Anti-Oppression Linkspam Community

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.]

( cut for number of links )

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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franzeska: Not Really a Comics Fan: Superheroes, Manga, vitriol, and the OTW

Aside from excoriating various strawmen parts of fandom, the other reason for this post is that I'd like people to take a long, hard look at that anime/manga vs. "comics"/"cartoons" divide. Western fans of sequential art seem to take it as a given that these things are fundamentally different on some basic, profound level, but should we be doing that really? Every time I have a fundamental difference pointed out to me, it's something that distinguishes one small subset from another small subset or something that's on average more true of one or the other. It's never a genuine difference between the majority of things in one group and the majority of things in the other.

branchandroot: The difference between manga and comics

I agree that fuzzy Orientalism is the most regrettably common way Western fans of similar media from different national/ethnic groups (eg comics and manga) express their differentiation. That particular expression is generally a lot of hot air, yes.

But I also think there are real fan-culture differences, touching on though not always rising directly from the mother-culture differences of the sources. This is my attempt to articulate the ones that I've seen.

ceitean: demographics in animanga fandom - no, really, they're important

I've (unfortunately) seen everything mentioned in branchandroot's post -- the fuzzy Orientalism, the strange homophobic embracing of yaoi, the tendency to brush gender issues under the table, all of it. But I've also seen a rising tendency for animanga fandom to correct itself on these issues. And from what I've seen, that tendency seems to come with age.

wistfuljane: A Rant In Non-Linear Form

I think for many people who scoffs at fans for being angry at translators and publishers for not keeping cultural conventions such as names and honorifics, they do not understand the personal issue rooted here. It's an issue of cultural appropriation, yes. But for me, it's more a matter of losing an identity and being redefined.

wistfuljane: Race Discourse: Bringing Anxiety Attacks Since The Beginning of Time

Here's something else: just as animanga is seen as an open safe space for females, it (the English-speaking corners) is also seen as an open safe space for Asian-Americans, other English-speaking Asians and to a lesser extent People of Color (hello media written about Asians by Asians! hello culture and characters with which they can identify! hello media not about white people!). Or it's supposed to. It is made unsafe by the rampant of fetishism and exoticization of Asian culture and people by mostly white animanga fans.

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