Meta: Authorial Responsibility, Consequences and Context
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: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 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.
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.
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: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 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.
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.