Social Justice Remix Panel
Here are my notes from the social justice remix panel! Yes, I really did type this much while being on the panel. I was feeling quite tired and vague and thought I might not manage to say very much, so I figured at least I would make a record. :)
As always, this is not an exact transcript, just the best I could do. Storify of the panel is available here thanks to
wrdnrd.
Remix Culture encourages the combining, editing, and recontextualizing of existent media to create new works. How can remixing text, videos and music be used to critique the original sources and bring attention to issues of social justice and marginalized communities?
Liza Furr, Alex Jennings, Alexis Lothian (me), Micole Sudberg, Na'amen Tilahun
Liza, moderator: I am from the moderator pool I don't know anything about topic so will be asking panelists questions.
Beginning with intros: what drew us to panel
Alex, standup comedian entertainer & sf author from New Orleans.
Remix culture has very specific meanings in NOLA, surrounded by jazz. Uses recontextualization indicative of remix in his writing, recontextualizing media to bring it new meaning. Implications for activism and art.
Me: talking about vidding and about doing academic work on remix.
Naamen: writer, reader, reviewer. Loves idea of remixing original texts, but also a wider view: fan fiction recreating queer characters where no characters existed, a personal form of social justice where queer peple can find themselves in remixes.
Micole: a fan, watches & reads vids and fanfiction and has also made vids, written fic. The primary impulse to remix is not necessarily based in social justice, but bc it is part of your life it becomes part of the artwork you make. Particular remix culture I am part of with fic and vidding is sometimes described as being innately a social justice thing bc people are interacting with and reclaiming a corporate text. I have some major issues with that. An act can be a form of social justce in that you are reclaiming the text (in my fandom it's very much women connecting to each other, forming a creative and supportive community) but the texts we produce are not always countertexts. Sometimes they reaffirm and even exaggerate issues with the source. Maybe I'll be the negative person on the panel.
L: Where are we coming from? What is remixing to each of us? What does social justice mean?
N: I'll do the remix question. Remix means not only fan fiction/vids but also works that recreate traditional narratives in sff. Making old texts in a new and innovative way: eg recreating biblical stories. The Open Secret Poetry Cabal at WisCon: Nancy Hightower did poems and stories remixing the bible from POV of women characters. I enjoy remixing of our entire culture; fairytales are teaching tools. that tell us who we should want to be: the prince or the princess, not the old lady in the woods. When we remix (fairytale remix a big genre in YA right now) it taps into what we grew up with & changes it.
M: long tradition of feminist rewriting of fairytales.
I started defining remix very narrowly in musical sense; wasn't sure if it was appropriative to use it for other kinds of work. Came to see it as valid use.
Was concerned because musical remix seemed more innately politicized than fan remixes: but this may have been about the remixes I initially encountered and was not necessarily true. In some ways remix is a rejection of originality -- not in a bad way, but rejecting the idea that texts are creations of one individual without influence. A more explicitly -- not necessarily communal, but more aware of belonging to a community than being the single heir of a tradition, a representative figure for a generation.
me: all art is remix, we try to push against that with idea of plagiarism, but it's contradictory.
M: persistent argument about whether fan fiction is plagiarism. But point of fic is riffing off known texts.
me: fan fiction creators value individual authorship too.
M: in creative work, US culture follows labor theory of value rather than capital theory of value: there is a sense that you have ownership if there is something that you made. Cf writers guild strikes, comics, arguments about whether writers should get rights to something vs the model of work for hire. Something of this in the ways fan writers [missed this part]
Alex: my relationship with remix culture is very broad: I consider it not just a tool for creation of art or critique but an entire way of seeing, expressing artistic sensibility. In my own fiction, for years I felt dissatisifed w direction of my work. When I started studying, listening to jazz I realized what was missing. Remix sensibility prevalent in African American culture: not just in hip hop and jazz but way of telling stories, of what henry louis gates called signifying. Pieces of information (music passages, folk tales, stories) bringing together in artistic web that makes them into something enttlirely new.
Remix is avenue to reclaim ownership of vast amount of media & information I have taken in over the course of my life. New novel: always liked Pippi Longstocking & wanted to create something that would make kids feel how I felt reading those for the first time. A Pippi Longstocking analogue who resembles kids like me: Peaches Lavelle, super strong 11 year old girl with giant red Afro puffs in New Orleans. Inherently political & concerned with social justice because, to express and comment on life in that neighborhood accurately, social concerns immediatly arise even in an off kilter fantasy world. Pippi L lives alone in a house with animals; after Katrina many kids were forced back to city for school without their parents accompanying them. Book allows comment on the loss and abandonment experienced by kids in a way that adds to experience of reader. Instead of cutting and pasting ideas together, I can draw on multiple sources
N: there are times when whole cultures remix things. Cf cultural appropriation panel. Greek myth about Apollo's sun losing control of cart, goes to Africa and burns people and that's why the people of Ethiopia are so dark. In Ethiopian culture, a remix of this myth says that the first people were burned too dark, placed in South Africa, the too underdone placed in Europe, and the perfectly brown people were in Ethopia. Problematic on its own level but Ethiopian people recreated the myth to make themselves beautiful. Remixing historical texts; also importance of the Queen of Sheba to Ethiopian culture.
M: Jeremy Love's comic Bayou, in some ways a remix of Alice in Wonderland, & of southern tales.
Reclaiming, property, cultural appropriation. Power differentials affect this. Rock and roll as a remix of jazz, what comes up when you think of it that way.
Remix as cultural exchange: the positive version of appropriation. Yet it can still be appropriative.
N: remix as an act can be a kind of social justice. But if you remix a work and keep all the misogynistic, racist elements, reinforcing the rest of the narrative, that doesn't seem as much like remix to me.
M: Thingswithwings and Eruthros made a vid for Yuletide, the annual fan fiction exchange that encourages writers to create fandom for sources that don't usually get fan fiction. TWW noticed that in sources where there were a lot of women and people of color, fandom in general focused mainly on white male characters. Slashing the text != queering the text.
N: the show Psych: how many of you know that the actor who plays the main character is Latino (Mexican), though he is coded as white on the show. The obvious slash pairing would be the two main characters who are friends, but the main black character gets left out in fan fiction.
Online explosion when it was revealed that Blaise Zabini was black in HP7. Fan art for the character after revelation shows stereotypical traits reminiscent of post-civil war southern art.
Posted about this and came home from work to 160 abusive comments.
Audience asks if original post is still up; N says he will try to repost on wordpress blog with comments.
Audience: similar issue with Hunger Games casting, even though it was clear from the earliest moment in the text that two main characters were brown.
M: and so much vitriol got directed at the actress who played Rue, Amandla Stenberg, and Quvenzhané Wallace -- the hatred directed at black girls for mere existence.
N: with Quvenzhané specifically, she is too confident and doesn't allow anyone to talk down to her. The Onion comment calling her a cunt.
M: I think the Onion were trying to criticize the media reaction to her, but they were calling a 9 year old girl a cunt, how is that okay?
Happened again with Rihanna and Chris Brown -- making a joke of domestic violence. White feminists were supporting it in a way that they would not have done if it had been about a white woman.
… can we get this back to remix?
I flailingly try, connecting questions about cultural theft vs reclamation
N: Quvenzhané playing Annie, there's a remix for you. Casting of Helmdall in Thor as balck; Nick Fury as black changes the comics.
A: Donald Glover for Spider-man and now there is a character in comics.
N: Starbuck in BSG.
aud: when a remix talks back not to original source but to remix community. Glockgal's comic showing Supernatural brothers as Desi, they go through US having to constantly be detained, showing ID, punchline has them getting deported to Mexico
aud: Elementary
N: Modern New York remake of Sherlock Holmes; Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson. The most egalitarian Holmes.
aud: Kate Beaton as remix creator. Hark! A Vagrant; comic about Watson. And there is fan fiction of Hark! A Vagrant, comes up in Yuletide.
aud: feelings of ownership around fan, reaction, remix work. Sometimes props up and reinforces troubling themes. People still feel very grounded in the work they create. What are ways to confront and interrogate that without resulting in…
M: massive flamewars?
N: a lot depends on how the writer responds. Also usefulness of discussing ideas, trends, problems in ways that might not be direct attacks.
L: is it any different for work outside of remixes?
N and A: it's the same
M: fans of work get very invested.
People trying to critique what happens in fandom is a small example of larger backlash in US Culture: racist hate crimes, restrictive legislation against women, homophobic hate crimes. To a small extent backlash is indication that we are successful; you can't always avoid it. I am more explicit about my references than Na'amen is: I didn't want individual people to be attarcked or to feel bad, but I wanted readers to be able to evaluate evidence for themselves. People need to be able to judge whether your post is responding to what the original person said, or whether you're misrepresenting them, consciously or unintentionally.[edited to closer reflect what M actually said]
N: example is requireshate: a reviewer who is often harsh and insulting re: gender and race issues, in very extreme language. Very divided feelings about her in the community/on this panel. She wrote about Jo Abercrombie's work & he responded saying that she was right. Then the fans came to defend him….
N: How to be a fan of problematic things: read it. I am a fan of so many problematic things! But we are allowed to read those things and critique them.
Aud: Author is dead panel yesterday. Idea of removing author from work is interesting in remix culture; fans
me: are there different contexts for thinking about the author when remix draws from corporate vs indie media?
A: intention of the remixer is very important. Important to have a clear rationale for why we take a work and remix it. I used to write xmen fic and insert my own characters; I got to the point where I wondered why I wasn't writing my own characters.
N: marginalized communities: Maurice Broadus has King Arthur retelling based in Detroit with brown people. That's a remix we don't get; Arthurian myth is a big thing we all grow up with to some degree. To have that remixed so people of color can see themselves in the myth is really important to marginalized communities. Fan fiction was important to me because I wanted queer characters and didn't have them. Helped me to realize myself as an author.
a: when dad used to read Lord of the Rings aloud to me as a kid, he would stop when the horrible depictions of evil brown people came up and tell the kids about where this guy got his idea, and remind us to do things differently when they did their own work.
M: hapex_legomena vid about LOTR orcs, coming out of racefail
Timmi Duchamp's GoH speech about the view from nowhere, the privileged view of things being taken as an objective view of things. Privileged view is taken as assertion of facts rather than a point of view; remix puts the view from somewhere into the text.
aud: mainstream hollywood's desire to remake, reboot everything has brought them to appropriate some of remix culture's methods. Should we be excited because this might lead us to more diverse representation?
A: seems more like an opportunity than a threat. There will be a lot of crap turned out and some good things too.
M: Marvel cinematic universe, OMG. Revisiting old texts without questioning narratives
Recasting memes in fandom, race and genderswapped recasting of big shows. To literally see alternative casting is a powerful moment.
aud: comments are always 'i would watch this;
aud: recasting memes end up using many of the same faces; a sign of how limited our exposure to a deeper pool of talent is.
aud: impt to remember that labor is going on all over any sort of big media; not a monolith, and easier for an individual fan to remix than for someone on the ground floor of a corporation; but people are working toward it.
me: I get concerned when questions of social justice boil down purely to representation. We need to also think about questions of structural change.
N: the point of art to me is to change the mainstream.
M: we didn't really talk about what social justice meant to us. For me social justice was very related to reading, to literary criticism. Entry point was feminism. Intro was literary, was feminist sf & lit crit of the canon. It has belatedly become clear to me that narratives of fiction are also narratives people use to explain politics and their lives. I thought people were much more aware of the conditions of their narrative than they were! Remix as innately connected to social justice bc stories we tell about who we are, who other people are, have implications related to social justice. Probably possible to have art that is a purely aesthetic experience in music, etc, but probably not in words. No such thing as a simple story.
A: with democratization of publising, changing of gatekeeping, influx of diversity to this and other fields. The time is right for the tool of remixing to move closer to the mainstream and allow us to reset the table. We don't realize until after the fact that the giants of the past have been replaced by us… we need to take control of our own narratvies, spehperd them into existence and cultivate them. Even after it is finished a work is still able to grow and change.
Posted at Dreamwidth.
comments.
As always, this is not an exact transcript, just the best I could do. Storify of the panel is available here thanks to
wrdnrd.
Remix Culture encourages the combining, editing, and recontextualizing of existent media to create new works. How can remixing text, videos and music be used to critique the original sources and bring attention to issues of social justice and marginalized communities?
Liza Furr, Alex Jennings, Alexis Lothian (me), Micole Sudberg, Na'amen Tilahun
Liza, moderator: I am from the moderator pool I don't know anything about topic so will be asking panelists questions.
Beginning with intros: what drew us to panel
Alex, standup comedian entertainer & sf author from New Orleans.
Remix culture has very specific meanings in NOLA, surrounded by jazz. Uses recontextualization indicative of remix in his writing, recontextualizing media to bring it new meaning. Implications for activism and art.
Me: talking about vidding and about doing academic work on remix.
Naamen: writer, reader, reviewer. Loves idea of remixing original texts, but also a wider view: fan fiction recreating queer characters where no characters existed, a personal form of social justice where queer peple can find themselves in remixes.
Micole: a fan, watches & reads vids and fanfiction and has also made vids, written fic. The primary impulse to remix is not necessarily based in social justice, but bc it is part of your life it becomes part of the artwork you make. Particular remix culture I am part of with fic and vidding is sometimes described as being innately a social justice thing bc people are interacting with and reclaiming a corporate text. I have some major issues with that. An act can be a form of social justce in that you are reclaiming the text (in my fandom it's very much women connecting to each other, forming a creative and supportive community) but the texts we produce are not always countertexts. Sometimes they reaffirm and even exaggerate issues with the source. Maybe I'll be the negative person on the panel.
L: Where are we coming from? What is remixing to each of us? What does social justice mean?
N: I'll do the remix question. Remix means not only fan fiction/vids but also works that recreate traditional narratives in sff. Making old texts in a new and innovative way: eg recreating biblical stories. The Open Secret Poetry Cabal at WisCon: Nancy Hightower did poems and stories remixing the bible from POV of women characters. I enjoy remixing of our entire culture; fairytales are teaching tools. that tell us who we should want to be: the prince or the princess, not the old lady in the woods. When we remix (fairytale remix a big genre in YA right now) it taps into what we grew up with & changes it.
M: long tradition of feminist rewriting of fairytales.
I started defining remix very narrowly in musical sense; wasn't sure if it was appropriative to use it for other kinds of work. Came to see it as valid use.
Was concerned because musical remix seemed more innately politicized than fan remixes: but this may have been about the remixes I initially encountered and was not necessarily true. In some ways remix is a rejection of originality -- not in a bad way, but rejecting the idea that texts are creations of one individual without influence. A more explicitly -- not necessarily communal, but more aware of belonging to a community than being the single heir of a tradition, a representative figure for a generation.
me: all art is remix, we try to push against that with idea of plagiarism, but it's contradictory.
M: persistent argument about whether fan fiction is plagiarism. But point of fic is riffing off known texts.
me: fan fiction creators value individual authorship too.
M: in creative work, US culture follows labor theory of value rather than capital theory of value: there is a sense that you have ownership if there is something that you made. Cf writers guild strikes, comics, arguments about whether writers should get rights to something vs the model of work for hire. Something of this in the ways fan writers [missed this part]
Alex: my relationship with remix culture is very broad: I consider it not just a tool for creation of art or critique but an entire way of seeing, expressing artistic sensibility. In my own fiction, for years I felt dissatisifed w direction of my work. When I started studying, listening to jazz I realized what was missing. Remix sensibility prevalent in African American culture: not just in hip hop and jazz but way of telling stories, of what henry louis gates called signifying. Pieces of information (music passages, folk tales, stories) bringing together in artistic web that makes them into something enttlirely new.
Remix is avenue to reclaim ownership of vast amount of media & information I have taken in over the course of my life. New novel: always liked Pippi Longstocking & wanted to create something that would make kids feel how I felt reading those for the first time. A Pippi Longstocking analogue who resembles kids like me: Peaches Lavelle, super strong 11 year old girl with giant red Afro puffs in New Orleans. Inherently political & concerned with social justice because, to express and comment on life in that neighborhood accurately, social concerns immediatly arise even in an off kilter fantasy world. Pippi L lives alone in a house with animals; after Katrina many kids were forced back to city for school without their parents accompanying them. Book allows comment on the loss and abandonment experienced by kids in a way that adds to experience of reader. Instead of cutting and pasting ideas together, I can draw on multiple sources
N: there are times when whole cultures remix things. Cf cultural appropriation panel. Greek myth about Apollo's sun losing control of cart, goes to Africa and burns people and that's why the people of Ethiopia are so dark. In Ethiopian culture, a remix of this myth says that the first people were burned too dark, placed in South Africa, the too underdone placed in Europe, and the perfectly brown people were in Ethopia. Problematic on its own level but Ethiopian people recreated the myth to make themselves beautiful. Remixing historical texts; also importance of the Queen of Sheba to Ethiopian culture.
M: Jeremy Love's comic Bayou, in some ways a remix of Alice in Wonderland, & of southern tales.
Reclaiming, property, cultural appropriation. Power differentials affect this. Rock and roll as a remix of jazz, what comes up when you think of it that way.
Remix as cultural exchange: the positive version of appropriation. Yet it can still be appropriative.
N: remix as an act can be a kind of social justice. But if you remix a work and keep all the misogynistic, racist elements, reinforcing the rest of the narrative, that doesn't seem as much like remix to me.
M: Thingswithwings and Eruthros made a vid for Yuletide, the annual fan fiction exchange that encourages writers to create fandom for sources that don't usually get fan fiction. TWW noticed that in sources where there were a lot of women and people of color, fandom in general focused mainly on white male characters. Slashing the text != queering the text.
N: the show Psych: how many of you know that the actor who plays the main character is Latino (Mexican), though he is coded as white on the show. The obvious slash pairing would be the two main characters who are friends, but the main black character gets left out in fan fiction.
Online explosion when it was revealed that Blaise Zabini was black in HP7. Fan art for the character after revelation shows stereotypical traits reminiscent of post-civil war southern art.
Posted about this and came home from work to 160 abusive comments.
Audience asks if original post is still up; N says he will try to repost on wordpress blog with comments.
Audience: similar issue with Hunger Games casting, even though it was clear from the earliest moment in the text that two main characters were brown.
M: and so much vitriol got directed at the actress who played Rue, Amandla Stenberg, and Quvenzhané Wallace -- the hatred directed at black girls for mere existence.
N: with Quvenzhané specifically, she is too confident and doesn't allow anyone to talk down to her. The Onion comment calling her a cunt.
M: I think the Onion were trying to criticize the media reaction to her, but they were calling a 9 year old girl a cunt, how is that okay?
Happened again with Rihanna and Chris Brown -- making a joke of domestic violence. White feminists were supporting it in a way that they would not have done if it had been about a white woman.
… can we get this back to remix?
I flailingly try, connecting questions about cultural theft vs reclamation
N: Quvenzhané playing Annie, there's a remix for you. Casting of Helmdall in Thor as balck; Nick Fury as black changes the comics.
A: Donald Glover for Spider-man and now there is a character in comics.
N: Starbuck in BSG.
aud: when a remix talks back not to original source but to remix community. Glockgal's comic showing Supernatural brothers as Desi, they go through US having to constantly be detained, showing ID, punchline has them getting deported to Mexico
aud: Elementary
N: Modern New York remake of Sherlock Holmes; Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson. The most egalitarian Holmes.
aud: Kate Beaton as remix creator. Hark! A Vagrant; comic about Watson. And there is fan fiction of Hark! A Vagrant, comes up in Yuletide.
aud: feelings of ownership around fan, reaction, remix work. Sometimes props up and reinforces troubling themes. People still feel very grounded in the work they create. What are ways to confront and interrogate that without resulting in…
M: massive flamewars?
N: a lot depends on how the writer responds. Also usefulness of discussing ideas, trends, problems in ways that might not be direct attacks.
L: is it any different for work outside of remixes?
N and A: it's the same
M: fans of work get very invested.
People trying to critique what happens in fandom is a small example of larger backlash in US Culture: racist hate crimes, restrictive legislation against women, homophobic hate crimes. To a small extent backlash is indication that we are successful; you can't always avoid it. I am more explicit about my references than Na'amen is: I didn't want individual people to be attarcked or to feel bad, but I wanted readers to be able to evaluate evidence for themselves. People need to be able to judge whether your post is responding to what the original person said, or whether you're misrepresenting them, consciously or unintentionally.[edited to closer reflect what M actually said]
N: example is requireshate: a reviewer who is often harsh and insulting re: gender and race issues, in very extreme language. Very divided feelings about her in the community/on this panel. She wrote about Jo Abercrombie's work & he responded saying that she was right. Then the fans came to defend him….
N: How to be a fan of problematic things: read it. I am a fan of so many problematic things! But we are allowed to read those things and critique them.
Aud: Author is dead panel yesterday. Idea of removing author from work is interesting in remix culture; fans
me: are there different contexts for thinking about the author when remix draws from corporate vs indie media?
A: intention of the remixer is very important. Important to have a clear rationale for why we take a work and remix it. I used to write xmen fic and insert my own characters; I got to the point where I wondered why I wasn't writing my own characters.
N: marginalized communities: Maurice Broadus has King Arthur retelling based in Detroit with brown people. That's a remix we don't get; Arthurian myth is a big thing we all grow up with to some degree. To have that remixed so people of color can see themselves in the myth is really important to marginalized communities. Fan fiction was important to me because I wanted queer characters and didn't have them. Helped me to realize myself as an author.
a: when dad used to read Lord of the Rings aloud to me as a kid, he would stop when the horrible depictions of evil brown people came up and tell the kids about where this guy got his idea, and remind us to do things differently when they did their own work.
M: hapex_legomena vid about LOTR orcs, coming out of racefail
Timmi Duchamp's GoH speech about the view from nowhere, the privileged view of things being taken as an objective view of things. Privileged view is taken as assertion of facts rather than a point of view; remix puts the view from somewhere into the text.
aud: mainstream hollywood's desire to remake, reboot everything has brought them to appropriate some of remix culture's methods. Should we be excited because this might lead us to more diverse representation?
A: seems more like an opportunity than a threat. There will be a lot of crap turned out and some good things too.
M: Marvel cinematic universe, OMG. Revisiting old texts without questioning narratives
Recasting memes in fandom, race and genderswapped recasting of big shows. To literally see alternative casting is a powerful moment.
aud: comments are always 'i would watch this;
aud: recasting memes end up using many of the same faces; a sign of how limited our exposure to a deeper pool of talent is.
aud: impt to remember that labor is going on all over any sort of big media; not a monolith, and easier for an individual fan to remix than for someone on the ground floor of a corporation; but people are working toward it.
me: I get concerned when questions of social justice boil down purely to representation. We need to also think about questions of structural change.
N: the point of art to me is to change the mainstream.
M: we didn't really talk about what social justice meant to us. For me social justice was very related to reading, to literary criticism. Entry point was feminism. Intro was literary, was feminist sf & lit crit of the canon. It has belatedly become clear to me that narratives of fiction are also narratives people use to explain politics and their lives. I thought people were much more aware of the conditions of their narrative than they were! Remix as innately connected to social justice bc stories we tell about who we are, who other people are, have implications related to social justice. Probably possible to have art that is a purely aesthetic experience in music, etc, but probably not in words. No such thing as a simple story.
A: with democratization of publising, changing of gatekeeping, influx of diversity to this and other fields. The time is right for the tool of remixing to move closer to the mainstream and allow us to reset the table. We don't realize until after the fact that the giants of the past have been replaced by us… we need to take control of our own narratvies, spehperd them into existence and cultivate them. Even after it is finished a work is still able to grow and change.
Posted at Dreamwidth.
comments.