of the cause of injustice precisely in language, it's not surprising that they would want to take a normative approach to language use at all class levels. When they turn this lens on working-class communities, classism undoubtly infects their analysis, but I doubt is sufficient to explain for the entirety of the critique.

If my middle school were a television show, it'd probably be true that having the students talk the way they did would be "realistic," but I wouldn't want the show to glorify it, nor could I fault anyone who was unwilling to write fanfic for the show because the language squicked them.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I think a normative approach to language use at all class levels is inherently classist. It is essentially people with privilege coming into less privileged communities, telling them they are fucked up, and telling them the only way not to be fucked up is to act the way the outsiders want them to act. Is that so difficult to understand?

I don't condone the use of racial or gender or homophobic slurs at any level and when I go home I make it known that I don't want these things said in my presence. But I'm aware that I'm mostly benefitting myself there as what I'm essentially doing is making my own language environment more comfortable, not staying there and working with people. I don't want to live there. But because I don't want to live there (and people who don't know me no longer recognise me as someone who belongs there, because I no longer dress or act the way they do and only have the accent when I'm tired), I'm not someone they're going to listen to any longer than they have to, unless they're family or old friends, and I deal with that.

I also do not think SPN glorifies anything that anyone says; it just presents things as they are. (One of the things that makes me very uncomfortable about academic fandom is that I often feel they want all of their shows and all of our fics to present the characters as Good Role Models, not real people!)

I don't fault anyone who doesn't watch it or doesn't want to write fic for it. Mostly, I get in arguments over it with other people who are also fans. I also don't want to read an SPN fic where the characters all talk like they read metafandom and debunkingwhite and feminist, mostly because it would be OOC and I would be looking at it thinking, "who is this person and what has he done with Dean?"

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I think a normative approach to language use at all class levels is inherently classist.

Why just language? Why not all behavior? It seems that the logical endpoint is that people of privilege shouldn't hold any normative beliefs at all.

Note that I'm not saying that all classes should use the same language, simply that some things can be normatively wrong for the set of all classes which exist in the actual world.

Now, people of privilege are very likely to hold wrong normative beliefs as a result to the blindness caused by their privilege, whether it is male privilege or white privilege or whatever. And thus they should be very careful and respectful and listen and seek to learn as much as they can and revise their beliefs as necessary. But to expect them to not hold any normative beliefs at all seems to me to be ludicrous.

I just can't see how this approach doesn't lead to relativism, which as a feminist who believes sexism is an objective moral evil I can't accept.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I just can't see how this approach doesn't lead to relativism, which as a feminist who believes sexism is an objective moral evil I can't accept.

We're probably never going to completely agree on everything, then, which I am okay with. I think sexism is wrong, and racism and classism and homophobia are wrong, but I'm not the kind of person who even uses phrases like "objective moral evil" and I'm definitely not a moral absolutist in general--I can name a number of things that I think are always wrong like rape, torture, killing a person who has never done you harm and is not showing signs of intending to do so directly, stealing things you don't have an emergent need for and can't get, lying for personal gain, betraying someone who trusts you...but moral absolutism in general scares the fuck out of me just as much as completely untempered relativism does. I'm a wave/particle, absolutist/relativist, free will/determinism = OTPs kinda gal.

Also I think a world in which everyone behaved in exactly the same way at all times would be intensely boring to live in (so not a utopian) and I don't want to live in a world where there is no cultural diversity, which means that I think each culture will have to come to its own conclusions about how to right the injustices.

I'm reminded of an argument I had with my Chinese ex-mother-in-law who tried to defend sexist behaviour as 'cultural'. I told her that sexism was a universal problem and that even though it seemed to her that white culture wasn't sexist and feminism was Western, that wasn't so. I agreed with her that white people's ideas about how women should be treated shouldn't be imposed upon her, but at the same time, her daughter wasn't white, and her daughter was not, in my opinion, being inherently un-Chinese when she wanted to be given the same consideration that her brother got. Of course some of her issues were that she associated Chinese feminism with the communists in China, but the thing is, I agreed with her that white people shouldn't be telling Chinese people what to do and that there had been enough of that entirely--but her daughter was Chinese, and she thought there was a problem and she had the right to ask for what she felt she needed.

I mean, is sexist behaviour wrong? Yes. And language that some people find offensive should be reconsidered. At the same time, the answer isn't always that the offended person is right about the language of a group they're not part of being inherently offensive; misunderstandings sometimes occur in cross-cultural communication or communication across class lines.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I think you are ignoring the considerable amount of SPN criticism which doesn't focus on the characters' dialogue but on the show's general treatment of white women and people of color.

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

I know there are a lot of dead women in SPN and a lot of dead black men. I think somebody needs to do a body count though (unless someone has and I missed it when I was buried in my RPG), because there are also an awful lot of dead white guys and it is horror.

I was pretty pissed off that Henriksen died, but I'm not completely convinced that the body count is the issue some people think it is, especially after the discussion (http://marishna.livejournal.com/425140.html) in marishna's journal where I found out that often they don't know which characters are going to be CoC when they're writing the scripts because they don't specify what race they want to be cast in that role. I am much more bothered by their refusal to cast any recurring female characters who are not "hot". But that's something the CW is forcing on Kripke.

Honestly, of the shows I watch SPN is probably the one I find least offensive in that way. There is a huge amount of racist bullshit on Heroes and while House is not generally bad, when it is bad that way it is SO BAD.

[marinarusalka.livejournal.com]

often they don't know which characters are going to be CoC when they're writing the scripts because they don't specify what race they want to be cast in that role.

I'm not convinced that's much of an excuse. First of all, Henriksen was around for a year. Surely at some point before "Jus in Bello" got written, somebody must've noticed that they'd cast a black man. Second of all, doing story revisions to account for unforeseen factors is an ordinary part of a TV writer's job description. They do it if a location becomes unavailable, or an actor sprains an ankle, or the FX budget runs out or filming gets delayed due to weather. I don't think it's inconceivable that they could say, "hey, we've cast a minority actor here, let's go over the script to make sure we're not portraying the character offensively."

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

Did you think Henriksen was written offensively?

My biggest problem with him was that he died. Which I'm gonna ignore till there's a body.

[sabonasi.livejournal.com]

there are also an awful lot of dead white guys

But there are also a lot of non-dead white guys. Not only are the heroes white guys, but there are white guys who appear as one-shots in episodes and don't die. Can you think of a single one-shot Black male character who survives? What about a recurring Black male character who's storyline ends without them dead? While not male, Jo exited the story without dying.