What Fandom Racism Looks Like: The Cult(ure) of Nice

July 22, 2020July 22, 2020 Stitch4 Comments

In the OTW Election Q&A segment on “AO3 Content Policy and Warnings”, there’s a merged question that asks the candidates:

How will you protect fanworks and meta which are upsetting or offensive across your platforms? What about if those fanworks or meta express views which are illegal/censored in some countries, but perfectly legal in others? Say a fan’s works don’t challenge problematic values endemic to older canons, or espouse problematic values directly. Providing they politely abide by AO3’s TOS, do you believe this fan deserves equal protection under Ao3’s TOS (a posting platform, confidential treatment of their RL identity, ability to report harassment)?

Mind you, this question clearly is more focused on protecting fans creating content that could be considered problematic or harmful than it is on considering that fanworks aren’t more important than fans – and we’ll talk about how this sort of questioning elides conversations of race and racism to make it out to be about kinkshaming and anti-queer rhetoric another time, probably tomorrow.

But what stands out is the last part:

Providing they politely abide by AO3’s TOS, do you believe this fan deserves equal protection under Ao3’s TOS (a posting platform, confidential treatment of their RL identity, ability to report harassment)?

While I’m sure, if pressed, the people responsible for that Frankenstein’s monster of a question will deny that racism and racist fanworks are the kind of content they’re talking about (because they always say “we weren’t talking/thinking about racism in fandom” and uh… duh) –

Let’s work this word problem out with some fandom racism:

Antiblackness in (Service of) the Archive: A Statement

June 16, 2020July 22, 2020 Stitch10 Comments

Huge chunks of transformative fandom are currently playing the most actively antiblack game of telephone in the world.

And I’m the subject.

What will I be by the time they’re done? I’m already being compared to trans exclusionary radical feminists despite being nonbinary, accused of holding grudges against people I don’t know and have likely never interacted with, and being slandered literally every single time that someone else mentions me as an author to read.

And all because I write about racism in fandom in a relatively sharp tone.

Thread Collection: Antiblackness in the Archive (6/14)

June 14, 2020 Stitch4 Comments

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.

I Am Not My White Friends’ Keeper

June 8, 2020June 7, 2020 Stitch4 Comments

Here’s an interesting fact that you might not have known before this very moment: I, the Stitch, am apparently responsible for the behavior of any white person I am friendly or friends with inside of fandom. It doesn’t matter if I’ve seen the behavior or not. It doesn’t matter if everyone involved is an adult or not.

I personally am responsible for handling my white friends.

Or at least that’s what one Hannibal fan made it their point to claim when tagging me into a thread that I demanded that I take responsibility for and handle a white friend whose opinions on racebent characters in the show aren’t my opinions on racebending and whose behavior in fandom isn’t something I can or do control.

Why Write About Fandom Racism At A Time Like This?

June 6, 2020May 29, 2021 Stitch9 Comments

The short answer?

We live in a racist world and that world doesn’t stop existing when someone crosses over some kind of threshold to fandom.

The long answer?

In fact, because fandom communities are insular and twist themselves in circles to avoid engaging meaningfully with things that disturb the peace that they’ve surrounded themselves in –

The racism that folks have as baggage lugged around offline? Gets stuffed full of more racism and carted around to other fandoms.

Surprisingly, Transformative Fandom Sucks At Research AND Reading Comprehension

April 27, 2020April 27, 2020 Stitch3 Comments

In case you thought that the chaos and stress caused by the two million (and counting!) COVID-19 cases worldwide would be enough to stop the Rey/Kylo contingent from being on John Boyega’s case and up his ass over their ship-

You thought wrong.

Stitch Talks Ish: Episode 4 – Where Stitch Processes

April 6, 2020October 15, 2020 Stitch

Episode Notes:

Did you catch the previous episode yet? That was an hour long review of BTS’ Map of the Soul: 7! And, unlike this episode, it has a transcript!
There’s a chance that I mispronounce Sik-K’s name when I talk about m-flo’s collaboration with him, eill, and Taichi Mukai (“tell me tell me“). Apologies for that! One note though is that I and Sik-K (in this one HIphopKR interview) pronounce it the same way which is unexpected!
m-flo loves BoA “the love bug“
The original twitter thread I used to document my project’s progress
My #StitchProcesses tweets
The masterpost for my massive project on blackness and antiblackness in these industry and fandom spaces
“A Brief History of Korean Hip Hop”
Bad Rap /My review of Bad Rap
“How American R&B Songwriters Found A New Home in K-Pop“
“K-pop in the Age of Cultural Appropriation”
I slipped up when recalling it but YunB is playing Biggie, not Tupac! (Check out the Quick Coverage here.)
“kpop is purer than western rap/hip-hop” (2/25/2019)
“appropriation or appreciation? unpacking south korea’s fascination with black culture“
If you can afford it, please pick up a copy of Myoung-Sun Song’s Hanguk Hip Hop: Global Rap in South Korea. It has changed my life for the better and her scholarship is stellar and timely!
Korean pop and hip hop have come to mean a lot to me over the past significant chunk of my life. In some ways, I am an hold hand. In other ways, I am a baby fan. It’s fascinating to see the ways that these spaces are and aren’t similar to other fandom spaces I’ve been in. In excited to keep working, researching, and writing in these spaces and broadening my understanding – oh, and having fun in fandom which is like… actually happening on the regular, y’all!
I mention constantly how I couldn’t do a lot of my work without the friends I’ve made along the way. I would like to thank, first and foremost, Jae and LJ. I could not have kept my head relatively cool without being able to shout in their general vicinity about it. I’d also like to thank my K-pop fandom friends on Twitter like Carrie, Brie, Morg, Caps, Misha, and Quil. There are so many of you who have opened your hearts, minds, and DMs up to me across the past year and I love you all so much.

Transcript

Speaker: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 4 of Stitch Talks Ish. If you missed it check out last month’s episode where I reviewed BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7.

I feel like it’s a fantastic episode, just saying –

But on a related note, episode four is also going to be about K-pop, but from a more critical lens.

What Shipping Says About Fandom Antiblackness

March 26, 2020 Stitch1 Comment

Note: I originally did this as a thread in like… 2018 but I think it’s still extremely relevant and so… it’s a blog post now! (If it was a blog post before this, pretend it wasn’t. Mkay?)

I love seeing folks who ship ships that came about as a way to distance a Black character from their white faves be like:

“The only reason antis are mad are because they think [Black character] is nothing without [white character]”

Whose Job Is It To Fix Fandom?

February 10, 2020February 9, 2020 Stitch2 Comments

During the first two weeks of January, I came across an exchange between two Star Wars fans who were absolutely holding on to the narrative that the Rey/Kylo shipping fandom was being burdened with false accusations of racism – two weeks into the fandom as a whole going off on John Boyega over separate comments he made on New Year’s Eve.

@enfysblessed – I’ll repeat it until I’m blue in the face. Fandom as a whole is racist because society is racist and scapegoating one wildly diverse, large group who have one thing in common isn’t helping anything and is actively making it harder to combat fandom racism
@bensvvolo – this is honestly the most baffling thing to me, people not realizing the racism they recognize is societal and, I’d argue, not even fandom’s “job” to “fix”.

Two things stand out to me about these two tweets.

First, there’s the idea that supposedly scapegoating a “wildly diverse, large group” (Rey/Kylo shippers) for racism they are either participating in or not stopping from their fandom… is “actively making it harder to combat fandom racism”.

As someone who’s been writing about fandom racism relatively professionally since 2015? (And casually, to an extent, since the time of the Sleepy Hollow and MCU fandoms’ initial antiblackness?)

It’s actually fans like those two that make it hard for me to have my work taken seriously and for other fans to recognize and work against fandom racism.

Stitch's Media Mix

A critical Stitch.

Tag: fandom antiblackness