Thinking ahead to the Fan Labor panel

[elements]

The sure-to-be-wonderful MIT Comparative Media Studies Futures of Entertainment 2 conference is starting this morning, and while I'm excited about the entire event, I'm not surprisingly most interested in the panel on fan labor, which is scheduled for this afternoon and features the brilliant Catherine Tosenberger, known and loved by many of us

Comments

a few disjointed thoughts

[spare_change]

This is interesting. For me, fandom doesn't matter, not at all, and that's what I like about it. I don't see the need to instrumentalize my trivial pleasures into something bigger in order to take enjoyment from them. In fact, that kind of kills the enjoyment for me.

As a fan, what I want is to be left alone. I mean ... I like reading dirty furtive hatesex and I like my hobby being dirty and furtive too, in an innocent way. Wanting some sort of official recognition or imprimatur takes all of the giddy naughtiness out of it, for me.

I also am somewhat uncomfortable with the discourse of fan labor and the idea that every kind of labor must be instrumentalized and compensated in some way (symbolically if not financially). It's depressingly capitalist, to me ... I don't see this kind of approach as subversive or groundbreaking at all, but rather as a way to take something that is somewhat outside the margins and try to conform it to the status quo.

I guess what I'm saying is that I truly believe that fandom DOESN'T matter, and that to take such a position isn't kneejerk negation, but actually really creative and empowering. For me. As an academic and former artist, the freedom not to matter is one of the most blissful things I can think of.

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[spare_change]

Also, to step away from my own personal investment in fandom for a minute, I think there is a lot of danger in wanting some sort of "compensation" and to be involved in the creative hierarchy in some way. Because what makes fandom so great is that it's such a free-for-all. You can write whatever you want -- no matter how crappy or offensive -- and post it without having to go through the screening of actual publishing. Whereas if fandom becomes more part of the mainstream, then all sorts of censorship processes are going to occur. I mean, fandom isn't just clever feminist reimaginings of everyone's favorite TV series (or whatever), it's also chan and incest and crappy emotional porn. And, in fact, I would argue that more people come to fandom to get their kinks (whether sexual or narrative) met than to produce anything that the mainstream might consider worthwhile.

(Apologies for being so incoherent ... I'm undercaffeinated and jetlagged!) ♥

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[elements]

I think that's part of what makes me uncomfortable, too. The thing is that we don't seem to have a choice about at least confronting and thinking about this, because media companies are building using fan labor into their business models, and it's important, to me at least, that we not just watch that happen without having a conversation about it within fandom, rather than just at media conferences with sparse attendance from fans.

I think I may not have said things right in terms of the why of why I think fandom does and ought to matter. For me, the one way that it *truly* matters is that it is an end in itself - the other ways people use to "justify" fandom's existence are nice, but they're not the real cigar, at least not for me. Why fandom matters is because fandom matters to us, in whatever ways it matters to us, and I think that the core distillation of that is that fandom is about shared stories. I don't care if our shared stories matter to anyone outside of fandom, and that's where I think I should have said things better, but maybe that helps to say here. Fandom doesn't matter because of anything we give back to the outside world, it matters because of what it is to us.

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[pir8fancier]

I think this very issue became an "issue" when Fanlib saw all this creativity and wanted to make bucks off of it. The individual expression as dollar signs. I'm very cynical. If they had been vaguely successful, fandom would have died. Because it would have said to the people who own the original copyright that money can be made off of it. Which would have sent them to their lawyers pronto and asked for a piece of their pie. Whether it IS their pie is still up for debate. Derivative, pastiches, etc. That inevitable court case would have happened sooner. It WILL happen because someone who is a lot smarter than Fanlib and who understands fandom (not some lameass male execs) will couch renumeration in some acceptable language, and the lawyers will go to town. Unfortunately, I don't think the future of fandom is in our hands. Until the legal aspects of writing fanfiction is solved, then I think fandom is sort of in a bubble.

Another aspect is that the strikethrough revealed to me how fragile all this is. Say 25% of the HP fandom fled and went to other journals. I think it had a tremendous impact on the energy of the fandom. Some people have returned, but it's not the same. I think it's difficult to quantify because all this happened with the publication of the last book and the closing of canon, but the HP fandom has/had an enormous amount of slash-based fanfiction, which I think had an enormous impact on people. It forced me to flock my LJ. I'd never considered that before. I now friend anyone who friends me, but that limits MY control over my LJ.

I agree with above. I want the freedom to write what I want to write, I don't want to make money off of it (because once you start making money, your choices are limited because you have an audience that needs to be fed). The freedom to write WHATEVER is more important to me than anything else. Once money is involved, the suits show up. Once the suits show up, then the power I have over what I can post is GONE. And as much as I hate saying this, the Fanlib debacle said to me that a bunch of young hip white guys think we are all a bunch of naieve, stupid women who don't know the financial power that we wield. Of course we know what sort of power words have. The point is that we are not giving that power to you. Assholes!

Re: a few disjointed thoughts

[spare_change]

Apologies for both rambling at you and then for deleting -- I am totally out of it and making no sense whatsoever. Will try to put together a better response tomorrow.

*stumbles off dizzily to bed*