Fandom - Meta and Academics
Here are some fannish things that I wanted to rec. (OK, quite a few things. This post got quite long.)
♥ First up: a couple of fannish podcasts! Not podfics, actual podcasts where people discuss fandom, fic, slash, pairings, and so on.
slashreport, also on twitter, iTunes and slashreport.com
This, my friends, has provided me many hours of laughter. It's like listening in on someone's fannish conversation in their living room with a bunch of friends - in this case it's
rageprufrock,
mklutz, and their guests. It has produced some of the goofiest, tangential and wrong conversations I've ever heard - and they have the balls to publish it. But they also have a lot of interesting things to say about fandom in general and different fandoms in particular. It's very informal, just friends talking together. I recommend listening from the beginning so you can witness the jokes evolving. Also, their twitter is very active with crack and conversations. It's probably all NSFW, though. They don't really shy away from much. Things to know:
slashcast, and tumblr
Slashcast is also a lot of fun. It's more structured, and put together by different people for different sections: LGBT news (in the US and around the world), Insider Interviews (authors, vidders, beta's, fans who organize cons or communities, ect), Slashers on the Street (discussion of great fannish get-togethers and cons), Meta discussions on a variety of topics, Fandom Opinion, and Mailbag. They rate themselves as being a hard R. Their posts are full of links to all the communities, works, and stuff talked about in the episode. Things to know:
I've gotta say that listening to all the Fandom Safaris and Pimp My Fandoms is dangerous - you may come away with more new fandoms to add to your Netflix list than you know what to do with.
And to wrap it up, there is also a single podcast episode by
kohlrimmedeye, which is rambly fun to listen to.
♥ Listening to all this fannish audio lately really drove something home for me: Slash fandom is primarily female. Now I know that's the general fannish consensus, but for some reason I stopped to think about it recently. Almost every podcast I've heard have been all female. Every single podfic I have is read by one or more women. I currently have 158 stories by 59 readers, and 12 podcast episodes. That's not a comprehensive overview of fandom of course (by a long shot), but I think it still says something. I know there are male slashers, and I sincerely don't mean to say that I wouldn't welcome men on my flist, or as a podfic reader. I'd enjoy hearing a man read a podfic, as I think it might bring a bit of a different feel to the story. But as a female slasher (a kinky, sexed-up, bisexual, potentially polyamorous one) who has always been somewhat embarrassed by all those desires, it means something to me to turn on my iPod and hear other women tell me - through their choice of story to read, and their expressed opinions - just how much they like those very same things. It's a concrete and lovely reminder that I am not alone in this. It may not have been intentional on the part of the readers and speakers, but I draw support from all the female voices in fandom who speak their love for slash, kink and alternative lifestyles.
And something else that makes me squeeful about women slashers:
SL/ASH: A short documentary video about slash fandom by Nick Spunde that touches on the fact that slashers are mostly women. He interviews two women for the project, one of whom, fpvs, speaks on camera. The interviews are interesting, the video is very well put together with story snippits, fanart and screencaps, and
fpvs is cute and a lovely speaker. Harry Potter and Supernatural are the two fandoms mainly discussed. It doesn't say anything that we slashers don't already know about ourselves, but I think it's a nice presentation for someone who is totally not familiar at all with fic or slash. (Except Wincest is discussed, which limits the number of people I'd actually rec it to IRL, but whatever.)
♥ A while ago
fleete posted her MA report on the st-xi kinkmemes (
st_xi_kink and
st_xi_kink_meme) and I really enjoyed reading it. (I kept meaning to rec it, but didn't until now) It's a detailed break-down of the kinkmeme concept, and the st-xi kinkmeme in particular, for an outside audience. It's an extremely dense and complicated paper on a subject that many of us in fandom probably take for granted, and I found it to be fascinating. Note: Fleete has flocked that post. She says "It's kind of odd: in order to keep it technically "unpublished" on the web, so that I can get it published by a journal in the future, I need to keep it under friends lock, but anyone who wants to read it can friend me, and I will gratefully add them so they can read it."
And on a related note, can I just say what a tragedy it is that LJ has deleted comments by deleted journals? It can make reading old conversations weird when you only get half the conversation. And who knows how many comment fics at kink memes and in journals that are now lost. That saddens me, though I realize that every single thing that is ever produced in fandom cannot be permanent. Even at the AO3, which would love to be a permanent fannish archive, a fan can take down their own fanworks. But maybe this will happen less as the AO3 directly hosts more types of fanworks. I hope so, because I hate clicking on a link to a work I loved, or a highly recced work, and not finding it there.
♥ I've recently discovered that kink_bingo (
kink_bingo) has !meta and !essay tags. You can write essays or meta fics (as well as do other types of fills) for the kink fills on your bingo square. I've found some fascinating things there, like You Belong To Me: an essay on collars by
fizzyblogic, The Riches of Embarrassment: Or, Why I Don't Have a Humiliation Squick by
thingswithwings, Discipline, and the Line Between Guilt and Shame by aris-tgd, and Force Me, Please: On Noncon and Noncon Play in Fanfic by
bironic. I love that fandom will speak openly about things that are considered very taboo by the 'mainstream.'
♥ Academics in fandom, or acafandom, is something that I follow casually. I tend to be pretty shy about responding to meta posts, but I enjoy reading them. Analyzing why we do what we do is something I find fascinating. I love meta posts on all aspects of fandom, even though they can sometimes get wanky or intense. I enjoy being introduced to a new idea by someone who clearly has an interest in discussing that topic. Sometimes the topics are difficult to discuss, and sometimes they have deep, systemic implications that are difficult to change. But I still love the discussion, the back-and-forth of a community trying to sort itself out. I think there is a certain optimism inherent in the decision to write about a topic - that topic is now poised for thought and discussion, and that can mean change in those who read it. By now everyone's probably aware of
metafandom, but I don't see much discussion of the OTW's contribution to meta or acafandom on my flist, so I want to promote them a bit.
I occasionally stop by the Symposium Blog and Transformative Works and Cultures, both projects of the OTW, for analytical discussion on how fandom interacts with media and the 'outside world'. TWC is an academic, peer-reviewed journal on fan studies. It covers a wide range of topics that concern fandom, everything from fic to vidding, video games to knitting. Symposium authors blog about fannish topics. It tends to be a little more casual than TWC, so I'm more likely to browse there. I find TWC to be generally more difficult to read, especially the Theory and Praxis sections, because of it's highly academic nature. There are times when I need a dictionary, and when I have to go back and pick apart sentences to understand the meaning of a paragraph. But despite that, they have some very interesting articles. Here are some that I enjoyed:
Symposium (some recent posts I've enjoyed):
On Very Special Episodes and "Holiday Favorites" by alexjenkins: Netflix and the fannish viewing experience.
After Henry Jenkins: Transmedia Fandom by Andrea Horbinski: I love the way she uses the quote from The Matrix. This goes really well with Henry Jenkins' post Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of Fanlib and
cesperanza's Why I Support the OTW post (Or, as I think of it, her I want us to own the goddamned servers post.)
OT3's: Disrupting the Intimate Society? by Andrea Horbinski: I really enjoyed the second half of this article. Also, it linked to this extremely detailed breakdown of Trek ships and categorizations on the AO3. <3
On TWC:
Painful Pleasures by Anne Kustritz - an article which lead me to buy the kindle edition of The Story of O so that I could compare it to the story used for comparison in the article (The Story of Obi by Lilith Sedai) and fanworks in general. My feelings and thoughts about this topic are far too great to outline here. I'd like to write them out in a separate post one day. (Note, in case anyone else is thinking of buying the Kindle edition of The Story of O, be aware that the third part of the book, basically the ending, was not included in that edition. The reason given: "In the final chapter, which has been suppressed, O..." - I cut off the sentence because it gives spoilery recap of the ending, in case anyone cares not to be spoiled. I have no idea if the ending is removed from all editions of the book, or just the Amazon edition.)
Women, "Star Trek," and the early development of fannish vidding by Francesca Coppa - A very detailed history of vidding, partially in response to a reporter writing "Since the dawn of YouTube, fans have been melding their own amateur video with the music of their favorite bands." Ha! I love that Francesca and the OTW (through both these publications, and at Fanlore, where any fan can edit the wiki) are recording our history in a way that will hopefully last for a very long time on the net. It also gives an early fannish history of Star Trek TOS, and a detailed argument for women vidders (and viewers) responding so strongly to Spock and Number One in the TOS pilot.
Repackaging Fan Culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models by Suzanne Scott - Fascinating read about fandom as a gift economy. Includes great links at the end.
And there are lots of Supernatural articles there that I'd like to read, after getting more of the show under my belt. So, I think that's all I've got for right now. There's more meta I'd like to get into eventually, and I'll try to post when I do. (I've also said 'fascinating' and 'interesting' far more than I should have. They just seemed right, though.)
♥ First up: a couple of fannish podcasts! Not podfics, actual podcasts where people discuss fandom, fic, slash, pairings, and so on.
slashreport, also on twitter, iTunes and slashreport.com
This, my friends, has provided me many hours of laughter. It's like listening in on someone's fannish conversation in their living room with a bunch of friends - in this case it's
rageprufrock,
mklutz, and their guests. It has produced some of the goofiest, tangential and wrong conversations I've ever heard - and they have the balls to publish it. But they also have a lot of interesting things to say about fandom in general and different fandoms in particular. It's very informal, just friends talking together. I recommend listening from the beginning so you can witness the jokes evolving. Also, their twitter is very active with crack and conversations. It's probably all NSFW, though. They don't really shy away from much. Things to know:
- There will be unwarned spoilers! They've gotten a little better about warning for spoilers (especially for currently running fandoms) before saying something, but you still should watch out for it.
- They have great special episodes where they focus on one particular thing or fandom, like: porn, yaoi (which is apparently pronounced totally different than I thought it was), Merlin (which I haven't heard because I haven't really watched the show and I didn't want to spoil), and Author Talks.
- They have Fandom Safari, wherein someone attempts to entice the audience into their fandom in the shortest amount of time possible. The first one I heard (and only one, so far) was for Dresden Files (can't remember who sent it in right now, sorry!). It was amusing hearing her cram her argument into the shortest time she could, but she did a great job. I actually want to read the books and dive into the slash now.
- They each rec two to three works at the end of the episode, often related to the topic.
slashcast, and tumblr
Slashcast is also a lot of fun. It's more structured, and put together by different people for different sections: LGBT news (in the US and around the world), Insider Interviews (authors, vidders, beta's, fans who organize cons or communities, ect), Slashers on the Street (discussion of great fannish get-togethers and cons), Meta discussions on a variety of topics, Fandom Opinion, and Mailbag. They rate themselves as being a hard R. Their posts are full of links to all the communities, works, and stuff talked about in the episode. Things to know:
- Slashcast started out as exclusively a Harry Potter podcast. September 1, 2011 was their first multifandom episode, after a lengthy break. Early episodes contain very in-depth HP conversations.
- They post monthly, usually at the beginning of the month.
- The Pimp My Fandom section is longer and a bit more thorough than /reports Fandom Safari.
- The different LGBT News presenters frequently add interesting and eloquent commentary on the news they are reporting.
I've gotta say that listening to all the Fandom Safaris and Pimp My Fandoms is dangerous - you may come away with more new fandoms to add to your Netflix list than you know what to do with.
And to wrap it up, there is also a single podcast episode by
kohlrimmedeye, which is rambly fun to listen to.
♥ Listening to all this fannish audio lately really drove something home for me: Slash fandom is primarily female. Now I know that's the general fannish consensus, but for some reason I stopped to think about it recently. Almost every podcast I've heard have been all female. Every single podfic I have is read by one or more women. I currently have 158 stories by 59 readers, and 12 podcast episodes. That's not a comprehensive overview of fandom of course (by a long shot), but I think it still says something. I know there are male slashers, and I sincerely don't mean to say that I wouldn't welcome men on my flist, or as a podfic reader. I'd enjoy hearing a man read a podfic, as I think it might bring a bit of a different feel to the story. But as a female slasher (a kinky, sexed-up, bisexual, potentially polyamorous one) who has always been somewhat embarrassed by all those desires, it means something to me to turn on my iPod and hear other women tell me - through their choice of story to read, and their expressed opinions - just how much they like those very same things. It's a concrete and lovely reminder that I am not alone in this. It may not have been intentional on the part of the readers and speakers, but I draw support from all the female voices in fandom who speak their love for slash, kink and alternative lifestyles.
And something else that makes me squeeful about women slashers:
SL/ASH: A short documentary video about slash fandom by Nick Spunde that touches on the fact that slashers are mostly women. He interviews two women for the project, one of whom, fpvs, speaks on camera. The interviews are interesting, the video is very well put together with story snippits, fanart and screencaps, and
fpvs is cute and a lovely speaker. Harry Potter and Supernatural are the two fandoms mainly discussed. It doesn't say anything that we slashers don't already know about ourselves, but I think it's a nice presentation for someone who is totally not familiar at all with fic or slash. (Except Wincest is discussed, which limits the number of people I'd actually rec it to IRL, but whatever.)
♥ A while ago
fleete posted her MA report on the st-xi kinkmemes (
st_xi_kink and
st_xi_kink_meme) and I really enjoyed reading it. (I kept meaning to rec it, but didn't until now) It's a detailed break-down of the kinkmeme concept, and the st-xi kinkmeme in particular, for an outside audience. It's an extremely dense and complicated paper on a subject that many of us in fandom probably take for granted, and I found it to be fascinating. Note: Fleete has flocked that post. She says "It's kind of odd: in order to keep it technically "unpublished" on the web, so that I can get it published by a journal in the future, I need to keep it under friends lock, but anyone who wants to read it can friend me, and I will gratefully add them so they can read it."
And on a related note, can I just say what a tragedy it is that LJ has deleted comments by deleted journals? It can make reading old conversations weird when you only get half the conversation. And who knows how many comment fics at kink memes and in journals that are now lost. That saddens me, though I realize that every single thing that is ever produced in fandom cannot be permanent. Even at the AO3, which would love to be a permanent fannish archive, a fan can take down their own fanworks. But maybe this will happen less as the AO3 directly hosts more types of fanworks. I hope so, because I hate clicking on a link to a work I loved, or a highly recced work, and not finding it there.
♥ I've recently discovered that kink_bingo (
kink_bingo) has !meta and !essay tags. You can write essays or meta fics (as well as do other types of fills) for the kink fills on your bingo square. I've found some fascinating things there, like You Belong To Me: an essay on collars by
fizzyblogic, The Riches of Embarrassment: Or, Why I Don't Have a Humiliation Squick by
thingswithwings, Discipline, and the Line Between Guilt and Shame by aris-tgd, and Force Me, Please: On Noncon and Noncon Play in Fanfic by
bironic. I love that fandom will speak openly about things that are considered very taboo by the 'mainstream.'
♥ Academics in fandom, or acafandom, is something that I follow casually. I tend to be pretty shy about responding to meta posts, but I enjoy reading them. Analyzing why we do what we do is something I find fascinating. I love meta posts on all aspects of fandom, even though they can sometimes get wanky or intense. I enjoy being introduced to a new idea by someone who clearly has an interest in discussing that topic. Sometimes the topics are difficult to discuss, and sometimes they have deep, systemic implications that are difficult to change. But I still love the discussion, the back-and-forth of a community trying to sort itself out. I think there is a certain optimism inherent in the decision to write about a topic - that topic is now poised for thought and discussion, and that can mean change in those who read it. By now everyone's probably aware of
metafandom, but I don't see much discussion of the OTW's contribution to meta or acafandom on my flist, so I want to promote them a bit.
I occasionally stop by the Symposium Blog and Transformative Works and Cultures, both projects of the OTW, for analytical discussion on how fandom interacts with media and the 'outside world'. TWC is an academic, peer-reviewed journal on fan studies. It covers a wide range of topics that concern fandom, everything from fic to vidding, video games to knitting. Symposium authors blog about fannish topics. It tends to be a little more casual than TWC, so I'm more likely to browse there. I find TWC to be generally more difficult to read, especially the Theory and Praxis sections, because of it's highly academic nature. There are times when I need a dictionary, and when I have to go back and pick apart sentences to understand the meaning of a paragraph. But despite that, they have some very interesting articles. Here are some that I enjoyed:
Symposium (some recent posts I've enjoyed):
On Very Special Episodes and "Holiday Favorites" by alexjenkins: Netflix and the fannish viewing experience.
After Henry Jenkins: Transmedia Fandom by Andrea Horbinski: I love the way she uses the quote from The Matrix. This goes really well with Henry Jenkins' post Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of Fanlib and
cesperanza's Why I Support the OTW post (Or, as I think of it, her I want us to own the goddamned servers post.)
OT3's: Disrupting the Intimate Society? by Andrea Horbinski: I really enjoyed the second half of this article. Also, it linked to this extremely detailed breakdown of Trek ships and categorizations on the AO3. <3
On TWC:
Painful Pleasures by Anne Kustritz - an article which lead me to buy the kindle edition of The Story of O so that I could compare it to the story used for comparison in the article (The Story of Obi by Lilith Sedai) and fanworks in general. My feelings and thoughts about this topic are far too great to outline here. I'd like to write them out in a separate post one day. (Note, in case anyone else is thinking of buying the Kindle edition of The Story of O, be aware that the third part of the book, basically the ending, was not included in that edition. The reason given: "In the final chapter, which has been suppressed, O..." - I cut off the sentence because it gives spoilery recap of the ending, in case anyone cares not to be spoiled. I have no idea if the ending is removed from all editions of the book, or just the Amazon edition.)
Women, "Star Trek," and the early development of fannish vidding by Francesca Coppa - A very detailed history of vidding, partially in response to a reporter writing "Since the dawn of YouTube, fans have been melding their own amateur video with the music of their favorite bands." Ha! I love that Francesca and the OTW (through both these publications, and at Fanlore, where any fan can edit the wiki) are recording our history in a way that will hopefully last for a very long time on the net. It also gives an early fannish history of Star Trek TOS, and a detailed argument for women vidders (and viewers) responding so strongly to Spock and Number One in the TOS pilot.
Repackaging Fan Culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models by Suzanne Scott - Fascinating read about fandom as a gift economy. Includes great links at the end.
And there are lots of Supernatural articles there that I'd like to read, after getting more of the show under my belt. So, I think that's all I've got for right now. There's more meta I'd like to get into eventually, and I'll try to post when I do. (I've also said 'fascinating' and 'interesting' far more than I should have. They just seemed right, though.)