Fan Fiction and Feminism

[louisedennis]

By what I gather is the customary LJ mechanism, I've had my attention drawn to How fan fiction makes us poor. In short this relates the feminist question of "Why women don't write" to fan fiction and it clearly resonated with a lot of people

Comments

[ladyofastolat]

I saw that some weeks ago. It didn't resonate with me, either. While I could agree that in the past a lot of women's endeavours have been belitted, I didn't see that as applying to fanfic nowadays. A lot of the comments seemed to be saying that fanfic has very little status in the world because it's done by women. I think that fanfic has very little status in the world because it's done by fans - i.e. sad, geeky people who dress up in costumes and play childish games and like stories about silly things like magic and spaceships. I really don't see gender as coming into it. If the wider world knows about fanfic (and I suspect that most people have never heard of it) I bet they don't realise it's mostly done by women. I'd been involved in X-Files fanfic for well over a year before I realised that most writers were female.

[louisedennis]

I think the argument is a bit subtler than women write fanfic therefore it is belittled. It runs along the lines of things that women have historically done are belittled by our general culture and fanfic falls into the category (by challenging certain boundaries and assumptions) of things that women have historically done. I just don't make the link between "things women have historically done" and "fan fiction" (at least as it manifested itself in the Who community in the late 90s

[ladyofastolat]

I don't think the original poster was saying that women write fanfic therefore it is belitted, but I felt that some of the comments, and the large amount of follow-up posts on other journals, were saying that. I also think we need to remember that a lot of fanfic doesn't really deserve to get recognition. Yes, some fanfic is excellent stuff, but quite a lot of it is awful.

Personally, I don't really like to think of things too much along gender lines. We're all human, after all. I'm all for equality, but I think it's easy to see sexism in places where it doesn't exist.

[lil_shepherd]

I think I need time to put my thoughts in order, and not at 10:15 either. I've been keeping out of the various sexism debates currently floating about, but I can't help feeling that many of the writers don't know their fannish history. A lot stems from the attitude throughout LJ, at least, that fanfiction history starts with the internet. It is true that most fanfiction published nowadays is internet based and written by women, but this was not always so.

Fan fiction started with mainly male writers (Sherlock Holmes fandom, 1920s onward) but didn't really get going among women until Trek. What's more, though Who was on the air before Trek, organised fandom and fanwriting didn't really start getting up steam here until Trek fandom arrived in spades into the UK from the US in the early 70s. Trek was mainly female at that time, and Who as you remark, mainly male. Then there was the fact that all fannish fiction, be it original or based on someone else's work was frowned on in UK fandom. If you wrote fanfic, you kept it quiet

[cupidsbow]

Actually, the history of fanfic is more complex than just the texts which arose from within fandom (which began about the pulp era, the 1920s-30s). For instance, Beatles fanfic (mostly by women) was before Trek, and there were earlier clumps of fanfictions riffing things like Alice in Wonderland too, from back in the 19th Century (also most notably by women), but I can't presently find the link to the fannish history I read for the source of that info (although some of it is mentioned in the wiki).

It is interesting, though, that you know of the predominantly male-practiced Holmes fandom, and not the others, don't you think?

(Hi, louisedennis, just here to link your post to my "Response" post. Your well-made point about Who fandom was also made in the comments to my post by angiest, who also pointed out that it was a predominantly gay fandom. I hadn't known that before. He also had some other really interesting things to say here, which you might find of value. I'll leave you in peace again now. :)

[lil_shepherd]

I was talking about UK fandom - and the fact I know about Holmes rather than Beatles fandom says more about my interests than sexism. In the UK at least, that's regarded as a very different type of fandom, while fandom has links to the Baker Street Irregulars. Also, by the sixties, when I became aware of it, official Holmes pastiches had been professional published, so the history was public record.

Something else you might consider. In the 60s, no-one was at all surprised that I always took out books from the section of the library labelled for boys - I was by no means the only girl who did this. However, my brother, who loved Enid Blyton, had to get me to take out her girls' school stories for him, or face raised eyebrows. That was sexism, for sure.

[lil_shepherd]

Incidentally, I wasn't suggesting that you didn't know about fannish hisory - but that a lot of the wank around seems not to.