I can't be the only one who sees a certain degree of irony here...

[rushin_doll]

Well. Hello, LJ. It has been some time, has it not? While my posting history shows that I've been offline since early July, the truth is that my LJ habits have been sporadic since sometime in February of this year. This was due primarily to my class load being crazy and me just having a lot to do. Prior to that I was rather diligent about

Comments

[rushin_doll]

For what it's worth the remark was intended to be facetious. I'd be willing an interested in exploring the disconnect between my intention and your reading of it in more detail, as I suspect that it says a lot about me and the way I present myself, but I'll leave that up to you. For clarity: the driving force behind this post is that I am excited, I have friends I think will be excited to know that I am excited and possibly be excited to participate, and LJ happens to be a tremendously good tool for sharing that excitement with them.

I'd actually be curious to know whether other people will read this the way you have, or whether there's a specific contextual disconnect between you and me. In the interest of honesty I should admit that this question springs to mind, in part, because there's a part of me that wants to think that I'm a good person and that some disconnect is responsible for the appearance of privilege rather than me actually utilizing privilege. But I'm also curious because it would be tremendously beneficial to me to know if I'm throwing my privilege around.

Anyway, I'm especially curious, if you'd be willing to expand, about your hard and immediate rejection of the third option. I'm specifically curious because that's the sort of fanfic that I find most compelling both personally and structurally.

Curious,
Ana

[silveraspen]

As I said, I figured you were sourcing your remarks in a humor-related basis, so yeah. I am also not at all surprised that you are excited and delighted to have the chance to share and engage with a group of people to explore something that is of great and enjoyable interest.

It DOES sound like an awesome class, and one that's going to have a lot of potentially-wonderful things to learn and discuss.

I'll admit there may be a specific disconnect between us, and we can discuss that further if you want to engage on that topic. However, that said:

1) Privilege does not have to be deliberately intended to apply or be present. That's inherent in the nature of privilege.
2) Before I start down the path of attempting to explain that, are you familiar with any of the great "fandom fails" that we've seen so far in 2009? I am thinking specifically in this case of RaceFail/the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM in the context of "outing" fannish identities, and also of the more recent SurveyFail.

My rejection of the third option is in part because I do think it's out of the scope of the assignment and would shift the discussion from fanfiction per se to the related-and-yet-different topic of the properties and rationales involved in online community engagement. It could be an interesting side discussion, but it is so very far from being the same thing as fanfiction.

It's also in part because if you are going to use community work as an example of something, it's both polite and ethical to have the community approval first. See related topic in point #2 above re: outing identities.

[rushin_doll]

I'm with you on your first point, there. Perhaps ironically one of my undergraduate focuses in sociology was on social stratification and institutional privilege, so I have a strong intellectual and academic understanding of how privilege works. Of course I also belong to every politically privileged majority that I can readily identify within the power structure of the United States (white, male, heterosexual, protestant, etc.) so I often run the risk of slipping into it anyway.

And while a lot of the stuff you mention in your second bullet point is stuff I'm peripherally aware of, it's just periphery. That was gearing up about the time I was falling out of my regular LJ habits. So I know what happened in broad strokes, and have a general sense for how the discussion played out, but the nitty-gritty isn't something I'm intimately familiar with.

And, unrelated, but because it may not have been clear, when I talked about my third option I meant I would be writing fiction on my own based on a community-generated world. It may just be an approach difference, but I don't see that as being "using community work" in a way that is qualitatively different from writing fanfiction within the context of a fan community that produces various sorts of fanworks. You may have understood what I meant, but I figured it might be worth elaborating in case you thought I was talking about rewriting threads wholesale or something like that.

Definitely interested in more discussion,
Ana

[silveraspen]

Perhaps I am not being sufficiently clear. Let me rephrase.

I often run the risk of slipping into it [privilege] anyway

You already have it. Whether one is consciously expressing a thing does not change the fact that the thing may exist -- or in this case DOES exist -- in a larger context.

Here, let me give you specific examples of presumptive privilege from your own statements made to me in the comments above:

Statement 1: the disconnect between my intention and your reading of it
Demonstrates: Assumption that the error is on my part and not yours; assumption that intention absolutely defines reception despite larger contextual arena; assumption that other people's opinions/interpretations have less validity than your own

Statement 2: that wants to think that I'm a good person and that some disconnect is responsible for the appearance of privilege
Demonstrates: Assumption that privilege does not apply if not desired; expression of fallacy that possession of privilege equates to innately "bad" personality characteristics (It doesn't; actions do that.)

Statement 3: it would be tremendously beneficial to me to know if I'm throwing my privilege around
Demonstrates: Inherently-privileged assumption that it is my responsibility to educate and inform you for your benefit.

Regarding the third option: My interpretation of what you meant matches what you just stated above. I stand by what I said. And yes, it CAN be considered using community work, because you alone are not the defining voice of the community. Given that the characters in a fandom-based RP are based on others' creations, it may seem like splitting hairs, so let me be even more clear: my concern is not for the use of the characters, it's for the subsequent representation of the game community itself.

As I read over this post and the comments, I think you could gain valuable insight from educating yourself regarding the previous fails I mentioned, and questioning your assumptions in the process. References:

SurveyFail: Master linkspam post; and declining to participate, by Dreamwidth user eruthros. Valuable as a shining example of how NOT to conduct research in or on fandom.

RaceFail: rydra_wong's master linkspam post starts here; you may find Ann Somerville's summary particularly useful and accessible. I strongly recommend you read tablesaw's post " Notes on Reading an Internet Conflict," especially any number of the references contained therein, for reasons aside from discussions of race alone.

The thing is, Ana -- you've heard me say this before. You've heard me express these concerns before, starting with a certain incident in 2007 (I am being circumspect because those posts remain locked), and again in occasional discussion, and again in person regarding a wish for data collection in a recently-created online context, and now here we are again.

You've said it yourself, just now; you have studied topics in an academic context that should lead you to know better. I am absolutely certain you are capable of seeing the problem here.

You know better.

Stop doing this.

[rushin_doll]

About the time I'd half-written a rebuttal to this comment I realized that I'd be better served by stepping back, giving myself some time and emotional distance, and thinking about things. I think I benefited from doing so, and I appreciate your candor here.

The big benefit of stepping back and letting my emotions disengage was that I was able to actually give your examples some serious consideration rather than going with my initial knee-jerk reaction. So here are my reactions after some time to think about them. I don't know that they merit a response, but I did want to share them, as much to get them written down as anything. I do have a couple of caveats, and I've included them for the sake of precision, but I don't think they actually impact your point. They're quibbles more than rebuttals, and I'm not trying to use them as counter-arguments, just an attempt to make clear my thinking.

1) This one I have to cop to with a caveat. I am, definitely, working on a blame-shift here, and that's a big deal. My quibble is that I'm not trying to shift blame from me to you, though I can see that it reads that way. My actual honest intention was to shift the blame from me or you onto some sort of combinatorial effect. A combination of how I say things with how you read things in which both and neither of us are at fault. This doesn't make it any less an attempt at blame-shifting, Further, the weight of other people who read things as you did suggests that it's not some idiosyncratic thing between just you and me. And, finally, my own rereading of my post (which prompted the subsequent edit) pretty much revealed this one to be entirely my fault. I suppose I could have saved a lot of time if I'd just reread the thing at the beginning rather than operating out of my internal knowledge of what I was trying to say.

2) This one I've got to cop to with no caveats at all. It's rather embarrassing to realize that I haven't fully internalized this lesson when much of my undergraduate work was spent studying the structural nature of stratification and political power. Thanks for calling me on it.

3) Again, I've got to cop to this one. In my initial response yesterday I was going to argue that this was really me just asking for assistance from friends, the same way I was trying to do with the post: getting input into a decision I need to make. But further reflection has made it clear that this wasn't what I was doing at all because even if no one responded to this post I would have still made a choice between my three options. But if you were unwilling to engage me in discussion I wasn't going to seek out or deeply consider privilege. So you're accusation here is spot on.

I also used my break from the discussion to read the linked posts. I skimmed rydra_wong's list again, having done so previously, but must admit I didn't reread any of the posts linked to from there. I then reread "Declining to participate" (which I read when it was posted), read Ann Somerville's summary, which I hadn't seen, and reread tablesaw's post, which I'd read when it was posted. Still trying to think my way through those within the context of this discussion.

Quick note, not really related to this discussion: as far as I'm concerned you're welcome to discuss the 2007 thing openly as far as I'm concerned. Those posts are locked because the comments that other people contributed, which were greatly appreciated, were made to lock posts. I feel that a locked post can foster a sense of safety which allows people to say things they might not otherwise, and it would be a violation of trust for me to unlock a post and make public any comments that were made in the context of the post being locked. If it were just me, those posts would be public, so I don't mind the discussion of them in open forums.

Anyway, I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this discussion as I do feel I've benefited from it. I suppose only time will tell if I really have, but that makes me no less grateful.

Appreciatively,
Ana

[badninja]

I like you a lot, Ana, but I'm going to be honest about what I think is the reason people can get irritated around you. It feels like you insert a certain amount of distance between yourself and others on here. This comment is a good example. Try rereading it from an outsider's perspective - it sort of comes across like you're using LJ to study human interaction and making no secret of it, but making no effort to get closer to others.

Now, I know that isn't true, okay? But that's how it can come across, sometimes. You said you were curious, so... yeah.

[rushin_doll]

I can sort of see your point, and I'd love for you to elaborate on the "distance" thing you're perceiving if you're up for it. But my gut reaction is to say (perhaps inaccurately) that I'm not writing for outsiders. I'm writing for my flist. And, at least in theory and to a first approximation, my flist is made up of people who know me. I basically expect people to bring the context of what they know about me outside of this post to the table when they read it, and that would, hopefully, mean that they knew what I'm trying to say.

Which may be wrong-headed of me, in that I shouldn't be doing things that way. Or it could even just be wrong, and even with context people don't get what I'm trying to do.

Open to possibilities,
Ana