bicrim | A Fan manifesto

bookshop wrote something that all of us in fandom, or who are concerned with censorship, intentional community building, and queer/feminist politics need to read. My response to it is below. (Lactavist mamas, listen up, six apart is at it again--now censoring fanfiction under the same "morality" clauses they used to censor breastfeeding icons last year)

At the end of the panel I moderated last weekend on slash fandom and convergence, I made a little impromptu solo speech. It went something like this:

What we do as slashers, what we do as members of fandom, has meaning. It's not just about writing fanfic and participating in a community of fanfic writers, but about sharing a collective voice. There are moments when that voice extends outside of the community we're in, moments when fandom is not just about fandom, but about something far more far-reaching, about social change, and tolerance, and a new way of experiencing culture. What we do has a meaning, and we need to understand that, be aware of it, and use our fandom experience with pride.

The whole reason the slash panel came about was because last July praetorianguard and I were brainstorming about how we could make Phoenix Rising more slash friendly. Suddenly we had a slash panel with one of the keynote speakers of the conference and a professional erotica write flying across an ocean to talk about how slash fic had directly affected her career.

At the same time, elements and I were talking about how we could use citizen journalism to expand our fandom experience outward, and a month later Convergence Culture was published with a final chapter on how grassroots movements on the internet are becoming powerful voices for social change. Erica and I thought, wow. This is it, this is what we want to do.

And I spent three days in the city of New Orleans talking to people who had lived in their cars and lost their homes during Hurricane Katrina, editing footage of a disaster-ravaged city using downloaded programs I originally got to make fanvids and cheesy livejournal audio posts.

What we do as fans has meaning.

It's not a coincidence that we spent an entire conference in New Orleans last week saying repeatedly, "your fan voice matters" only to come back and find FanLib drastically misrepresenting and exploiting that voice, and simultaneously find fans reacting against that website in profound and provocative ways. Collective ways.

And it's not a coincidence that immediately on the heels of that moment comes a far scarier moment. It's not a coincidence that now we as a fandom are being called upon directly to use our collective voice once again.

What you do as a fan has a meaning. Your voice has a meaning. Our collective voice is the loudest thing on this website. Yes. Livejournal.com. We are this website.

What we do as fans has a meaning and a purpose.

Why it's not about porn

Fandom is not about porn any more than the gay rights movement is about Teletubbies. Fandom is a collective entity that gives voice to the minorities, the subversionaries, the reactionaries, and the radicals. It's a powerful movement. FanLib knew that when they spoke of the 'collective fan energy' they wanted to harness and turn back towards the media industries that spawned them.

But that's not what fandom is about. Fandom is about a shared space where freedom of expression brooks no exceptions - where we are our own arbiters of justice and where we create our own aesthetic. Fandom is a microcosm of a world where the social hierarchy is completely inverted. In fandom if you're a minority, if you're gay, bisexual, transgendered, or female, you're on the top of the pecking order. Nowhere else but fandom.

Fandom is a reflection of how we want the world to be - a world without social constraints, race, gender bias or homophobia. A world where you can be recognized and admired and contribute something that you love just by being a fan, just by existing in this space.

Fandom, for all the wank we create, is an idealized space. The voice that we have created, our collective fandom voice, is also an idealized one.

The collective fandom voice is not a voice that invites sexual deviants to victimize children, nor is it one that corrupts young minds and teaches them to value perversity. It is a voice that teaches tolerance, caution, empowerment, and diversity. It is a voice that self-censors, self-actualizes, self-edits, and self-educates.

We have power as fans.

For the last 9 months I've followed the trail started during that first conversation with Amy - how can we make this convention slash-friendly - without knowing where it was going to lead. For the last 9 months I have studied convergence and the properties of being in fandom while interacting with a changing internet space, and I have said, over and over, we have power as fans. I have said it, over and over, without knowing why I was following this path.

Tonight I know with everything in me that the reason I went on this 9 month journey, the reason I met the academics I met last week, the reason I toured the Ninth Ward and saw where the levees broke, even the reason I met Erica five and a half years ago, is so I can say this to you now.

You are fandom. This is your voice. Use it.

Why it matters

Chris Williams from FanLib was right about one thing. Fandom can no longer continue to be a hidden voice within a rapidly mainstreaming media culture. People are going to attempt to assimilate us into a larger cultural context. They already are. Think about it. There's a reason, a serendipitous reason, the deletions happened right after FanLib, and it's not because of bad fandom karma. FanLib was a warmup, folks. A practice run for the real thing. And both events, FanLib's attempt to exploit fans and Six Apart's attempt to censor them, involve us in the same question. The question.

Are we, as fans, going to let other people define what fandom is for us, or are we going to define it ourselves?

If fandom wants to exist in the current healthy and autonomous space it occupies, it is going to have to fight for that space. Our fandom voice can be far-reaching, and it can have a powerful, powerful momentum that carries over into all sorts of spaces - gay rights, women's rights, transgendered rights, citizen journalism, all levels of political activism - but until we acknowledge that power ourselves, and use it, fandom itself will never be safe space.

We have *got* to stop letting people define what fandom is for us. The idea behind astolat's call for a Fandom Archive run by fans, for fans, was exactly right. But it's not just about preserving the fic. It's about letting people know who we are and what we are.

We, and by we I mean all of fandom - everyone from Harry Potter to anime fandoms lost dear people and communities today - have got to come together and create, not only a viable concerted means of combatting what happened today on livejournal, but any future attempts by those outside of fandom to try to tell us what fandom is or isn't. How many times have you all read some horrible write up of a fandom meetup in the Guardian or Newsweek where fans were represented as off-kilter extremists with subversive porn fetishes?

Not any more. We have got to create a viable means whereby fandom has a representative voice within the larger public sphere, and we have got to, as individuals and collective units, stand up for ourselves at every opportunity.

What you can do:
# Be aware of why this is important. Your right to participate blithely in fandom, free from all cares, depends on your being conscious of this moment, right now, and why it matters.

# Until those directly affected by today's purges have gotten a chance to talk to Six Apart, stop all monetary exchanges with Six Apart. Kill your plus accounts. Don't buy permanent accounts next month (I know, that's hard). If you have a paid account, don't renew it, and for god's sake don't renew it. Your Weasley twins and Sam/Dean icons won't do you much good if LJ can kill your journal for having them up anyway. Six Apart reacted to financial threats on the part of the action group who approached it; let's see how it reacts when a third of its membership base stops contributing to it financially.

# If you know someone who has been directly affected by the purges today, and you have their contact info, LET US KNOW.

If you are someone who has been directly affected, let me, femmequixotic, or elements know. We are working on this issue with people outside of fandom who can help, but to be as effective as possible, we need the names of as many people as we can find who moderated a suspended journal or lost their accounts. (Does anyone have lynntownsend's email?)

If you have contacts who can help, or if you can help in any professional capacity, let us know.

# Speak out and stay informed. Follow life_wo_fanlib and fandom_lawyers, and Fandom Wank. Most importantly, talk about fandom. Talk about it.

Now is the time to speak out about what fandom means to you. The time to keep speaking out. Fandom voices are becoming louder and greater all the time, and this is not the time to back down or be afraid.

It is time to acknowledge our power as fans, and it is time to use that power to stop letting other people tell us what fandom is.

It's time to start telling everyone else what fandom is, and what we as fans are about. They'll never leave us alone, but we can, if we work together, make sure that our rights and our freedom of expression, our power as fans working within our own community, is heard by all around us.

We can make sure that fandom is never taken for granted, never exploited, never misrepresented, never stigmatized, again. We can do it.

But we won't do it by hiding. We will do it by reaching out, just as we did last week with FanLib, and harnessing our collective energy to define our shared space, and the things we want from it.

This is only the beginning.

____

Sunday in New Orleans I had lunch with elements, shaggirl, mimoletnoe, and Dr. Henry Jenkins. We had a conversation in which we, while discussing the FanLib controversy, agreed that what we need as fans is a representative body to speak for us to the press, to those who could potentially misrepresent fandom to the larger culture. We weren't going to discuss it until we had gotten a bit further in the development stages.

But it's exactly what we need. Not just a representative body, but a representative mentality.

You are fandom. You show the world what fandom is, and by extension, what it is not: it is not a den of online predators or a bed of corruption.

We, as a fandom, more than anything, need to understand that fandom is not just about fiction. It is about the perpetuation of an idealized space when the world would tell us we're too young/fat/queer/confused/deviant/effiminate/butch/black/white/whatever to be heard, to have power, to have the power of creative expression. Fandom gives us that when nothing else does.

Fandom, it's time to stand up and tell the world who we are, and why they cannot, and should not, stand in our way.

I'm in the happy position of someone who lost their job because of her fannish activity, and who could, very very easily, lose it again. It's why I completely flock my journal. But you know, now when I see so many people locking down their ljs because of this, my instinct is the very opposite - to be more public about my fandom participation than ever.

If anybody has the right to be afraid of the consequences of being a fan, you're looking at her.

I'm not afraid. And I'm going to speak out.

I hope everyone of you who reads this will join me

Yes, we need to claim our voice as fans, and as a culture. We are the minority voice of modern literature, as well as one of the strongest international internet communities that exist. And we are overwhelmingly female. It is time that we come together, and stand up for our worldview, which is a sex-positive, queer, anti-racist, celebration of the marginalized! We don't just "tolerate", or even "accept" the ugly, the fat, the dark (both literally and metaphorically), and the bent, we embody it, we embrace it, and we give it our voice. We are important. We are, I believe, the future of art, and of community. We are pioneers, and we dare not let ourselves, or our future descendants down. -Kristin