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Why Professional Ethics Matter
I put out work at a decent pace, and I started publishing at a relatively young age, so I've been around for a few years. People cite my work from time to time, and it's always an honor regardless of whether they agree with me, disagree with me, or just mention me in passing.
This year, however, I came across two academic essays that "read" my work in a way that I found creepy and invasive.
The first is a chapter in a collected volume of essays about video games that discusses one of my Peach/Bowser fics at length. The author is very respectful and appreciative, and she doesn't have any problem understanding or interpreting the story, but I still wish she had contacted me first.
I understand that one's writing becomes fair game once it's been released into the wild, but it's still considered standard professional practice to get in touch with someone who isn't a professionally published author/artist before you publish something about their work. There are many reasons why it's important to do this, including simple professional courtesy, but one of the main reasons you want to communicate with independent creators is because consent and cooperation are two important factors in ensuring that you're not using your position of relative power to exploit them for your own gain.
The second is an article in an academic journal that performs a Foucauldian reading of one of the posts on my professional blog. Basically, when I was a grad student, I made a long post about my research methods for a certain project. Because the world of academia can feel very closed and competitive, there's something of a tendency for people to study really niche and obscure topics about which the person pursuing the topic can become the sole expert, not in the least because he (and it's usually a "he") is the only one with any real access to the primary sources under investigation. I think this is stupid and counterproductive, so I wanted there to be a freely available documentation of my methods so that my work could be easily reproduced and/or challenged by anyone who was interested in the broader field.
So what this male academic did was to treat my statement of methodology, which is clearly identified as such in the first two paragraphs of the post, as some sort of outsider text that required a male-gendered theoretical analysis in order to be properly contextualized within a larger body of female writing. This is bizarre not just because, again, it's common professional courtesy to get in touch with someone whose writing/art hadn't been professionally published if you want to use it in your own work, but also because there is a universally accepted and codified system of academic peer citation that this guy refuses to use when he discusses my blog post, an expanded version of which was later formally published in a widely circulated and cited academic article. What this dude is doing is forcibly removing me from my position as an active subject and transforming me into a passive object, which I find super weird and uncomfortable because I did not consent to becoming the object of anyone's Anthropological study of, you know, all the crazy things that women get up to online.
I think the main reason why these two essays upset me, however, is because I'm always vaguely anxious about the possibility that people who are not sympathetic to me as a person or as a fellow human being are silently reading what I post online and then not so silently judging me. Like, even though I know how unlikely this is, I'm always a tiny bit worried that my stuff has been posted or linked to on a parody account or a reddit thread about bad fic or bad art, and this is sort of like the professional equivalent of that?
I don't mind people writing about my fannish and more casual work in a professional context, and in fact I can imagine getting a very welcome ego boost from that sort of thing under different circumstances, but people doing this without my knowledge or consent is gross and I don't like it, I'm just saying.
This year, however, I came across two academic essays that "read" my work in a way that I found creepy and invasive.
The first is a chapter in a collected volume of essays about video games that discusses one of my Peach/Bowser fics at length. The author is very respectful and appreciative, and she doesn't have any problem understanding or interpreting the story, but I still wish she had contacted me first.
I understand that one's writing becomes fair game once it's been released into the wild, but it's still considered standard professional practice to get in touch with someone who isn't a professionally published author/artist before you publish something about their work. There are many reasons why it's important to do this, including simple professional courtesy, but one of the main reasons you want to communicate with independent creators is because consent and cooperation are two important factors in ensuring that you're not using your position of relative power to exploit them for your own gain.
The second is an article in an academic journal that performs a Foucauldian reading of one of the posts on my professional blog. Basically, when I was a grad student, I made a long post about my research methods for a certain project. Because the world of academia can feel very closed and competitive, there's something of a tendency for people to study really niche and obscure topics about which the person pursuing the topic can become the sole expert, not in the least because he (and it's usually a "he") is the only one with any real access to the primary sources under investigation. I think this is stupid and counterproductive, so I wanted there to be a freely available documentation of my methods so that my work could be easily reproduced and/or challenged by anyone who was interested in the broader field.
So what this male academic did was to treat my statement of methodology, which is clearly identified as such in the first two paragraphs of the post, as some sort of outsider text that required a male-gendered theoretical analysis in order to be properly contextualized within a larger body of female writing. This is bizarre not just because, again, it's common professional courtesy to get in touch with someone whose writing/art hadn't been professionally published if you want to use it in your own work, but also because there is a universally accepted and codified system of academic peer citation that this guy refuses to use when he discusses my blog post, an expanded version of which was later formally published in a widely circulated and cited academic article. What this dude is doing is forcibly removing me from my position as an active subject and transforming me into a passive object, which I find super weird and uncomfortable because I did not consent to becoming the object of anyone's Anthropological study of, you know, all the crazy things that women get up to online.
I think the main reason why these two essays upset me, however, is because I'm always vaguely anxious about the possibility that people who are not sympathetic to me as a person or as a fellow human being are silently reading what I post online and then not so silently judging me. Like, even though I know how unlikely this is, I'm always a tiny bit worried that my stuff has been posted or linked to on a parody account or a reddit thread about bad fic or bad art, and this is sort of like the professional equivalent of that?
I don't mind people writing about my fannish and more casual work in a professional context, and in fact I can imagine getting a very welcome ego boost from that sort of thing under different circumstances, but people doing this without my knowledge or consent is gross and I don't like it, I'm just saying.