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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 whatheyiya 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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-28 01:15 am (UTC)*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.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-28 01:31 am (UTC)Oh G-d yes.
Understood, but I think there has been some of that with men--Caleb, Pastor Jim?
Samantha Ferris felt that the CW was reluctant to allow Kripke to bring her back because she was older. I believe she said this in a blog post.
And sicced the Feds on the boys, ending up with the death of Henriksen, which means she has to replace him. Bela was always intended to be a recurring character and the CW tried to get Kripke to make her a Love Interest (ugh).
I was disappointed that Ruby wasn't Lilith and that Lilith is the big bad; I had really wanted Lilith to be on the boys' side against Azazel and/or his replacement, but I'm a daemonology geek.