alixtii | Entries tagged with meta

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), then a set of privileged 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 (which is itself an interesting case, as the existence of Buffy's tombstone, while "clearly canon," is itself hard to reconcile with the events of "Bargaining" and is thus in need of fanwanking). The text becomes radically manipulatable, and there are no privileged 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 privileges fanon over canon.

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 (sometimes a system of clearly imaginary authority--do the producers of our shows really care if we accept X as canon?) 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, which was too fuzzy to sharply delineate, and then ignored it.

The rules, gacked from

witchqueen:

( The rules )

Five questions from

witchqueen:

( How did you get to femmeslash? ) So the short answer is: it's all

cadence_k's fault.

( How did you get to my LJ? )

( What's your academic background? )

( If you were organizing fandom )

( Are you now, or have you ever been, a Discordian? Discuss. )

And these five from

musesfool:

( What's the story behind your LJ username? )

( Name your five favorite female characters )

( Which of your icons do you most associate with yourself? )

( What's your favorite time of day? )

( You have to explain fandom to aliens )

ETA: I should write Catherine/Amy bodyswitch 'cest. Y/N?

I was thinking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in part because I've just finished reading the The Long Way Home arc and in part because it's come up in a couple of discussions I've been having lately. And it made me think of the way that for me, fanfic works as a sort of je me souviens--a way of saying "I remember" to the source canon.

Most canons sort of pummel forward without looking backwards. That probably was more true in the 90's than now, since serial storytelling seems to be coming back into vogue now and starting with a "Previously on" has become the norm rather than the exception. Something I loved about Veronica Mars was that the same set of supporting characters kept on returning in seasons one and two--and when that stopped being the case in season 3 I quickly lost interest in the show, because I wanted to know what Gia Goodman and Carrie Bishop and Madison Sinclair and Van Clemens and Trina Echolls were all up to.

And just ask any Voyager fan just what happened to Joe Carey.

Sometimes the new stories are worth telling in their own right. I'm not saying there's something bad about the new Who giving us Reinette and Sally Sparrow instead of using all its time making references to Romana and the Rani (whoever they might be)--because there isn't, not at all.

Regardless whether a canon seems to be suffering from massive long-term memory loss or is actually rather decent on referring to what has come before, fanfic is a way of hearkening back to those beloved times, of remembering them and saying that I love them. Or that I hate them. Or that I just think they're funny.

It's a way of taking minor characters--like Scott Hope from Buffy (who is, remember, canonically gay), or Reinette or Sally Sparrow from Doctor Who, or some forgotten character from old Who (which I haven't seen much of--most of my old Who knowledge comes from apocryphal audios)--and reaffirming one's love for them. It's a way of remembering that quirky piece of canon that everyone else seems to have forgetten and to bring it to the front and make something new with it. It's a way of returning to a favorite line of dialogue or a particularly stunning visual image. It's a way of saying "Remember when?"

And every "What if?" is also a "Remember when?" when you think about it.

It's a way of digging our fingers deep into the canon we already have and engaging with it. Fanfic can tell new stories using the characters we love, the same way canon does. But fanfic, IMHO, is at its best when it does all that and embraces where its come from in a way that the source text rarely does--rarely is able to, if we are honest.

This is why I write Amy Madison so much, because she exists in these odd corners of the text but never in its center, and by inhabiting I've invented new villains and new heroes and new demons and new mystical texts, because sometimes they are what the story I want to tell needs, but if I can reference something we've already seen in canon I'll choose to do that almost every time, because I love it and I want to bring it into my story, a metatextual whisper of ":Wasn't it great that one time when....?" to the reader. Remember that lame episode when a demon came from outer space? They're the catalyst in my Buffy/Torchwood crossover.Jurisdiction.

The entire premise of Divine Interventions was just to get Ethan, Amy, Dawn, and Cordelia in a room together, stir in Hecate, Janus, and Osiris (all deities mentioned in the show itself), resurrect Rack, and see what happened. Because these were pieces of what had gone before that I loved (or at least liked--I'm not really sure how Cordelia got in there) was interested in playing with in the present.

When "The Girl in Question" is bashed, retconned, and fanwanked, both my Buffy/Immortal fics (in which Buffy not only is dating the Immortal but marries and has a daughter by him) and The Ransom of Andrew Wells are my way of saying, yes, I did see that happen, and I loved it. I'm not going to forget it.

Each and every fic is, in its own way, a love song.

Through events like

buffyverse1000 and

femslash_minis, I was able to dig my fingers deep into the forgotten and underutilized corners of Buffy canon, inhabiting at times a wide arrange of characters who populate the periphery of the text. I can't think of a more potent way of saying "I remember" than writing Gwen Raiden/Nina Ash, as

cadence_k did. Or, you know, Edna Mae Wilkins fic. *loves

femslash_minis co-participants*

As many problems as I may have with The Long Way Home (even beyond one particular retcon), this is one of the things that I think Joss got right: the comic really does engage with the seven seasons of Buffy (and five seasons of Angel) that preceded it--indeed, to a degree that I don't think would have been possible in a television format. It's partly because the comics really are more like fanfiction than like canon that he can get away with it--he can have a character (I won't say which one so as not to spoil anyone) mention their mother and have us remember the one episode in which that mother appeared and understand the implications of the reference. (And it's not spoilery, because I can think of at least four characters off the top of my head who had parents appear in exactly one episode and I'm sure there are more). Also, comics don't have the practical considerations that make it necessary for canons sometimes to move forward; they don't have actors negotiating for money or the difficulty of arranging for certain guest stars to return.

Unfortunately, not all creators are Joss, and we're rarely so lucky.

In some ways, there's nothing more depressing than when a show you once loved seems to have forgotten its past completely, as sometimes VMars seemed to do in its third season and as Voyager seemed to do starting with its third episode, to the point that two seasons might seem to be entirely separate canons from each other, one open and the other for all practical purposes closed, that just happen to share some characters and/or settings. But even then fanfiction provides us with a way of remembering that past and proving that we at least, have not forgotten it.

It allows us to say: I remember. Je me souviens.

And I'm damn well not going to forget.

Part two of the Will Brooker and Ksenia Prasolova discussion on gender and fan studies has been posted to

fandebate (as well as Henry Jenkin's blog). This discussion is particularly interesting to me because of the following statements from Will Brooker:

For a male fan or scholar to explain his fandom of a cult text in terms of “Claire Bennet is hot!” (even jokingly) would conjure up all kinds of negative connotations and sad stereotypes of a guy in a dark room with a screen full of cheerleader pics and a floor scattered with Kleenex. But it’s not unusual for a female fan or female fan-scholar to add, perhaps lightheartedly, “and it doesn’t hurt that the main characters are totally cute guys!” or admit that she writes slash because she’s turned on by the idea of those cute guys getting it on. I wonder how it would sound if I said I wrote stories about Claire and her hot cheerleader friends romping in the locker room. I don’t think it would be celebrated as an example of resistant fan creativity.

*whistles innocently*

There's a post over at

languagelog that touches on the issue of whether use-without-citation always counts as plagiarism. Geoff Pullum's answer is one with which I agree, although different in some respects from the fannish consensus which seems to have been reached. Here's the money quote:

That's the subtle line between plagiarism and literary allusion. It's plagiarism if you copy someone's writing and you don't want it to be noticed that you were copying; it's allusion if you do exactly the same but you do want it to be noticed.
If I had hoped Mr McIntyre would not identify the source of my very funny metaphor and would think me responsible for its brilliantly humorous simile, I would not be a brilliantly humorous writer, I would be a dumb and contemptible plagiarist. And if I had thought he would spot the quotation but I was wrong and he did not, I would be in an awkward spot for two reasons: (i) I would have gratuitously insulted someone I didn't even know, and (ii) I would have used someone else's clever humor without admitting it or citing the source, and would thus have put myself in danger of being fingered later as a plagiarist.
But I had judged him right: I took him to be well acquainted with such familiar features of our culture as the Dilbert strip, and I intended him to see that I was quoting, and he did, and I intended him to see that I intended him to see that I was quoting, and he did, and I intended him to see that I intended him to see that I intended him to see that I was quoting, and he did, and... Perhaps it would be simpler if I just cut this (non-vicious) infinite regress short and say that I intended there to be not just recognition of the quote but also mutual recognition of our mutual knowledge state.

Eliot and Pound used uncited sources all the time in their own work, after all, and I think its perfectly reasonable for me to drop a line from Firefly or Angel without being required to give chapter and verse. Because, like Pullum, I trust you guys to recognize that I'm quoting.

That remains enough even if I'm wrong in my trust. After all, I hardly recognize any of Pound's allusions; that's why I have my trusty A Compendium to The Cantos of Ezra Pound by Carroll F. Terrell. But as I argued here, right after the

reel_sga discussions, the most important thing is that a writer act in good faith toward her readers.

Note that the subject heading reads "a Christian perspective" and not "the Christian perspective." I figure there's at the very least two billion different Christian perspectives on any given subject. However, the authorial responsibility discussion (once again, cf. metafandom) has already produced response on authorial responsibility from explicitly religious positions, both Buddhist and ~~Wiccan~~ Feri. Since I enjoy talking about religion in this journal, I thought I might discuss, as much for my own benefit as anyone else's, how my Christian faith informs my position in the discussion. While I'll use phrases like "Christianity teaches..." I don't claim that Christianity is a stable thing or that "it" teaches the same things to all people; know that my meaning is actually much closer to "According to my interpretation of Christianity...." Of course, Christianity is probably much better known in the English-speaking world than Buddhism or Wicca (eta: or Feri), so a lot of this might seem old hat, but I'll say it anyway. (Also, for those already familiar with my theological moves, I'll be speaking mostly from "within the metaphor.")

All that said, Christianity teaches that words are incredibly powerful things, so much so that Jesus Christ is himself referred to as the Word of God. St. John famously opens his gospel with "In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was [a] God," deliberately echoing the writers of the Pentateuch which begins:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." Thus evening came, and morning followed--the first day. [Gn 1:1-5, NAB]

The very act of creation is presented as a verbal command, followed by an act of naming. Christians turn to words, to language for a metaphor for divine power because we recognize the potential power inherent in words. As an Episcopalian, I believe in consubstantiation, that words spoken by a priest can make bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. When I recite the words of the "Our Father"--words given to us by Jesus himself--and those set down by the Council of Nicea in the Creed (not to mention the rest of the mass, really), I am reaffirming my connection with two millenia of Christians. Words are heavy things to Christians.

Okay, but so far we've just been talking about words in general. No one's been denying that words can teach and instruct and persuade and obfuscate and be powerful. It's fiction that the debate is over. That's just made-up stories, right--nothing like divine commands or a metaphor for a person of the Trinity.

The Bible itself in many (some would say most) places composed of fiction; I think even most Biblical "literalists" accept the Song of Solomon as love poetry and not a documented account of actual love affairs in history. It's the rare Christian who would use "It's just fiction!" as an excuse to ignore those parts of Holy Writ entirely.

But Jesus himself also used fiction to teach, famously--and not all the stories he told are pretty. The Parable of the Good Samaritan [Lk. 25-37] is, essentially, hurt/comfort, no? The Parable of the Rich Fool [Lk 12:16-21] is deathfic. The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant [Mt 18:21-35] involves torture (which is treated as justified within the world of the parable).

But it might be argued, that despite taking on these topics, Jesus was being "responsible" about them. After all, the above parables are all, essentially, morality tales--they use their macabre subjects to teach lessons about how we should live our lives. And that's true, of course. Jesus did indeed preach God's law according to the mandates of the Father. But it must be remember that not everyone who heard Jesus recite his parables had the context to understand them. All three of the synoptic gospel writers (St. Mark, St. Matthew, and St. Luke) make a particular point of this fact in the Parable of the Sower (Mt 13:1-23, Mk 4:1-20, Lk 8.4-15), which must be explained for the disciples away from the crowd. All three evangelists go on to quote (the Greek translation of) Isaiah:

Listen carefully, but you shall not understand! Look intently, but you shall know nothing! [Is 6:9, NAB]

Many times it was only his inner circle of disciples who had that necessary context to understand what Jesus was saying. (Sometimes even they didn't understand.) Within the community, he could be understood to be responsible, but outside that inner circle his words would be reviled and misconstrued. (Can you see the parallel I'm drawing here?)

Jesus knew his stories would be heard by those who did not have the context to understand them, and would be misinterpreted by them--and he was okay with that. He knew he couldn't (well, he could, I suppose, being God and everything, but he wouldn't) control how every person would understand what he said, but it was important nonetheless to preach for the benefit of those who could understand. And maybe, just maybe, some of those people who lacked the context to understand would be driven to find out that context, and be transformed.

The Bible itself is filled with rape, incest, genocide, slavery--you name it, it's probably in there, sometimes described in glowing terms. And God knows that atrocities have been committed based on what is found within that book. Christians believe, however, that with the grace of God received through the Holy Spirit, we can become responsible readers with the wisdom to be able to use these stories to inspire us to good rather than evil works in his name. Why wouldn't the same be true of fanfiction?

[Yes, I just wrote a Christian defense of incest fic. I love religion.]

I'm glad we are having the authorial responsibility discussion (cf.

metafandom), because "Isn't it contradictory to talk about a safe space for yourself, and then go on to render feminist criticisms of media (e.g., the Mary Jane statuette)?" is a not-stupid question that deserves to be mulled over and answered. Which is not to say that it is contradictory, because I don't believe it is, but being ignorant of the way that a contradiction could be seen to exist leaves our feminist arguments for what we are doing open to an objection that we could otherwise address.

I think that, in the large, the people who are "for" authorial responsibility (and I think that some of them really see everyone who disagree with them as against responsibility, rather than simply disagreeing on what that responsibility entails, using the same pseudologic that leads pro-lifers to assume that all pro-choicers love abortion and want to have as many as possible) are ignoring the differing effects that context can have on what authorial responsibility requires. Which is ironic, because their argument is really all about context.

No, I do not believe that works are written or read in a vacuum. Indeed, according to the flavor of literary theory to which I subscribe, in a vacuum the very act of reading would be impossible. But I don't support the writing of incest (for example) because I don't think that fictional texts have consequences. I support the writing of incest fanfiction because I am cognizant of the specific context within which these works exist and are meant to be read.

I mean, I believe that fictional texts have real-world consequences. I believe that fictional texts should be critiqued and judged by consequences they can reasonably be expected to have (Heinlein did not expect Manson, nor should he have). Radical feminist, here. It's pretty much a corner stone of my world-view; I believe it at least as deeply as I believe anything else. I believe that much of mainstream media supports a mainstream patriuarchal ideology and should be called on the fact. These are pretty much tenets of faith for me.

But I believe fandom, even (or especially?) its incest fics, resists that ideology on several levels. (While possibly being co-opted by it on other levels. I'm a radical feminist, I can problematize anything, including the problematizations. But sometimes we have to go for the surface good and leave deeper systemic issues for later. Women's suffrage is more important than gender-neutral language or nonsegregated bathrooms, although they're all necessary.) That incest fic? It's on the side of the angels.

The consequences of a HP fanfiction, written within the community of women for the community of women, are different than the consequences of having Lucius shagging Draco in a Warners Brothers blockbuster. Which is not to say that I'd automatically condemn having Lucius shag Draco in the WB movie, or automatically condone the fanfic. But the rubrics I used would be pretty radically different in how they were calibrated.

For one thing, (online LJ media fanfiction) fandom is a community in which a community of readers is also a community of writers (and vice versa), a fact I have yet to have seen mentioned but which I think is deeply significant. Our defining feature is that we are not passive consumers of texts. We are not going to be affected by a fictional text in the same way as Joe Average. We recognize the possibiliy of ambiguity of meaning and unreliable narrators, and God knows we know how to read "against the grain" (a grain which is itself, to my mind, socially constructed) to give a text the meaning we want to give it.

( I've said a lot of this before, actually ) I'm just not convinced that, using the hermeneutical conditions brought to bear by the fandom community onto texts produced by that community, that a text could be read to be in favor of certain things which the fandom community agrees is wrong, such as rape. (Obviously, not everyone in fandom uses the same hermeneutic conditions, but when we're assuaging the damage a text could do, we're talking about trends.) Which is not precisely analagous to the question of whether such texts could affect us negatively (i.e., make us more accepting of rape) without being read as explicitly pro-rape, I suppose. But when read under those conditions I have no reason to believe that those sorts of texts will produce such a negative effect, and none of the interlocutors have given me any reason to believe such.

When I criticize, say, the movie Underworld (which drives me crazy with the way feminity is presented within it) I am doing so recognizing that a) its audience is not fandom, and will not in general read it subversively, and b) its producers (who were men) do not have the feminist cred that fan authors get. Same would go for the Mary Jane statuette, or Powergirl's cleavage, or Supergirl's anorxia, or the way that Stephanie Brown gets remembered, or whatever. (I mean, I hang out in femslash fandom. There's a lot of objectification of women going on around here. It's not the same.) (And note that none of the things above are intrinsically problematic, since I don't believe texts speak with a moral voice of their own. I'm sure there are big-busted people and skinny people on Krypton. It's the pattern within its social context--particularly that these unrealistic specimens of womanhood are made by and for het males--which is troubling.)

Insofar as fandom's specific context has been recognized by these authorial responsibility interlocutors, it has mostly been to say that, no, fandom is not a unique special snowflake. Which, you know, is a strawman argument. For an example, take

cofax7's (who is on my flist and whom I love) formulation of the following "unstated assumption":2. That as a members of a mostly-female community we are entitled to privilege our desires over any other concern because we've been oppressed in the past with regards to our creativity and sexuality.
First off, I don't care in the least what happened in the past--the past is past. Fandom's identity as a community of women for women earns it special status not by virtue of the oppression women may have suffered in the past with regards to their creativity and sexuality but because of the oppression they continue to suffer to this day. I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy, dude.

That said, "we are entitled to privilege our desires over any other concern" is absurd. I won't say that no one has argued that, because I'm sure someone somewhere has, but I certainly don't think it is an "unstated assumption" monolithically behind the entirety (or even majority) of one of the sides in the debate. Saying one (I suddenly feel uncomfortable, as a het male, using the first-person plural in this context, because it isn't my, i.e. Alixtii O'Krul's, desire which should be privileged per se) is entitled to privilege one's desires over this specific concern does not mean that one feels that one is entitled to do so with regards to any possible concern. As I've said before, fandom's Get Out of Jail Free card only goes so far.

In particular, I trust fandom on racial issues about as far as I can throw it, although that's still more than I trust the mainstream media. The SGA wank aside, the most frequent meta discussion on race seems to be variants of "Why don't we talk about race more?" No one's saying "Why don't we talk about sex more?" (Okay, actually, they have. The mind boggles.) We talk about sex all the times, and as far as I'm concerned fandom's earned its cred as far as sexual politics go. Not so on race. It still has a long way before it earns its ghetto pass, so to speak.

Conclusion: Claiming fendom as a safe space for women's fantasies does not mean that one does not acknowledge that fiction has consequences. Also, you should totally go write for my Incest/Cross-Gen porn battle. Or sign up for the 'Cest-a-thon. Or, if that sort of thing squicks you, don't. Either way I'm good.

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?

Current Mood: bitchy

If you haven't figured it out from the frustrated rant I made yesterday, there's been some gender discussions going on this weekend, mostly in response to the FanLib thing. I made a comment here that I'm pleased enough with that I'm going to copy it here:

Doesn't it trouble you at all, in regard to the selection of the board and whether this is gender motivated or incidental, that the definition of sexism you're employing is a non-disprovable hypothesis?

I can't prove that "patriarchy" exists any more than I can prove that "liberal democracy" exists, and yes, you can't disprove it anymore than you can disprove liberal democracy. So we have two choices: we can either become positivists and be skeptical about anything we can't touch or feel, and never talk about freedom or love or justice, or we can accept that non-disprovable hypotheses are the bedrock of interpreting our world. What we can do is look at individual situations and connect the dots so as to see a larger pattern.

We're talking about interpretative lenses, and no, a lens cannot be proven or disproven. That does not mean that one lens is just as good as another, though. A conspiracy of evil robots that look just like humans is no more or less disprovable than "patriarchy" or "liberal democracy," but it doesn't help us to communicate or to live justly in this world; indeed, such a lens works against those ends. The concepts of "liberal democracy" and "patriarchy," on the other hand, along with all of feminism, allow us to better work for justice and equity along gender lines, which is useful.

(A worldview including invisible pink unicorns is, I think, neutral as to the way it allows us to live justly in our world.)

~~executrix~~

liz_marcs linked to this debate over the canonicity of the Season 8 Comics and as much as I knew I should, I couldn't look away.

So far, I have wisely refrained from joining in, because why bother when you know the other person is incapable of listening? (Although I always have to wonder at people who treat the term "canon" as if it were transparent. We as fen invented the relevant sense of the word. Nobody uses it that way outside of our circles.)

I do want to point one thing out, though, here because my flist is capable of listening. Now, it doesn't matter what Joss Whedon says. We as fen define what is canon. But if we look at what he did say? He never said the comics were canon.

He said that he understood the comics to be canon, and he understood them that way because he was writing them.

You might argue that the difference in meaning is small, but I never assume that Joss Whedon doesn't know what he's doing when he is using language. He made a statement about how he saw the comics. He never, ever told us as fen whether we should consider them to be canon. And I don't think he would, other than a) ironically, or b) unthinkingly. Joss understands that "[w]hat may or may not have happened is entirely up to the viewer, that's what makes it art."

(And seriously, if I'm going to read Joss Whedon-penned comics, I want him to treat them as canon. That doesn't make them canon, but I want him to treat them that way.)

ETA: And

liz_marcs is my hero all over again, as I read through the comments more fully. She and

janedavitt bitchslap this guy into the next century.

ETA2: And I finally gave in and threw my hat into the ring: ( Read more... )

ETA3: Actually, the whole exchange has me thinking about the fanboy/fangirl distinction I sometimes talk about with

cathexys. This guy is so very much a fanboy. I can't help but think that his constant appeals to the Word of Joss and his inability to allow for any shades of grey in legitimate reader response somehow reveals an insecurity about his ability to exist outside of a hierarchical system--that he (unconsciously) sees fluidity of meaning as a challenge to his own position and power and privilege.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm a fangirl.

As a reader, one has the right to read a story however one wishes. One can read a story written in English as if it were written in ungramatical French. One can read it through a feminist lens, or a Marxist lens, or a post-colonial lens. One can print it out and use it to wallpaper one's study.

One can go on to write fanfic about how character A and character B were really screwing each other off screen. (Yes, even if the original story is a fanfic. So I say.)

When one comes across truly offensive content--homophobia, racism, misogeny--one has the right to make a fuss. When one comes across something that just offends oneself, one still has the right to make a fuss, but everybody else has the right to mock and laugh and tell one to STFU.

Or one can use that marvelous invention, the back-button.

Once the story is written, the author is dead.

BUT. . . .

As an author, one has a right to tell a story however one wants. One has the right to include content that will make the readership feel uncomfortable. One has the right to make implicit promises and then not follow through on them.

One has a right to end a chapter on a cliff-hanger.

One has the right to post the story in one large chunk, or in parts once every day, or whatever makes one's writerly heart happy. One has the right to make the readers wait in delicious agony for that next part.

One has a right--nay, an obligation--to make one's readers feel. That's called good writing. Readers don't have to feel what one wants them to feel, but if one isn't trying to exert one's control over them, one isn't doing one's job.

One has a right to give one's readers what (one thinks) they need rather than what they want. One has a right to give one's readers what (one thinks) they want rather than what they need.

Being "cruel and manipulative" is part of an author's job. Period.

All of these things are tools in a writer's toolbox. And next time I see someone trying to steal these tools out of my favorite writers' toolboxes, I am going to be very, very upset.

(Which is not to say that my favorite writers couldn't make great stories with a blunt screwdriver and their hands tied behind their backs.)

So many of you, the ones who follow

metafandom at least, will be familiar with the rough outline of the discussion:

kradical--Keith R.A. DeCandido, the author of, among other things, the Serenity novelization (which I own but have yet to read)---made a post discussing the difference between fanfic and professional media tie-in fic in which he had the bad sense to call tie-ins "superior" (with the scare quotes) because they were a) legal and b) professionally edited. Discussion ensued, in which there was both much blowing what KRAD said wildly out of proportion and people who decided, much as they did during the SGA race discussion, that as long as the conversation was going on they might as well chime in. Which brings us to this post by

liviapenn, who puts forth the challenge: "Let's make a list. Of awesome, legal, published fanfiction."

Now this post is wonderful just to see all the derivative works which have made their way into print, some which really boggle the mind, like Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So. But what I really find interesting are the places in the comments where fans question the criteria for inclusion into the list, by putting forth some defintion of their own of fanfic--their Theory of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, so to speak--and explaining how Professionally Published Work A doesn't fit into that definition of fanfic. What they're trying to do is put forth a conceptual analysis, the primary tool of "analytic philosophy," in which one attempts to sort out problematic cases. One of my professors from university (very much from the analytic tradition--he had a Ph.D. in math from Cambridge and one in Philosophy from the den of positivism known as M.I.T.) explained it like this: Everyone agrees that it is bad to boil babies and good to help old women across the street (although I must add that of course "everyone" agrees on no such thing), the trick is to tease out the essential qualities so as to address problematic cases and decide whether they fall under the concepts of "good" or "bad."

The goal is to "carve nature at the joints" which, of course, implicity assumes that nature (or at least language, as analytic philosophy has largely dumped metaphysics and epistemology in exchange for philosophy of language) has joints, that there's a clear cut place where something stops being fanfiction and starts being something else, even if no one else has managed to find it or quite agree on where it is.

The best way to point out that someone's analysis of goodness is faulty is to prove that it includes boiling babies or excludes helping old ladies across the street. (This is in contrast to, say, the deontological ethics of Kant, who would start with first principles and run with them irrespective of how ludicrous his conclusions ended up looking.) And with fanfiction, the best way to prove that a given Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not is faulty is to demonstrate that it excludes the latest McShep WIP.

The first Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not was provided in this thread, with the specific problematic case being Gregory Maguire's Wicked:

( Read more... )

Now to provide a functional definition of fanfic makes perfect sense to me (I don't agree with

liviapenn when she accuses

djonn of tying the definition of fanfic to issues of quality), but this definition seems particularly problematic. My problem with dividing fanfiction from "a manuscript where the [. . .] serial numbers were filed on" based on whether the work engages the source material isn't that I think the division is nonsensical, the way that I think a division between gen and het based on canonicity is nonsensical (although producing a workable account of what is and isn't "engaging with the source text" may well prove impossible). It's that it excludes a number of stories from being fanfic which aren't problematic cases--in this case, pretty much any PWP. Indeed, this type of story is so manifestly a part of fanfiction that we've coined a term for it: ATG, or "Any Two Guys/Girls." And the conclusion that these ATG PWP's aren't fanfic is a reductio ad absurdim which for me refutes

djonn's entire Theory of What Fanfic Is and Isn't.

Another example can be found here, when

azdak takes on the problematic case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead :

( Read more... )

First off, there's plenty of fanfiction which is written not out of an intense love for the source text, but out of a desire to play with it, to fix it, or just because one thought one could write it and put it down as such for

yuletide. So

azdak's Theory of What Fanfiction Is and Is Not ignores the rich diversity of motives fanficcers might hold as they work their craft.

Secondly, the definition assumes that fanfic treats characters only as people and never as fictional characters. Some fics are more meta than others, but being a pretentious metafic doesn't make a fic not fanfic. Fic for Stoppard's play continues to treat Ros and Guil as fictional characters even as they slash them, because to remove that element would be to ignore sometime integral to the source text (one'd be writing Hamlet slash rather than Stoppard slash), but it's still fanfic. Most people on my flist are familiar with some of

wisdomeagle's mind-blowing metafiction, and I've written a metafic or two myself.

Other Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not come off just as badly. Tying fanfic's status explicitly to copyright issue excludes not only the problematic cases but also half of

yuletide as well. (OTOH, the Yuletide fics often don't rest as comfortably under our notions of fanfiction as other fics for 'thons might.) Notions of community can't unproblematically make a distinction between literary fiction and professional science fiction are also written in the context of a community (at times an overlapping one with fandom, at times not).

cathexys' attempts to delineate a slash aesthetic haven't been as successful as she'd like.

I don't want to come off as claiming that Wicked or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead aren't problematic cases, or that it isn't problematic to lump Homer's The Oddessy and

liz_marcs' Living History in the same category.

liz_marcs' story is clearly and intuitively fanfiction in a way that Homer's isn't. But when the definition we construct to exclude Homer also ends up excluding Living History, that's a sign that the definition is fundamentally broken.

As a post-structuralist, I tend to view conceptual analyses as quaint holdovers from the days of Bertrand Russell, when it was thought that language could be made as wonderfully precise as mathematics. (It turns out mathematics ends up being as wonderfully imprecise as language.) But that isn't to deny that conceptual analyses can be great fun as logical puzzles, especially as one comes up with more and more convoluted examples to prove that under a given definition case A which intuitively falls on one side of the line in truth falls on the other. Indeed, that's why analytic philosophers are so much fun to spend time with--they always come up with the kookiest examples. (And then no one in the classroom laughs, and I'm looking around wondering if I was the only one in my Intro Phil class awake.)

Instead, I turn, as I did in the gen vs. ship debates, to the notion of genre, to the post-Wittgenstein idea that language is always-already fuzzy, and no matter how much you look you won't find uncomplicated joints in language or nature. In her defense,

azdak recognizes (parenthetically) that what she puts forth may be if not "the defining quality" then "at least one of the central characteristics," but still she seems to think it to be defining enough to disqualify Stoppard's play without needing to refer to any of the other ways it is different from our core notion of what fanfiction is and does. In the end, all we have is partial truths and faulty definitions--and if you've ever looked inside a dictionary, you know that's all we ever have. Fanfiction is about engaging with the source text, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about treating characters as human beings, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about violating copyright, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about community, except when it's not. Fanfiction is written by women for women, except when it's not. Fanfiction is subversive, except when it's not. Fanfiction is about unleashing fantasies, except when it's not. Fanfiction "reads like fanfic" except when it doesn't. A fic that does many of these things will fit more comfortably under our intuitive notion of what fanfiction is then a fic which only does one of them. Some works are clearly fanfiction or clearly not fanfiction, being the fannish equivalent of baby-boiling, while some problematic cases rest in the grey areas between.

So keep on putting forth your Theories of What Fanfic Is and Is Not, but expect me to be there, shooting holes in them, because that's my idea of a good time.

ETA:

azdak continues the discussion with more on "Fanfic" as a fuzzy category.

[T]he fan community has also begun to generate a smaller (but growing) number of lesbian stories envision this type of reciprocal relationship between two female characters. [. . .] In lesbian slash, as with male-centered slash, sexuality involves a dispersal of traditionally masculine and feminine traits [. . .]. That the conventions of lesbian slash follow so closely those of the older and more fully developed male slash is not surprising, but it does point to the degree to which these same models are and have been available for narratives that more directly represent female experience.

That's from Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers, which I recently ILL-ed. (pp. 197-8)

It took me a while to decide why this comparison didn't seem to ring true for me. Was it merely the 15-year time difference between when the book came out and the present? Obviously much of the difference in terminology is due to the evolution of the genre in that time period; we'd never think to call femslash "lesbian slash" today, seeing how it is neither necessarily produced by lesbians (he says) nor about lesbians per se (the "slash is not gay" phenomenon)--in some ways the field has changed from its narrower existence in the late 80's and early 90's.

What I finally decided, though, was the difference is that the "adrogenizing" of male characters was being painted as a resistant measure on the part of fans in order to explore identity outside of strict gender roles. Kirk and Spock each have some characteristics which could be considered to be traditionally coded feminine, but neither figure is particularly androgenous--it is the fan writer who chooses to emphasize the feminine characteristic in order to produce this androgeny.

This seems to link in to present-day concerns about "feminizing" male characters, a concern I admit to finding silly or at least misguided--shouldn't the concern be whether the character is acting in character for himself as opposed to his gender. If there's canonical evidence for his breaking gender type, then he should; if not, the problem is not being in character, not being "feminized."

There does seem, however, to be a sense that these "feminized" versions of the (male) characters are somehow OOC. But nobody ever complains about "masculinizing" female characters, do they? Ever wonder why not?

In particular, in the example of "lesbian slash" that Jenkins offers (from a fandom with which I'm familiar; the other is Jenna/Cally from Blake's 7) Tasha Yar/Deanna Troi from ST:TNG, the androgeny to which he points is very much contained within the canonical characterizations (from my perspective, admittedly, which is already influenced by being a femslasher; there's no way to make this argument from a strictly textual/formal standpoint). I think it's more likely for female characters appearing in these sorts of patriarchal-value-derived works to be more complex in terms of gender construction than the male characters, because it was assumed that for both men and women it is the traditionally male characteristics which manage to make the character "interesting." (Of course, the masculinity ascribed to the female characters rarely if ever is allowed to threaten male dominance or interfere with the character's ability to act as eye candy for heterosexual males).

My point isn't, of course, that femslash is more IC than m/m slash, because I don't believe that (conceptions of what is in character will always-already depend upon the hermeneutic conditions under which we are interrogating the text), and newer canons tend to have more complicated gender constructions for both male and female characters as well as an understanding that characters can be interesting (and thus marketable) for their traditionally female traits. (Progress!)

But I do take the differences in the way femslash and boyslash are produced to be further indicative of the distinctiveness of the two genres. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: a community of women writing women in homosexual relationships isn't going to end up working through the issues as a community (the same community, in many cases) of women writing men in homosexual relationships.

This post is a response to melannen's much-recced (and deservedly so) post on the slasher's gaze, but more directly a response to a couple of responses to her post, namely ithiliana when she says, "I'm going to immediately complicate it by asking about 'the femslash gaze' (because although people are convincing me that slash can be f/f as well as m/m, her meta seems to focus on the male object of slash gaze…..)," and kyuuketsukirui when she asks "The very fact that there are two men involved means there will be men doing the looking and men being looked at. This applies for gay porn, lit, even real life. How can it be something specifically slashy/the defining characteristic of slash?" To respond to both of these points, however, I think requires a deeper engagement with the original post that prompted these responses. In particular, I want to use lots of examples, because that is that for which Grace (=kyuuketsukirui, but easier to type) asked.

[Note: This was originally longer and more coherent, and then I lost that draft. Since then it's been sitting on my hard drive getting less and less topical. I really don't have the time right now to perfect it any more, so I give it to you as it is.]

( The Het Male Gaze )

( The Queer Female Gaze )

( The Femslasher's Gaze )

After--what? a week? a week and a half?--of the gen vs. ship debates (cf.

metafandom), I've finally come to a conclusion. They--with "they" being pretty much everyone with whom I disagree, on every side of the table--don't want genre labels. They want warning labels. (Admittedly, this wasn't so much my brilliant inspiration, as some of them coming out and admitting it.)

When we look for Serenity in the DVD store we look under "Science Fiction" (if the store has an S.F. section), because the movie is more science fiction than it is a western. You won't find a sticker on it saying "Warning: This film contains Western elements" and even if you read the entire back cover you won't find any indication that some people consider the film to be a western in addition to being science-fiction (in part because the cover sucks, but what can one do). (I'd use Firefly rather than Serenity to make my example, as the former has more western elements than the latter, but it'd probably more than likely be found in a "Television" section--which shows that fannish categories don't make any less sense than any others.)

If I go to the bookstore and browse through the science fiction section--which I do less than I used to, since I have an insane number of books already purchased and unread--they are in that section because they belong to the genre. They do not, however, have warnings that say: "Warning: This book may contain mystery elements" or "This book contains a boy and a dog" or "This book has a romance in it." No, it gets filed under the dominant genre, the best fit. The summary, if the book has one (not all do), might give a sense of the secondary or tertiary genres if there are any. (And even then the summaries aren't written by the author, so sometimes the summaries suck and give away too much, and sometimes they seem to be for a completely different story altogether, like the summary on the back of my copy of Time Enough for Love.) Then again, it might not, and you might find out half-way through the science fiction mystery you've been enjoying so much so far that it also includes a romance and a boy with a dog. If you hate these elements so much you can't go on, then tough, you're out $6.50 you could have spent on a different book.

In the fanfiction world, things are much better for the ridiculously fragile: all fanfics come with a money-back satisfaction guarantee.

"Het" is a genre which includes texts that focus on m/f romantic or sexual relationships. It is not a warning; I refuse to label my stories for someone so ridiculously fragile they will be crushed if they come across a reference to a heterosexual couple, even (what they, using their hermeneutic, consider to be) a non-canon couple. "Femslash" and "m/m slash" are genres as well, not warnings. I absolutely will not label my stories for someone so ridiculously fragile (or homophobic, although in these cases I don't think my interlocutors are) they will be crushed if they come across a reference to a homosexual couple, even (what they, using their [heteronormative] hermeneutic, consider to be) a non-canon couple.

Indeed, the best way one can tell that "gen" isn't a genre the way the gen fans (or at least the vocal gen fans with whom I've been disagreeing) have been using it is that it can be defined far too precisely. Genres don't work that way; their edges are always-already fuzzy. Warnings--or, in this case, the lack thereof--do. A genre specifies what a work is about, whether it's about falling in love or solving a mystery or fighting demons, which is subjective. A warning specifies if a given element is present--think of those warnings for peanuts on products that don't even include peanuts, because people can be just that sensitive to the oils--which is not subjective.

"Milk Chocolate" M&M's may contain peanuts; it says so on the wrappers. That doesn't make them Peanut M&M's, and anyone looking for Peanut M&M's and finding Milk Chocolate ones isn't going to be satisfied.

Anymore, the only time I warn, ever, is for non-con. I wouldn't (I don't think--I'm not making any promises) withhold pairing information if the relevant pairing was incestuous, even if it was very brief, and I think I might even add a note in the case of a pairing like "Cindy Mackenzie/Lauren Sinclair" making clear the relationship, so you could say I'd warn for incest. But I don't warn for death, and I don't warn for pregnancy, and if I've already said it, I don't care, I'll say it again: I will not warn for het or femslash or m/m slash. Absolutely out of the question.

I provide a Genre Index so people can find the sorts of fic they'll probably like, like putting all the science fiction books together in the bookstore--not so they can be protected from stuff they don't like. If you like homoerotic stories about women which are romantic and/or sexual, you'll probably like the stories I classify under "femslash." But that doesn't mean you won't find elements you don't like there. Tough. As I said, money-back satisfaction guarantee. (Stealing a

languagelog chestnut even more, I'll even throw in a free year's subscription to this journal.) Stories are frequently listed under more than one genre, and yes, a story about fighting demons in which Dawn and Giles just happen to be married will be listed under both gen and het. (And I suspect the reader going in expecting pure het is going to be more disappointed than the reader expecting pure gen.)

Admittedly, it's not just gen fans who want warnings when it comes to pairings. 'Shippers can be just as bad, with a Buffy/Angel fan not wanting to hear a mention of Buffy/Spike or Spike/Angel even if the fic is post-"NFA," or some such. A plague on both their houses, I'll say--if a couple paragraphs referencing some (in your mind noncanon) pairing in a long plotty multichapter epic can ruin your entire reading experience, you really have to get over yourself.

But this is the first time I've heard anyone suggest that we subvert the entire genre classificatory system to turn it into a warning system. Because just, erm, no.

cofax7 has a post on impossibly pretty casts and how we as audiences react to and fanwank the impossible attractiveness of the characters.

I think I think of Sunnydale as being inhabited by impossibly attractive people, but it never bothered me. For one thing, Sunnydale always struck me as a (white) upper-middle class community--even if many of the people were lower class people who could afford to act upper-class because of low property values. I went to a private high school and a private university and a lot of people were impossibly attractive there, too. I suppose if I thought about it it should have been a lot more of a problem on Veronica Mars, where the 02ers wouldn't have been able to afford to keep themselves looking like the 09ers.

Plus the Hellmouth lets you fanwank anything.

I only really think about this when I create OCs, because my first impulse is to always create OCs who are pretty (not so-impossibly-Mary-Sue-pretty, but pretty) girls, because I am shallow, and then I feel guilty and like a bad liberal. Then I think about the rest of the population of Sunnydale, realize an unattractive female would be really out of place, and stop feeling guilty. (I'm not someone who feels fic should be more realistic than canon. Unexpected realism--for example, witches in the Jossverse talking like real-world Wiccans--throws me out of the world of the fic.)

And I rarely mention in the fic whether the character is pretty, so it's really just my imagination I have to worry about. Although my Character Index has pictures of some of the OCs, which are usually taken from IMDb or otherwise of (impossibly attractive) actors.

Some of the WNGWJLEO meta that has been going around has made me think about the rôle of sexual identities in my own fanfic writing. I've already mentioned before that I've noticed that WNGWJLEO doesn't seem to be a trope in femslash--or at least the femslash I've read--the way it is (or has been) in m/m slash fandom. (I do wonder if WNG is more likely to be a trope in fandoms which are more OTP-centric than Buffy femslash fandom tends to be, fandoms like XWP or Law and Order or Wicked.)

There's been a lot of talk about how characters understand their own sexuality in fic, especially when they find themselves in a type of relationship different than the sort they may have had in canon, and--I suppose--what that means about us as writers and readers and a community. It's been much noted, although no one is quite sure what to make of it, that while the WNG trope doesn't seem to as common as it was (depending on how one defines) the characters in same-sex relationships don't exactly seem to be identifying as gay (or even bi, in most cases), either. Is fandom a post-gay space? No one seems to know for sure.

Anyway, all the discussion made me want to navel-gaze and to look at how sexual identities function--or don't--in my writing. (That is, I'm not talking about how the characters are portrayed in canon, but how I think about them when I'm reading, and how I might expect a reader of my fanfic to respond to them in those stories.)

Some of my characters do have sexual orientations as such, in my imagination if nowhere else, even if they're never really seen identifying with those orientations. Dawn and Faith are in my mind bisexual, even though I really don't see Faith spending much time on coming up with labels for herself. Willow and Kennedy are lesbians, and identify as such in a fashion which is more overtly political and self-aware even while at the same time their queerness is very domestic and in some ways heteronormative. (Kennedy'll have sex with a man in the context of an orgy--I'm thinking mainly of Dawn/Giles/Faith/Kennedy foursomes here--but it's really not her cup of tea. Willow's orientation builds upon her statements in canon, and in part as a resistant measure against all those who paint her bisexual.)

However, I think ambiguity can be important in fic, so other characters have less well-defined sexualities. Buffy is straight unless she's with Faith (a whiff of WNGWJLEO) or appearing in the fic. (I jest, but the fact that Buffy does revolve around her means I have written femslash about her. I see those stories--unlike most of my stories--as sort of AU's, being about a slightly different Buffy than the one we know.) My Andrew is not strictly gay, which leaves open various levels of queerness. I pair him with female characters, but try and keep his mannerisms and dialogue in line with canon, so if he reads as gay there he'll probably read as gay in my fic, too. My Giles is straight insofar as we know but with a deliberate attempt to recreate the Giles/Ethan subtext whenever they meet, to keep open the possibility they may have been lovers. I've only shown Ethan involved with women or talking about being involved with women, but he has subtext not only with Giles but also Beth (an OC who is, despite the name, male). Xander and Oz are presumably straight, as I don't like to write them that often, but that assumption should probably be problematized as well. . . .

A lot of what I write is femslash, so I don't have a lot of straight people appearing in my fics, or at least not a lot of female straight people. This isn't problematic until one considers that I write a lot of my fic in the same universe, so that slowly everyone is becoming bi: not just Dawn and Faith, but also Amanda, Vi, Lilah, Eve, Harmony, Amy. . . who's left? Samantha Finn? (Only until the next 'thon. . . .)

And of course my characters are queer in other ways than just being bi or gay or lesbian, although that opens the can of worms of just how much we're going to let into the term before we've let in every relationship without a picket fence. (Is Dawn and Giles' open marriage queer? Maybe? Would the age-difference and previous power-differential itself be enough to make it queer? Maybe not?)

Homophobia isn't really a present force in my stories, although of course the world they take place in is heteronormative. In part that's because the characters I'm writing about are priveleged enough, with the resources of the Watcher's Council behind them, to do what they like--who really is going to tell a Slayer and a Wiccan who they can sleep with? Of course, that's unrealistic in that it assumes the Council itself is totally accepting of queerness. (Of course, we don't know that such judging doesn't go on in my Watcher!verse, but if it does it happens outside of the stories I am telling.)

Homophobia is touched upon in my "St. Clare's" fics, where Faith and Kennedy are teaching at a Catholic school, but even there it's mostly for humor: the juxtaposition of the Vatican's outdated morality and the reality of the school itself, where no one is taking that morality seriously despite paying a certain obligatory amount of lip-service to it.

I've tried different ways to organize my meta, but the only way that really seems to work is tags; it's just too sprawling to organize any other way. But I thought I might visit my meta tags, either one-by-one or in groups, and put forth a collection of the major meta posts with that theme, with annotations and commentary, to trace the evolution of my thought on the subject. I decided to start with the topic of monsters, those who do evil while willing good. What is striking is how these posts are at once me taking a thought as it percolates through my consciousness and evolves in my mind, and is also a discussion, as I take from many different sources that inspire me--other LJ posts, discussions in comments, and, of course, popular culture.

1. Buffyverse Day 2005: An essay on power and its rôle in the Buffyverse, and its rôle in making me love the Buffyverse. This post is important because it goes to length to describe why the will-to-power has such a hold over me as a reader and viewer of texts, tracing my (essentially fannish) history with the motif, finally culminating with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but only after a great many twists and turns.
[The characters] challenge the clear and easy distinction between hero and villain and make it extremely clear that "normative" is not always the same as "good." In doing so, the show flirts with the fascination I and others feel for the villain, recognizing it as not essentially something belonging to the Other (the monstrous, the vampiric), but something which is essentially human.

2. The Monster in the Mirror: A direct response to a Colbert Report sketch which compared President Bush to Superman, but also more indirectly in response to jennyo's fangirling of Laura Roslin and my own fangirling of a decidedly dark version of Dawn. Here I explicitly formalize the notion of the "monster" (which has of course been a staple of my meta ever since): they who do evil in the name of good, whether it's Jack Bauer torturing people on 24 or whatever. Here I take the stand that monsters are not the sort of people we want, say, running the country in real life, but also admitted just how powerful a hold that sort of character has over us in fiction.
Call me an idealist, but this is what I think: if we have to abandon our principles to save the world, then we turn ourselves into a world that is no longer worth saving. [. . .] I'd rather watch the Huns invade and enslave us all by force than give up one bit of my American civil liberties (the precious few that are left!) in the name of security.[. . .] // The twist is, what if the Huns at the gates aren't Islamofascists, but vampires and demons?

3. More Meta on Monsters: A Response to the BSG Finale: Um, basically what it says on the label. A response to the season finale for season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. Spoilers.
I'm fascinated in Dawn and Giles as monsters, ubermensch with whom I vicariously identify through the will-to-power, but my relation to Roslin is different. I turn to her as a maternal character, as the President I'd like to have, and so like Jed Bartlett or Gina Davis' character from Commander-in-Chief (whatever happened to that show anyway?) I don't want to see her turn into a monster. A monstrous President strikes far too close to home, whereas a monstrous starship captain is far enough removed that I can enjoy the expression of the will-to-power.

4. Meta: Mimesis, Monsters, and Morality: In which I begin to angst that I keep writing about characters doing all these actions with which I am ethically and politically uncomfortable. I don't have any answers to my questions yet, but I am beginning to ask the important questions. Also, I begin to frame the issue in philosopher-speak.
By writing about monsters--indeed by glorifying in their will to power--am I condoning their actions? Am I condoning that is acceptable to infringe on human freedoms in the name of security, in defiance of the one principle which I hold most dear? The answer to that strikes me as unequivocately no; none of these stories come with disclaimers saying "The behavior in this story is morally acceptable." They are fantasy and wish-fulfillment, not how I really want the world to be but how I sometimes like to pretend it is (or could be). But neither do they (nor should they) come with disclaimers saying "The views expressed by this fic are not necessarily those of the author." We should take responsibility for our creations.

5. More Meta on the Morality of Mimetic Monsters: I begin to come up with answers--that we need to concern ourselves not with the formal characteristics of a text but how it functions in a sociohistorical location--and to frame both the questions and answers much more deeply within the language of analytic philosophy. I also begin asking more questions which question the way that texts communicate their meanings, which of course is a whole different theme in my meta--and one I'll collect in a different post.
I find it difficult, as someone skilled (not by any fancy education, although I have that too, but simply by living in the culture and speaking the language) in various relevant narrative conventions, and even with imaginative resistance and assuming that the same moral rules apply in the fictional world as in this one, to interpret Buffy as not endorsing the actions of Buffy (even when she's clearly wrong, like late season 7) or Giles, or Battlestar Galactica as not endorsing the actions of Roslin. The narrative conventions make it clear who is in the right and who is in the wrong. [. . .] The question that needs to be asked isn't what would be the ideal text in the feminist utopia but what is empowering to these people at this time on the ground?

6. Points of Interest in a Convergence Culture: I respond to a post by jennyo where she discusses how Laura Roslin is "a scary, dangerous person who's going to break and make the Cylons look like kids playing at evil" and why she fangirls her anyway.
God knows that in real life there is nothing more dangerous than someone who is certain that they are right and won't respect any limits on doing what they feel they need to do. The only difference, I suppose, is that in fiction we can be sure that our Mary Sues really are always right, at least in the moral order in which we read out of (or into) the text. But is this really all that separates a Roslin from an Operative? And what does that say (if anything) about real-world ethics? (And if ethics sometimes falls to the exigencies of a crisis, when is that crisis, and who draws the line? Some would claim we--meaning "the United States of America" or perhaps even "Western Civilization"--have already fallen into that sort of crisis.)

"femlash" : "slash" :: "microwave oven" : "oven"

*

Some people are having "the authorial responsibility discussion." Some people are having it intelligently, some foolishly, some civilized, some wankfully--such is the way of the world.

Long-time readers will remember me struggling with these very questions myself when I asked "Do texts speak with a moral voice?"

But the question can't be--or at least shouldn't be--about what is inherently objectionable. The issue is context. Who is reading? Who is being harmed? The last question requires a healthy dose of both theory--to understand how thoughts can lead to words can lead to deeds--and empiricism, to see how they are actually doing it. The same text in different contexts can serve radically different--often diametrically opposite--functions. Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by socialist Eric Blair, has been reappropriated by the neo-conservatives. Hell, the New Testament has been basically reappropriated by evangelicals and conservatives. WTF?

It's not what is being written, in and of itself, which is at issue; it's what is being written in the context of how, and by whom, it is being read. (And who's writing, both individually and as a community.) What may be perfectly fine in the feminist utopia may be problematic in the here-now, and vice versa.

What other texts--and by texts I include practices, customs, behaviors--does the text in question connect with or resist? Sexual deviants, good and bad, do not have a broad network of structures already in place in our culture to facilitate their predation; sexists, racists, and heterosexists do. (Where rapists fall could be arguable--but again, noncon in a mainstream comic book is not going to have the same sociological effect as in a fanfic. It's just not. The values of the interpretative community are different, the readers are different, it just has a completely different function, and any quick and easy comparison between the two is absurd.) A story about incest is not going to function in the same way as a story about racism.

(Which is not to say that I don't come down firmly on the side of laissez-faire when writing what we want, when representing our fantasies. We have to work out our issues within the iconography which we have at hand, at that means at times writing things which may be sexist, racist, or heterosexist. But writing what we want is not the same as refusing to be critical of them after we've written them--the response to problematic speech is never supression, and always more speech.)

If you don't believe that patriarchal structures and systemic sexism (racism, heterosexism, etc.) are embedded in our society, then I'm sure that we feminists come off looking like self-righteous, wanton hypocrites, wanting a ridiculous double standard.

But then you come off looking willfully blind, so I suppose we're even.

As remarked before in this journal, the underlying process of the game of "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" provides some interesting fundamental similarities and dissimilarities to other processes of inquiry: to a detective investigating a mystery, to a scientist developing a theory, to the work of logicians, linguists, and lawyers. So it should be in no way surprising that while going through my favorite blogs, I came across several matters of interest which speak to the philosophical issues at hand in the way we go about our canon-formation (speaking of canon here as a set of "facts" about a fictional and/or actual world derived from a text, rather than as the text itself).

( Language Log, Volokh Conspiracy, and Original Meta )

The Tradëscan Codex

All That Was Not, Is Not, and Will Not Be

Adapted from a Conversation with wisdomeagle

Interview Meme

Meta: Fanfic as Je me souviens

Heh.

Plagiarism vs. Allusion

A Christian Perspective on Authorial Responsibility

Meta: Authorial Responsibility, Consequences and Context

I Aim to Misbehave

Feminism and Proof

Because I Couldn't Help Myself

On Readers and Writers

Conceptual Analyses of Fanfiction, and Why They Don't Work

Why Femslash Is Different, Part 1,001

Meta: Gazes in/and/of Criticism

Gen, Slash, and Het: Warnings or Genres?

Impossibly Pretty People. Guh.

WNG Femslash

Meta Revisited I: Monsters

More Thoughts

Blogroll: Narrative Implicatures and the Chewbacca Defense

Profile

October 2023

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