This is super relevant to fandom, where “nice” white women & queer people latch on to acceptable Black/brown targets and will spend months or even YEARS spreading hate & harassing others in the name of “their” thing.
These spaces are surface level progressive with a deep racist rot.
Read More »Originally posted as a thread on Twitter on August 4, 2018
Read More »Fandom about shows/films with white queer characters: “You have to support it because it’s a win for ~all of us~ and #RepresentationMatters”
Fandom about shows/films with queer characters of color: “I don’t know why, but just don’t feel like this is something I’m interested in”
In December 2020, I posted 30 posts on my website and four posts on Patreon.
21 of the posts on my website made up a three-week streak of content and that three-week streak is pretty much why I stalled out on the Patreon posts.
I… won’t be doing that again on the fly.
2021 is gonna be slow to start when it comes to content because I am tired.
I am burnt the fuck out.
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A lot happened in 2020. While it’s been one stressful year, it’s also been a year where I’ve pretty much stayed booked and busy and writing. So for those of you who aren’t super duper online, here’s what you’ve missed in terms of content, milestones, and strange or stressful things.
Best Website Content:
Quick Coverage: John Boyega Ends 2019 With a Bang (And a Hearty ‘Fuck You’ To Rey/Kylo Shippers)
Aside from the kiss-and-dissolve, the majority of their intimate moments are fight scenes. Which is fine if you personally view fighting as foreplay but the whiteness leaps out about a fandom that sees violence – including kidnapping and the threat of torture – as a precursor of romance, but clearly reciprocated affection between Finn and Rey as uncomfortable… for her and for them.
Rey/Kylo Shippers: A New Look At An Old Face of Fannish Entitlement
Read More »It doesn’t matter that for Rey/Kylo shippers, The Rise of Skywalker provides more fanservice than an A.C.E. concert.
Because while they’ve gotten ninety nine percent of what they wanted from the franchise, they didn’t get the big thing that they really wanted:
Kylo Ren’s redemption in the form of an utterly unearned Happily Ever After where Ben and his tradwife Rey pop out little Skywalker spawn to perpetuate the Skywalker family’s genetics and their shitty legacy.
I already made the Amy Cooper comparison back in June in Why Write About Fandom Racism At A Time Like This? where I talked about what the racism in the supposedly progressive queer/women run fandom spaces looks like:
It looks a lot like… Amy Cooper calling the cops on Christian Cooper and pretending that her life was in danger when all he wanted her to do was leash her damn dog, actually.
(And before you accuse me of “trivializing real racism” or whatever the actual fake woke set is calling it these days, understand that what Amy did and what the nice white women of fandom do are the same kind of behavior and they all weaponize their white womanhood for the same end: a permanent silencing of Black voices that they don’t like or agree with. I get to make comparisons like that considering that I’m subject to Amy Coopers in and out of fandom.)
I was right then and I am right now: there are white women and queer people in fandom who utilize their marginalization (womanhood or queerness, sometimes a blend of both with a splash of mental health issues and claims of trauma inspiring totes valid lashing out thrown in) in fandom.
They use their ability to inspire ATTACK-PROTECT urges in folks in the same way that Amy Cooper tried to utilize her white womanhood to get the cops to come in guns ablaze to protect her from… Christian Cooper’s nerdy ass asking her to put her dog on a leash.
The goal in fandom, as with Amy Cooper and various other cop-calling, hysteria weaponizing Karens, is to control who gets to speak, who is listened to, who is taken as an inherent threatening presence trying to control or harm others… and who should be.
Read More »Merry Christmas to me! This came a week early and so… A hasty, hopefully hilarious unboxing.
You can leave a nickname or anon when you ask your question and I won’t be collecting emails or anything like that!
As always, I’m only eligible to be nominated for awards related to fan writing (because my fiction writing is… sporadic and also super NSFW when I do post it). If you were so inclined to nominate me for something – like the Hugo Award for Fan Writer or any similar award – here’s what you could nominate me for!
I’m a fan writer because I’m a fan writing about fandom – maybe not fandoms you think about on the regular, but spaces that need coverage that strays from solely celebratory. My writing primarily focuses on queerness and/or race in media/fandom spaces and I document and push back at established narratives about the supposed progressive spaces and what fandom is actually like when you’re in the thick of it.
As of this point in 2020, I posted 101 pieces on my site for a total of 185,232k words. These pieces covered antiblackness in transformative fandom, Korean pop/hip hop fandom, how a popular Tor release missed the mood of 2020, music reviews, the Star Wars fandom’s endless awfulness… and so much more. I uploaded a handful of videos to my YouTube channel, recorded and posted like nine podcast episodes, wrote for I-D and Teen Vogue, and pissed a lot of racists off in fandom just for pointing out the facts of fandom.
2020 has been tough, but I have put out some of my best work so far despite all the wild shit I’ve been through and it’d be cool if folks recognized that, you know?
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Over the last few months, a few friends and I have been meeting online semi-regularly to watch pre-recorded conference panels or academic talks. While this originally began as a system of mutual accountability around a seminar series, it’s since mutated into an actually enjoyable part of my downtime.
After years of struggle, the academic conference experience suddenly has room for joy again. It’s been a damn revelation to me!
Read More »September is all about placeholders, catching up, and hurricane prep.
It’s peak hurricane season from here until the end of October (November usually doesn’t have hurricanes like that but I’m prepared to be wrong) so there is a huge chance that I will be preoccupied with dealing with storms as the month crawls on.
So, I can’t promise any content beyond what I didn’t get to do in August for Patreon (because for once I did most of the stuff for my site) because I’m still trying to hustle and take care of my family since things are tough BUT I will do my best!
Read More »I haven’t shared a lists of links in a while, huh?
Well here’s some of what I’ve been reading, speaking on, and watching across the internet!
I’m doing this like intense and incredible speed-run through Korean hip hop across my project because I want to know and listen to everyone and out of nowhere (for me, a person who does not follow HipHopLE on social media and does not read Korean well enough that that’d make any difference anyway), here comes a casual conversation between three of the “greats” in Korean hip hop. Out of the three men here, I’m more familiar with The Quiett’s work but I’ve listened to them all and seen them in things.
One thing that stood out for me was how this understated “three dudes talk hip hop history and memories” was one of the things that felt really close to the things I grew up with in terms of Black rappers siting down and talking about their own histories. So it’s interesting and they touch on a lot of incredible memories and moments in their lives as rappers, producers, and dudes who ran (run?) their own labels or crews.
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I knew I’d wind up writing about blackface before this project was done.
Early on in my research before I ever had the #StitchProcesses hashtag and back when I could pretend I wasn’t super invested (like yes, there was a time when I could “play it cool” about all of this), my youngest niece and I went on a binge of research on YouTube. One of the things that kept coming up during my early outlining was how so many of the lists of cultural appropriation taken to extremes involved blackface from idols as part of the problem.
Within minutes of scrolling through YouTube, we came across acts like the still active and (sort of) blackface-ing Bubble Sisters. We saw a (racist in its own right) documentary on blackface in Korea and Japan that showed a large number of blackface moments that left us both shaking. Some of the same incidents involving idols – like A Pink’s Bomi made up as Michol, the Bubble Sisters’ everything, and Super Junior’s Shindong and Yesung in two separate instances of Blackface and other members of the group supporting a performer in blackface – show up on those same lists about cultural appropriation.
The only problem with that is that blackface is not a form of cultural appropriation. It is minstrelsy and horrifically antiblack on top of that, but it’s not appropriation. They’re not appropriating anything, they’re insulting it.
Read More »Let’s keep this short and simple because we’re already three days into August:
Hurricane season is going to amp up from here on in so everything here getting done hinges on there NOT being a major hurricane disrupting my life across August. (It also hinges on me not having to address racism from folks in fandom but since some weirdo’s already got me in their sights over it… I figure we’re off to a shit start there… So I’ll have to work around my rage.)
Here are my goals for the month in terms of content! There’s one secret thing I want to do for social media, BUT I can only do it if I get access to my Twitter data and so… we’ll see if I get to do that this month.
Website
June… happened hard.
To be entirely honest here, June was probably the busiest I’ve been aside from the first two weeks of January where I was documenting the racism Rey/Kylo fans were slinging John Boyega’s way. June was ALSO (I mean, like January) a very racist month. I mean, my god, I basically didn’t get to do what I wanted to do with my site content because I had to deal with the fact that racists in fandom haven’t figured out that they can just ignore me instead of shit talking and slandering me endlessly.
And I’m trying to work as much as I can because again, I’m basically my family’s breadwinner and that is… a lot, so my hierarchy of writing (and reading) goes a little something like Day Job > (Freelance if I Can Get It >) Patreon > Website.
July is already looking like it’ll be busy, but I’ve whipped out my Happy Planner for the first time in about two months and I plan to get shit done – barring a hurricane or a massive terrible political moment, of course.
But I’m trying, y’all.
Read More »I just did a thread on Twitter about the specific ways that antiblackness manifests in fandom via fanworks on the Archive of Our Own (or any other hosting site, to be fair) revolving around punishing, harming, killing, etc Black characters and since some of y’all aren’t on Twitter or in the event that you’re blocked on my main… I turned it into a blog post lightly edited since I don’t have to abbreviate points for Twitter’s character count.
There’s a thing about the Racism on the Archive of Our Own that i wanted to mention.
The racism specifically directed at Black characters (and sometimes fans and performers) in some fanworks on the archive does diverge somewhat from racism aimed at non-Black East Asian or Latinx characters for example:
All characters of color get fanworks that are full of mild to major racist stereotypes and that is definitely a thing I don’t know how to fix via reporting or tagging.
But Black characters get that and abusive fan content to tear them down, dehumanize them, or put them in their place.
Stitch's Media Mix 
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