oh fandom, NO!

[rm]

http://community.livejournal.com/jackxianto/3668643.html
in which someone says something that sounds an awful lot like "die-hard SF/F fans are an oppressed minority."

http://community.livejournal.com/jackxianto/3668643.html?view=12636067#t12636067
In which I yell.

thanks for the heads-up from starstealingirl

Subcutlures, because they are by definitions not the mainstream dominant culture, are technically minorities.

But here's the deal, I'm a minority because I'm queer, because I'm Jewish, because I am not as white as look.

Engaging with enterainment in a non-culturally dominant way may be responsible for affecting the tone of huge swathes of my life, but it doesn't define it. Being a member of an actual minority does.

I am not a minority because I like SF/F or because I cried and cried and cried for Ianto or even because I have an unpopular fannish opinion in the sense that I'm not all worked up about RTD and whether he respects fandom or not -- I don't care, I don't need his approval.

Believe me, I get what you are saying. For older fen in particular, there is this very real sense of being in this small, sort of looked down upon subculture and since many of us interact with the world differently than the mainstream (there are studies on the high incidence of the non-neurotypical in the fannish community), I do sort of get why you chose this angle to frame your point.

But with things like Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Comic Con, Dragon*Con, and, yes, the Children of Earth miniseries, fannishness is now a pretty nearly mainstream activity.

But more than that: no one ever threw beer bottles at me for being fannish. No one ever threatened to rape me for being fannish. No one fucking threatened to beat my face in with a brick for being fannish. They have (the first two) because I was gay and (the third) because I'm Jewish.

Considering one of the biggest plot points and now fandom controversies relates to the show's handling of Ianto's sexuality, you really might want to check yourself here.

I am a minority and it's not because I loved a man who never was, even though I did.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Well, belonging to subcultures can make you a member of an oppressed minority - religions are the obvious example, though there are plenty of others. And I suppose somebody somewhere once got beaten up or lost their job because they were a sci-fi geek. So in some senses I feel if they want to define themselves as an oppressed minority it isn't for anyone else to step in and disagree - they know their own lives best. But on the other hand, they don't give any actual factual examples to back up their claim and it certainly doesn't gel with my own experience of being a sci-fi geek, so personally I'm going to dismiss them as attention-seeking wankers. Life is too short to do any more.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

And I suppose somebody somewhere once got beaten up or lost their job because they were a sci-fi geek
I'm pretty sure they didn't.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Ah, but when members of an oppressed minority speak out we have to just Shut Up and Listen(TM). We mustn't doubt their word because then we are Silencing(TM) their voices with our Privilege(TM). Claiming that we see no evidence for their oppression is just a form of Derailment(TM). And pointing out that we are ourselves a member of the minority and yet don't experience any oppression just proves we don't understand the full implications of Intersectionality(TM).

;)


The serious point being: when you see these arguments used for something that is evidently bollocks, it does actually help clarify why people can have trouble taking them seriously even when they are used for something that isn't bollocks. And that the explanations and discussion often need to take place several stages further back than many people realise, because if you just fling around words like Privilege and Derailment it is just bloody annoying unless they are already sold on the whole system.

But life is still too short to care.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

I do not in anyway want to claim that sf fan= oppressed minority, however, I knew a lot of people who were beaten in middle and high school for being geeks. None of them needed hospitalization, but I've been knocked down and had my ribs kicked by a guy taller and stronger than me for it. People do get beaten, just not killed.

I actually agree with the OP completely and with the point y'all are making here. There is nothing close to equivalence between people being torqued off over something some writer said and a character dieing and things like lynching or what happened to Mathew Shepard. I had guys follow my friends and I screaming death threats and throwing rocks because our group was mixed race. I've had a number of really ugly incidents where people I knew tried to rape me. I'm not going to be killed for my sf related interests, but there is a reasonable chance of me being killed or severely beaten for my gender. The fan fail and the drama lama thing cut no ice with me. Trust me. I'll take the rib kicking. I'll still never forget Andy Cristos kicking me over and over the teacher who saw it never saying a word, though.

I do suspect that people in fandom carry a lingering sense of oppression, though, because of things that no longer apply like group kicking, being stuck repeatedly head first in trash cans, sexual humiliation, etc, all of which were common for my school. (You could see someone beaten every class change from 4th to 9th grade at my school, just standing in the hall. 10th-12th the violence was less overt). It's not life threatening and it's over, but I think a lot of people in the Geek community bare memories and emotional scars from that sort of violence which lead them to over react to small stuff once they grow up and are part of the privileged majority.

This is absolutely not an excuse, but an explanation.

I liked B5, but I remember being genuinely scared of the B5 fans at conventions because some of those people were scary, verging on violence if someone admitted to liking Star Trek, one step away from a mob scary. That kind of fanaticism scares me whether they are that fired up over religion or their favorite fanfic pairing. It's scary enough being trapped in a mob of people who really, really like you and just want to touch you because they think you are cool (I was a popular counter culture figure in Eugene, OR for a while, not media famous or anything, but having thirty people rush me repeatedly parking lots etc. is more fame than I honestly wanted or needed.), how much worse to be surrounded by people infuriated because they don't like some artistic choice you made. Add to that a misplaced belief in fandom's personal oppression, crazy magnified and it's a recipe for one of my own personal nightmares, that is.

This trend of privileged folk crying "We're being oppressed" when it's more like "We are unhappy about being mildly inconvenienced" is unhealthy and scary whether it's this current fandom fail or certain "Christians" whining about how someone saying "Happy Holidays" is as bad as racial profiling. It's leading this society somewhere I'm pretty sure I don't want to go.

I keep wishing everyone would just take a deep breath, step back, and get a little perspective. I know I'm damned lucky because when I'm periodically pulled over for driving while poor (Bellingham cops random stop people in old beat up vehicles to check for warrants), I'm not going to be arrested or tasered or beaten because I'm about as pasty white as you can me without being an actual albino. It still pisses me off, but I know I can expect to be let go in ten minutes. I sure wish everyone could be lucky enough not to expect to be arrested or tasered or whatever just for not being white, because that's pretty fucked up right there. There is so much messed up and wrong in the way people who don't happen to be rich white straight cis-men get treated that I think it's absolute crap to be screaming if someone isn't into Kirk/Spock they are anti-gay or whatever. I think that energy would be better spent trying to fix the real serious problems.

Sorry, I'm rambling. I can't sleep in this heat.