i don't like capitalism: news at 11.
last week i went with lana (who is now writing for women write about comics, which is…how i now know she's into comics, go me, A+ paying attention to other people, yay) to see phoebe gloeckner speak at UM. nominally about banned books, and nominally in an interview format, as conducted by jim ottaviani.
i really like gloeckner. i find her kind of intimidating, because her work seems so exacting, and also so far away from the comics i'm drawn to reading. blah blah imposter syndrome due to low genre expertise.
anyway that's not my point. my point is that the q & a period of the program was pretty terrible. i mean, the first question asked was so terrible that i seem to have wiped it out of my brain, i just remember how i kind of wanted to yell WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK when it was asked. idk. that is also not my point. my point is that the next-to-final question was not terrible in itself, and it took me a couple of hours to figure out what was off about it.
here's the deal: it was about trigger warnings. it seemed possibly prompted by the talk itself (which maybe could have used a content note re: graphic references to sexual violence & violent deaths of children, but…there's maybe a bit of caveat emptor there, too. if you're familiar with gloeckner's current project and the general honesty with which she approaches her work, your eyes were likely already open on that count.) anyway. a woman in the audience asked a relatively thoughtful question that displaced fannish ethics onto a commercial capitalist setting - and that's the problem. you can't do that. i mean, that's part of why monetizing fandom doesn't work, even though people keep right on trying to package and sell us. but this was in the opposite direction. "would you consider putting trigger warnings on your work?" the answer was no. of course it was no. gloeckner gave a thoughtful answer, she took it seriously, and she may even have noted that it's different when people are assigning a book, recommending it - but not when you're selling it. her explicit reasoning was that sticking a trigger warning or a content note on the cover of a book you are trying to sell in a store reduces the entire content to that particular trigger. so a brief mention of past sexual assault in the text gets a big red TRIGGER WARNING RAPE sticker on the cover. consumer capitalism, marketing, is just not built for that. it's anti-subtlety. and that's how & why books get banned. it's tipper gore (remember when tipper was the big bad? oh rosy, innocent past) and the PMRC, and those fucking explicit content stickers. all they create is another class of items to save the children (the ladies, the poor, the lesser) from.
it stops people from buying the thing. when sales are the aim, that's a problem. of course, there was also a terrible question from the audience about how when books are banned that creates a frisson of scandal that sells more books. ahahahah oh how we laughed at that "fact". or not really, but gloeckner did point out that her books are sometimes sealed in cellophane and stocked not in fiction or graphic novel sections, but rather in self-help. where anyone who buys them will be misled.
i believe strongly in content notes & trigger warnings. i also believe that businesses are never going to prize me as an individual over me as a customer. i don't want professional authors told they need to warn people away from buying their books. i'm not cool with the way it works & doesn't work already. i don't think sales should be the aim, but that's a much larger issue; they need to be the aim in this system we're currently living in, so.
it just made me think about the ways we port pieces of fandom into the rest of the world, successfully and unsuccessfully. we echo-chamber and create false equivalencies, and sometimes, rarely, we bump up against a wall that turns out to be an illusion. not always. just. question-asking-lady, you got all bruised up on that one. :/
originally posted at http://general-jinjur.dreamwidth.org/673385.html. possibly there is commentversation there? let's see:
i really like gloeckner. i find her kind of intimidating, because her work seems so exacting, and also so far away from the comics i'm drawn to reading. blah blah imposter syndrome due to low genre expertise.
anyway that's not my point. my point is that the q & a period of the program was pretty terrible. i mean, the first question asked was so terrible that i seem to have wiped it out of my brain, i just remember how i kind of wanted to yell WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK when it was asked. idk. that is also not my point. my point is that the next-to-final question was not terrible in itself, and it took me a couple of hours to figure out what was off about it.
here's the deal: it was about trigger warnings. it seemed possibly prompted by the talk itself (which maybe could have used a content note re: graphic references to sexual violence & violent deaths of children, but…there's maybe a bit of caveat emptor there, too. if you're familiar with gloeckner's current project and the general honesty with which she approaches her work, your eyes were likely already open on that count.) anyway. a woman in the audience asked a relatively thoughtful question that displaced fannish ethics onto a commercial capitalist setting - and that's the problem. you can't do that. i mean, that's part of why monetizing fandom doesn't work, even though people keep right on trying to package and sell us. but this was in the opposite direction. "would you consider putting trigger warnings on your work?" the answer was no. of course it was no. gloeckner gave a thoughtful answer, she took it seriously, and she may even have noted that it's different when people are assigning a book, recommending it - but not when you're selling it. her explicit reasoning was that sticking a trigger warning or a content note on the cover of a book you are trying to sell in a store reduces the entire content to that particular trigger. so a brief mention of past sexual assault in the text gets a big red TRIGGER WARNING RAPE sticker on the cover. consumer capitalism, marketing, is just not built for that. it's anti-subtlety. and that's how & why books get banned. it's tipper gore (remember when tipper was the big bad? oh rosy, innocent past) and the PMRC, and those fucking explicit content stickers. all they create is another class of items to save the children (the ladies, the poor, the lesser) from.
it stops people from buying the thing. when sales are the aim, that's a problem. of course, there was also a terrible question from the audience about how when books are banned that creates a frisson of scandal that sells more books. ahahahah oh how we laughed at that "fact". or not really, but gloeckner did point out that her books are sometimes sealed in cellophane and stocked not in fiction or graphic novel sections, but rather in self-help. where anyone who buys them will be misled.
i believe strongly in content notes & trigger warnings. i also believe that businesses are never going to prize me as an individual over me as a customer. i don't want professional authors told they need to warn people away from buying their books. i'm not cool with the way it works & doesn't work already. i don't think sales should be the aim, but that's a much larger issue; they need to be the aim in this system we're currently living in, so.
it just made me think about the ways we port pieces of fandom into the rest of the world, successfully and unsuccessfully. we echo-chamber and create false equivalencies, and sometimes, rarely, we bump up against a wall that turns out to be an illusion. not always. just. question-asking-lady, you got all bruised up on that one. :/
originally posted at http://general-jinjur.dreamwidth.org/673385.html. possibly there is commentversation there? let's see: