Comments on PurplePopple's Journal

Everyone has bias. The best method that I've found of dealing with it is to admit it up front so people are properly informed so they can make their own judgment: I have problems with OTW, especially as it pertains to their retelling of fandom history. I've been involved in trying to tell the history of fan fiction communities and fandom since 2000. My theoretical background is based on education, with some communications, sociology and history theoretical frameworks added to the mix. I am not grounded in any sort of feminist background academically and find it really doesn't interest me. I define fandom internally, based on how I see fandom defining itself. I love fan fiction. I love fandom. I love fandom history. Fan History is my expression of that love and one that a number of others share in the same place.

With that out of the way, time for the major part: The Organization for Transformative Works is basing some of their claims and plans on the history of fannish works: "We value our identity as a predominantly female community with a rich history of creativity and commentary."

Putting aside the issue of the gender exclusionary language for the moment (as that has been covered repeatly), let us focus on "predominantly female community with a rich history" and go back to their mission statement which states: "We preserve our fannish economy, values, and creative expression by protecting and nurturing our fellow fans, our work, our commentary, our history, and our identity while providing the broadest possible access to fannish activity for all fans."

OTW is defining the history of fannish works as predominantly female. What does this mean? It is rather unclear at this time. OTW is still not sure what they mean which makes this even difficult.

In reading their comments of the people affiliated with this organization, we can speculate as to the idealogical grounding for what will emerge: They see fandom coming into existence with Star Trek and starting with television and movie slash fanzines that gained popularity during the 1970s. This fits in the view of fandom that Kristina Busse, one of the major forces behind OTW's academic journal, has historically held in her comments where you're not a legitimate part of fandom unless you can trace your roots back to Kirk/Spock and failure to connect to that particular tradition means you're feral.

franzeska elevates personal experiences of her and others with the organization as a history representative of everyone else. When confronted with different histories or histories that do not match her own, she appears dismissive to me, saying "but it has not been my experience at all."

This dismissal, as franzeska and defining based not on research and fact, as kelly-holden did, but on what they want to believe, should be troublesome if you are looking for an objective view of fandom history that accurately reflects the history of our community. It elevates the personal experiences of a few select people to that and dangerously conflates these limited experiences to that of a whole population with out giving a rational for why the experiences of the chosen accurately reflect what is going on. (This problem is not helped by OTW not defining terms so that those who criticize them and those who support them can have a shared vocabulary from which to offer a critique.)

This practice of elevating personal experiences of a few while rejecting contrary personal experiences and scholarship which counters those experience is exclusionary in the extreme. One of their people high up in their organization, franzeska, has invalidated the fannish experiences of those in bandom, sports fandom, anime, cartoons and comics. It says that while the Organization for Transformative Works may make noises about not being exclusionary, their methodology and conceptual framework which provide the support structure for the organization, say differently: Bandom which does not share its roots with media fandom slash fanzines dating to the 1970s need not apply. Sports fandom need not apply. Transformative works which do not connect to slash fandom need not apply.

The Organization for Transformative Works has provided no history on their website to support their claims but what we can of infer how they understand history by what their major academics representatives and their board says. These members frequently couch their views on the history with qualified like "as I know it" or "this is my belief". The problem is that they are is frequently wrong. Fannish works predate the 1970s. They did not all grow out from the same cultural shared heritage. They were not all tied in to English speaking, Anglo-centric fandom. The concept of fandom predates Star Trek and Harry Potter was not the second biggest most influential fandom after Star Trek. Being wrong, failing to do basic research, engaging in historical revisionism, approaching our history with an agenda or a preconceived notion on how fannish communities engaged in creation fanworks, that serves the good of a few is not the world's smartest move. It undermines the credibility of the organization, of the individuals involved in this project and fandom. Trust me: Been there, done that, tried to learn from my mistakes and moved on... but being wrong has cost me. And it will cost the Organization for Transformative Works.

Now, what about fandom history?

The term fandom dates back to 1896 and was in reference to baseball fans. The term was used a number of times in magazines and newspapers during the next 40 years to describe groups of sports fans, radio and movie fans. The term didn't begin to get used in relation to science fiction until after it was was first applied to sports.

There were separate fan fiction/fannish works communities, operating in isolation from each other. This included professional wrestling fandom, which was dominated by women. Fiske, John. Researching Historical Broadcast Audiences: Female Fandom of Professional Wrestling, 1945-1960. Diss. Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 1997. 5 Apr. 2006. is well worth reading to learn more about that. It predates the whole slash zines of the 1970s. BandFic was being written and published in magazines like 16 during the 1960s and 1970s. The forces of the media encouraged this and teenage girls would send in their heterosexual, non-sexual stories for various contests and to be published. Some of the girls who disliked this wrote their own homoerotic stories in response that they shared amongst themselves. Comics fan fiction, which at times was in comic strip form rather than prose narrative, were operating during the 1970s and their were organized fan fiction contests. The Sherlock Holmes community had been actively engaging in pastiche, a form of fan fiction which operated on the fringes of legitimacy, since at least the 1930s and much of the membership was male. Anime fandom first started in Japan, with a Japanese speaking fan base. It was only later that Anime came to the attention of the Anglo audience, and by that time some of the terminology and cultural practices of Japanese fans were used by their English speaking cousins in fandom. The USSR and its satellites had their fandoms, existing behind the iron curtain. As their contact with western fandoms was limited, they developed their own cultural practices which still show differences from English fandoms even today.

During the 1970s, slash fanzines might have become dominant, published by a lot of and defining for a core audience but that absents a number of other things going on in communities that were connected to that community. Most of the fanzines that were coming out of fandoms of that era, which includes Doctor Who, Blake's 7, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dark Shadows to name a few, were not all about slash. There were a lot of fanzines which were newsletters, letterzines, reviewzines, gen fanfic, het fanfic, and more. The partial and incomplete list of Blake's 7 and Star Trek fanzines only hint at this. A number of these non-slash and non-fic oriented zines were created by men.

If we're revisiting slash, according to Mary Morris on FCA-L, men were writing Blake's 7 femslash with female pen names, which had its roots in women fan readers' views that men were unable to write female perspectives well. If a female pen name was used, the zine was much more likely to sell and the story was more likely to be read. This means that, if we're looking at history and trying to do historical ethnography work on female participation in fandom, names alone are not good enough to establish gender participation.

What communities were big and influential is a sticky, loaded question. Saying Harry Potter and Star Trek is overly simplistic. Yes, a lot of terms and practices came out of the Star Trek fandom. Yes, the Harry Potter fandom is huge and huger than most fandom. The question is how many of these Harry Potter fans are migrating to other fandoms? How influential are they in their new communities? Do their new communities already have existing cultural practices and norms? At some point soon, looking at FanFiction.Net, FanLib, MediaMiner.Org, AdultFanFiction.Net, Quizilla, anime will over take Harry Potter in terms of sheer production, helped along by their long history, their history of Anime conventions, the ready available new fan texts available in book and animated form. A lot of the big television fandoms, book fandoms, movie fandoms, those large and influential fandom communities are not necessarily influential when it comes to other groups like Anime. Sailor Moon, Digimon, Pokemon, Transformers, Gundam were all influential in Anime. That doesn't necessarily translate outside of that population. X-Files was hugely influential in the formation of current fandom. A lot of archiving practices, in media fandom, came out of it... and X-Files is the fandom that gave us FanFiction.Net. Good Charlotte, AFI and Mest were influential in ebandom but that didn't necessarily translate into being influential in rock based fanfic fandoms. Led Zeppelin and Duran Duran were comparatively large pre-net BandFic communities. They influenced some smaller bandom communities during the 1980s and 1990s. Unless you're grounded in the history, you're not going to know that. Unless you place some value in bandom as its own separate thing, you might not agree or see that. Star Wars was highly influential in some ways for being a reaction AGAINST what some saw as the overabundance of adult and slash material in the Star Trek fandom. On micro and macro levels, depending on your self ideation as a fan, your general knowledge of fandom, where you are and where you participated, the ability to see or agree with any statements regarding influence is just going to change which fandom you see as influential and large.

If you're interested in more history of fandom, check out Fan History and feel free to lend your voice in sharing our history. The more data we have, the more personal experiences we can integrate in, the more people we have fact checking, the better and more complete our own history will be.