![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingAs I continue to reblog cute pictures and post fluffy shipfic on Tumblr, I continue to be tagged on reblogs of social justice call-out posts. As far as I can tell, I'm being targeted because of a pseudo-literary reading of Ganondorf's villain monologue at the end of The Wind Waker (link), which is a fairly lazy piece of writing but for some reason got a decent number of notes when I posted it back in March.
I was doing a lot of "volunteer activism" at the time - one of my lawyer friends dragged me along to babysit people's children while she did pro bono legal advocacy for people whose relatives had been imprisoned during the recent riots in Baltimore - and a relatively minor but still important part of my motivation for posting the piece was that my experiences had made me sick and damn tired of seeing Ganondorf being portrayed as "evil angry barbaric Oriental other." Ironically, I'm now being accused of perpetuating neoliberal and neocolonialist ideology, ie, "black people always want white people's shit."
It's complicated, and I'm willing to acknowledge the validity of multiple points of view. What I am not willing to acknowledge is the condescending and counterproductive assumption that I am ignorant and need to be educated, especially not at the rudimentary "Intersectional Feminism 101" level at which Tumblr seems to operate (probably because a majority of its most active users are in fact college students).
As Angela Davis has written, "Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners."
I am going to get that quote tattooed on my palm; and, the next time someone sends me an off-anon message to inform me that I am a bigoted cunt and should commit suicide immediately, I will tell them to talk to my hand. Or to read Women, Race, & Class for a more informed and nuanced (and still gut-wrenchingly relevant, even thirty fucking years later) view of how to handle intersectionality, either way is good.
I would consider closing my ask box entirely, but I get a lot of sweet messages from friendly strangers and adorable anons. Also, I want to continue to document the "anti" "aggro" "discourse" on Tumblr, which I think is an extremely interesting subcultural movement. I've been having almost daily conversations with a professional cultural anthropologist friend of mine about the recent drama in the BBC Sherlock fandom, and the two of us are thinking of putting together an actual academic paper about Tumblr-based fandom wank. We have both seen our fair share of epic wank sagas since the early 2000s, but we both agree that the wank on Tumblr is really... special.
I was doing a lot of "volunteer activism" at the time - one of my lawyer friends dragged me along to babysit people's children while she did pro bono legal advocacy for people whose relatives had been imprisoned during the recent riots in Baltimore - and a relatively minor but still important part of my motivation for posting the piece was that my experiences had made me sick and damn tired of seeing Ganondorf being portrayed as "evil angry barbaric Oriental other." Ironically, I'm now being accused of perpetuating neoliberal and neocolonialist ideology, ie, "black people always want white people's shit."
It's complicated, and I'm willing to acknowledge the validity of multiple points of view. What I am not willing to acknowledge is the condescending and counterproductive assumption that I am ignorant and need to be educated, especially not at the rudimentary "Intersectional Feminism 101" level at which Tumblr seems to operate (probably because a majority of its most active users are in fact college students).
As Angela Davis has written, "Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners."
I am going to get that quote tattooed on my palm; and, the next time someone sends me an off-anon message to inform me that I am a bigoted cunt and should commit suicide immediately, I will tell them to talk to my hand. Or to read Women, Race, & Class for a more informed and nuanced (and still gut-wrenchingly relevant, even thirty fucking years later) view of how to handle intersectionality, either way is good.
I would consider closing my ask box entirely, but I get a lot of sweet messages from friendly strangers and adorable anons. Also, I want to continue to document the "anti" "aggro" "discourse" on Tumblr, which I think is an extremely interesting subcultural movement. I've been having almost daily conversations with a professional cultural anthropologist friend of mine about the recent drama in the BBC Sherlock fandom, and the two of us are thinking of putting together an actual academic paper about Tumblr-based fandom wank. We have both seen our fair share of epic wank sagas since the early 2000s, but we both agree that the wank on Tumblr is really... special.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-07 08:34 pm (UTC)WELL FRIEND, LET ME TELL YOU.
This response is going to be a little heavy, so content warning for mentions of sexual assault and victim blaming, I guess?
The BBC Sherlock fandom has reached the point at which the fandom is its own fandom, I think. Because the fans don't have much to speculate on and react to except each other, there's a fan wank bubble that's been growing larger as the fandom itself grows smaller. There are multiple locked comms here on Dreamwidth for hosting wank and reporting wank and discussing wank, and there's apparently all sorts of Livejournal-era silliness going on, like people breaking f-lock to post screencaps of posts and comments. I haven't been paying attention to any of that, but the wank on Tumblr has been so public and visible that it's difficult for even a low-level user like myself to escape it, even though I don't run in those circles.
The way I see it, the most epic wank began in 2014 with what people called "TJLC," an acronym for "the Johnlock conspiracy," which refers to the belief that the John/Sherlock ship is the official canonical endgame for the series and that the creators have been dropping not-so-subtle clues all along. (I apologize if I'm telling you something you already know, but just in case.) This seems like a perfectly innocuous fan theory, but it was partially formulated in response to the accusation that the show engages in queerbaiting, which was a fairly serious charge in the minds of a lot of fans. Instead of arguing over whether or not the ship was canon, the fans started arguing about issues surrounding representation in popular media. Things got really nasty, and totally normal people – people who said things like "maybe it's canon, maybe it's not, or maybe it's both at the same time" – were attacked for being homophobic, bad feminists, not media literate, etc. A lot of people, not knowing the history of the wank, got caught in the crossfire; and, instead of making the argument itself transparent, the loudest voices instead decided to wage a "why you're doing feminism wrong" education campaign, which obviously did not go over well.
Disputes over modes of symbolic representation devolved into an almost Orwellian policing of female sexuality, and by the beginning of 2015 kinkshaming had become the dominant mode of "discourse." This is where a lot of the "you can only talk about rape if you can provide receipts for your own personal rape" nonsense got started, although that sort of thing had of course been brewing in other fandoms off and on for years. This all came to a head at 221b Con, in which a group of trolls appeared at a panel for the specific purpose of derailing the conversation and making at least one of the panelists uncomfortable. Here is her account:
http://thegreenirene.tumblr.com/post/116696525144/what-happened-at-221b-con-2015-the-gender
As you might imagine, this turned into a huge big thing, with a lot of people saying "never again."
Except this year it happened again. There's still a lot of dust in the air, so I don't want to link to anything specific, but the prevalence of kinkshaming has made a number of people feel as if they need to take a stand and provide ALL THE RECEIPTS for the sexual violence they have experienced in their lives. Because Tumblr is so public, many of these people have posted long "fandom meta" pieces on AO3 with graphic accounts of how they've been raped and how their experiences are related to the fic they read and write. The resulting conversation on Tumblr has now turned to delineating what should be a safe space, and for whom. This seems like a good conversation to have, and it most certainly would be were it not for all the victim blaming of newly vulnerable individuals.
Obviously I don't think any of this wank is healthy or conducive to any real discussion of social justice. Because flames spread so rapidly on Tumblr, what should have been a temporary bonfire lit by a small number of trolls expanded way out of proportion. The closest analogy I can make is what happened on Twitter with Gamergate, as the Sherlock wank is just as much of a non-conversation about "representation" as Gamergate was a non-conversation about "ethics in gaming journalism."
Fun times, bro. Fun times.
TL;DR: I think you got out of Tumblr while the getting out was good.
Thread hopping ...
Date: 2016-10-08 07:20 am (UTC)Speechless.
[after reading the post you linked I honestly felt that I just need to press "post comment" and say no more because I am speechless due to a state of dread and horror. i needed to zone out for a little while after reading that post from thegreenirene.]
.
.
.
A lot of people, not knowing the history of the wank, got caught in the crossfire; and, instead of making the argument itself transparent, the loudest voices instead decided to wage a "why you're doing feminism wrong" education campaign, which obviously did not go over well.
In recent years I have seen this kind of dynamic occur in other fandoms and in other interest groups on tumblr, and in fandom spaces not on tumblr. I also know of incidents with similar dynamics on twitter and facebook, all outside of fandom. Obviously, these aren't necessarily wars over "doing feminism wrong" but, it is always doing "something" wrong -- always some form of ritualized groupthink that takes control of a public forum, and then other people on that public forum say something that isn't phrased in the correct tribal lingo and the attacks begin.
Disputes over modes of symbolic representation devolved into an almost Orwellian policing of female sexuality, and by the beginning of 2015 kinkshaming had become the dominant mode of "discourse."
Because nothing says "inclusive feminism" like the policing of female sexuality... >_>
no subject
Date: 2016-10-13 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-14 01:17 pm (UTC)(Sorry for the long-ass essay in response to your comment. It is possible that I may have had too much coffee that afternoon.)
no subject
Date: 2016-10-15 09:38 am (UTC)