OTW, our fully furnished fannish city
Dec. 15th, 2007 07:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabThere is nothing I have wanted more than a fannish home on the internet, with infrastructure and diplomacy and representation from all walks of fandom, privileged equally and in a safe space, from where we can stand as one to fight for the legitimacy of our practices AND have a home, where our sisters and lovers live, where we can come back at the end of the day and share our desires and our picspams and porn. I've always envisioned fandom as a kind of sprawling city -- certainly in number and in vocality we are as large and impressive as any subculture, with our own jargon, needs, values, and subcommunities. Just like in the days when het writers railed against slash writers, or slash writers railed against RPSers, at the end of the day, I hope/believe we continue to find more in what unites us than divides us -- hence the need for an umbrella'd home for us all to explore our potentiality as producers of fannish content and our community as it sails toward legitimacy and intellectual ownership.
The OTW site went live, to the expected range of responses from glee to wank, love to hate. And as there are as many kinds of fannish people as there are fish in the sea (or whatever) it's unsurprising -- except for the fact that this Organization is specifically set up to represent ALL OF US.
I know most of the board members of the OTW personally, along with the staff of the academic journal and the legion of fannish volunteers trying to get involved, and while I have tremendously high hopes for the project, there are some significant obstacles standing between the OTW as it is now and the ideal OTW that we can all get behind and feel part of.
1. The academic bent on the part of the board and the site, from the mission statement to the adjunct academic journal, can understandably be interpreted as a kind of elitist vocabulary that not all fannish folk are discoursed in. Or, in other words, the privileged members of the OTW board -- which can then translate into the environment into which normal folk will be expected to join -- come from a place where fandom and fannish activities are academized, and therefore subject to a level of politicizing and theorizing that only the most rarefied of fandom members participate in. And so it's prohibitive -- folks without an academic background can't be expected to have the vocabulary to discuss fandom in these terms, and therefore they're left out of the political process and may find themselves, and their needs from fandom and feelings about fandom, unrepresented.
2. The OTW has made a very clear stance on its protective and legal acknowlegement of the need to legitimize fannish WORKS, but it lacks the same kind of agenda when it comes to protecting the CREATORS of the fannish work, namely us. In the world of textual theory, the author dies the minute the work comes under scrutiny -- but in our case, killing off the author for the good of the text is actually short-changing what is great about fandom, again, US. The academic journal is called Transformative Works and Cultures, which does address the environment of fannish cultures, but only in an academic or socio-anthropological sense. Rather than that kind of top-down representation of fannish "culture," I think it's much more necessary to have an archive of our own where we can PRACTICE fannish culture, and where we participate for the REASONS we came into fandom in the first place, love, desire, interactivity, community, FUN.
3. And then there's most definitely a percentage of fandom -- probably a large percentage -- that's not interested in being politicized and who don't participate in fannish activities for the textual queering or narrative subversion...but rather for sex! And fun! By linking the OTW archive to the political and legal campaign for the acknowlegement of fanworks, and by linking them both to the TWC academic journal, people who might not have otherwise wanted their participation and product to be coopted into a political agenda will find themselves just that. You know, civilizing the savages who don't necessarily want to be civilized. Sure the culture might do better if democracy was imposed, but, like the US in Iraq, it's not exactly up to one group of "civilized" individuals (in this case the aca-fans who are versed in the language and theory necessary to make the legitimization of fandom into a political and intellectual property issue) to impose one particular breed of legitimatizatin on a wider and more diverse group at large.
4. The archive itself, once it goes live, could really prove or disprove a lot of my fears, and until we can actually start poking around and see what kind of environment we have to move into, there's really no way of knowing if OTW will reach the necessary tipping point to become THE fannish home base. The resourceful programmers among us are working right this moment to construct a brand new open-source infinitely scalable and modular platform for the archive to be built on, which is exciting but also nerve-wracking because reinventing the wheel is always a dangerous prospect. If it turns out that the archive is really primarily an ARCHIVE, then, while it will indeed be an organization protecting (and housing) transformative WORKS, it will certainly NOT be the community we need in order to actually migrate from Livejournal. And if the new software DOES include the community-making infrastructure that we've gotten so used to and implemented so well across LJ, the question will become whether it's better for individual fans to work and play in an environment that's specifically fan-based (and therefore welcoming and inclusive) while also perpetrating its own fannish agenda (and necessarily politicizing the "works" on the site and the environment that made them possible) -- OR to toil in friends-locked anonymity on Livejournal, threatened with TOSsing and adult content flags, but party to no fannish agenda but your own. Also, the beta process surrounding the launch of the new software has been remarkably opaque -- I haven't heard hide nor hair about asking for functionality or attributes for the software, nor do I even know where one would go to share ideas about what we (as representatives from diverse and different walks of fandom, anime, RPS, etc) need in regards to our fannish "home."
5. All of this is really about making sure that the OTW -- or any long-term fannish home -- be inclusive rather than exclusive, and that it respect and privilege what fandom does for US over what fandom means for society at large. Or at the very least, these should be two different discussions -- one, what do fans NEED from a home on the internet, and two, what does the WORLD need to know about us and our practices? And then, of course, what are the best ways to marry these two agendas so that, along with the simple acknowlegement of transformative work as both legal and legitimate, we are ALSO respected as creators of these works, growing from a largely female-populated community based social consciousness. This is, to a degree, in the OTW mission statement, but so far we don't know how it's going to play out.
6. And then specifically, there are some problems with transparency as far as how the committees have come about and as far as communication has gone from within the board/committees and fandoms at large. First, the only members listed on the website are the five members of the "ruling council" board, which is great, and though they use their real names they include great fannish cred in their bios (plus most of us know who these folks are anyway) and are doing a good job demonstrating that they're a good set of representatives. BUT, the committees are all closed-door, and even the volunteer/recruiting posts had screened comments and then simply CLOSED when the committees were full, without sharing the information regarding WHO was participating in these committees and what THEIR agendas and projects are. I went over to try and join the Community Relations committee only to find it closed, with no information as to where I can go to either a) participate in development or b) observe the beta process and help tweak it along the way. The fact that there's no access to the beta site or room for feedback at this point in the process is also sort of oppositional and in contrast to the initial inspiration -- an archive of OUR OWN. In other words: what can we do now, as a group and as participants, to make sure that this is a process that is continually shaped based on what it is that we as a group, as a village, need from this home.
7. To wit, this is about participatory culture -- this is about US. The quick turnover from a community-spawned process to a corporate/bureaucratic top-down initiative is sort of contrary to what excited me about the project in the first place, and I can absolutely see how the bureaucratic language could threaten the average fangirl who's looking to get involved but is turned off by the corporate lingo and economics of the site development. Also -- where'd the fun go? We're here for fun, and sex, not just legitimacy, and part of being a creative and dynamic organization means there has to be irreverence, inclusivity, and a feeling of warmth and homeyness to the site; as it stands, we might as well be stock brokers with a cute umbrella.
At the end of the day, the problem with the OTW right now is that it is heading toward a great political and legal organization to protect the intellectual property/fair use licensing of texts as fanwork -- but it's still the organization of transformative WORKS, and not, yet, the organization for CREATORS OF transformative works. The author is dead, the works are protected...and our processes and methodologies are out in the cold, knitting and petting our cats and being lesbians and librarians and cosplayers and gamers and RPSers and fanboys and vidders and so on. In order for the OTW to be a true fannish home, it needs to be a home that we, we women, we writers and fans, want to live in -- not just a political entity that protects our work.
I want to thank the fans who went above and beyond to bring the OTW about, to get organized, to retain legal council, to do the dirty work and research that will be necessary when we're in a position to defend our legal and fair use appropriation of the texts we're transforming. And I also want to thank the programmers and genius kung-fu Python scripters among us who are, as we speak, building the archive software for the OTW's archive and (hopefully) blogging and social networking platform. I have nothing but the highest hopes for this project -- and I'm already feeling the excitement stirring for the upcoming possible fannish migration into a home where we're protected -- a home that loves us! Mostly, I just want to make sure that what we build reflects all of us, in the greatness of our numbers and diversity of our practices of participation, to make textual poaching and participatory fandom a living, breathing entity that's legitimate, respectable, and revolutionary.
ETA: Several comments have pointed out that I've been too heavy-handed on the female-space side while simultaneously trying to preach inclusivity -- whoops! Some irresponsible/flippant language use there on my part; sorry. By "female space" I'm actually lifting that from the OTW mission statement, and from the fact that, insofar as fandom is a gendered entity, this kind of textual poaching is considered "fangirl" behaviour (vs. action figures, comics, and video games, described as "fanboy" behavior -- see also the Jenkins debates on Gender and Fan Culture for more about these linguistic gendered activities, while remembering of course that just because a behavior is considered "fanboyish" or "fangirlish" it's still open to and participated in by men, women, transpeople, etc.) and in the OTW's political statement and much academic work that's written on participatory culture, our breed of ficwriting and production of works has been generally gendered female. FWIW.
On the otherhand, my offhanded "lesbians" comment was not at all meant to be a description of everyone around here, it just came as part of a list that included knitters and librarians -- and as neither a knitter nor a librarian, obviously I don't think that's all we are, I was just, you know, being rhetorical.
Anyway, thanks to the folks who pointed out my oversight -- and I am right there on board with making the OTW protective of ALL walks of fanlife and all methods of participation.
The OTW site went live, to the expected range of responses from glee to wank, love to hate. And as there are as many kinds of fannish people as there are fish in the sea (or whatever) it's unsurprising -- except for the fact that this Organization is specifically set up to represent ALL OF US.
I know most of the board members of the OTW personally, along with the staff of the academic journal and the legion of fannish volunteers trying to get involved, and while I have tremendously high hopes for the project, there are some significant obstacles standing between the OTW as it is now and the ideal OTW that we can all get behind and feel part of.
1. The academic bent on the part of the board and the site, from the mission statement to the adjunct academic journal, can understandably be interpreted as a kind of elitist vocabulary that not all fannish folk are discoursed in. Or, in other words, the privileged members of the OTW board -- which can then translate into the environment into which normal folk will be expected to join -- come from a place where fandom and fannish activities are academized, and therefore subject to a level of politicizing and theorizing that only the most rarefied of fandom members participate in. And so it's prohibitive -- folks without an academic background can't be expected to have the vocabulary to discuss fandom in these terms, and therefore they're left out of the political process and may find themselves, and their needs from fandom and feelings about fandom, unrepresented.
2. The OTW has made a very clear stance on its protective and legal acknowlegement of the need to legitimize fannish WORKS, but it lacks the same kind of agenda when it comes to protecting the CREATORS of the fannish work, namely us. In the world of textual theory, the author dies the minute the work comes under scrutiny -- but in our case, killing off the author for the good of the text is actually short-changing what is great about fandom, again, US. The academic journal is called Transformative Works and Cultures, which does address the environment of fannish cultures, but only in an academic or socio-anthropological sense. Rather than that kind of top-down representation of fannish "culture," I think it's much more necessary to have an archive of our own where we can PRACTICE fannish culture, and where we participate for the REASONS we came into fandom in the first place, love, desire, interactivity, community, FUN.
3. And then there's most definitely a percentage of fandom -- probably a large percentage -- that's not interested in being politicized and who don't participate in fannish activities for the textual queering or narrative subversion...but rather for sex! And fun! By linking the OTW archive to the political and legal campaign for the acknowlegement of fanworks, and by linking them both to the TWC academic journal, people who might not have otherwise wanted their participation and product to be coopted into a political agenda will find themselves just that. You know, civilizing the savages who don't necessarily want to be civilized. Sure the culture might do better if democracy was imposed, but, like the US in Iraq, it's not exactly up to one group of "civilized" individuals (in this case the aca-fans who are versed in the language and theory necessary to make the legitimization of fandom into a political and intellectual property issue) to impose one particular breed of legitimatizatin on a wider and more diverse group at large.
4. The archive itself, once it goes live, could really prove or disprove a lot of my fears, and until we can actually start poking around and see what kind of environment we have to move into, there's really no way of knowing if OTW will reach the necessary tipping point to become THE fannish home base. The resourceful programmers among us are working right this moment to construct a brand new open-source infinitely scalable and modular platform for the archive to be built on, which is exciting but also nerve-wracking because reinventing the wheel is always a dangerous prospect. If it turns out that the archive is really primarily an ARCHIVE, then, while it will indeed be an organization protecting (and housing) transformative WORKS, it will certainly NOT be the community we need in order to actually migrate from Livejournal. And if the new software DOES include the community-making infrastructure that we've gotten so used to and implemented so well across LJ, the question will become whether it's better for individual fans to work and play in an environment that's specifically fan-based (and therefore welcoming and inclusive) while also perpetrating its own fannish agenda (and necessarily politicizing the "works" on the site and the environment that made them possible) -- OR to toil in friends-locked anonymity on Livejournal, threatened with TOSsing and adult content flags, but party to no fannish agenda but your own. Also, the beta process surrounding the launch of the new software has been remarkably opaque -- I haven't heard hide nor hair about asking for functionality or attributes for the software, nor do I even know where one would go to share ideas about what we (as representatives from diverse and different walks of fandom, anime, RPS, etc) need in regards to our fannish "home."
5. All of this is really about making sure that the OTW -- or any long-term fannish home -- be inclusive rather than exclusive, and that it respect and privilege what fandom does for US over what fandom means for society at large. Or at the very least, these should be two different discussions -- one, what do fans NEED from a home on the internet, and two, what does the WORLD need to know about us and our practices? And then, of course, what are the best ways to marry these two agendas so that, along with the simple acknowlegement of transformative work as both legal and legitimate, we are ALSO respected as creators of these works, growing from a largely female-populated community based social consciousness. This is, to a degree, in the OTW mission statement, but so far we don't know how it's going to play out.
6. And then specifically, there are some problems with transparency as far as how the committees have come about and as far as communication has gone from within the board/committees and fandoms at large. First, the only members listed on the website are the five members of the "ruling council" board, which is great, and though they use their real names they include great fannish cred in their bios (plus most of us know who these folks are anyway) and are doing a good job demonstrating that they're a good set of representatives. BUT, the committees are all closed-door, and even the volunteer/recruiting posts had screened comments and then simply CLOSED when the committees were full, without sharing the information regarding WHO was participating in these committees and what THEIR agendas and projects are. I went over to try and join the Community Relations committee only to find it closed, with no information as to where I can go to either a) participate in development or b) observe the beta process and help tweak it along the way. The fact that there's no access to the beta site or room for feedback at this point in the process is also sort of oppositional and in contrast to the initial inspiration -- an archive of OUR OWN. In other words: what can we do now, as a group and as participants, to make sure that this is a process that is continually shaped based on what it is that we as a group, as a village, need from this home.
7. To wit, this is about participatory culture -- this is about US. The quick turnover from a community-spawned process to a corporate/bureaucratic top-down initiative is sort of contrary to what excited me about the project in the first place, and I can absolutely see how the bureaucratic language could threaten the average fangirl who's looking to get involved but is turned off by the corporate lingo and economics of the site development. Also -- where'd the fun go? We're here for fun, and sex, not just legitimacy, and part of being a creative and dynamic organization means there has to be irreverence, inclusivity, and a feeling of warmth and homeyness to the site; as it stands, we might as well be stock brokers with a cute umbrella.
At the end of the day, the problem with the OTW right now is that it is heading toward a great political and legal organization to protect the intellectual property/fair use licensing of texts as fanwork -- but it's still the organization of transformative WORKS, and not, yet, the organization for CREATORS OF transformative works. The author is dead, the works are protected...and our processes and methodologies are out in the cold, knitting and petting our cats and being lesbians and librarians and cosplayers and gamers and RPSers and fanboys and vidders and so on. In order for the OTW to be a true fannish home, it needs to be a home that we, we women, we writers and fans, want to live in -- not just a political entity that protects our work.
I want to thank the fans who went above and beyond to bring the OTW about, to get organized, to retain legal council, to do the dirty work and research that will be necessary when we're in a position to defend our legal and fair use appropriation of the texts we're transforming. And I also want to thank the programmers and genius kung-fu Python scripters among us who are, as we speak, building the archive software for the OTW's archive and (hopefully) blogging and social networking platform. I have nothing but the highest hopes for this project -- and I'm already feeling the excitement stirring for the upcoming possible fannish migration into a home where we're protected -- a home that loves us! Mostly, I just want to make sure that what we build reflects all of us, in the greatness of our numbers and diversity of our practices of participation, to make textual poaching and participatory fandom a living, breathing entity that's legitimate, respectable, and revolutionary.
ETA: Several comments have pointed out that I've been too heavy-handed on the female-space side while simultaneously trying to preach inclusivity -- whoops! Some irresponsible/flippant language use there on my part; sorry. By "female space" I'm actually lifting that from the OTW mission statement, and from the fact that, insofar as fandom is a gendered entity, this kind of textual poaching is considered "fangirl" behaviour (vs. action figures, comics, and video games, described as "fanboy" behavior -- see also the Jenkins debates on Gender and Fan Culture for more about these linguistic gendered activities, while remembering of course that just because a behavior is considered "fanboyish" or "fangirlish" it's still open to and participated in by men, women, transpeople, etc.) and in the OTW's political statement and much academic work that's written on participatory culture, our breed of ficwriting and production of works has been generally gendered female. FWIW.
On the otherhand, my offhanded "lesbians" comment was not at all meant to be a description of everyone around here, it just came as part of a list that included knitters and librarians -- and as neither a knitter nor a librarian, obviously I don't think that's all we are, I was just, you know, being rhetorical.
Anyway, thanks to the folks who pointed out my oversight -- and I am right there on board with making the OTW protective of ALL walks of fanlife and all methods of participation.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-12-16 11:54 am (UTC)I'm a lesbian slasher but my personal community of fannish friends includes straight women, straight men, bi women (including both my primary and secondary partners), bi men, and transfolk. We are readers, writers, artists and sometimes all three. These are the people with whom I feel safe to do my fannish thing and be my fannish self and I cannot and do not want to consider myself a part of any community that excludes them.
One of the things that I've always found problematical as a lesbian leatherwoman is that people in fringe spaces have this weird tendency to try to find even more fringy people to exclude. I hate to see that kind of thing happening in fandom because I don't want to see fandom lose any of its voices.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-16 12:42 pm (UTC)