an absolute word tart! (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} schemingreader) wrote,@ 2006-01-28 20:48:00 |
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| Current mood: |  exhausted |
| Entry tags: | meta |
Meta on the fabulousness of fandom for snegurochka_lee
I made some comments to snegurochka_lee's journal in a sort of sardonic shorthand, and she asked me to expand on my thoughts there. So I am doing so, with a more earnest tone.
“Fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them." William Morris
Fandom subverts the dominant cultural paradigms of audience passivity, challenging mass media hegemonic discourse by encouraging individual creativity.
Take for example, the massive Harry Potter fandom in which I am a participant, since it's the largest and most obvious manifestation of this phenomenon. When Jo Rowling wrote her first Harry Potter book, we were all thinking like Muggles. That is, we thought: "Here's a nice book for children that adults can enjoy, too." We didn't think: "Oh, look, another franchise opportunity for Harry Potter movies, t-shirts, calendars, video games, figurines..."
I'm sure Jo isn't sorry that her lovely little book became an international media phenomenon, but it does do something negative to our experience as readers. Between the movies and the media images, we are left with an ultra-canonical reading, a single way to interpret a book. Indeed, to some extent, a single way to interpret the experience of reading. When you write stories that recast the Harry Potter characters and plot, you enter into the process of interpretation and take the reins of the story into your own hands.
Just think what you are messing with when you write stories about television programs. The whole medium is designed to keep you salivating for hamburgers and weight-loss programs. You aren't buying the messages of enforced passive consumption of entertainment when you decide that you can use a shared audience experience as a stage on which to create. I don't participate in any TV fandoms, but I think they are in some respects the most revolutionary thing going.
You might think: "Oh, we are ripping off someone else's characters, taking their intellectual property." Take a long view, though. Look at the King Arthur stories and the spin-offs they spawned in the eleventh century. People all over Europe were retelling the stories of the Knights of the Round Table. The whole problem with mass media is that it makes artists' livelihoods contingent on killing their art. It used to be that songwriters sold their sheet music, not their recorded performances. We have commodified the entire experience of making art. In some respect, fan fiction and fan art stand against all of that.
Fandom provides a framework for women to praise each other's creativity in a shared mass cultural context, while overthrowing the supremacy of that context and privileging our own readings.
One thing that I particularly like about fandom is that most, though clearly not all, of the writers and artists are female. I want to add here that as I am positing fandom as a sort of model of feminist community, that I do like the inclusion of male writers and artists in it. We include male creators and promote and enjoy their creative efforts, but don't necessarily privilege their vision, and that seems just perfect and right on to me. I love the thought of a non-separatist women's community. I also notice that there are writers in nearly every age group, though most of the stories I read are by female writers between ages 18 and 50. I see these women encouraging each other to write.
I was traumatized by my experiences in a college creative writing program. Though I have written nearly every kind of non-fiction, I did not think anyone would want to read my fiction. So I didn't write any fiction—for about twenty years. When I started reading fan fiction, I saw that writers had formed communities to issue prompts and challenges. People were providing the equivalent of a gigantic creative writing workshop. The only thing missing was the sense of competitiveness and bitchiness. Now that I have taken the plunge and become a participant, I can see that people are even more generous than I thought. We write for each other. We provide each other with excuses to write, we write love notes to each other for writing, we just encourage the daylights out of each other.
Fan artists are if anything, even more giving.
Every piece of fan fiction is not equally worthwhile. It's not all great art. But if fandom does anything, it encourages people to write and create, to hone their skills. In fandom you can cut your chops. When I see the work that young women in their late teens and early 20s are producing in fandom, I am ecstatic. I know that by providing a place to practice and eager, appreciative readers, we are making writers. We are writing midwives, whispering "Okay, now—push!"
Fandom creates multi-generational communities of women who work together to overthrow patriarchal suppression of women's erotic impulses.
Yes, this is my fancy justification of all the porn: here goes. We don't all agree about what constitutes a feminist sexuality, a sexuality that privileges women's experience. For some of us, anything that does not look like a romance novel will do, and for others, it has to be romantic or it's ugly. It must look odd to some people that a big part of fandom is women writing about men having sex with other men, but some of us find that a big turn-on. We also write about a variety of sexual practices and acts, performed by many different types of pairings. There are even some people who write from an asexual perspective.
We don't have agreement about what's good sex, nor about what's good politics around sex. We have constant discussions and arguments about whether we should be writing or reading stories that eroticize rape or sexual abuse. I think these are fraught issues. But here's what I like: we are writing about what we think is hot, we are trying to turn each other on, and we are talking about it. We are also giving each other positive feedback for writing about our sexual fantasies. That is incredible! Where else do we have that? Television talk shows and mass-produced erotica/pornograph/romance media don't provide this level of honesty and creativity.
Though we don't all agree about what it should look like, fandom provides a model for pro-sex feminism, for women reclaiming control over their sexuality, minds first. I really love the model of having people post warnings at the tops of their stories. It shows we have figured out, at least to some small degree, that we don't all feel sexuality the same way. We get that everyone is different, and can encourage more than one view of sexuality. Our whole vocabulary of kinks and squicks is a sophisticated acknowledgement of the varieties of human sexual experience.
I have a bit more on the new meanings I've found in slash fiction, but I think I'll save that for another post.
