Comments | puella_nerdii: It's not FOR you.

puella_nerdii

It's not FOR you.

Oct 01, 2009 19:23

Boy, '09 sure seems like the year of PrivilegeFail in fandom, doesn't it? This time, however, there's fail coming in from both sides there are arguments put forth by both camps that I'm uncomfortable with.

Brief background: The Lambda Literary Foundation revises/clarifies/what-have-you their mission statement, which results in a revision of the ( Read more... )

socially relevant!, meta(stasis)

Comments 33

mithrigil October 1 2009, 23:44:55 UTC

You already know how I feel about this, but I'll just chime in that if anyone says that the performing and literary arts aren't skewed toward straight white men I'll let you do the laughing in one ear while I sing D-flats in the other.

puella_nerdii October 2 2009, 02:04:27 UTC

But Artists are Egalitarian, donchaknow!

(And ladies, I think if you all lost your virginities, you'd all shed a lot of your inhibitions as actors!

One of the adjunct professors told us how he heard that at one of the top conservatories in Britain. This was in the late nineties/early 2000s. Yyyyeah.)

lady_venn October 1 2009, 23:53:48 UTC

Oh, SurveyFail. (Don't know much about Lambda!Fail, so will not comment)

Assholes like you (you = SurveyFail, not you = Puel): Making it harder for people like me to do right by fandom anthropology. Not to mention there are SO MANY THINGS WRONG WITH WHAT THEY WERE TRYING TO DO AND HOW THEY WERE TRYING TO DO IT THAT IF I EVER RUN INTO THEM IT WILL NOT BE PRETTY AT ALL.

Especially since I may want to do some potential graduate work with that sort of thing...

puella_nerdii October 2 2009, 02:14:16 UTC

Oh god don't even get me started on the methodology!fail, I've taken like one methods course and I can design a more valid survey than that. HOW DID THOSE EEDJITS MAKE IT OUT OF GRAD SCHOOL. HOW.

byzantienne October 2 2009, 02:59:48 UTC

They didn't GO to grad school.

They have BAs and were using their old school IDs to make themselves sound legit.

puella_nerdii October 2 2009, 03:00:52 UTC

-- oh man I didn't hear that part.

Excuse me while I laugh.

Lots.

Mmmm, schadenfraude.

Thread 12

rene October 2 2009, 00:03:19 UTC

Ignoring all privilege issues inherent with this, I also have to say...what on Earth gives some people the notion that they are owed something by Lambda, anyway? They're a non-profit foundation with specific goals in mind that may or may not change over time depending on any number of factors in the community they're meant to help represent.

But they can't change their mission statement because it wasn't always that way and because it disenfranchises certain authors and because we said so? Uh, no. They can do what they want. Other services are available to people who don't like it.

puella_nerdii October 2 2009, 02:17:42 UTC

Yeah, it's got that nice air of entitlement to it, doesn't it? And it's not like the Lambda Awards changing their focus shuts out the Poor Straightfolk from All Literary Awards Ever. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a lot of the winners of literary awards? Will still be straight people. Writing about straight people.

gileonnen October 2 2009, 00:22:20 UTC

You've made some excellent points here--most of them, better-phrased than my own versions of them would be; the vast majority of them, more widely applicable. I read this debacle in a highly (almost dramatically) subjective manner, and so my responses are emphatically mine. I ask you to bear this in mind as I make my next point.

I think what interests me most about this discussion (as a person who has had to do a lot of coming-out-to-self; as genderqueer, as pansexual, as polyamorous) is that there seems to be a divide between people who think that Lambda should be rewarding LGBT authors for good production of books and the people who think that Lambda should be rewarding authors for good production of LGBT books. Clearly Lambda is taking the former course, and their organization certainly has the right to determine what constitutes eligibility for their award. Moreover, they've agreed that self-identification is the yardstick by which they measure this eligibility; that's certainly showing greater-than-average sensitivity to the ( ... )

puella_nerdii October 2 2009, 02:28:05 UTC

Regarding your last point: yes, and terribly so, and that's why I can never really get behind the "death of the author" movement -- the context in which an author is writing in, both personal and sociopolitical, matters and informs their work in ways that they're both aware and not aware of, down to what kinds of things they assume are common sense. But authors are neither dead nor gods: they're people, and their experience of being people in the world is what motivates them to write. It motivates them all differently, because everyone interacts with the contexts in which they live a little differently, but that lived experience is still there -- and it's a more subtle kind of authorial intent than "what did Author Z mean by the butterfly on page 93?" but in a lot of ways I think it's a more interesting one.

-- sorry, that was a bit of a tangent.

I think I was like you when I was younger, and the advent of the Internet has changed that a lot, because a lot of contemporary authors are now accessible in ways they weren't before. I ( ... )

kynn October 2 2009, 10:03:24 UTC

...namely the one that white women never experience oppression. Via keeva on Dreamwidth:

Actually, that's a pretty inaccurate misstatement of my position. See the comments on my post for more details, but the gist of it is that SurveyFail was processed by the vast majority of people who commented on it in a very different way than how anti-oppression posters dealt with RaceFail and MammothFail. Almost always, SurveyFail was seen as an individual person's personal failings (which it was), but rarely was it addressed in the larger context of societal oppressions, privilege, and institutional sexism/transphobia (which it could have been).

Saying I believe, based on my analysis of SurveyFail, that "white women never experience oppression" is ridiculous. Since I don't believe that, and I've never said that. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop putting words in my mouth, especially in the context of trying to form some sort of false equivalency -- "there's fail coming in from both sides" -- between what some people have written and what you ( ... )

kynn October 2 2009, 10:58:54 UTC

I wrote more about this here, including how I fucked up what I meant to say, ended up looking pretty damn stupid, what I really wanted to say, and how I could still end up looking stupid anyway! Enjoy.

kynn October 2 2009, 11:00:29 UTC

Er... here. Geez, I should just get some sleep instead of trying to post. :)

puella_nerdii October 5 2009, 15:12:53 UTC

Sorry it took me this long to get back to you -- it's been a long weekend.

I'm sorry I misrepresented your position on the latter -- that was overreaching on my part, and I apologize for it. I'll emend the post.

Regarding SurveyFail, I still disagree; I'm thinking largely about the meta arising before the protest art surfaced, which did shift the nature of the discussion, but most of the commentary I saw on my friendslist, and on posts like the ones thingswithwings and eruthros made on DW, talked about SurveyFail in the context of pathologizing and misrepresenting women's sexuality, specifically fannish women's sexuality. Yes, the individual failings of the researchers were discussed -- in regards to their methodology, largely, which really was awful -- but this statement by eruthros struck me:
It's the same old sociobiological bullshit, the same old attempts to universalize and naturalize their ideas of gender roles, the same old approach that makes us nothing but a data set.Admittedly, most of the commentary I read came from ( ... )