keeping myself honest
Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death - Joss Whedon on the gang murder of Dua Khalil and the status of women in general.
Reading this essay made me get my butt in gear and finish revising the story I posted yesterday. Not because I think it was all, go womyn, roooaaar! But because, well, at least it was about women, however fictional and unbelievable they may be.
A while back, panisdead did some commentary on her stories in order to look specifically at how she presented, consciously or unconsciously, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. I thought it was a brave thing to do and also really, really interesting. I don't generally write to make some kind of point about these issues, but certainly "attitudes and assumptions," as panisdead put it, do slip through sometimes.
Also, coffeeandink has been doing an on-going census check for episodes of Supernatural, an idea which I'm going to boldly appropriate for my own uses.
So here's my attempt at turning the mirror back on myself.
Census
Fanfiction stories posted publically: 58 (January 1999 - May 2007)
Stories where entire POV was male: 32
Stories where entire POV was female: 18
Stories where POV was both genders: 8
Stories where POV character was white (or actor was white): 57
Stories where POV character was non-white (space aliens don't count!): 1
Stories where relationship was between white characters only: 56
Stories where relationship featured a non-white character: 2
....damn. That came out much more skewed to white male characters than I thought it would. Uh, thank goodness for Scully, I guess? I'm sure there are other statistics I could tally up which might be relevant to this inquiry -- please feel free to suggest any.
And, insofar as it may be a relevant datapoint in itself, I am an Asian female.
Okay, that took me forever to count up and I must run off now. Commentary on selected stories to follow.
Reading this essay made me get my butt in gear and finish revising the story I posted yesterday. Not because I think it was all, go womyn, roooaaar! But because, well, at least it was about women, however fictional and unbelievable they may be.
A while back, panisdead did some commentary on her stories in order to look specifically at how she presented, consciously or unconsciously, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. I thought it was a brave thing to do and also really, really interesting. I don't generally write to make some kind of point about these issues, but certainly "attitudes and assumptions," as panisdead put it, do slip through sometimes.
Also, coffeeandink has been doing an on-going census check for episodes of Supernatural, an idea which I'm going to boldly appropriate for my own uses.
So here's my attempt at turning the mirror back on myself.
Census
Fanfiction stories posted publically: 58 (January 1999 - May 2007)
Stories where entire POV was male: 32
Stories where entire POV was female: 18
Stories where POV was both genders: 8
Stories where POV character was white (or actor was white): 57
Stories where POV character was non-white (space aliens don't count!): 1
Stories where relationship was between white characters only: 56
Stories where relationship featured a non-white character: 2
....damn. That came out much more skewed to white male characters than I thought it would. Uh, thank goodness for Scully, I guess? I'm sure there are other statistics I could tally up which might be relevant to this inquiry -- please feel free to suggest any.
And, insofar as it may be a relevant datapoint in itself, I am an Asian female.
Okay, that took me forever to count up and I must run off now. Commentary on selected stories to follow.