Anti-Oppression Linkspam Community

[Warning: the moderators who checked links for this Linkspam Roundup did *not* check comments]

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fairestcat: *rages*

DID YOU SEE WHAT SHE DID THERE??? Because I sure as hell did. Let me break it down.
She suspects that "some female slash writers" who say they're bisexual are just doing it to "gain credibility". But of course, she'd never imply that any specific person were doing that, oh no, she'll just vaguely suggest that "some" of them are, thus casting the net of suspicion and doubt as wide as possible .

alixtii: Femslash and the Lesbian Experience. Which Is Clearly Not My Experience.

It makes sense to me, in a more-or-less purely theoretical way... that may be totally wrong, that a predominately queer female body of writers writing for a predominately queer female audience about characters who are in some sense or another queer and femele doesn't require them focusing on how they are representing themselves (because the people to whom they are representing themselves are themselves), or at least not how they are representing themselves in any way which requires realism. Rather that which is being represented is a set of hopes and dreams, fears and fantasies. It's not a mirror that's intended to exist without distortion; indeed, given the grim reality of so many queer female lives, it'd be the source of much pain and anguish if it were. Femslash, no less than m/m slash, is frequently a genre of escapist literature (although, of course, it doesn't have to be, and it can be in ways other than the immediately obvious).

bodlon: More thoughts about hot man-on-man action

On the whole, I find the position that slash (or mainstream m/m fiction written by or for women) is anti-gay hard to sustain.
I agree that it’s problematic in that there’s a tremendous amount of appropriation going on, and that there’s a significant amount of factual error and projection happening, but slash doesn’t arise out of some sort of hostile impulse.
Practically speaking, slash exists virtually independently of Actual Gay Men. The only necessary thing that Actual Gay men and slash have in common is the idea that men can be attracted to one another emotionally and/or sexually. If Actual Gay Men were a significant factor for slash to exist (or if slash were a significant factor for Actual Gay Men), there would be more of a connection there.

mistresscurvy: On Privilege and Responsibility

However. There is a huge difference between saying that there are instances of problematic characterizations or plot points or objectification that should be addressed and saying that women aren't allowed to write about gay men's experiences fullstop. The fact that there are examples of fail within a genre doesn't mean that the entirety of the genre is rotten. This is the exact opposite of the straw man argument from RaceFail09 that since it's so difficult for a white person to write characters of color without failing in some manner, they shouldn't even try. I do believe that writers have a greater responsibility to fully consider how they write characters of marginalized groups they're not members of, but there is a huge difference between that and saying you shouldn't write them at all because you don't belong.

avendya: (no subject) [Poll on demographics of fandom; DW version]
avendya: (no subject) [Poll on demographics of fandom; LJ version]

This poll is simply trying prove or refute the statements that "fandom is mostly heterosexual females", or "most of fandom identifies as queer" (both of which are common statements at the moment).

calicokat: (no subject) [Post discusses question of fandom's responsibility to the LBGTQ community]

I've been watching this "Fandom's Responsibility to the LBGTQ Community" from a distance[...] And honestly I haven't read everybody's arguments, only picked up on things here and there, but as for fandom's responsibility to the LBGTQ community...
It doesn't have one.

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We really appreciate all the feedback that you've offered on the warnings issue, both positive and negative. It's good to hear when we get things right and it helps us even more when we get suggestions as to how we can do better.

One important point that the discussion seems to reinforce is the idea that offering warnings is an inherently subjective enterprise. A post that is viewed by one person as enlightening and important can be viewed by another as marginalizing and hateful. Subjectivity comes not just from the commenter(s) but from the fact that people will inevitably respond to texts in different ways. Even warnings themselves can be read in different ways: as commentary, as reading tools, as educational tools, as activism, as value judgment, as a means of bringing problematic content to light. And, yes, also as criticism, attack, or proof of undesired bias. In all of this discussion, the mod team has attempted to pay particular attention to those who find warnings a necessary tool for reading and participating in anti-oppression discussions.

In general the message we've taken away from your comments is that warnings are useful for many (if not all) people for a whole host of reasons, even given their inherent subjectivity. It seems that they would be more helpful if we could improve their specificity and come up with a set of guidelines that would improve both consistency and transparency. (Particularly when it comes to tricky intersectional and intragroup issues.) Ideally we would like our warnings to function as a means of illuminating and improving the discussion rather than shutting it down.

So... we as the linkspam_mod team will now be going away and trying to put together a coherent set of guidelines on warnings. This may take some time, but hopefully not too long. Naturally the guidelines will be for your use as well as ours, and once we've drawn them up we will present them in linkspam so that we can hear your thoughts.

If you have further feedback right now we're still eager to hear it. You can comment on this post, the previous one, or get in touch with us by PM. (As per usual, comments are screened by default but will be unscreened unless they are derailing, abusive or off-topic. If you want your comment to stay screened, please say so.)

One final note: thank you to everyone who expressed concern about burn-out on the part of the mods! For the time being we feel that we have our workload under control, but we'll certainly be looking at our warning policy with an eye towards keeping it that way.

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The moderators are discussing feedback concerning Warnings and hope to post later today; until we decide what our policy is, we will continue to try to warn. ETA: The post we hope to post today will solicit feedback. Sorry for the confusion/ETA.

Post contains multiple topics relating to different Race discussions in fandom:

( Racefail )
( Star Trek and Race Linkspam #1 )
( Chromatic Casting Linkspam #2 )
( Historical AUs and Race Linkspam #2 )
( Implicit Erasure )
( S.J. Tucker Song )

[This post contains links to discussions of: lbgt issues, cultural appropriation, gender, and race. Since they do not make up a themed dialogue/discussion, they are posted chronologically, from earlier to later.]

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( LGBT Issues: Linkspam #10 )


[Related to the issue of women writing slash but shifting focus to erasure of women in slash]
( Women in Slash Linkspam #1 )

zvi: You don't have to go looking for this stuff, it just traipses across your reading page, you guys

So, sadly, the happy fun times gay Regency story has fucked up colonial issues. Which sucks donkeyballs, because what someone opening that story up wanted was 20k of the good slashcrack. But, weirdly enough, if you know a lot about the history of India and Britain and you read the story, the issues smack you in the face and throw you out of the whole thing and it's just sitting there being fucked up.

naraht: History without oppression?

You can interrogate oppression, subvert it, attack it, analyze it, satirize it, wearily accept it, ignorantly accept it, happily accept it, ignore it, brush it aside or try to hide it. All of those are options when you're writing historical fiction. But I don't believe it's possible to create an oppression-free society within a given recognizable historical context. Escapism can only ever go so far.

rm: sundries

Anyway, examining the Regency AU, and the oddities of it, and how to reconcile them or not with the historical and later literary source is really interesting stuff, especially in the context of a lot of the issues fandom is grappling with lately. I think it also speaks, tangentally to a lot of the post-CoE discussion about the use of homophobia in the narrative regarding Ianto. As writers, can we show biases without enacting bias? Is it better to remove non-narratively central hate from stories or keep it in for "realism"? What do we do when the audience doesn't get it? How do we as writers do it so the audience does get it? Are these even in the right questions? Etc.

marina: (no subject) [discussion on subverting or avoiding colonialist attitudes in historical works]

Also I have spent most of today seething over various things that have been on my mind lately. Twilight and True Blood and how one is perceived as ~girl fiction~ and the other is not, Sherlock Holmes and how that movie brilliantly, imo, created a certain universe where all the issues of Victorian England were present but elegantly handled and how I'm afraid that fandom will not realize where the bodies are buried and will traipse all over the skeletons.

darkrose: Through a glass, darkly

Removing a character from their historical context by ignoring the problematic aspects of that context is exactly what I wanted to avoid. At the same time, I'm not writing a dissertation on slavery during the Crusades, or about 10th-century Constantinople, or Roman Alexandria, or the history of any of the cultures Jason's been a part of. The arc is fundamentally a romance. The question that this discussion seems to raise is whether or not it's possible to write a historically accurate story with authentic characters that acknowledges the systems of oppression but isn't, in the end, about those systems.

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