(no subject)

[nerdflighter]

pokes my head up from the depths of hell (Mumbai summer) to talk about a take I saw...months back.



I was scrolling through fanacademia twitter (as you do) and came across the idea that writing Slavery AUs is racist, which admittedly isn't that far-fetched but then I spent a lot of time feeling intensely guilty about being into slavefic, and then I was like

- why is it racist to engage with an idea, even if you're getting off on it?
- is it actually racist or is it that just people trying to shut down certain kinds of fan creativity
- why should I be listening to them, instead of the more important party in this conversation, namely my horny cortex?
- is all engagement racist or are there exceptions
- why are we privileging vanilla (not E rated for sexual content, in this case) content over content that gets people off?
[if you have answers to these questions + other reasons why Slavery AUs (esp sex slave AUs) are Good Actually feel free to lmk because I do want arguments to fall back on]

and then I realized at some point down the line that I simply disagreed with the idea that the progressiveness of fandom could be measured in terms of the identities of the people we wrote about instead of, you know, OUR engagement with the themes and narratives and characters and spaces and each other, and the myopic focus on 'there are x number of fanfics about poc in this fandom' was actually, like, holding us back from having a conversation about how progressiveness in fandom looks different from progressiveness in mainstream media/mass media, while also being the kinda question that was actively detrimental to ME as a PoC In Fandom who makes content, and is it more progressive of me to make content about anime by that metric? or is progressiveness more about...other things. Like themes! [read this article for more]

edit: which is not to say that writing about marginalized characters ISN'T important, it's just not always the most important thing or the best measure of these things

Comments

[codex8]

My perspective on this take is that a) it can depend on how broadly that person was defining slavery, and b) despite there certainly being racial diversity issues in connection to kink, there are actually a LOT of non-white and - specifically relevant to this discussion - black people in particular in kink and kink spaces and they talk about this stuff rather extensively and the consensus I've seen boils down to "people can be racist about this or in doing this, but that doesn't make the concept or every single iteration of it actually racist".