Fan Fiction and Feminism
May. 11th, 2007 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatBy 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.
But not with me, which I find suprising, and made me wonder why. I guess I'm not exactly the most prolific fanfic writer by a country mile and I've occupied the world of classic Doctor Who fan fiction - a predominantly male environment. As such it had never occurred to me that fan fiction was a primarily female passtime nor that fan fiction writers might be considered a "community of women". But it also had never occurred to me that "Women don't write". Quite the opposite in fact - I've spent much time in recent years worrying over why women don't do science (which has a vague corollary that they are writing instead). I only did english up to O' level (and doesn't that age me). But we covered Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte and Carson McCullers (and I'm impressed I found her name by simply typing "Frankie, Frances, Meningitis" into Google) alongside Shakespeare, Dickens and J. Meade Faulkner without any suggestion that they should be considered particularly unusual. Of course, I was in an all-girls school and was being taught by teachers not unaware of feminist theory so its possible that they were opting for a deliberate policy against "Pollution of Agency" and "Double Standard of Categorization". In fact, come to think of it, they were also recomending "Lord of the Rings", "Day of the Triffids" and "The Time Machine" so possibly I was fortunate in teachers with a liberal definition of "Literature". I've been dragging up in my memory the books I was made to read at school, and there are indeed more male authors on that list than female, but this is the first time I've ever considered that you might infer from that the conclusion "Women don't write" as opposed to, say, "Hasn't society changed".
But not with me, which I find suprising, and made me wonder why. I guess I'm not exactly the most prolific fanfic writer by a country mile and I've occupied the world of classic Doctor Who fan fiction - a predominantly male environment. As such it had never occurred to me that fan fiction was a primarily female passtime nor that fan fiction writers might be considered a "community of women". But it also had never occurred to me that "Women don't write". Quite the opposite in fact - I've spent much time in recent years worrying over why women don't do science (which has a vague corollary that they are writing instead). I only did english up to O' level (and doesn't that age me). But we covered Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte and Carson McCullers (and I'm impressed I found her name by simply typing "Frankie, Frances, Meningitis" into Google) alongside Shakespeare, Dickens and J. Meade Faulkner without any suggestion that they should be considered particularly unusual. Of course, I was in an all-girls school and was being taught by teachers not unaware of feminist theory so its possible that they were opting for a deliberate policy against "Pollution of Agency" and "Double Standard of Categorization". In fact, come to think of it, they were also recomending "Lord of the Rings", "Day of the Triffids" and "The Time Machine" so possibly I was fortunate in teachers with a liberal definition of "Literature". I've been dragging up in my memory the books I was made to read at school, and there are indeed more male authors on that list than female, but this is the first time I've ever considered that you might infer from that the conclusion "Women don't write" as opposed to, say, "Hasn't society changed".
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-11 03:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-11 03:57 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-11 04:46 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-11 09:41 pm (UTC)Fan fiction started with mainly male writers (Sherlock Holmes fandom, 1920s onward) but didn't really get going among women until Trek. What's more, though Who was on the air before Trek, organised fandom and fanwriting didn't really start getting up steam here until Trek fandom arrived in spades into the UK from the US in the early 70s. Trek was mainly female at that time, and Who as you remark, mainly male. Then there was the fact that all fannish fiction, be it original or based on someone else's work was frowned on in UK fandom. If you wrote fanfic, you kept it quiet from your SF fannish and sercon friends, not to mention from literary researchers. That was certainly true in 1978, when I joined both sides of fandom.
I also think that there is still a difference between the US and UK sides of fan fiction writing fandom - and an age difference. How much of the problems arise from sexism, and how much from other factors is something I am not qualified to judge, but, hell, fan fiction is illegal under US copyright law, and dubious under ours. If we choose to write it, we take the consequences of not being paid for it, and our efforts not being recognised. I am happy to accept that. Some people, apparently, are not.
I'm not making much sense so I'll shut up.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 01:56 am (UTC)It is interesting, though, that you know of the predominantly male-practiced Holmes fandom, and not the others, don't you think?
(Hi,
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 05:46 am (UTC)Something else you might consider. In the 60s, no-one was at all surprised that I always took out books from the section of the library labelled for boys - I was by no means the only girl who did this. However, my brother, who loved Enid Blyton, had to get me to take out her girls' school stories for him, or face raised eyebrows. That was sexism, for sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 06:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 06:58 am (UTC)I didn't mean to imply that your knowledge of early fanfiction was necessarily sexist, either, or that sexism is only possible in one direction. The idea of applying feminist theory to fanfiction was one I thought worth considering, and it has inspired some really interesting responses, so I'd say it was worth it; but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's the *only* valuable approach to deconstructing fanfiction's role, function and history.
That said, I think we often have a big blind-spot about women's contributions to writing, even now, which is why I responded to you in the way I did. I find silences interesting (such as those of early fanfiction communities, which have tended to drop out of our consciousness, with the exception of Holmes). The trouble with silences, though, is that I can only guess what has caused them. It may be institutional sexism (it seems a useful theory), but it may not be, or it may be institutional sexism in combination with a number of other things (which seems more likely). That uncertainty is one of the reasons I opened the idea up for discussion with my post; I certainly don't consider that post a definitive statement! And it wasn't meant as some kind of capitalist manifesto, either. I can understand why people might assume that I'm pro-selling fanfiction given the points I make about poverty, but I'm not (I think it's too simplistic a solution, even assuming everyone agrees there's a problem), which is why I don't say so in the essay.
Huh. I didn't realise I needed to say all that so badly. I've tried not to let it bother me when people have plainly misunderstood the essay (that is not directed at you), but clearly I haven't been as immune as I thought. Stopping now :)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 08:42 am (UTC)You have an interesting point about silence, but speculation is speculation unless you were actually there or someone who was has given details - and, of course, for such people as the early Janeites, this didn't happen. Even while people are still alive, speculation banishes eyewitness accounts. For example, I have seen academic essays and lj comments that speculate on why there was no slash in early Blake's Seven fandom. None of them seem to know the real answer, which was that a fan publisher promised a member of the cast that she would not allow slash to be published in the UK. She was a formidable lady, and it wasn't.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 09:05 am (UTC)Many, many disciplines use speculation as a chief tool of interrogation (including many branches of science and history; archeology for instance, which speculates wildly on the basis of fragmentary evidence and massive silences in the record). I think there's a place for that, right alongside doing quantitative and qualitative research to try and find proof to support the resulting theories.
That said, I agree that speculation can banish eye-witness accounts; in fact, that's exactly what Russ argued that the institutional sexism within the Literary canon was doing to women's writing!
So I would argue that there's speculation, and then there's speculation, and some of it is valuable, responding to a desire to solve a problem or fill in a blank, and some of it is gossip or propaganda in disguise. Saying all speculation is pointless (is that what you mean by "speculation is speculation"?) would mean that, for instance, science-fiction is pointless, as it's the genre of speculation; it would mean that all scientific hypotheses are pointless.
If that is really what you are arguing, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. But it certainly was effective in redirecting our conversation away from the idea of political silences, which you conceded was an interesting point.
I thought I was misreading the hostility in your initial reply to me, but I'm not, am I? You don't want to engage with this topic, and I shouldn't have replied to you. Dammit. I had that policy of not replying for a reason. You thought this was a safe space and I barged in. I apologise for that.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 02:45 pm (UTC)Speculation is fine, but it is different to logic and reason - and I have this irrational love of the latter two...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 03:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 04:09 pm (UTC)Friends?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 03:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 04:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 04:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 05:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-12 05:38 pm (UTC)It might not be the right time, if it ever is, to link to this piece of Doctor Who fan writing from the late 1980s:
The Joy of Doctor Who
already discussed in the comments to a fairly recent post of mine here as "a somewhat-amusing yet remarkably condescending and sexist article", so be warned.