This is what I mean when I say "fans pretend that they're powerless and have no choice about how they interact with canon/fandom to abdicate responsibility":
...but fanwork creators are not helpless, passive mirrors being held up to canon. We are active participants in responding to and reshaping the narratives that we have chosen to consume/buy from professional creatives and corporations.
Heteronormativity is also a story "we're told from infancy." Heterormativity is ALSO a "structure of power that we live and breathe and eat and sleep within... [a] political and social structure that defines our worlds."
AND YET we challenge that ALL THE TIME, as fans! Why does heteronormativity get to be an exception while misogyny, white supremacy, and other forms of bigotry get a pass?
The person I screenshotted has a WHOLE PHD and yet can't imagine fandom as any better than sheeple being led around by our noses and forced to drink from the well of bigotry.
Never MIND that there's actually a lot of media out there for fandom to "learn other narratives from" featuring women &/or PoC - but when given those opportunities, fandom either ignores that media or manages to make those stories about White Guy Bystander #3 ANYway. Or "this is really cool world building, what if we ignored the female protagonists / protagonists of color and used it as a neat au setting for our white male blorbos instead!"
Fandom is not passive. Fandom makes ACTIVE CHOICES.
And denying our agency wrt bigotry while ALSO celebrating fandom as a ~queer feminist utopia~ where we ~reclaim popular narratives~ and ~rewrite them according to our wildest whims~ is just exposing what our priorities REALLY are. It exposes what we think is immutable about society, what's "too hard" or "impossible" to challenge (even internally), and what we think is worth actively resisting.
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
kaledo-art
jacobvanloon
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
