(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".

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

What readily comes to mind is that... slavery isn't just a black thing, and the constant focus on the connection between slavery and antiblackness or even slavery with race is erasure or willful ignorance of the many other ways in which slavery has manifested or does manifest in society. Yes, the whole issue of black slavery comes with a certain scale and magnitude that pushes it to the forefront of these discussions, but activism that says "this is the biggest, so it should be the only focus" is just awful.

I would also say that "slavery" as an entire concept doesn't necessarily have universal themes to it. There are many many broad themes which are easily conceptualized as being indicative of slavery and expected within such a system... but not necessarily anything completely universal. And so in a certain sense, it's not always apt to assume that any given interpretation of slavery is a reflection of (American) black slavery, per se. Although I guess your mileage may vary depending how your AU is structured, exactly, and whether it is explicitely supposed to be identifiably comparable to American black slavery.

Also why is it reasonably okay for Proper authors and filmmakers and storytellers to write historical fiction set in slave eras and societies but not fanfic authors? Hmm, seems like your generic wank over the idea that fanfiction is illegitimate and has no literary, analytical, subservise, or transformative merit. And also the automatic assumption that anyone writing slavery content would be in a position to perpetuate racism rather than be a subject of it has the faint odor of "fans are (cis) straight white girls."