thuvia ptarth

Nearly all of my vid collections are in plastic slipcases. Shouldn't we be looking into cardboard/biodegradable packaging for vid collections, a la indie record productions?

This thought brought to you by the purchase of too many and yet unregretted indie/alternative CDs in the past two months, and also by the knowledge that I won't be putting together a vid collection myself anytime soon.

I wasn't going to bother posting on this because Everybody Knows, but then I remembered I thought Everyone Knew about William Sanders, too, and some people didn't, including close friends of mine. So:

Laura Hale/Michaela Ecks/partly_bouncy/purplepopple is a liar, a terrible researcher, a disgrace to the name "historian", a generally disruptive and abusive presence in fandom, and a person who has repeatedly outed fans (linking their real-life names to their fannish identities against their will) who has been abusing the good will and resources of fans for commercial purposes, who has deliberately seeded her wiki on fandom history with bad information, and who has deliberately attacked, smeared, and abused other fans in order to gain herself page hits.

Ban her from your personal journals and communities. Do not support her projects with your time, effort, or money. Avoid visiting her projects unless you need to verify reports of her behavior, and if you do, please use the "nofollow" directions outlined here.

Links

• Details on the current outing*
  
• astolat's response
  
• Details on the commercial project
  

* I know of at least one other case, and in general it's been kept quiet because raising a fuss about X getting outed only outs them more. But this isn't a one-time thing. It's a pattern.

Some of you have seen some of this argument already, and some of you haven't, and my feelings about arguments made on both sides are mixed, so I'm going to start with a recap and continue with tons of exposition. Those of you who haven't skipped out already, please bear with me.

mamadeb posted a complaint about Yuletide signups going live on Sukkot, a Jewish holiday. I read her tone as intended to be humorous, in a passive-aggressive way, but other people--including several on her friends list--read it as accusatory. She's said in comments that she didn't intend to accuse the Yuletide mods of deliberate malice, just carelessness. In the comments, but not in the original post, she also expresses a wish that the ficathon had a "more neutral name." In addition to the arguments in her comments, her post got picked up by Fandom Wank.

I am disturbed by some of the objections to mamadeb, and particularly by the nature of some of the responses on Fandom Wank. I'd like to make it clear that I'm not bothered by people who disagree with mamadeb's initial complaint. I do not, in fact, agree with her complaint about the timing of the signups. The signups were pre-announced and there's a two-week signup period with no penalty for signing up late in the period or reward for signing up early. The signup period is two weeks long precisely to allow people who have conflicts during that a period a long enough opening that they can find time to sign up.

I also do not criticize people who read Mama Deb's tone as accusatory; as I said, I read it as intended to be humorous, but also, as I implied by "passive-aggressive," as not quite coming off that way. Several of her initial commenters suggested steps she could take to make sure Yuletide nominations didn't conflict with Jewish holidays in the future, and her dismissal of all of these did indeed rub me wrong.

Finally, I do not agree with her dismissive attitude towards paganism and Christian holidays in the comments. She's not the spokesperson I'd have picked, and I am probably not the one she would have picked, but nevertheless I am speaking out about the few items on which I do agree with her.

I am disturbed by the number of people who disclaim a connection between the term "Yuletide" and Christianity, or for that matter between "Christmas" and Christianity; by the initial Fandom Wank post's cavalier attitude towards the possibility of a Jewish complaint; and by the outright anti-Semitism from some of the Fandom Wank commenters. (Yes, I know, they're Fandom Wank. They're still part of fandom.)

To elaborate:

1. Yuletide and Christianity
   I am aware that "Yule" was originally a pagan term and it has been reclaimed by many neo-pagans for the winter solstice holiday. However, for several centuries now, it has been associated with the Christmas holiday, and the name of the Yuletide challenge is taken from a Christmas carol. I realize that for many people in the West, especially but not exclusively Christians, Christmas has become a secular holiday because it is associated with their national culture (hi, guys, I've been in the UK in December, you cannot convince me I am being American-centric here) and because it is recognized as a holiday by their secular governments. I know Jews and members of other religious minorities in the West who are not bothered by the terms "Yuletide" or "Secret Santa" and who have Christmas trees (and who set up huge fandom-crossing obscure fandom ficathons!) and who distinguish the cultural practice of Christianity from the religious practice of Christianity. I am not one of them, partly because so few Christians seem to have an understanding of Christianity as a cultural practice, or the ways in which they receive the privilege of a cultural default, even when they themselves are not religious or choose atheism or a different religion. Why should they have this understanding? Privilege is the headache they don't know they don't have.
   
   I am going to be very explicit about this: I'm not just talking about this ficathon. I'm not asking for the name "Yuletide" to be changed. I think that would be a huge headache, to begin with, and at this point I even have positive associations with the name, because of my happy involvement with the challenge. But I am saying that "Yuletide"--whether in reference to this challenge or in general--is not nondenominational. It is not religiously neutral. It is not broadly inclusive.
   
   And really, the important part of that last paragraph for me is the "in general." This is not about an attitude specific to fandom. This is about an attitude in the cultures from which Western media fans come.
   
   And the amount of resistance to this concept--that Christianity is not everyone's default and it is not a neutral position--is what disturbs me in many responses.
   
   
2. I get the sense in this thread that some people think it's not really anti-Semitism if it just affects some Jews, not all of them. To be quite honest, this seems to me about the same reasoning as saying that forbidding French schoolgirls to wear veils isn't anti-Muslim because it only affects the really devout ones, or that forbidding black women in public offices in Florida to wear braids or dreads isn't racist because some black women like straightening their hair.
   
   No, not all Jews turn off their computers on the Sabbath or on Sukkot. I don't. But that doesn't mean I am unaffected by the mockery of traditional Jewish customs.
   
   
3. Several of the comments on Fandom Wank, including the original post, were not so much anti-Semitic as Christian-centric. This is still, frankly, a problem. An inclusive society depends on recognizing that others are not like us and that their communities, folkways, traditions, and identities are valuable to them and innately worth preserving. The failure to realize this, or to recognize specific instances of exclusion, is privilege in action; it is generally motivated by ignorance rather than malice, but the ignorance is still hurting other people.
   
   Comments I would place in this category include:
   
   
   
   
   • If mamadeb is so upset and bothered by Yuletide signups beginning on Sukkot (and Yuletide's name), why is she even bothering with Yuletide?
     
     If it bothers her that much, then why be a part of it?
     
     As at least two subsequent commenters did point out, it's not unreasonable to criticize an institution which excludes you.
     
     
   • Uhm, just curious, does anyone know why mamadeb has an issue with the term "Yuletide"? (No sarcasm, I really do want to know.) and several of the responses, expressing disbelief, contempt, indifference to the exclusion of Judaism and other religions, and--this may be my favorite--the idea that since the Christmas carol the challenge name came from was originally a pagan Welsh hymn, it's not really Christian, even though Wales was converted to Christianity in about the fifth century of the Common Era (a fact I found by about five minutes' Googling, and if you don't know what the Common Era is, you too can Google to find out) and the hymn has been used as a Christmas carol throughout the English-speaking world for at least two hundred years now.
     
   
   
   
4. ETA 9:17pm: I'm leaving this up because people responded to it, and it affected my mood, but mayatawi offered an explanation for the exchange here, so I retract the accusation of anti-Semitism. I still think the conversation was ill-advised, but I don't think there was any malice involved.END ETA
   
   Comments which passed right over Christian-centric to anti-Semitic came up in this thread:
   
   

   
   panthea: Uh, at a guess... because most non-Jews have never even heard of Sukkot, let alone know when it is?
   
   Mamadeb waved the same persecution flag when sign-ups for the Muskrat Jamboree (tiny tiny slash con in Boston this year) opened on... some other Jewish holiday. I wanna say Rosh Hashanah, but that's just because it's fun to say.
   
   mindset: My non-Jewish boyfriend's favorite Jewish holiday is Sukkot, just because he enjoys pronouncing it "suck it". He is a great big silly. :)

   
   
   Do I have to explain what's wrong with this? Do I really have to explain what's so insulting about someone not just saying that Jewish holidays aren't well-known in the West, but implying that they're not worth knowing? Do I have to explain why it's exoticizing and insulting and just generally not okay to make fun of the name of Jewish holidays, or to take a holiday name and turn it into a sexual slur/insult? Do I really, really, really have to explain why someone saying "Suck it" instead of "Sukkot" isn't being a great big silly, he's being an asshole, and so is the person quoting this with approval?
   
   Do I really?
   
   ETA 9:17pm: mayatawi offers an explanation for the exchange here, so I retract the accusation of anti-Semitism. I still think the conversation was ill-advised, but I don't think there was any malice involved.
   

Preamble
I'd like to emphasize that I'm ... noodling, sort of; trying to work out what I think as I say it. And what I'm trying to do here is to not to declare a particular set of fantasies or generic conventions wrong or right, but to consider how we can communicate better about these fantasies, conventions, and responsibilities to other fans, rather than perpetually ending up with hurt feelings, pre-set opinions and prejudices, and the rather frustrating sense that other people are not hearing what we're trying to say.

And whenever I say "we" above, I definitely do include myself.

Fantasy and safe space
I've been trying to niggle out some connections I feel but cannot easily articulate among recent fandom brangles about the harshing of squee, incest in Supernatural, race in SGA, fandom as a safe space, and what I see as the fairly complicated relationship of fantasy and reality. My predominant impression, as someone has friends and respected acquaintances on all sides of most of these debates, is that we--media fans--have a lot of trouble not interpreting disagreement as disapproval, or disapproval as insult, and that we have some difficulty separating out disapproval or criticism of our beloved objects (whether canon or fandom) from disapproval or criticism of ourselves. And as someone who finds criticism (both in the analytical and the negative connotations) an important mode of fannish engagement, I personally plan on working on that.

I've seen a lot of discussions of fandom as a "safe space," and I think that's a lovely idea with some very problematic implications, not least of which is that different people want and need spaces safe from different and sometimes mutually exclusive things. Some people need a safe space for fantasy and play, and some people need a safe space from the oppressions (of race, of gender, of sexual violence) that are an inescapable fact of their daily life, that are not simply toys for fantasy for them. Fandom can be very valuable as a free space for fantasy -- but there's a reason we don't let the id out to play in the streets with children, and that's because, unrestrained, it can hurt people. Sometimes our pleasure does hurt other people. Sometimes that hurt is our responsibility, and sometimes it's not -- I really do not have a blanket statement of permission or refusal here, I do not think that repression of the fantasy is value-neutral or unproblematic, either; the repression of fantasy is one of the world's most basic means of social control.

I told you I was having trouble articulating these connections.

I guess if I had to boil it down into a few sentences, I would say that fantasy is inevitable and it can be reactionary or it can be revolutionary and it can be other things entirely; that sometimes fantasy is entirely divorced from the real world, but sometimes it is not; and that, as responsible adults who seek to behave rightly by other people, when we publish our fantasies, our thoughts, our opinions, it behooves us to consider their impact on other people, even if we decide that the positive impact of expression for us outweighs the negative impact of the expression on other people. What I feel like I'm seeing, a lot of the time, is an automatic defensiveness and fear at being asked to consider how we or what we've said appears to other people, a defensiveness that comes out of the fear that we're wrong, or the inherited shame and discomfort we feel about our positions of relative privilege or fantasies we ourselves may find problematic, or out of the startlement at being called on a sense of entitlement we didn't know we had and may not be ready to confront.

[ETA 4/3 9:59pm: I've heavily edited this post to separate out the general discussion of fandom and fantasy space from a specific question of the SPN newsletter; it was thoughtless of me to associate the two.

[This post is public because I did want to get the opinions of fans not on my flist. However, it is not a request itself, and it is not directed at the maintainers of the spn newsletter, although I'm aware some of them may stumble across it; I am trying to figure out if a request is a good idea. A day later I'm inclining towards "not a good idea," but I dislike deleting posts; it feels like trying to cover up your mistakes, and I'd rather acknowledge having made them and move on.]

I've been wondering if it might help settle some nerves in Supernatural fandom for the newsletter to re-arrange the template to list gen stories before Sam/Dean.

I like this idea entirely apart from the recurrent arguments about the role of incest in fiction because it accords with my personal notions of categorization -- you do the gen, which is a subset of stories distinguished by its lack of or failure to focus on pairings, and then you do all the stories that belong to the category of pairing fic, broken down by significant pairings. It seems to me that this makes it easier for non-Wincest readers to cut off their reading when they reach the end of the category, instead of having to skip past the Sam/Dean (unless of course they're also looking for het or other), has a neutral effect on the subset of Sam/Dean slashers who also like gen (which seem to me to be a large percentage of fandom), and offers only a mild inconvenience to the Sam/Dean slashers who do not like gen, as they tend to be indifferent to gen rather than disturbed by it.

There's a lot of "seems" in there because I haven't done any kind of rigorous analysis of this (my life is sadly empty of pie charts), and because I haven't yet gone through the newsletter info/memories to see if this idea has already been proposed, discussed, and rejected. I don't want to re-hash old arguments, and I don't want to express this as a demand or an entitlement; I think the newsletter is a great fandom resource, put together by people who are doing great work for the fandom infrastructure, and I get a lot of good out of it as it is.

But I thought I'd throw it out there as a proposal and see what you guys think and whether you know of any previous fandom history affecting it that I might not be aware of.

[ETA 4/3: Other issues moved to a separate post.]

I'm going to be offline for most of today traveling and celebrating Passover, so I will probably not be able to respond to comments quickly.