“The harm of cultural appropriation lies in how the people doing the appropriation of a minority group’s culture, removing it from its context, dehumanize the minority group and dismiss their concerns or humanity.”
Another issue in
how cultural appropriation of Black culture and Blackness leads people to devalue the culture and people they’re
copying: across my research for this essay series – and this installment in
particular – one thing that keeps coming up is how little people care for Black members of the fandom spaces and for
Black people in general.
One way that they
do this is in the way they talk about hip hop and rap.
How many times have you seen people talk about how they didn’t actually like hip-hop or rap until they listened to it from a Korean artist because that version of the genre was so much purer?
I see it primarily with the rappers currently in idol groups, but I don’t doubt that hip-hop artists in Korea who are outside the idol industry get hyped up in a similar way.
Rap from Black
USians is always associated with violence, poverty, grasping for unearned
power, misogyny, etc.
The image of a
rapper to Koreans and to many non-Black fans engaging with this music –
especially outside of the US – is someone closer to Fetty Wap in “Trap Queen”
or Snoop Dogg in the nineties than Jidenna in “Long Live the Chief” or Janelle
Monae and Missy Elliot in uh… anything.
Like there’s no attempt to understand that there’s diversity in hip-hop in the US, that rappers and Black people come from all walks of life and are valid because of it.
“Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.
Edward Said, Orientalism
“Dressing up as “another culture”, is racist, and an act of privilege. Not only does it lead to offensive, inaccurate, and stereotypical portrayals of other people’s culture … but is also an act of appropriation in which someone who does not experience that oppression is able to “play”, temporarily, an “exotic” other, without experience any of the daily discriminations faced by other cultures.”
Near the end of
January 2019, TK Park of “Ask A Korean” fame took to his site in order to talk
about the response from (primarily) Black people to the article he and Youngdae
Kim had written for New York Magazine/Vulture about
the history of Korean hip hop.
In Park’s article
“K-pop in the Age of Cultural Appropriation,”
he argues that the idea of cultural appropriation is “inapposite” to K-pop
because “K-pop is a product to imperialism by the West, and in particular the
United States”.
Park unpacks this statement across the article to some various levels of success, but essentially his goal lies in removing the very potential of/responsibility for the appropriation of Black American culture from Koreans and Korean Americans. He does this, in part, by repeatedly bringing up the aftermath of the Korean War and the long arm of US imperialism as reasons why Black people “can’t” complain. (I’m legitimately Not Kidding about this shit.)
He makes it about privilege as he scolds the (presumed Black) audience for daring to have opinions about how Black music and culture are repackaged by many Korean hip-hop and pop artists and discussed by them and their fans.
This rec list highlights some of my favorite reads for stories focusing on a queer female main character. I also tried to get a good balance focusing on diversity among authors and their characters!!
I adore Stephanie. ADORE. Stephanie is an up and coming urban fantasy writer who takes trope and genre subversion to a whole other level with her Harrietta Lee series. I’ve reviewed Bloodbath and Deadline before and a constant across both reviews is how much I can’t stop loving Harry’s ridiculous ass. I don’t know if I want to be her bossy friend or gently kiss her face (or both??).
This morning, one of the fic writers I follow retweeted a condescending three-tweet thread about how folks in fandom that are critical of the AO3 and other fandom institutions (for things like the racism in fandom, the amount of explicit sexual content centering underage characters and performers, etc) were trying to “Make Fandom Great Again” and oppress queer (white) people who’d fought so hard to gain freedom in fandom.
However, that longing for fannish past comes primarily from white, cis, and het fans longing for the silence and bubbles they made in order to silence other marginalized and vulnerable voices in fandom.
I know I was like “I’m not going to do another month with
three public installments of What Fandom Racism Looks Like” but uh… so far
that’s what August is shaping up to be.
I’ve got three installments of WFRLL on the docket to go up on my site this month: a piece on “Fandoming While Black”, the cultural appropriation in Korean pop/hip hop essay I’d been working for about two weeks after I failed hard at foregrounding, and a short installment on intent behind racist fanworks and how intent isn’t magical.
I’m also playing catch-up this month with my rec list for
F/F content, the series squee post for Grayson, and, if I can get the
time to reread it, my review for Alyssa Cole’s A Prince on Paper.
I’ll also be posting public video content related to the
upcoming cultural appropriation essay and the Supergirl fandom’s
continuously racist reactions to Mehcad Brooks and James Olsen. (And, despite
the fact that I’m behind on my attempt at having a podcast on Patreon, I’m
contemplating doing mini-podcast episodes starting the end of this month! We’ll
see how this goes!)
I’m a sucker for a good enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance. And Team Kill Dracula – a silly non-namesmush of a ship name for the triad relationship between Alucard/Trevor/Sypha from Netflix’s Castlevania series absolutely provides that potential.
This ship is relatively popular in fandom with 188 of the 835 stories across the AO3’s section for the anime series. (No idea how many stories are on FanFiction.Net specifically for the anime, but I’m assuming that there are… some?) The only ship that’s more popular is solo Alucard/Trevor, which is still pretty darn quality.
For those of us who grew up with tragic and romantic vampires and the folks who hunted (and were haunted by) them, the ship offers a lot to love in terms of potential. Sadness, serious angst, shirtless vampires, a spunky Speaker –
Look, y’all. The ship basically sails itself. You can create pretty much any content for it and it’ll probably work because the ship is so so versatile. Interested in learning more about the next best thing to happen to triads in fandom since the Leverage OT3?
I’ve talked a ton about what fandom spaces look like when Black woman steps into a racebent role, but not about what happens to Black men who play racebent roles in the same franchises.
If you think that things are any easier for Black men in
fandom well…
You’ve thought wrong.
This installment of What Fandom Racism Looks Like will look
at how the racism behind how the Smallville
fandom treated Pete Ross – played by Sam Jones III – and how, over a decade
later, the Supergirl fandom pulls
from the same playbook in order to excuse heaping a ton of racism on James
Olsen and the black actor that plays
him, Mehcad Brooks.
In super awesome and (probably super surprising) news, I’ve got a gosh-darned BOOK coming out in a MONTH!
Judge Anderson: Flytrap, my second novella and my first work published in a standalone book with my name on the cover, is coming out from 2000 AD in August.
This is a story that was incredibly fun to write and that gave me a chance to flex my writing muscles. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to write in Anderson’s world and I don’t know that I can ever convey how much this opportunity means to me.
If you want to preorder this fantastic (if I may toot my own horn a bit) novella, preorders are open here at the 2000 AD online store and there are just 200 physical copies available!
Two hundred floors up on Wormwood Block, in one of the poorer corners of Mega-City One, a cit turns on her neighbours, biting and raging. Just another futsie, in a city filled with everyday tragedy.
Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson and her new partner take the call. It should be an open-and-shut case, until she tries to read the poor futsie’s mind and finds… nothing.
Somewhere in Wormwood is a predator, setting a trap for people like Cass. Hell of a way to finish her second year on the streets…
Thanks for watching and thanks for (hopefully) reading!
Note: the video Absolutely freezes and then skips a bit partway through – no fault of the terrific teen helping me by holding the camera at all – all issues across the board are my own!
We haven’t had a ton of truly celebratory fandom-related content on here in a hot minute and that’s because my critical brain is in overdrive working on various projects.
However, one thing I’ve wanted to share with y’all across my deepening investment in K-pop and alongside the critical work I’m doing about the genre/industry and its related fandom spaces is what I flat out love about it.
So instead of the BTS World review I’d actually planned to try
and get out, I’m going to do a post looking at my favorite BTS songs and why I
love them. I’m including solo member songs (solo meaning that they’re not a
part of the EPs/CDs they put out with the group) in this and uh… you’ll be able
to tell really fast what my favorite kinds of BTS songs in terms of
arrangements/who gets the focus.
(And on the subject of BTS World: no joke, the game’s a time
and money sink and I am surprisingly not captivated by it despite my love of
dating sims on top of the frustration. And since I can’t screenshot anything since
I’ve got an Android phone – the game lets iPhone users screenshot with a
warning ugh – it’s kind of annoying.)
Anyway! Here’s a list of my most favorite BTS songs!
I’m glad I can share this sort of purely celebratory
experience with you nerds!
The text, from a screenshot of a really cool message I received, reads:
hi stitch! im a regular reader of your site, and i wanted to ask a question that im unsure if you’ve addressed so far or not. having grown up on tumblr from 2011 onward, i definitely feel you hit the nail on the head about the “blank slates ghost” and migratory slash fandom always hyperfocusing on white men. it’s really telling how ships like stucky (while i personally enjoy it) can completely overshadow and create hostility toward steve/sam; i had a friend who got routinely vagued and harassed for that exact thing. but what im wondering is, on the flipside, how can white and nbpoc interact w black characters in ships without being creepy abd voyeuristic? i liked your post about the finnpoe racist fics where finn is always hyper-big and sexualized, that kind of demonstrated some stuff Not to do, but i wonder if there’s more nuance to it? should we accept that black fans will sideye/be more wary of nonblack people getting involved in the slash scene for black characters, or are there more dedicated steps we can take to openly be supportive and non-fetishistic? thanks for reading this even if you dont have much time to answer!!!
I got this message in my inbox a few days ago, but since the email address attached to it looks like it’ll bounce back if I email them back and this is a topic I’m sure many of y’all have been wondering about… I decided to make public! I hope that my anonymous reader sees this and knows that I’m grateful to them for being a longtime reader and for sending this message!
There are two real questions being asked here and I’m going to try my best at tackling them in clear and relatively concise ways.
At least, that’s what Laurell K Hamilton is trying to
convince us and Anita across the twenty-six books in her Anita Blake: Vampire
Hunter series: one of the core themes across the Anitaverse is the idea that shapeshifters are people and
they deserve the consideration that people get.
It’d be an admirable approach to take if not for how Hamilton
sets up shifters and their pack dynamics. Shifter society and the dynamics
between members in a particular group towards insiders and outsiders –
especially if those outsiders are human – really make you question what she’s
actually succeeding at.
For this pint-sized primer, we’re going to be talking about
the main shape-shifter groups Anita interacts with across the Anitaverse –
wolves, leopards, hyenas, tigers, and lions, the lone prey group in the whole
dang thing, swans – and why Hamilton’s worldbuilding and her rationale behind using shapeshifters as metaphor for
various marginalized identities remains more full of holes than a slice of
Swiss cheese.
Outside of maybe a handful of countries around the world, there aren’t many places where I’m guaranteed to be entirely free from anti-black racism. Even my home island of St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands isn’t a safe space for me as a Black person –
And I grew up there.
Because anti-blackness is so ubiquitous across so many different spaces and how often it shows up in situations where Black people aren’t actually present or involved, I am not surprised at anti-blackness being present out of the blue – to me at least.
I am really not surprised at how antiblackness shows up in the K-pop fandom – because antiblackness is everywhere in fandom spaces.
But there’s something a little… extra about how anti-blackness works in K-pop fandom spaces and how much of that anti-blackness is actually fueled by issues present in the music industry’s consumption and repackaging of Black culture.Read More »
I love being able to get up, come into work, and put together ads or blow through edits on a batch of articles for one of our clients. I love having the chance to use my English MA Editing Skills (TM) to make our marketing department a better one.
This is a wrap-up/write-up of my overall comments during the PCA 2019 Roundtable on Racism in Fandom/Fan Studies Spaces (which I chaired). Feel free to check out write-ups from Robin Anne Reid and Samira Nadkari, two of the other participants on the roundtable.
Across transformative and curatorial fandom spaces, racism is so entrenched in the skeleton of fandom – from erasing fans of color via the ahistorical rewriting of fandom history to killing off or torturing characters of color in fanworks – that to uproot and remove racism from fandom would leave it looking like those floppy cored sheep from the bone vampire episode of Futurama.
PCA 2019 was my second time attending this conference in three years. It was my second time coming into these academic spaces and getting up to talk to a hopefully invested audience about racism in fandom spaces.
But it wasn’t my first time talking about the way that misogynoir works in fandom.
Talking about misogynoir and other forms of racism in fandom and media is kind of… my thing.
It’s an aspect of fannishness that I feel proud of working on and where I feel compelled to continue honing my skills. It’s a form of fannishness that I like because I finally have the room and the words to verbalize my concerns as a queer Black person in fandom.Read More »
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