Dr. Robin Anne Reid

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May 3rd, 2007

Welcome To My Treehouse! @ 09:52 pm

Naming Policy:

A number of people I know in LJ under their fan pseuds are posting over at blogs under our legal names (I consider my fan pseud totally real--I even have a tattoo!). I have a firm policy of not linking fan pseud and legal names for anyone in any space and would ask that you all follow that policy as well. I'm not moderating or controlling comments and would rather not do so; I much prefer to trust people until there is conclusive proof that I cannot. I am allowing but screening anonymous comments.

Having to start with this policy is in fact very connected to the topic and questions that led to my making this LJ active earlier than I'd planned and in ways I had not planned: the issue of academics who are fans, who participate in fandom under pseuds (although in a number of cases, many of us know each other under both names and don't mind other fen knowing our various names; the concern is more related to workplaces, especially for graduate students, tenure-track faculty, independent scholars who also work as adjuncts, etc.). A number of us do scholarship as well, on fan fiction, vids, other fanac.

Everyone I know who fits this category is a woman.

There are male scholars who are in media studies and fan studies and related fields; I don't know if any of them are *on* LJ in any participatory way (the general consensus is, mostly not). The association of "weblogs" as public/intellectual discourse spaces and LiveJournal as a fluffy, girly, social, emo diary/BFF space is one that has been around since before I joined LJ.

So I'm wondering (and will post a link in a few other places) about your experiences in LJ, in blogs, in other spaces, as an academic, or as a fan, or as both! Yes, this LJ is my academic one, but no degree is required to participate--just an interest in the questions I'm writing about.

Recently, a friend of mine in both academia and fan spaces, brought into public debate issues that a number of us had been talking about for some time, often in private (under flock, in chat, etc.): the issue of the gendering in fan studies, media studies.

You can see her blog entry here: http://kbusse.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/mit5-review/

I'm participating over there (at great length which will surprise none of you who know me in other spaces).

The impetus for this entry was attending Media in Transition 5/

It's important to note that what we're talking about is, I firmly believe, systemic in academia (if given the chance, I'd say in mainstream and other U.S. cultures--that being the only national culture/s I know well enough to judge.



Two things struck me as I participated over there the past couple of days: the first, is that a post made by Henry Jenkins on his blog (asking for feedback on the conference) received only 8 posts (until today when it went to 11) while comments on Kristina's zoomed to over 60 in a shorter time. In fact, for a while, I thought Kristina's link to her entry had stopped discussion over there (I see that at my university often: the feminists raise our issues, and most of the male faculty--not all--suddenly grow very quiet and have to leave. It's an interesting tactic.)

I want to note the post just made by Ron Robinson where he brings up the issue of marginalization of people of color. He notes the fears he had to face in posting what he did: I can guess at them because I know the fears that those of us who are (the ones I know in person) primarily Anglo-American women have felt at expressing what we have.

The second thing that struck me is the perceived need by Kristina and some of my other friends to set up a "blog" over there -- that despite (what I gather from my memory of conversations) efforts to get the fanboys over here to talk, they generally avoid L J. So in order to take *our* conversation about gender issues (and it's sad that we could not address race in any meaningful way) public, to include them in it, we had to go over to their treehouse.

I've been a declared feminist since the summer of 1982 (the first person to verbally shove me, challenging me to read feminist work, was a Dr. R.D. Brown, one of my favorite professors at WWU (and a male!) who was the life partner of a feminist who also taught there. Part of the reason I delayed going to my doctorate was that I spent years reading all the women's work I'd been denied until then; I only went back in 1988 when I knew I could do feminist work. But I had lots of experience of marginalization, exclusion, and prejudice against women in academia before then (I started university before the current policies against sexual harassment were in place). And although I am lucky enough to have tenure (and be a full professor) at my current university, many of those problems still exist here, in different forms than in the 70s and early 80s, but remarkably similar in many ways.

At this stage in my life, I'm not that interested in spending that much time trying to integrate with the male establishment--I don't care if I become any sort of "big name" in fandom *or* scholarship. I'm a contrarian, and in this very small and in some ways completely unimportant choice, I'm drawing a line for myself. I prefer to have a professional presence here, in LJ, and to see what discussions about the same issues can be generated here.

We've seen examples of women aca-fen going over to blog primarily because of the desire to engage in this discussion in public, under real names.

So I'm wondering if any men will come to (or are in) LJ--academics--aca-fans--and willing to discuss the issue in this space.

There's a lot going on in Kristina's blog, so maybe there's no need for this other complementing discussion, but I think there may be.

Since I will also be introducing my graduate students in the fall to LJ communities and some of these issues, I hope that they will be able to participate as well. I'm teaching a graduate course, online, that's part of a new focus in our doctoral program. The course is "New Media Literacies."

I'm open to suggestions about what else I might post about in this blog: some of the things that most interest me are mentoring women in my field, and related fields; the Human Subjects projection issues relating to internet research which have changed; interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts in writing and teaching.

 
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From:[info]duskpeterson
Date: May 4th, 2007 05:01 am (UTC)
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LiveJournal's statistics show that LJ is heavily weighted toward women. I don't know how reflective this is of the blogging world in general. However, because I announce my writings here, I tend to think of LiveJournal, not in gender terms, but in fiction community terms. There are many fanfic comms here (mainly female). There aren't many gayfic comms here (mainly male). There are many mixed-orientation erotica comms here (a mixture of male and female). There aren't many romance fiction comms here (mainly female). There are many dark fiction comms here (a mixture of male and female).

Parts of LiveJournal are intensely non-girly. They just aren't the types of places that fangirls are likely to stumble across. :)

The blog entry you linked to made this sound as though it was partly a vidders vs machinima makers conflict. For me to be sure that this was solely a gender-based problem, I'd have to know whether female machinima fans were participating at LiveJournal. If not, then I'd suspect that part of the problem lay in the fact that certain communities start off in certain parts of cyberspace and feel reluctant to venture out of their space.

(I do know that there are a healthy number of male slashers at the LJ comms I participate at. That may simply reflect my reading interests, which are toward the type of slash that is more likely to attract male readers.)

Of course, where online communities start may be influenced by where other people of the same gender are. It may well be that, because lots of females were participating at LiveJournal, that's why fanficcers ended up here rather than in some other part of cyberspace. But I was part of the transitional time period when fanfic e-mail lists switched to fanfic LJ, and everyone moved here, regardless of gender. The Men's Club, an e-mail list for male slash writers, stopped receiving posts at the beginning of 2004; [info]men_who_slash started at the end of 2004. Not a coincidence; that was the year when many fanfic e-mail lists went into sharp decline and many fanfic comms sprang up.

I don't want to deny the presence of gender bias, of course. It continues to be pervasive in our society. But I think that, any time people start to segregate themselves, there are usually multiple factors at work.
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 7th, 2007 03:56 pm (UTC)
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Thank you for the link to the statistics (I was just wondering how to get there--I know LJ keeps stats, although much of what I've seen in the past are the age stats)!

The problem is, always, that we tend to generalize based on our own experience; although I've had a fandom journal since 2003, I think I've only met/added male slashers to my flist in the last six months or so (and only two, that that!). My flist is heavily weighted toward women, mostly from my own choice (I only met the male slashers when I started investigating f/f slash).

At some point, I hope scholars are able to do some research on the fan movements from space to space because the little I've heard from people is just fascinting.

The post I'm linking to raises, in part, concerns about how male scholars of media studies are focusing all the attention, history, and claims of origin on machinima which apparently has more male creators vs. vidding (which is being ignored). The concerns are raised by scholars who've attended conferences and heard the presentations and see a pattern of bias/exclusion in the scholarship. I don't know anything about machanima, and only a little about vidding, so I cannot really contribute anything to any discussion. I would be sure there are female machanima creators, just as there are female gamers--and more work needs to be done in all those areas (we have the same problem we did with feminist sf--so much to work on, so few, relatively speaking, scholars who work in this marginalized area).

The related issue (and why I posted this post) is that the perception of LJ as (stereotypically, negatively) girly, and how that plays into (again) academic issues--a number of women aca-fen have found this space intensely useful for not only our fanac, but also our acadac. But the perception is that the "real" academic discussions are in the (male authored) blogs.

From what I've been seeing recently, fanfic is perhaps attracting a larger group of male fanficcers than was the case years and decades ago--and that will be changing things.

When you say you like the type of slash more likely to attract male readers--could you expand on that? (For example, I tend to prefer more action, AU, dark types of stories in LOTR fandom, rather than stories that have a number of traditional romance elements. I even did a paper on the issue of whether some women who prefer dark/torture/action/horror oriented genres in their profic reading and movie reading might not be fans of those genres of slash/fan fic, and found that my very small sample tended to support that hypothesis.)

I prefer to think of some of the choices I've made as separatism (not segregation) which I do see as self-chosen: in terms of academia, I am not going to make any effort to do that type of scholarship which is most valued by the canon/traditionalists in my discipline (which has meant for years, I've been writing on feminist sf, and now am working into queer readings of fan fiction). I should note that there are women academics who are v. canon-tradionalist (meaning mostly male authors, mostly white, etc.)

My work is separatist in that I choose not to spend much time on the male/canonical authors (except for Tolkien, who is the sole exception!). I also see no need to "justify" this focus (but then I'm lucky enough to be tenured).

In this very specific case, although I see why certain friends of mine set up blogs to try to interact in the male aca=fan community--I'm refusing too because I'm too old and grumpy to take on what I see as most of the effort of building bridges because, for decades, I've seen the on-going exclusion of feminist scholarship in literature despite bridge-building efforts.

However, just as I see that many types of feminist movements are necessary, so too I see that many types of strategies are necessary in this academic dialogue.

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From:[info]duskpeterson
Date: May 7th, 2007 06:14 pm (UTC)
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"But the perception is that the 'real' academic discussions are in the (male authored) blogs."

Could part of the problem be that LiveJournal presents itself as a place for social networking? You go onto its home page, and it has a very different feel to it than, say, Blogger. It's a "hey, we're all friends here!" type of approach. (Not to mention Frank the friendly goat.) Similarly, the way the posts are presented suggest socializing - you're offered options for Mood and Music.

So if I were coming here as an academic, not knowing anything more about the place than the way in which it was set up, I'd question whether this was a place that was friendly to academic-style conversations.

My father, who's an academic, resisted using a Mac simply because he couldn't stand its cutesy (i.e. user-friendly) approach to interacting with the user. Of course, those were in the days before Word acquired its smiling staple. :)

"The post I'm linking to raises, in part, concerns about how male scholars of media studies are focusing all the attention, history, and claims of origin on machinima which apparently has more male creators vs. vidding (which is being ignored)."

Very distressing. Do you think that anti-slash bias might be playing a role here? I'm not familiar with machinima, so I don't know whether it ever has gay themes, but I can imagine that m/m stuff might well be the sort of topic that some heterosexual male scholars would want to avoid thinking about - and it would be difficult to write about vidding without at least touching on the topic of slash.

There was a case recently where a journalist came onto fanfic comms, seeking information for an article he was writing on fan fiction. He made clear he did not want to write much about slash. I read the resulting article and thought it was a refreshing contrast to the majority of news articles about fan fiction, which tend to overemphasize the presence of slash, probably because the journalists figure this will be something new that their readers don't know about. (I'm going to be generous and assume that the journalists aren't just going for the titillation effect.) But I can see how some slashers would be concerned at the possibility that this journalist had an anti-slash bias.

[Continued in the next post.]
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 06:01 pm (UTC)
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I see you and I have the same problem with LJ's character limits in replies--I'm always having to break comments up!

I think you raise an excellent point in how LJ presents/constructs itself (including Frank the mascot) as a social/networking site, as *clearly* not academic (although I remain astounded by the number of academics at all levels and also what I call academically minded fans (Matt Hill calls them fan scholars) who happily exist in LJ.

And yet--here's where the gender thing gets interesting--LJ was founded by (mostly? primarily? males?) (all the debate over the term "friends list). And yes, there are many male-dominated spaces in LJ (I've found a few as I followed up on interests for informal research for my fic). And let's add in the sad (to me) fact that some fen are actively hostile to academic tone/style discussions (I don't claim that 'tl;dr' was coined in response to academic style length, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised!).

So there many and multiple complex reasons--far more than I can come up with--which is why I was thrilled to see people jumping in with ideas and comments.

I wrote a stylistic analysis of discourses in two archives a while ago (it is being published in an essay collection on LOTR)--I used functional grammar to analyze the style of writing in the introductory sections of a LOTR selective archive (more formal, what many academics deem academic and/or masculine) and a more open one (more informal, i.e. "feminine"?) -- yet both were clearly run mostly or entirely by women. Women can learn the academic styles of writing/discourse (and sometimes I wish we'd stop identifying them as masculine--or else admit, as my current favorite theorist does, that women can participate in creating masculinity--men, in femininity).

The story about your father and Macs is a great one: I *loathed* the only Mac I had to use for any time (Apple IIc). I also disliked Word and preferred (the old, command-driven) Word Perfect. Yet I know journalism and art departments rely on macs (more graphics stuff), and one of the most fervent Mac adherents in my department (and around here you have to fight for your right to have a Mac) is a male rhetorician (even he says the IIc was not good).

I only gave up clinging to Word Perfect when the company got bought out and it suddenly looked like Word.

I've always thought some of that divide was styles of processing/learning--ie the more word oriented, text oriented a person was (me), the more one would prefer hardware/software that was worked that way. Those seemed the more intuitively right. The more visual/graphically oriented a person was, the more the icons/graphics/menu programs would appeal. I didn't find the Mac user friendly--just horribly clunky to "manipulate" ("why can't I just press a command key instead of having to clumsily maneuver a cursor to a silly little square!").

(I hated mouses when they came in--although I love my laptop's mousePAD! I first used a computer in a government clerical job in the early eighties-still remember that horrible orange text against black screens.)

Academics in most departments (excluding journalism, art, math, especially) may skew both toward more "verbally" oriented and prefer that approach.

The more I've been thinking about the divide in academic scholarship, the more I'm wondering if some of it is driven by focus/method: media studies focuses more on the media texts. Fan studies on the fan activities. There's an overlap, of course, but how much disciplinary methods and focus work, vs. gender bias, vs. anti-slash bias, I don't know (in theory, fan studies does not cover only slash, but in practice, I admit it's probably the majority of work covered.)

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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 06:01 pm (UTC)

part 2 of comment above

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I just do not know enough about vidding vs. machanima though since the vids I have seen are all slashy, that could definitely be a reason for exclusion. What I do gather from the people I know doing vidding scholarship, it's as if the vids are not even known enough to be ignored by the male scholars--but I could be wrong.

Was the journalist you mention the one doing a more economic focus? Article in the Wall Street Journal (if I'm remembering correctly). I was interviewed by a journalist last fall (he was given my name by someone I know through the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts where I present on fan fiction) last fall, I think, whose focus was more on the economics, what Jenkins calls convergence culture, the ways in which fans may move into professional jobs. I was actually glad to see a journalist focusing on something beyond slash (because so much more exists in fandom, and so often the sensationalizing of slash is what is covered in the media). (I didn't get named in the article--I just gave background and some names to contact.)

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From:[info]duskpeterson
Date: May 7th, 2007 06:16 pm (UTC)
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"From what I've been seeing recently, fanfic is perhaps attracting a larger group of male fanficcers than was the case years and decades ago--and that will be changing things."

What I'd like to know is how similar issues are playing out in the world of professional publishing: how many male writers are writing about different orientations than their own. M. Christian - a one-man factory for turning out erotica - has written everything from heterosexual erotica to gay male erotica to lesbian erotica. He's heterosexual, as it happens.

What I rarely see mentioned in academic discussions of gender in slash - perhaps because so many of these academics specialize in media studies - is the fact that female-written m/m pro-fic has existed for decades. Occasionally some academic will mumble something about Mary Renault, but I don't know of any academic study of heterosexual female writers of pro-fic m/m. (The GLBTQ Encyclopedia does have an article on lesbians writing m/m, and gay men writing f/f.)

In leather literature, both heterosexual female writers and lesbian writers have been writing m/m since the 1970s - and some of the most prominent leather literature has been produced by them. (Think Anne Rice.) This is well known in leather circles, but no academic seems to have shown any interest in this topic, or in the wider phenomenon of women writing professional gay erotica/porn.

But then, academic study of erotica has been poor in general. I once nearly caused a heart attack to the poor librarians at my local university library when I asked them whether they knew of any indexes that catalogued the contents of porn magazines.

(When last I checked, the answer remained, "None." I ended up having to start my own index.)

"When you say you like the type of slash more likely to attract male readers--could you expand on that? (For example, I tend to prefer more action, AU, dark types of stories in LOTR fandom, rather than stories that have a number of traditional romance elements."

Yes, precisely. And also, while I'm quite flexible as to what type of gender presentation I like in a story (I've written stories about flagrantly effeminate men on occasion), I do like some stories that have a strongly masculine portrayal of the characters.

[Continued in the next post. Yes, I'm being overly lengthy.]
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 09:59 pm (UTC)

Yes!

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I heard a fantastic presentation at Slash Fiction Day on that very topic: Sheenagh Pugh looked at Mary Renault and Rosemary Sutcliff (Sutliff?) as an example of women writers writing slash!

She's posted it online: Here it is!

And I think you're absolutely right about parallels in erotica by women writers, and the range of texts in erotica/pornography -- certainly Anne Rice's vampire novels (although her erotica is rather boringly het for most of the story) is part of this issue. The lack of academic attention to erotica (written) is probably linked to literature department's ideologies: I know there's work on film pornography (used to be an area at Popular Culture), and Ian Hunter (who organized Slash Fiction Study Day)writes on trash films including porn (the term is his), but not much in literary terms.

Lawrence Schimel (http://desayunoencama.livejournal.com/profile) edited a collection of lesbians writing gay erotica, gay men writing lesbian erotica, and that completely supports your point.


So, what I think you're saying, is that women writing m/m relationships (slash in fan fiction) is not as unique as it seems if critics/academics were more aware of literary precedents (but that media scholars don't have the print background, and literature people don't do erotica, mostly).

If that's the case, I agree--and in fact was doing some thinking myself a while ago about the whole issue of "pornography" in relation to slash (different definitions). A friend of me (I know her in my fandom persona) told me that it wasn't unusual to see a very mild/vanilla/het form of Real People Slash in the porn magazines she sells to as well--I tried to pursue the issue, but ran into the same problem you did. I imagined trying to interlibrary loan porn magazines for research, even if I could get publication information, and went, hmmm, maybe not!

Could I ask if your index is available online?

I'll be giving a presentation at Mythcon in August titled "Slashing the Fathers: Who's Anxious Now?"--arguing that I see "slash" elements appearing in genre fantasy novels by women, and doing a comparison between LOTR fanfiction and The Fall of Kings by Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner.
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From:[info]duskpeterson
Date: May 7th, 2007 06:18 pm (UTC)
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"The problem is, always, that we tend to generalize based on our own experience"

When I first read that, I thought you must be talking about me. :) I may also be over-generalizing about the presence of male slashers. All I know is that I've learned not to make assumptions about people's genders at the comms I'm at. And I've had to warn other people about the same. I had a long discussion once with a bisexual male slasher who was absolutely convinced that a certain original slash author we both liked (who had written an excellent World War I novel) was a gay man. The author's sometime co-author is a gay man, so we just couldn't tell for sure. When I eventually told her about this episode (the author was a she, as it turned out), she said she'd started out writing for erotica forums and was often mistaken there for a man.

On the other side of the coin, I was once well into an e-mail exchange with a slash author before I discovered he was a guy. The author was writing darkfic of the darkest sort, but it didn't occur to me that this had any bearing on "her" gender, because I knew a couple of female darkfic writers who had similar writing styles.

All three of those authors, perhaps not coincidentally, had started off writing for erotica newsgroups. So I rather suspect that writing style can be heavily influenced, not only by gender, but by which fiction communities one is trained in.

As for myself, I'm androgynous, and half the slashers I meet online assume I'm female, while half assume I'm male. I'm guessing this must have something to do with my writing style and the topics I write about, since the default assumption in the slash world seems to be that the author is female.

I also had a highly amusing experience where someone from the genre romance community, who had seen a booktrailer I'd made for one of my darkfic series, slapped a "male" label onto me the moment I stepped onto her forum. I proceeded to receive lectures from one of the other moderators about how I should conduct myself in women's space. I'd said nothing about my gender to the first moderator (explaining I'm in-between usually takes a while), we'd discussed both gay fiction and slash fiction, and there were plenty of female writers of gay romance at the forum. But apparently she assumed that anyone who wrote m/m darkfic must be a man.

"I even did a paper on the issue of whether some women who prefer dark/torture/action/horror oriented genres in their profic reading and movie reading might not be fans of those genres of slash/fan fic"

My impression - from conversations that go on at the darkfic forums I'm at - is that darkfic readers do tend to seek out similar pro-fic. But I can well imagine that the reverse isn't true, because darkfic isn't a pro-fic category. The various categories of darkfic - for example, slavefic and prisonerfic and warfic and rapefic and deathfic - all get scattered among various genres of pro fiction.

I once tried to figure out "What is Darkfic?" What was interesting to me is that the Goth category of dark fiction, which started out as being identical to horror fiction, has expanded beyond that. Dark fiction comms often accept subject matter that is unrelated to horror; for example, one comm describes itself as being devoted to works of art on "depression, death, suicide, pain, suffering, heartbreak, and so much more." This is close, though not identical, to the fanfic definition of darkfic.

[*Ahem*. Yes. Very lengthy.]
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 10:32 pm (UTC)
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Oh, no, it wasn't aimed at you, really--more me. I try to avoid it, but it sneaks in all the time. Friends and I've noted how we use "fandom" when on one level we should be modifying it like crazy--but that gets so clunky in more casual exchanges. I think you're right about male slashers--they are there, and growing in number. My ignorance of them was just that!

Since the internet does allow a freedom from immediate judgment based on appearance, it's never safe to assume anything about people although as your experiences show, people tend to do it anyway.

The connections between genres/story preferences and gender assumptions is why I like Halberstam's Female Masculinity--separating gender from bodies--that some women do self-present as more masculine, that they prefer those types of genres/entertainment deemed masculine--does fit my experience (sf over romance). I've tried a couple of the new sf romance authors (starting with Catherine Asaro) but I find the stories too het for my taste.

I must ask--have you considered presenting some of your ideas on the connections/relationships between erotica and fan fiction at a conference (academic or fan oriented!)? Because you're doing some fascinating stuff (and I think would especially enjoy Slash Fiction Study Day because one of the questions that keeps coming up is the similarities/differences between slash, erotica, porn--not only in terms of genre elements but also in terms of social context, gender, etc.).

Thank you for the link to your darkfic site. You might be interested in this definition by [info]savageseraph.

Writers have always created characters of other genders (etc.), sometimes badly, another 'fact' that people keep ignoring in their "omg women are writing porn" shock--and I tend to talk often about how women trained in academic disciplines pick up that "masculine" style. I have some interest in sociolinguistics, and I know the idea of being able to tell "gender" from writing is one of the most...enduring of folk beliefs. (A student of mine wrote a great paper on creating and gaming two characters: a man who was a healer, his sister who was a warrior, and reactions to his characters and him by gamers and their characters). If we're talking masculine style, let's talk about Proust! Then Hemingway!!

I have often been taken for a man (because of my writing style) and (in person) because of my preference for extremely short hair and certain clothes. I've never felt as if I fitted in with most of the women's groups I was involved in (from Campfire Girls to several feminist literary groups), but the mostly male groups in my earlier fandom days didn't fit either (though in my twenties I preferred being an 'honorary male' to being a girl). I've never been able to find the language to express it (except maybe Joanna Russ' "something else"!) although I considered androgyny for a while--that didn't work for me either. Something about 'masculine woman' works for me although, as you say, trying to explain it takes a great deal of time.



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From:[info]duskpeterson
Date: May 7th, 2007 06:19 pm (UTC)
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"My work is separatist in that I choose not to spend much time on the male/canonical authors"

I think having different interests than the majority never needs to be justified. Separation from people who have different interests than oneself is a more difficult matter. I've studied subcultures that have been essentially ghettoized as a result of the majority refusing to interact with them (at least within the context of their interests), and I can't say that the effects on them have been terribly healthy. A groupthink has developed in them that is very hard to shake.

On the other hand, these groups, precisely because the majority scorn their beliefs, are much more skilled at living the examined life than most other folks I know. They don't accept their beliefs uncritically; they constantly analyze those beliefs for flaws. So this helps to offset the groupthink in part.

"I'm too old and grumpy to take on what I see as most of the effort of building bridges "

Bridge-building isn't the right task for everyone. To use a tired analogy, somebody has to keep the home fires burning while others go off to war. :)

[Finished. Finally.]
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 10:38 pm (UTC)
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Bridge-building isn't the right task for everyone. To use a tired analogy, somebody has to keep the home fires burning while others go off to war. :)

Great point!

Some of the feminist writers whose work I most respect are those involved in bridge and coalition building--and part of their discussion is just how difficult it it, and the only reason for doing it is that the alternative is worse. In this very specific (and I'm well aware very privileged case), I'm not sure the alternative is worse, but maybe I'm hoping to be proven wrong.

I think we may agree of the question of segregation vs. separatism--and in some ways, although my work is separatist, my professional life isn't (that is, I exist within a typical academic environment--lots of men!--and do not mind professional interactions). The whole question of how much fandom is or can be considered a sub-culture (or as embodying numerous sub-cultures is interesting as well)--I haven't decided where I am on that issue either!


From:andreth_47
Date: May 8th, 2007 12:09 am (UTC)
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I am so glad I found your LJ, this discussion is fascinating me!

...the perception of LJ as (stereotypically, negatively) girly, and how that plays into (again) academic issues--a number of women aca-fen have found this space intensely useful for not only our fanac, but also our acadac. But the perception is that the "real" academic discussions are in the (male authored) blogs.

A note about the language we use to engage this topic: above, you use the phrase "the perception of" when I think what you mean is "the male perception of". I really think we need to be careful about this, or we end up a priori validating the very thing we're fighting. I would be willing to bet that the women here on LJ think that it's *here* where the 'real' academic discussions are occurring.
The old public/private dichotomy keeps recurring in our discussion, as well, and is also something we should view with caution. LJ *is* public space. It is validated by great numbers of the public (3.7 million active female users, or something like that). Academia is only 'the public' if you consider well, academia to be the public. I sorta see it as a bunch of ivory tower alchemists in a sealed circle, talking to themselves.
What you see on LJ is members of the public who have become so interested in their subject that they have become amateur and professional practitioners and scholars of it.
And if we write enough of our own history, we don't even need to care what HIStory will pass down about us; we don't need to worry about being written out. WE CAN WRITE OURSELVES IN.
(Note: I'm coming from a social rather than an economic viewpoint. I realize the issues are considerably different if one is a junior faculty member, for ex.)
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 11:00 pm (UTC)
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A note about the language we use to engage this topic: above, you use the phrase "the perception of" when I think what you mean is "the male perception of". I really think we need to be careful about this, or we end up a priori validating the very thing we're fighting. I would be willing to bet that the women here on LJ think that it's *here* where the 'real' academic discussions are occurring.

I cannot agree that it is a male perception, though I am perfectly happy to agree that some modification would be useful: how about a patriarchal perception? Or a sexist perception? Or a mainstream media perception (all the coverage of blogs playing a part in the political arena in the recent elections in the US focused on male bloggers, writing in a more 'journalistic' style which is perceived to be a masculine domain--the important thing is to keep remembering perceptions are often inaccurate).

A great deal of fandom writing is meta, analysis, historical, analytical. But it is not "acadedemic" in the limited sense of not being done by fulltime academics, published in academic spaces, etc. That isn't a value judgement: I don't say academic is better than amateur (someone who does it for love). Often it's worse (academic). It's different, just as fan fiction vs. pro fiction is defined different, by who is producing it and why, *not* the quality of the writing.

As another comenter pointed out, there are lots and lots and lots of men and male only communities on LJ -- it's not just female fandoms. LJ is important for fans, but fans are only a part of LJ.

I do find the writing that women do in LJ very important--but as an academic who studies, among other things, the exclusion of women from official histories and canons, I am aware that even best selling authors, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose work on economics was hugely important in her day) can be erased from the record, of how best selling women authors can be out of print within a generation of less after their deaths.

I recently taught a brilliant book on the "lost and forgotten" African-American women writers of the 19th century, by Jacqueline Jones Royster, that covers in brilliant detail women writers (many of them) whose work was in print and has been erased. click here for info.

(cont'd)
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 11:00 pm (UTC)
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And even within female fandom, the issue of locking and control of material and debates over who can quote what and who can link to what and who is watching shows that some people, at least, consider their LiveJournal to be a more "private" space (I agree that the public vs. private binary is breaking down in all sorts of way) than a public one.

There is a lot of academic scholarship on the arbitrary and ideological nature of "public" vs. "private," and the relegation of women to the "private" sphere (which can change).

Academia is only 'the public' if you consider well, academia to be the public. I sorta see it as a bunch of ivory tower alchemists in a sealed circle, talking to themselves.

This idea of academics has about as much validity as the stereotype of fans as nerds who sit in our parents' basements eating twinkies and logging on 24 hours a day. If you think I am one of those ivory tower types, why bother to talk to me?

I am an academic. I am a fan. I am interested in talking about gender and academia and fandom both in the public spaces of LJ and in the public spaces of academic articles. The stories (in all genres, narratives, and media) are being written; reality is always more complex than our textual representations of it. However, a thousand years down the road, what is "remembered" will only be a small slice of it. We have no control or idea what will survive (if anything!). Humans have left what records they can of their own stories; outside or later groups have made their own interpretations. The process is affected by relative power in a number of ways. I'm not going to say academics have to save fandom.

OTOH, it is important for me to include a book on fanfiction in a women writers class even though at the start most of my students were shocked not to be studying the "Great" (read: white, middle-class, canonical, and probably dead women) authors.

And what I am talking about here is an issue within existing scholarship--something that's important to academics--because we don't only talk to each other, we talk to students and the media and to others. I've spent years trying to get more science fiction/fantasy into "English" classrooms (and more multicultural and women's literature).

Is this very small discussion important to fandom as a whole? Probably not, nor will it stop the fans from producing all their own materials and distributing them on the internet and in other media. Academics who are fans who are doing scholarship just aren't that important to fans as a group!
From:andreth_47
Date: May 7th, 2007 04:10 am (UTC)

LJs and Usenet

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Very interesting post. While I'm not an acafen, I have had a somewhat parallel experience, being frustrated by the differences I've found between Usenet and the LJ world. I avoid blogs altogether, since nothing bores me faster than politics and males pontificating about politics.

My background is academic (*years* of liberal arts grad school), but not my profession. My interests are split between fandom and anthropology, gender studies, maybe some comp lit.
My more 'intellectual' interests, in feminism, fanfic and slash fiction, and in Tolkien literary studies, are pretty well fulfilled online without resorting to blogs.

But what I wanted to say was that I started out online in the usenet arena. I hung out on rec.arts.books.tolkien for years. Recently I've deserted usenet for LJ, and that is largely because usenet is so very much a boys' club, and LJ 'feels' like a much more female space. I've gotten terribly bored by the endless pissing contests, circle jerks, and other phallocentric bullshit on usenet. It's all about competition.
In my experience, hell yes, LJ is more about community and social space and is much more girly. Is that a problem? I sense a subtext to your question about blogs vs. LJ: that somehow the political is more valuable than the personal.
That bothers me.
It recalls the way that social behaviors are *always* accorded more value when they are practiced by men.
Try this out for a hypothesis: on LJ, the 'intellectual' or the 'political' is often present, it is simply not the focus. It is hidden in and merged with social chat, about fandom or private lives. But it's there.
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 7th, 2007 03:40 pm (UTC)

Re: LJs and Usenet

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Thank you for the useful comparison of usetnet and LJ: when I went out of fandom, we were in the ditto and mimeo zine phase, and when I came back in, it was in LJ, so I missed usenet altogether. While there are many spaces in LJ that are male-dominated, I agree (and value) the more dominant female presence in the parts of LJ I know. My earlier days in fandom (Trek and Apas) were with mostly guys; my LOTR experience has been almost overwhelmingly with women, and I love it. I wouldn't have gone back to the fandom I remember from the late seventies/eighties, but this space is a whole new experience.

Oh, the issue of gendering of online spaces and relative valuing of those spaces is part of this discussion: a number of women who are in LJs and who are aca-fan and who are doing scholarship on fandom have recently opened up blogs to discuss the gendering with male scholars in media studies who do not participate in LJ. I don't know if you had time to go read the linked post or the comments--but what I'm seeing is, again, the women aca-fen I know are in LJ. I don't know any male scholars doing media/fan studies, but of the ones my friends have met--they are *not* in LJ. How wide-spread this tendency is, I don't know.

I also do not see the pattern as a problem--except that it feeds into gender exclusions in academic scholarship and academia. A friend of mine hopes to bridge some of those gaps--but she finally had to go to a blog to do so. Scholarship on fan studies seems to be starting to break into male scholars valorizing certain fandom activities that are done by males which, again, is a concern to female aca-fans.

I think culturally the "blogs" are valued over "LJ" (did you see the wonderful map of online communities circulating on LJ?)--but I am trying, however clumsily, to state that I will not give in to that false dichotomy, and I will not open up a professional/academic blog for those reasons. (As a feminist since the early eighties, I know very well the falsity of trying to separate personal and political.) I love LJ.

I admit to separating my fandom LJ from my professional LJ, but that's another issue entirely!

From:andreth_47
Date: May 7th, 2007 06:35 pm (UTC)

Re: LJs and Usenet

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the issue of gendering of online spaces and relative valuing of those spaces is part of this discussion: a number of women who are in LJs and who are aca-fan and who are doing scholarship on fandom have recently opened up blogs to discuss the gendering with male scholars in media studies who do not participate in LJ. I don't know if you had time to go read the linked post or the comments

I can understand why women are doing this. If they won't come to our playground, we've got to go to theirs. Something about it bothers me, though. I think I'd rather leave them out of the discussion altogether. If they can't be bothered, why should we?
The linked post is on my ToDo list for today!

Scholarship on fan studies seems to be starting to break into male scholars valorizing certain fandom activities that are done by males which, again, is a concern to female aca-fans.

I noticed that in reading the abstracts for the MIT5 conference. A large number of papers on gaming and so on, far fewer on fanfic.
But, male activities are only valorized if you give priority to what the males are saying. If you listen to what women are saying, it's fanfic, maybe vidding, that are given value. This reminds me of an old debate in anthropology. In early studies of Papua New Guinean cultures, the anthropologists drew the conclusion that male activites like hunting and hair-braiding (yep!) and male ritual were accorded more value by the society. But when female anthro's started asking the women what was valued, the women answered activites like gardening, raising pigs for festivals, female initiation rituals, female myths and songs. Much depends on who you ask.
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From:[info]robin_anne_reid
Date: May 20th, 2007 11:15 pm (UTC)

Re: LJs and Usenet

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Re: usenet and LJ and blogs.

I've recently found and subscribed to via rss feed a number of feminist blogs (I plan to add them over here) and a great blog of feminist work on comics--so here it is again, the idea that "blogs" are for males pontificating about politics! Did you follow the Amanda Marcotte story? She hired by the John Edwards campaign to do outreach with the blogging world, but resigned when some conservative/fundamentalists went after her as a "hate-monger." I'm not saying you have to go to those blogs, but your comment shows my point--that people assume blogs are by men, not by feminists!

And I gather a large number of women fans were in usenet--and then migrated to LJ (some lament the change, liking the more centralized nature of usenet or listservs--I missed that era myself, being out of fandom from about 1990 to 2003).

I think we may be working our way toward a misunderstanding.

I apologize for my language leaving you with the idea that I was valorizing/valuing the male/academic/blogging style: I love LJ, I love the community (I've been active in LOTR online fandom since 2003, and what I loved and what kept me in the community was the community. I left the apa because I was tired of the macho discourse that kept going in the same ways every year). I saw my friends going into blogs to try to build bridges with some male scholars (who apparently refused to come into LJ), and wanted to say, no, I value this space as one of intense political, personal, fantastic types of communication. I consider LJ to be a queer female space (the space I've found) and profoundly feminist in a very broad reaching sense of the term (I know many find that word an insult, sigh). By feminist, I mean women are working together to create the spaces they want.

As a feminist since the early eighties, I'm well aware that what is valorized is male activity, no matter what it is (and that women can be part of that valorization!). I consider this journal (where, among other things, I can interact with and mentor younger women interested in academia, an activity I take seriously) to be staking a claim for the intellectual/political/feminist nature of LJ *despite* the stereotypes that might exist outside the space.

I refuse to allow academic discourse to be claimed by men (thus the work I've done for years on feminism and sf), any more than I allowed science fiction to be "men only" during the seventies. I am well aware of the larger patterns of marginalization of women in academia that I think underlie the specific issues brought out in this discussion.

And I also suspect that none of this will matter to most men (outside the minority of feminist, women-friendly men who do exist). That isn't going to stop me though!
From:andreth_47
Date: May 21st, 2007 09:21 pm (UTC)

Re: LJs and Usenet

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I've recently found and subscribed to via rss feed a number of feminist blogs (I plan to add them over here) and a great blog of feminist work on comics--so here it is again, the idea that "blogs" are for males pontificating about politics!

Sheesh. I fell into the very trap I was warning against.

Did you follow the Amanda Marcotte story?[...] I'm not saying you have to go to those blogs, but your comment shows my point--that people assume blogs are by men, not by feminists!

(see above) No, I didn't follow that story. Yep, I do tend to assume that blogs are male space. An assumption I see I should question! Perhaps [Warning: gendered assumptions follow!] one of the reasons males have been more attracted to the blogosphere, and women to LJ, is their respective formats. You were talking in another post this week about the threading format on LJ, and lamenting its lack on blogs. I liked what you said there. Blog structure lends itself to linear discussion, focussed closely on the original post. LJ's threading structure lends itself much more to the kind of communal discussion that we both enjoy. Perhaps that's why fanfic writers (mostly women) have gravitated more towards LJ, and blogs tend to attract males.

I apologize for my language leaving you with the idea that I was valorizing/valuing the male/academic/blogging style: I love LJ, I love the community (I've been active in LOTR online fandom since 2003, and what I loved and what kept me in the community was the community. I left the apa because I was tired of the macho discourse that kept going in the same ways every year).

No, you hadn't left me with that idea. I wasn't expressing myself clearly. I just meant that when we're discussing gender issues, we should try to avoid terms that themselves contain/reinforce the power difference we're trying to deconstruct.

I'm tending, in my old age, to an increasingly separatist stance. As Joanna Russ said, "It’s a What? from a group of turned away, pre-occupied female backs." I'm one of those backs.

And I also suspect that none of this will matter to most men (outside the minority of feminist, women-friendly men who do exist). That isn't going to stop me though!

And it absolutely shouldn't. I am one of the lucky ones who can say 'Meh. Think whatcha want' to the boys, because they're neither hiring me nor publishing anything I write. Acafen like you are in a different economic situation altogether, unfort. There's a male SF writer whom I greatly admire, Neal Stephenson. He's got a great quote: "It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists."
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From:[info]_mike
Date: May 22nd, 2007 05:07 am (UTC)
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[here from the epic thread @ kbusse's]

What software you use is all very path-dependent, I think; it's kind of unfortunate that it separates people who could really learn from each other. A lot of it is social: I feel slightly self-conscious typing my LJ url into blogs' comment boxes, simply because almost nobody else does. And I'm on LJ because people who were talking about things that interested me were here--having migrated from diaryland--and in order to talk to them on equal terms I needed to sign up. It shouldn't be overlooked: if you don't have an LJ account--and until very recently you had to pay cash or beg favors from an existing user to do so--your comments don't get your name attached in the same way. Wordpress is good about this; Blogger is spotty but ok, I think?

The internet's so fragmented that it's really easy for whole masses of people to be doing things without noticing each other. There's a lot of indie RPG work that happens on forums of various sorts with spinoff blogs, while the D&D folks have a contingent on LJ. My friend (whose day job is doing art for video games) posts his fanart of Venom and Catwoman on Deviantart, while half of my Warcraft guild had their personal websites at Myspace. LJ versus 'the blogs' is a distinction for people who run on words. ^_^

To pick up on a point from the other thread: one of the people in my flist was complaining about LJ comments; her flist isn't that large, and so between threaded comments and reply-by-email it turns into a series of one-on-one conversations between the author and the commenters with little cross-pollination between readers. (not that i have any answers, mind you; it's a mystery to me why some comments sections work and some don't.)
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Dr. Robin Anne Reid

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