I need White Feminism (which exists to benefit whiteness and white womanhood) to stop telling me that Black female characters are better off when they’re single.
I need White Feminists ™ in fandom to stop pretending that they’re protecting or promoting Iris West/Nyota Uhura/Abbie Mills/Eve Moneypenny by wanting these Black female characters to stay single and “strong” forever, pushing them away from the potential of canon romances with white male characters.Read More »
Recently, there’s been a spate of fannish and original writers claiming that they’re so afraid of negative reception and responses from people of color, that they refrain from writing characters of color in their works.
We saw this during Amy Lane’s racist mess (where she wrote a book that had a black character refer to himself as a monkey) where dozens of M/M authors rushing to defend her claimed that POC were so scary and aggressive in defending themselves from racism that they were perpetuating (racial slurs as “cute” petnames and objectification in droves) that they’d never be writing characters of color again.
We also saw it a couple months ago in fandom where BNF Franzeska decided that the best response to Black fans pointing out racism towards Finn in Star Wars to write thousands of words of white washed fandom history that contained comments about how we (people of color willfully misidentified as white social justice warriors jonesing for ally cookies) were why they weren’t writing Finn.
Her post claimed that white writers were terrified of being accused of racism for… constantly imbuing their Finn-characterization with stereotypes of black masculinity and objectifying Finn’s body.
I still see my fellow fans of color dealing with that shit now, damn near three months after all of the work Black fans and anti-racist allies put into writing and talking about fandom’s racism. It’s still a thing that I see people claiming as if researching and respecting characters and people of color in fandom is so damn difficult!
These authors’ excuse for unbroken whiteness in their fiction appears to be that it’s downright terrifying to imagine people of color who’ve asked for characters like them to be written responsibly getting annoyed with racist portrayals of these characters of color.
You know, because it’s all about hurt white feelings in the end and it’s more upsetting to be confronted about their racism than to be confronted by racism.
Note: Previously posted on the website Fandoms Hate People of Color (click the link to reblog it), I received permission to host this essay about the experiences one fan of color (who has requested to remain anonymous) had and witnessed within the Dragon Age fandom before exiting due to stress from everything that the fandom kept doing and perpetuated with regard to racism, harassment, and constant antiblackness directed towards fans and characters in the series. While this post has received minor edits for clarity and consistency as well as clarifying comments from me in endnotes, it remains largely the same as the post published on tumblr.
Content Warnings for: racism, antiblackness, ableism and ableist terms, mentions of abuse and trauma, and a brief mention of sexual assault in fan fiction in one of my clarifying comments
I had to leave the Dragon Age fandom a while ago because of all the racism (the last straw was right after that terrible Vivienne fic, not even the fic itself but white fandom’s reaction, the pointblank refusal to acknowledge that it was part of the same bigger problem that they contributed to every day) and ever since I’ve been thinking a lot about what the patterns actually are. I know for a fact that these patterns aren’t unique to the Dragon Age fandom, but it’s where I personally saw them most blatantly and was hurt by them the most. Specifically, I was most involved in the DA2 fandom, so my examples are from there.Read More »
When Devin Faraci wrote an article entitled “Fandom is broken”, there was a moment where I expected him to actually talk about the ways that fandom was actually broken.
Sure, he does mention how fan entitlement leads to threats against creators, but he also equates queer people asking for representation in the form of #GiveElsaAGirlfriend and #GiveCapABoyfriend (which has issues I’m going to mention later but still) and Jewish people angry about the Hydra!Cap with trolls foaming at the mouth about lady Ghostbusters.
He doesn’t talk about how these same trolls hunt down and harass women and people of color in the industry or fandom on the regular, or how the decision to make Captain America a secret Hydra agent was one calculated to upset and offend people, that Marvel essentially got the reactions that they wanted for that specific book.
No, the only markers that Faraci takes as indicators of how broken fandom is are trolls and marginalized people who want positive representation.
Cool.
Read More »
Earlier this week I got a chance to participate in an episode of fandom podcast Fansplaining that was all about race/racism in fandom and giving people of color a chance to speak about what they’d witnessed and experienced. It was amazing!
First, the cool content:
Fansplaining Episode 22A
In “Race and Fandom Part 1,” Flourish and Elizabeth follow up on the last episode’s questions about the impact of racism in the Star Wars fandom—and how it’s a microcosm of fandom at large. They interview Rukmini Pande and Clio, and they hear clips from Holly Quinn, Shadowkeeper, and PJ Punla. Topics covered include the historical presence of fans of color, space nazis, femslash and its discontents, and the Filipino perspective on the whiteness of media.
(Show notes!)
Fansplaining Episode 22B
In the second and final installment of our “Race and Fandom” episodes, fans of color continue to speak about their experiences in fandom. Elizabeth and Flourish interview Jeffrey Lyles and Zina (@stitchmediamix), then hear clips from Roz (@rozf), Traci-Anne, and zvi LikesTV (@zvilikestv). Topics covered include being Black and Jewish, Star Wars weddings, cosplaying characters of color, and why kink is never divorced from the real world.
Under the cut is a bit of backstory (copied largely from some DMs I sent earlier in the week) about what sparked this anger at fandom (for me and several of the contributors this episode):Read More »
(Wherein I answer the first part of @legendofzeldamajorass‘s question, sort of answer the second, and promise try to do a better job about fleshing out my comments at some point soonish when I’m not swamped with work.)
This is in response to Slash Shipping, Pseudo-Progressivism, and Reinforcing Patriarchal Standards in Fandom
First things first: Girls and people perceived to be girls are spoonfed some seriously toxic thoughts about what it means to be a girl and what femininity as a construct is from the moment that they’re born.
Think back to high school, if you weren’t a teenage girl, you were around them. How many of them were super nice to one another across the board? When you exist in a society that has made an industry out telling women they’re not good enough and never will be, you wind up with some pretty twisted views of what you’re supposed to be like.
One of the pushbacks I keep seeing to my post on slash shipping and pseudo-progressiveness is that people like you and like others assume that women aren’t capable of actively expressing internalized misogyny and that we shouldn’t confront the fact that it’s something that’s so very present in fandom spaces.
I was a teenage girl once. I was also a teenage slash shipper and have been a slash shipper for the past 13+ years. And I save everything. So I can go back and look at the slashfic I wrote and read back then and see very vividly the internalized misogyny that was present in my erasure of female characters or how I used them as villains more often than not. And I can also see the evolution of my writing as I turned my academic research towards queer history and gender studies.
And I’m still evolving! Because people talked to me, they called me out and they called fandom out. And I learned just as much from them as I did my textbooks.
So why should we you know… not talk about the fact that internalized misogyny (and internalized racism) is something that our fellow female fans need to grow out of because it definitely informs the way that a majority of them tend to gravitate towards the white dude ships when they ship slash.Read More »
I’m finally starting to grasp the idea that the writers and showrunners on Agent Carter view intersectional feminism as a great myth. I’m also clear on the fact that fandom feels the same way.
Last year, when Agent Carter came out in January, it was heralded as this fantastic show for women, womenhood, and feminism.
Except it’s not.
It can’t be.
Not when it lacks:
All women are not all represented in Agent Carter so why should all women support it? How are we supposed to respond to it as women who are diverse and who are not represented?Read More »
Obviously, this post has spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. And some of them might be above the cut.
Earlier yesterday, The Raven Cycle author Maggie Stiefvater took to tumblr (in a response to a message sent from one of her fans) to announce that she had beef with the Star Wars fandom in the wake of Episode VII: The Force Awakens.
Why does she have an issue with the fandom?
Could it be because fandom insists on shipping Rey with Kylo Ren despite everything he did to her?
Could it be because of racist AUs like the ‘segregation’ AU someone saw floating around?
Or could it be because clueless and offensive people fandom have decided that Finn is the ultimate misogynist for – wait for it – daring to hold Rey’s hand at some point in the film?
No.
Not even close.
Maggie has beef with the Star Wars fandom because they’re focusing too much on Poe Dameron and Finn.
You know, the first men of color to ever be main characters in a Star Wars film.
Instead of basking in that beautiful POC rep (or, if she must complain, point out that we still haven’t had a woman of color with a significant presence in the film series on that same level), she’s steamed because fandom isn’t focusing as much on Rey as they are on Finn and Poe.Read More »
Content notes: This post mentions and/or links to descriptions of sexual assault and harassment as well as racism.
If you were to listen to a certain group of Dick Grayson fans on the internet, you’d probably come to the conclusion that comic book fans are frighteningly intense and that the Grayson series (written by Tom King and Tim Seeley with pencils by Mikel Janin and colors by Jeromy Cox) is rife with orgies and plagued with issues of consent on every single page as Dick is forcibly separated from his friends and family to fight in the war against SPYRAL.
If you were to listen to that weirdly vocal group of fans, you’d also be just as wrong as they are.Read More »
Content notes: Aside from discussing racism in different forms across different cultures, this post also will talk briefly about the Holocaust and Transatlantic slavery. Note that I am AfroCaribbean and my lens is vaguely Western tinted as is much of the racism that I speak of. This doesn’t render my thoughts on racism (especially anti-black racism) invalid, but tends to kind of keep it narrow.
If you want to share your experiences with cultural or historical appropriation in fandom as a fan who is from somewhere else in the world or that has a different cultural background, feel free to message me and we’ll work something out in terms of posting here or on my tumblr.
If you’re arriving to this party a little bit later, head on over to the introduction post for this hybrid essay series so you can get a feel for how things are done here.
Last month, we talked about the techniques of erasure that fandom uses to decentralize people of color in popular media and prop up white (and often male) characters. We covered techniques from rewriting the relationships between characters to distancing characters of color from white characters they’re often shipped with.
It’s been a long month full of conversations about shipping and race. Many of these comments have been insightful and almost all of the responses that I have received so far have been positive.
This month, we’re looking at aspects of cultural appropriation in fandom and the ways that fandom frequently takes the culture and history of real and marginalized people and applies them to white characters.
In addition to defining cultural/historical appropriation and discussing why they’re not cool, we’ll also be looking at specifics like the use of horrific events in history (the Holocaust and the Transatlantic Slave Trade) as background/scenery for ship within fandom, and the Alpha/Beta/Omega trope and how fans tend to coopt and mutate actual history in order to manufacture gender/race –based oppression for cis white male characters.
We’re covering some heavy stuff both in terms of content and density. When talking about this aspect of how fandom gets it horribly wrong when creating fanworks, we’re going to look at:
I know this seems like a lot of text content, it’s all for a good cause. So let’s get started!
I’m writing less and less fan fiction lately.
Obviously. I mean, I went from writing dozens of pieces of fan fiction a year (I went from writing 400k words a year to less than 70k) to less than twenty in 2015.
Something’s changed.
Part of it can be that fandom, the ones I write for at least, has changed. Many of the people who read the stuff I write aren’t there anymore because they’ve moved on to other fandoms or they’re just too busy. The new folks maybe aren’t interested in what I write or they don’t feel up to communicating as much, so if they’re there, I don’t know it.
Maybe it’s because my ships, tropes, or kinks aren’t super popular anymore and people just aren’t reading the type of content that I’m putting out so I’m putting out less content in response.
Either way, I’ve noticed that I don’t really even think about writing fan fiction lately outside of commissions and the rare burst of creativity.Read More »
Originally written in April 2015 for the blog Womanist Glasses, I felt that a repost was timely and necessary as I prepare to talk about fandom and blackness in a couple of posts I’m set to post.
I still believe that everything in this post is a sad part of what it means to be in fandom when you’re a WOC, especially if you’re a Black woman and outspoken on top of that. My fandom experience hasn’t been easy and in some ways, it’s been very upsetting to know that a safe space for some isn’t necessarily a safe space for me.
As an outspoken Black woman in fandom who has had truly terrible experiences in what is supposed to be a safe space for me, I’ve noticed a few things about fandom and how it treats WOC as a whole. I’m coming from the DC, Marvel, and Teen Wolf fandoms so while I try to keep things vague, I’m not always good at that.Read More »
To be fair, when I open a video talking about fandom sucking, it’s easy to understand why I’m not more popular in fandom spaces. I’m not necessarily nice about certain things, but then —
I don’t have to be.
Three years ago, the James Bond fandom let me down big time with how their immediate response to Skyfall was to ship James Bond with basically everyone but Naomie Harris’ Eve Moneypenny. She often wound up pushed to the side as an ex or as a sassy Black British friend who hooked the two nubs up and made them see the light.
So of course, I got pissed. Because this sort of thing isn’t okay.
It doesn’t matter what you ship, but rather how you ship it. 00q isn’t an inherently problematic ship, but the fandom that focuses on him and Bond at the expense of female characters and characters of color?
They’re plenty problematic.
The response to this video (on tumblr at least) was so harsh that I deleted the posts I made without saving them and I basically dropped out of interacting with the fandom. I’m sorry but when you get called ‘homophobic’ for criticizing (not disliking, mind you) a fanon ship, you know things are a bit borked.
I’m posting this #FlashbackFriday video to show how little fandom has changed as an institution. We can do better, but let’s be real: it’s a lot easier not to.
Here’s a newsflash for you my fellow slash shippers: Your male/male ships that focus almost exclusively on white men aren’t as progressive or as rebellious as you think they are.
Especially when (not ‘if’) they come at the expense of women and characters of color who have significant intimate relationships with one or both of the two white guys you’re shipping.
Read More »
This is part one of a hybrid essay-rant series focusing on fandom (the collective community) and its intense race/racism problems. If you’re new to my blog and to this project, start here with the introduction post. Make sure to click the links and read the content because they’ll add further nuance to the essay here.
In addition to talking about race and racism, this post also mentions incest (with regard to how fandom interprets familial relationships to suit their shipping needs).
One thing that becomes overwhelmingly clear when it comes to the treatment of characters of color is the lengths that fandom is willing to go to in order to get them out of the way of their favorite white character ships. There are so many techniques that we could tackle, many of them framed subtly enough that it’s difficult to combat them, but for the purposes of this post we’re going to look at five of the most popular:
Stitch's Media Mix 
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