Fannish spaces, girls, and the culture of silence.
I've been thinking about this post for months, and there's no easy way to say it. It's born out of a lot of thinky thoughts on women, fandom, rape culture, and basically all the things I've been posting about lately.
In January, I made this post about gay subtext, and I was overwhelmed at the response it had. Then I made another post about ( Read more... )
In January, I made this post about gay subtext, and I was overwhelmed at the response it had. Then I made another post about ( Read more... )
To use myself as an example: in 2002 my friend C came to visit me, and while she was visiting she let me read and beta her N*Sync fanfic, where her main character, also named C, meets and falls in love with J.C. while the band is on tour. It was a fun fic. She was really proud of it. And I read it the whole time thinking LOL NOOB because her fic was so obviously a Mary Sue fic. But the thing was: she didn't know it was a Mary Sue fic. She was more or less brand-new to fandom, had come into Popslash via ff.net, and didn't know that there was a derogatory term for what she was writing. And all I remember about the fic now is that it was fun and she was really excited about it. But me--I'd only been in fandom a few years at that point myself, and I'd already gotten accustomed to hating and mocking a Mary Sue. So privately, I mocked hers. Why shouldn't i? And I still hate that I did that. Oh, and C. had already decided at that point to throw in some Lance/Justin slash, because she knew it would be popular. I don't think we can overestimate how quickly people assimilate to the culture that says Mary Sue=bad; slash=good.
I totally agree that the 'women are awesome' trope is frowned upon by our whole culture (see karenhealey's recent post about this!) --but I feel like the Mary Sue-shaming is especially pernicious and harmful because it functions at least in part as literary criticism: essentially, girls are being taught, after a lifetime of being taught "write what you know," that they spent too much time writing self-inserts and it detracted from the value and the literary quality of their work. It perpetuates the idea that girl's stories are of inherently less value than other stories. And there definitely is a conversation to be had about literary quality, but we can't have it if we shame and mock the story idea first. Not when boys who write about things blowing up don't get the same kind of treatment. :(
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I do hope that discussions about these issues will change some peoples' minds about Mary Sue (and maybe even FanFiction.net but whatever, maybe it's too early for that), but I do think that Gary Stus are similarly derided. Fandom is predominantly female, so reading a Gary Stu fanfic happens very seldomly and mostly in published work, where it is mocked accordingly. But as I said before I do think the Sue-shaming isn't doing fandom any favours. I do wish to see more YKINMK (your kink is not my kink) versions of writing, YLSDINMLSD (your literary style device is not etc) and more women to embrace their awesome (I've read karenhealey's post) and through that maybe they will even post Mary Sue.
In the end I continue to dream of a fandom(/world) that doesn't need to explicitly state that it is a safe space because it should be synonymous (or were safe spaces aren't explicitly needed because treating people like equals is not even a question), where writing whatever kind of fanfic/story they write is not something that anyone has to be ashamed of, no matter what they write they are not judged. Not by their fellow fen, nor by people not involved with fandom.
And hey, hopefully this post (and all the other posts like it) get fandom one steop closer to that goal :)
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