I think a flounce that dramatic should have some follow-up trumpet.
The response to my last post was really exciting, for the most part. As per usual, it both clarified things and made them more complicated. A few people were involved with ficsoreal in more vituperative exchanges, which showed me how quickly the question of the individual's ethical obligation becomes personal and very intense. I was actually intending the post to be more self-centered -- that is, let's talk about my responsibility and, okay, fine, your responsibility -- but we seem to return again and again to the individual offense, and the author's refusal to atone for that offense.
To address some things that appear to have been unclear in my initial post: I'm not claiming it isn't offensive. I too have my reasons for being interested in trauma and reader experience. Many of you do not read my journal, or have not read it for a while; what you could not know is that I do not regularly write about feelings like "hurt" and "anger." I found it difficult to talk about my hurt and anger, and therefore it may have come across that my emotions were insufficient, or that I was not taking them seriously. This is not the case. I know so much about trauma because it is a personal issue for me; I addressed this issue because I saw other people speaking for a figure that I identified with, the potentially traumatized reader. While this story did not produce a recurrence of trauma in me, other stories that relate to something traumatic that I went through have. This is precisely why I found the story so interesting.
Again, because some comments seemed not to get this: I get why people want the warning to be there. I am not going to show my pain in order to gain authenticity, because it closes down arguments too quickly that could otherwise become productive, but I would like you to trust that I understand.
The offense I feel when I read a traumatizing story, though, is not where I want to stop. I understand that the ethical responsibility of ficsoreal and her refusal to own that responsibility is very much worth discussing, but that wasn't quite the point of my discussion. I encourage you to write your own post on the subject, and I will respond in the same vein. The offense of the story, for me, brought up issues of responsibility that went beyond ficsoreal. I was interested in the issues of community that it raised, and in the issues of quality or expectations. What does it mean, in terms of our unspoken contract as members of an internet community, that we expect a warning to be more specific? What does that tell us about our assumptions about one another, what does that tell us about how we see the purpose of fanfiction?
As another point of clarification, at no point in my previous post did I claim that the story was "good." I would never use a vague term like "good" in a critical work. I argued that the story was effective, that I was temporarily doubled in the figure of Brendon, and that it produced a reaction in me (which can be synonymous with effective). This does not mean "good" to me. However, if this does mean "good" to you, then I want to think more about the way that you evaluate writing. Is a written work that doesn't offer you a point of identification and experience "bad"? I think this has significant worth as a discussion for minority readers -- who have been asked in many novels to trans-identify with majority characters. I think that a lot of times, we as fan writers and fan readers are operating on an impulse to "take over" and appropriate stories that don't allow us a point of identification. (That is, I have to do something to this text, or it’s going to do something to me.)
However, in noting all of this interesting stuff, I wrote that the effectiveness of the story (not its effect, but its effectiveness) was "SO cool." By using "SO cool," I was being flip, and I apologize for being unclear; what I meant was "problematic" and "interesting" and "very much worth thinking about."
It still is worth thinking about. I think the vehemence of the response to the story, to the point where hostilities continued in my comments, shows that we do have more of a ethical responsibility for our readers as fan writers. However, this responsibility is unspoken, a whole lot of the time, until someone offends it. In our day to day life, we have institutions in place to make people adhere to certain social contracts. For example, if you take off all your clothes on the subway, the police will be called, you will be imprisoned and probably fined. Some social contracts, however, are a site of common agreement: farting on the elevator is rude, rape jokes are not funny. The common agreement sites are the really contested spaces, because it's where different sets of cultural and social instruction collide. Foucault wrote about the feeling of being watched and monitored which keeps us adherent to social norms in "Panopticism," but I think one of the things he didn't address is how the prisoners are not only kept in place by the central tower, but also by each other. We navigate our unspoken social contracts through what other people allow or disallow, what they say is okay and what is not okay.
impertinence noted in a comment that fandom is a gift economy. I think this is a really important observation, and, as impertinence noted, this has been discussed in the past.1 It connected for me with Derrida's aporia, or im/possible puzzle, of the gift. I'm still thinking about this, but if you want to read more, take a gander at this link, which explains the concept pretty clearly. Derrida's ideas are placed in some philosophical context on this site.2
Some things that have been granting me perspective:
1 - arsenicjade, I bet you know of a source for this - if you do, could you throw it at me?
2 - bewildery, I know you're a fan of his, do you have anything that could make me sound like I know what I'm talking about ahahaha impossible clarify this for us all?
To address some things that appear to have been unclear in my initial post: I'm not claiming it isn't offensive. I too have my reasons for being interested in trauma and reader experience. Many of you do not read my journal, or have not read it for a while; what you could not know is that I do not regularly write about feelings like "hurt" and "anger." I found it difficult to talk about my hurt and anger, and therefore it may have come across that my emotions were insufficient, or that I was not taking them seriously. This is not the case. I know so much about trauma because it is a personal issue for me; I addressed this issue because I saw other people speaking for a figure that I identified with, the potentially traumatized reader. While this story did not produce a recurrence of trauma in me, other stories that relate to something traumatic that I went through have. This is precisely why I found the story so interesting.
Again, because some comments seemed not to get this: I get why people want the warning to be there. I am not going to show my pain in order to gain authenticity, because it closes down arguments too quickly that could otherwise become productive, but I would like you to trust that I understand.
The offense I feel when I read a traumatizing story, though, is not where I want to stop. I understand that the ethical responsibility of ficsoreal and her refusal to own that responsibility is very much worth discussing, but that wasn't quite the point of my discussion. I encourage you to write your own post on the subject, and I will respond in the same vein. The offense of the story, for me, brought up issues of responsibility that went beyond ficsoreal. I was interested in the issues of community that it raised, and in the issues of quality or expectations. What does it mean, in terms of our unspoken contract as members of an internet community, that we expect a warning to be more specific? What does that tell us about our assumptions about one another, what does that tell us about how we see the purpose of fanfiction?
As another point of clarification, at no point in my previous post did I claim that the story was "good." I would never use a vague term like "good" in a critical work. I argued that the story was effective, that I was temporarily doubled in the figure of Brendon, and that it produced a reaction in me (which can be synonymous with effective). This does not mean "good" to me. However, if this does mean "good" to you, then I want to think more about the way that you evaluate writing. Is a written work that doesn't offer you a point of identification and experience "bad"? I think this has significant worth as a discussion for minority readers -- who have been asked in many novels to trans-identify with majority characters. I think that a lot of times, we as fan writers and fan readers are operating on an impulse to "take over" and appropriate stories that don't allow us a point of identification. (That is, I have to do something to this text, or it’s going to do something to me.)
However, in noting all of this interesting stuff, I wrote that the effectiveness of the story (not its effect, but its effectiveness) was "SO cool." By using "SO cool," I was being flip, and I apologize for being unclear; what I meant was "problematic" and "interesting" and "very much worth thinking about."
It still is worth thinking about. I think the vehemence of the response to the story, to the point where hostilities continued in my comments, shows that we do have more of a ethical responsibility for our readers as fan writers. However, this responsibility is unspoken, a whole lot of the time, until someone offends it. In our day to day life, we have institutions in place to make people adhere to certain social contracts. For example, if you take off all your clothes on the subway, the police will be called, you will be imprisoned and probably fined. Some social contracts, however, are a site of common agreement: farting on the elevator is rude, rape jokes are not funny. The common agreement sites are the really contested spaces, because it's where different sets of cultural and social instruction collide. Foucault wrote about the feeling of being watched and monitored which keeps us adherent to social norms in "Panopticism," but I think one of the things he didn't address is how the prisoners are not only kept in place by the central tower, but also by each other. We navigate our unspoken social contracts through what other people allow or disallow, what they say is okay and what is not okay.
impertinence noted in a comment that fandom is a gift economy. I think this is a really important observation, and, as impertinence noted, this has been discussed in the past.1 It connected for me with Derrida's aporia, or im/possible puzzle, of the gift. I'm still thinking about this, but if you want to read more, take a gander at this link, which explains the concept pretty clearly. Derrida's ideas are placed in some philosophical context on this site.2
Some things that have been granting me perspective:
- A few lolcats. This is my default for achieving zen.
- Yoga for creating internal balance. The voiceover is a little irksome, but that's fairly standard for yoga videos. I wish there were one where the announcer cracked ribald jokes the entire time. Yes, I'm aware that's counter-productive.
- Chris Brown - Take You Down. The air humping! I love him so much, why is he so totally one of my students? (I have to look away when he takes his shirt off. Noooo! Little boy, shirt back on!) Two basketball players at my university were watching this next to me in the computer lab last night, and they kept saying "whooooo" really quietly whenever he did the little hip move. It was the cutest thing I'd ever seen.
1 - arsenicjade, I bet you know of a source for this - if you do, could you throw it at me?
2 - bewildery, I know you're a fan of his, do you have anything that could make me sound like I know what I'm talking about ahahaha impossible clarify this for us all?