Meta

[facetofcathy]

This is all posts tagged Meta (Some might appear in the Not_Fandom post or other posts.) Meta is used in the fannish sense to apply to all kinds of analysis, fannish or not.

• Not Your Mom’s Trans 101 « Transgression

"“Cisgender” is the term for people who have no issue with the gender that they were assigned at birth. For whatever reason, they are able to live somewhat comfortably within the gender role in which they have been cast. No one really knows why so many people are capable of fitting into such arbitrary categories."

I love the way he frames this. This is the starting POV you MUST have to get these concepts. Excellent post, a must read for anyone in fandom who writes/reads any genderfuck fiction. If you don't understand gender from this point of view, you will steamroll over trans people in your writing.

Not_Fandom Meta

• Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives | Video on TED.com

Interesting quick run through of his 5-part moral orientation theory. He is focusing on a very American-defined liberal vs conservative dichotomy with a slight recognition of the libertarian outliers. Of course American liberals are centrists by Canadian standards and American conservatives would be allowed to be the loony wing of the Conservative party, there to keep the haters and bigots happy (Jason Kenny).

What the video doesn't get into is how the two pronged liberals can talk to the five pronged conservatives in a meaningful way.

Not_Fandom Meta

• Describing characters of color in writing | Epiphany 2.0

Draws on examples from N.K. Jemisin's writing. Other examples are in the comments--it's safe to read the comments! Part 2 is linked from this post.

The main point? There's lots of words for brown. English is cool like that.

Writing Meta Fandom

• glockart: TUTORIAL: Drawing Characters of Colour

Cool post. Tangentially applicable to writing about people as well. (I'm not an artist, so I see it from my POV, which is writing.) In describing people, either through the eyes of a character or in the narrative voice, we must also look, think and look again to make sure what we saw is what is there. Then we have to think about the language we use and what it will mean to others as well as to ourselves.

Fandom Meta

• caithyra: Strong Feminine Female Characters

Yet another attempt to claim that femme women in media are somehow an endangered species. While I get that your POV greatly affects how you see things, and some people do not know how to express non-traditional femaleness without resorting to a false dichotomy, this post reads like wah, wah, wah, some people don't like the same things I do.

See comments for yet another equation of butch (barely--the example used is Starbuck) presentation with an "unhealthy" personality. Because anything masculine or not overtly emotional is automatically bad don't you know.

See comments for a much more polite dissection of why the post is full of shit.

Fandom Meta Your_Stereotypes_Are_Showing

• asexual_fandom | Ace Manifesto: Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock)

Title says it all. Includes film clips for those unfamiliar with the source, fic recs, and a link to another meta essay. Part of a new series at the comm. Good stuff.

Fandom:Sherlock(BBC) Meta

• elf: Some comments about "Citizenship"

I C WAT U DID THAR (whether you know you did it or not) applied to Moon's Islamophobic essay. This is really excellent picking apart of the rhetorical tricks and ideological and logical failures in the post. Helps make it clear why people responded positively to the first half in so many cases. Long, but a good and valuable read. Elf finds a lot I missed, but to be honest I hit the gosh, those Natives sure had immigrant problems, har har har, and kind of boggled through the rest of it.

Comments are interesting to analyze as well. I found reading the very elegant RPF fic (http://elf.dreamwidth.org/362415.html?thread=5150127#cmt5150127) about Moon being swept away by this outside force of bigotry interesting in that it anthropomorphized Islamophobia in the same way Islamophobes anthropomorphize Islam. Or Sharia or Halal. And thereby absolves Moon of all responsibility for her whole-hearted embracing of the idea, even at the expense of reason.

Meta Privilege Writing Fandom

• This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post - Coyote Crossing

This is a bookmark badly and inaccurately summing up the blog post while reinforcing the taggers' ideologies that they believed they saw reflected in the original post.

Meta Not_Fandom Writing

• The Political Compass

It's interesting, but it's still just a quiz with all the limitations inherent. I wanted to answer It Depends to some of the questions, and I don't think the four possible responses really allows for the situationally specific thinking as opposed to ideology. So it measures your ideology not what you'd really think or do in a given situation. Still very interesting to see how clumped up the US politicians are and how the rest of the world is not.

Meta Not_Fandom Politics

• Cumberland Advisors - Market Commentary

The short and pithy explanation of the US mortgage mess.

Not_Fandom Meta

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Who do I punch?

Meta Not_Fandom

• kimboosan | About the folly of some ficathon rules

Yes, this. Except without the bit about hurt feelings. I don't think that's quite the root cause here. Emotion is valid, especially strong emotion from actual harmed parties, but ONLY emotion and no reasoning can render an discussion purposeless. (Not saying the emotion and the reason have to come from the same person.)

One of the principles I try to adhere to in political analysis is don't pass a law you can't (or won't) enforce. Everyone needs to be able to understand your laws too.

However, it is possible to make these sorts of policies not the hard and fast rules the OP suggests--which would actually work but might tie the mod's hands--but rather, part of a set of guidelines or considerations that set out the political or ethical principles that the mods want their event to aspire to. That gives you your grey area, but still keeps power in the hands of mods who want to wield it. If a mod doesn't want to exclude things for content, then they should say so.

Fandom Meta

• apiphile: this is a plea for you to never, ever link to ontd_feminism

So it's not just me then. I'm not the only one who got a whiff of gender performance policing from the post in question.

Rant-style take down of the Geek Feminism how to be a proper woman fan post, and bonus allusions to the asexual bashing at ONTD_feminism (where no they don't really do feminism, they do people like me-ism) and started off with a much needed pointing out that the Bechdel test is not useful for analysis.

Interesting to read the one commenter who Does Not Get It and lumps all sex-positive people into the category of oppressors while thinking they agree with the OP, and the OP seems to fall into line.

Meta Feminism Fandom

• Ask Me Anything: Standards of Beauty – Sugarbutch Chronicles

Interesting. The author is ruminating on the activist/artistic boundaries of her writing re: body type, race, etc. I'm not sure I agree with the idea that vagueness serves some sort of unifying purpose in body descriptions. I'm not sure that depicting un-vaguely non-standard body types is objectifying by default. I honestly felt like she's rationalizing a bit.

The comments seem to reveal a community that assumes that erotica is about writing what you personally find sexually arousing. Er, really? I mean, it can be, but it can also be a little more abstract than that. (Granted, this author is writing from her own life.) Also, if one more privileged person barfs all over the comments to a post like this with write what you know as their slogan and stop politicizing my fun as their rallying cry, I will scream. It is funny that she thinks it's only lesbians who harsh the squee. I thought it was everyone on Dreamwidth.

Meta Writing Not_Fandom

• Tiger Beatdown › 13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon

A rumination on seeing feminism as only part of the much greater fight for greater freedom and equality.

“Okay, so here’s me. Privileged in basically every way. White, middle-class, cis, straight, first-world American, whatever. Except, I’m a lady. That’s the one way I might be oppressed a little. So here’s me standing in my privilege.”

I walked over and stood in the doorway to my study.

“Here’s me in feminism. In the doorway.”

I stepped over the threshold and into my study, which is a much larger room.

“And here’s me in the entire rest of the world, dealing with all the ways people have their humanity denied, dealing with concern and solidarity with basically everybody who is not privileged. And realizing there are way more people without full, uncompromised privilege than with it, and that this is kind of an essential fact of the human experience. Dealing with, like, the experience of being human on Planet Earth.”

Meta Feminism Not_Fandom

• Connecting with female characters in geek television | Geek Feminism Blog

Superficially, this is another go at female fans who display gross misogyny towards female characters. It aims to shock with cherry-picked examples of really nasty bashing, while re-writing SPN canon to make the facts fit the hypothesis.

Beneath all that is two things: One, the conflation of, "I don't like a lot of women in tv shows," with, "I really hate women on tv shows." The bashing examples are used to prove the internalized misogyny of the people who say the first thing, not the second.

Two, yet another exercise in attempting to map the ideas of privilege and power disparity onto an intramural discussion. This allows the author to bash the group she doesn't like in the name of disapproving of the behaviour of some. Which is ironic. Also, who is privileged here?

There is no room here for women who find the very narrow range of women (nearly all created by men) portrayed on tv alienating. There is a lot of defining what makes an acceptable woman fan though.

Meta Fandom Fandom_Makes_Me_Cranky

• zvi | help_pakistan meta #2: Critical Discussion is for Everyone

A meta post about the value of critical discussion of fanworks. Something I rather obviously agree with. I like the way Zvi divides fannish motivations into 3 broad categories, and I am clearly all about the fanworks. I think this post helped crystallize some of the sources of my frustration with the beta process and its perceived value, and also tangentially, my ambivalence about the value of Fanlore pages about individual fanworks.

Fandom Meta

• Becky is my hero: The power of laughter and disruption in Supernatural by Judith May Fathallah

This is a somewhat labourious explanation of one way to read Becky in SPN. I have no quibble with the potential to read the character in this way being there in the text, but if you do, and you at the same time read the show as a contained world where character actions have moral weight within the world (this post explains what I mean much better in a SPN context: http://karenmiller.livejournal.com/253814.html) then Becky becomes a self-centred asshole who can't see beyond the end of her own nose. I don't really see how that makes her a hero. This interpretation of Becky only works if you read the entire show as meta about itself. And if you think the writers are clever enough to do this on purpose.

Fandom:SPN Meta TWC

• "This isn't something I can fake": Reactions to Glee's representations of disability by David Kociemba

This piece takes a look at a single fandom in all its plurality--Glee fandom in various different places, with different types of fans and fannish behaviour--to see how response to a source text plays out in different fannish spaces. This is more abstract than Sasha_feather's piece in the same issue, and the two together are interesting. Without the reader response to the source that Sash_feather found to participate in on DW/LJ, her experience would have been very different. This offers a look into fannish spaces where that sort of response just doesn't happen.

Meta TWC Fandom

• From the edges to the center: Disability, Battlestar Galactica, and fan fiction by Sasha_feather

Excellent view of Disability and Fandom from a personal, individual FAN perspective. What makes this a thought-provoking read is the very fact that it is grounded from deep within a particular fandom perspective without any mediation. This is one fan's experiences with a source text, with fannish texts and with fannish interaction about both. The exercise is left to the reader to apply this POV to their own fannish experiences and see what is revealed.

Meta TWC Fandom

• Interview with Jo Graham, Melissa Scott, and Martha Wells

Awesome interview where Jo Graham explains how fandom is full of bitchy little girls (just like spies, yay!) who pile on people (for something never really explained--you don't need to anymore, everyone knows you mean those mean bitches who pick on nice white lady pro authors) while simultaneously ignoring (her) innovative fic and wanking up a storm and therefore throttle creativity. Or something. Just exactly what I go to a fandom-run journal to read. She's entitled to her opinion, but I don't get what the point of having this in the TWC is. It's starting to feel like TWC is all about fandom through the pro-author lens--you know, the people whose opinions matter.

Meta TWC Fandom

• Fan fiction as play « Symposium Blog

Yet another attempt to 'splain fanfic through the lens of profic transformative works. With a healthy dose of, la, la, la, porn, what porn?

It ends with this little gem worthy of the worst evo-psych dudes and that screams for a citation needed tag: "I’ll end with a final comment that is beyond the scope of this post ... There is a psychological component to the notion of play. One doesn’t play unless one is comfortable in the environment. There needs to be a sense of freedom and acceptance. And since playing often is improved by the presence of playmates, the play is more fun in a community of like-minded individuals. Women tend to be far more communal than men—they are less competitive and judgmental. I mention this as a partial possible explanation for why the majority of fan fiction writers are women."

Cuz obvs, that's got nothing to do with porn either.

My question is, why am I finding this crap in an OTW publication?

ETA neuroscience bullshit, not evo-psyph

Meta Your_Stereotypes_Are_Showing TWC-Blog

• Shakesville: How to Fuck

What it says on the tin.

Not_Fandom Meta Sexuality

• Etched with Soma's Pen - Dissimilation

"I started off as one of Elizabeth Moon's ideal minority people, you guys. Since I think most of you had more sense than me, let me lay out what that was like, cause this is what she's demanding other people do so as not to harsh her mellow with our differences; I guess this is what she thinks people like me should just agree to do so she doesn't have to "bend over backwards". This is what she thinks my nephew's life as a brown American should be like."

I have qualms reccing posts like this. People like me, who have the privilege of dispassion over issues like this, can become tourists of other people's pain. This post is viscerally affecting and personal and private, and I think it's a thing that should be read with respect. It's easy to abstractly talk about the entire issue (immigration, diversity, intolerance, assimilation, group-identity boundary policing, etc.) and never achieve empathy or sympathy for the people who don't have the privilege of dispassion or abstraction.

Not_Fandom Meta Privilege

• Jim C. Hines - Open Letter to Elizabeth Moon

"You mentioned the “responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country.” But this is a Muslim country. It is also a Jewish country. It is an atheist country. It is a country of Quakers and a country of Mormons, a country of Catholics and a country of Baptists. (Even, I have no doubt, a country of Jedi.)"

Not_Fandom Meta Privilege

• Rachel Maines | Technology Historian | Big Think

Interview covering Technology Historian Rachel Maines' first book on female sexuality and vibrators and her latest on hedonizing technology. Put the two together and you have something that is speaking about all the parts of Western society that fandom fits into and grows out of without ever mentioning fandom. After hearing about extreme ironing, you'll never think fandom is weird again.

Major accessibility failure in that the questions she is answering are text only on the video.

Meta Not_Fandom

• slacktivist: Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated

This is brilliant.

(Comments contain the expected writhing acrobatics of people who will do anything to not get it.)

Not_Fandom Privilege Meta

• MetaWatch

Ooooh! Fascinating. Some kind of statistical analysis of metafandom-linked posts. Okay, it calls me a BNF for July, which just, no, but it's interesting. Needs moar charts!!

Fandom Meta