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

[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).

I think there was then a second argument that, outside of the "women write it" angle fanfic is belittled in the same ways and by the same techniques that female writing is belittled. Again this is an argument I don't accept - the problem fan fiction has is that an editor has been nowhere near most of it, and the reason that editors don't go near it has a lot to do with the (relevant, but not really central to the argument about belittling techniques) copyright issues. It then also has the problem that most of it is "genre" fiction and therefore has to overcome the genre isn't literature prejudice.

Now you might be able to make the case that "genre" fiction is belittled in the same and by the same techniques as female writing (which brings us back to "but I don't write fantasy"), and you might be able to link that to a feminist argument when you consider the sheer number of women writing Crime Fiction and Chick Lit - but then of course you'd have to either explain why Science Fiction and Hard-boiled Thrillers (mostly written by men, if we're generalising) receive the same treatment or somehow exclude them from genre stereotyping.

[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.