I think fandom would be a far more tolerable place if people would have the basic understanding that the point of transformative work is to promote personal catharsis rather than collective social change.
So many, and I say so many, of the discourse posts seen here can be boiled down to “this trope does nothing for me as a woman / queer person / person of color, and therefore it is conservative, and therefore it’s bad (and if you like it you are being complicit in your own oppresion or something)” without taking into account that there’s a personal (and not just collective) level on which one navigates their own identities and experience oppression.
People have different individual needs to be supplied by the fiction they consume, and different methods to supply them. When you are working with a source material so scarce in actual representation such as mainstream media it’s only natural that our mechanisms to twist it around to make it more personally satisfactory would be flawed and not work for everyone. It’s okay. There’s no point in engaging in pissing contests about whose preferences are more woke when at the end of the day the reason we are all here, in fandom spaces, is because canon failed to completely fulfill us – as individuals and as minorities – so we decided to take matters to our own hands. It costs nothing to have good faith and assume that people with diverging tastes have their own personal reasons (that are no one’s business) to enjoy what they enjoy instead of jumping to the conclusion they are not as enlightened as you are.
I was with you ‘til you specified who this was aimed at: “woman / queer person / person of color.” If you’d been speaking about the need for space within fandom to allow “darkfic” or whatever, and the recent wave of people who use social justice language to enforce a Puritanical viewpoint, I’d have been on board. But this is not the first time you’ve said some stuff that sounds great until I realize you’re actually aiming it at marginalized people who’ve complained about bigotry in fandom.
And… no. You’re speaking as if there’s some kind of neutral ground to be held on the subject of bigotry. As if people who choose to “do nothing for” women/queer people/BIPoC are therefore not doing any harm themselves. But if you aren’t actively, constantly working against racism, misogyny, etc., you really are helping to perpetuate it. I can’t speak for fandom all over the world, but thanks to colonialism pretty much all of English-language fandom exists within hellishly bigoted societies. And all you have to do to be a bigot too is… just let it happen. It’s not a neutral choice. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
And sometimes people do need to work through their own bigotry for cathartic purposes; I recognize that. But by doing so, those people are causing harm to others, and they should recognize that – and do something about it. That doesn’t mean they can’t write their fic/draw their art/whatever, but it does mean that they need to consider more than their own personal catharsis before posting it. Nobody has the right to achieve their catharsis through someone else’s suffering. They least they can do is tag the fic to warn the other person of the danger (something lots of marginalized fans have asked for), or maybe post it privately and share it only with friends or upon request. If they can’t manage to work through their shit without hurting others, then they shouldn’t go unquestioned – in part because it’s not catharsis without reflection. The cathartic process includes recognizing one’s trauma, recognizing how that trauma is continuing to hurt the self and others, finding a way to purge it while minimizing further harm as much as possible, and thereby achieving a kind of relief or healing. That’s actually a place where marginalized people’s reactions to a fanwork can help with catharsis, because if the creator doesn’t realize the harm they’re doing, getting called out might hold up a mirror so they’ll understand, then hopefully get better. If they listen, and don’t just get defensive.
But to just… hurt people? In public, without attempts to warn, mitigate, reflect, or grow? That is not okay. That ain’t just “diverging tastes,” and it’s the exact opposite of catharsis. That’s sociopathy, with a side of malice or just selfishness. And since people also need to have the basic understanding that fandom is a social space, it would be a lot more tolerable if people recognized boundaries between their personal catharsis needs, and other people’s safety and humanity.
You make excellent points but none of them actually apply to my original post, because my post was not about bigoted fic. It’s about minorities policing other minorities on liking stuff perceived as “not progressive” or “conservative”. It’s about lesbians telling other lesbians that if they mostly ship m/f or m/m over f/f they must have internalized lesbophobia (when maybe they just feel alienated with how f/f ships are generally written and prefers to explore their queerness via a male character), it’s about women lecturing other women that if they like villain/heroine ships it’s because they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy into believing it’s their job to rehabilitate bad men (when maybe it’s a self-reconciliation fantasy where they see themselves as both parts?), it’s about trans people telling other trans people that liking trans characters who are shapeshifters is perpetuating the stigma against trans bodies (when some trans people just enjoy the fantasy of changing their bodies at will), it’s about that disabled woman who made a post about how the “princess in the tower” is cathartic to her because it reframes her immobility as worthy of care rather than a liability, only to have a bunch of presumably able bodied women lecture her on how that trope is sexist and never empowering and she should unpack that. it’s about how, growing up emotionally neglected, I too find comfort in the damsel in distress trope because it makes me feel worthy of being protected, but if I say it out loud I get ten randos telling me it’s just internalized misogyny.
this post is about minorities finding something worthy on what is usually considered imperfect representation and other minorities policing them under the assumption that just because a thing does not feel empowering for them as minorities then it’s inherently not empowering and bad and no one can ever get something good out of it and if another person of the same marginalized group happens to like it is because of internalized -ism against their own group. without taking into account that marginalized groups are not a monolith and people have different ways of experiencing their own identities and each of us have different needs when it comes to explore and relate to our identities. also it’s about not assuming what someone is getting from the fiction they like until you get to hear why.
again: it’s not about people writing marginalized identities they don’t have. is about minorities writing and consuming content about themselves and being policed if such content is perceived as not groundbreaking enough.
