Gender wank
From Fan History Wiki
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Gender is an issue that continually comes up in fandom because of historical inadequacies and differences that pre-date the Internet. This includes different gender compositions in fan communities, dominance of certain corners by one gender over another, lack of sensitivity to gender issues in general.
In the context of this article, Gender wank refers to issues and discussions regarding gender in fandom that contributors think have been historically important in discussing gender in fandom, or where people have been genuinely wanky regarding gender related issues in fandom.
[edit] Media fandom
Media fandom has frequently been characterized as female.
[edit] Enterprising Women
"Bacon-Smith also overgeneralizes with regard to the gender of fans, declining entirely to address the phenomenon of male participation in media fandom. Although it is true that men make up a minority of fanzine editors and contributors, their participation is nonetheless significant and should not be ignored. Some of Bacon-Smith's analyses pertain specifically to the psychological and social qualities of women; because not all fans are women, her analyses cannot be applied to fandom as a whole." [1]
[edit] FanLib
FanLib was a fan fiction archive founded in April 2007. The company was founded by Chris Williams and most of their visible employees were characterized as being male. Some members of media fandom complained about the policies on FanLib, that the site existed and that the creators did not understand why members of the fan community opposed FanLib. Some of this was characterized as a difference in gender, that the male owners of FanLib did not understand female fan spaces.
[edit] Science fiction
Science fiction has been a historically male community, with Mary Ellen Curtin putting estimates of the male representation of the fandom at ninety percent during the 1970s. Market forces reacted to this over representation of males by publishing female authors using initials and not revealing much about the author or some other way to not highlight that some authors were female. This started to massively change during the 1990s and 2000s, when readership demographics began to change. These changes have not always been pleasant, leading to a number of kerfluffles.
[edit] Race Fail 2009
One of the underlying issues in Race Fail 2009 was gender. The media fandom side was frequently characterized as female. The science fiction fandom was frequently characters as male. This led to additional tensions during the situation.
[edit] Star Wars
In 2005, Henry Jenkins said in an essay that women primarily do fan fiction while men primarily do fan vids and create fan movies. [2] Those comments were heavily discussed, some times angrily, in the Star Wars fandom as some fans did not appreciate what they saw as an over generalization on the part of Henry Jenkins. [3]
[edit] WisCon
At WisCon 33, there was controversy over the moderation of the panel titled Take Back the SciFi, which was to focus on the use of rape and sexual assault in science fiction writing and the influence of rape culture in the genre. An official statement was offered by the convention after the fact, addressing how male sexual assault and victims were marginalized in the discussion.[4],[5],[6],[7]
See Wiscon 33 Gender Kerfluffle for more information.
[edit] "The War on Science Fiction"
On October 9, 2009, a blogger by the name of Pro-male/Anti-feminist Tech posted an entry at The Spearhead entitled "The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minsky".[8] The posting claimed that science fiction was traditionally a "very male form of fiction" and bemoaned the increasing presence of women in the field and the supposed "feminizing" of the genre. Popular writer Joss Whedon was singled out as a "mangina", the reimagined version of Battlestar Galactica was criticized for "castrating" male characters, and the presence of women in science fiction was also blamed for discouraging men from entering scientific fields as they had in the past.
By October 12, the blog was beginning to be noticed and commented upon by others in professional writing circuits as well as media fandom on LiveJournal, seemingly leading to another round of Fail debates and kerfluffling.
See The War on Science Fiction for more information.
[edit] Slash
There has been a number of wanks related to gender and slash. Some of the major themes of these wanks take both sides of an issue that could be considered feminist:
- The over abundance of slash is misogynistic because people are refusing to write heterosexual or gen fic. They are not honoring strong female characters that would celebrate being a woman.
- Slash is inherently feminist because the communities involved are dominated by women, who are writing for other women in safe places for women.
[edit] External links
This section needs more information.
