Fansplaining and the way Professional White Fangirls Betray Us
The year was 2009. Early on, parts of fandom on livejournal overlapped with the pro SFF crowd also on there, and got embroiled in Racefail--a discussion that saw a lot of non-white fans speaking up and making connections between themselves for the first time. It also showed a lot of white people ass. A LOT of it. And then towards the end of the year, astolat and co launched the open beta of Archive of Our Own--a launch plagued with the voices of fans pointing out the way that non-white fans and fandoms were structurally excluded from it.
Those discussions never stopped. Fans of colour have been burnt out and driven away, and been silenced, but the basic point continues to be made over and over and over again by non-white fans who find enough energy in community to keep speaking up--the point that the white architects of fandom are invested in whiteness.
I bring up this little historical backgrounder because in 2009 Aja Romano was a veteran of numerous fandom wanks but not yet a pro journalist, Flourish Klink having helped found FictionAlley was a grad student with Henry Jenkins, Elizabeth Minkel was lurking silently in fandom, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw was on LJ a couple of years from starting fashion blogging and Anne Jamison had already been teaching fanfic in her college classes. (I don't know what Lin Codega was up to in 2009 because I suspect they are from a younger generation.)
These are all white people who have made a career from fandom. Who have been inside fandom for long enough to understand the dynamics. And who proudly talk about how cool fannishness, how subversive, how liberatory etc etc.
All of these people are friends, who have also worked professionally together. Most of them have made token gestures, in their professional work, at addressing racism in fandom. They will link to profiles of sexual harassers and proclaim support for survivors. They will shake their heads disapprovingly at the idea of fans trying to make money from fannish art.
But they don't ever want to actually shake the boat that they are professionally sailing in, and that means, as a professional fan, that they ally themselves not just with the dominant white fangirl, but also often enough, with the dominal white media creator.
All of which is background to place into context the absolute rage I felt when I saw opened the newsletter that Elizabeth and Gavia curate for fanfic recs, to see them recommending an essay by Anne, commissioned for the website that Flourish and Elizabeth founded and which is currently edited by them, Aja and Lin.
It's an essay, you see, where Anne opens her first paragraph by explaining how she's planning to funnel more money towards serial rapist Neil Gaiman by assigning a book he co-wrote for a college class she teaches.
Not that Anne ever descripes Neil as a rapist of multiple women, of course. She calls him "Former beloved icon and current pariah". One cannot, I suppose, expect a white American, even a professor of literature, to know that Dalits from the Paraiyar caste object to the useage of the word because of it's casteist connotations. One could, though, have thought that describing a sexual harasser through the lens of some of the (minimal) consequences he has faced, while, in fact, doing the opposite of shunning him, is something someone steeping in the feminism of fandom might have thought better of. Much less trivialise his crimes as "Neil Gaiman’s bad behavior".
But clearly not. Because Anne goes on to straight up misreport, and claim that Neil Gaiman exited Good Omen's Season 3 when in fact he is credited as "created for television by", "written for television by", "teleplay by" and "television story by". Of the three writers credited for for the teleplay (which is the final version of the script that made it to screen), sexual assaulter Neil Gaiman is one third of them. (The other two being white men who are friends of his and have made no move to speak up in solidarity with Neil's victims.)
Neil Gaiman is going to be making money from Good Omens, and Anne and her supportive group of editor pals all think this is great! So much so that they are happy promoting the show by publishing an essay which argues, in an act of passive voice that mirrors the NYT writing on Israeli war crimes, that the show pulled a Jesus and sacrificed itself for the sake of fans. Anne mendaciously credits the show's (terrible) plot to some amorphous collage of a female director and the Terry Pratechett estate, because apparently scripts are created through vibes.
Anne tries to be a thoughtful critique by writing howlers like "In one poignant example, the book version of Good Omens fandom often imagined Aziraphale and Crowley as characters of color before the casting of Sheen and Tennant effectively overpowered that narrative." LOL. Often? OFTEN?! I have pdfs saved of fics posted on livejournal from back when Gaiman and Pratchet both sneered at shippers, and in almost all of them, the characters are white. Of course they are. Fangirls will defend white cock with a ferocity they apply to no other demographic, and that's a part of what this essay is doing. Anne talks about how she's planning to continue to teach the book and write fanfic for the show because lalala isn't it all just glorious, that a show was somehow washed of the creator's sins and now belongs to the fans.
She writes about asexual fans who might have been let down by the explicit romance in the show, and shippers who might have been let down by the absence of a final kiss, and ageist fans who are too young and stupid to appreciate old man yaoi. In all those words, she does not once, ONCE mention the vast number of fans who have spoken up demanding boycotts of the show in support of rapist Neil Gaiman's victims. She does not ONCE mention that it was the grassroots level mobilisation of fans that kept the story alive after it first broke, and that raised the profile enough to force establishment players--authors, publishers, media makers--to publicly distance themselves from the Gaiman profit machinery. She does not ONCE mention that Gaiman is using his millions to sue his victims, and that therefore there is a direct link between supporting an IP he is earning profit from, and causing harm to survivors of sexual violence, many of whom were fangirls! Who were preyed upon by Gaiman because he knew how to manipulate fans and build fannish credibility! Apparently a portrait of Terry Pratchett in a hat is what fans need to feel safe and happy, not a single solitary statement in unequivocal support of the victims, which neither Rob Wilkins, Rhianna Pratchett, David Tennant or Michael Sheen have made.
It's just one essay, sure, amidst a swirl of hot takes by writers seeking a job and fans making Good Omens trend on tumblr. But it is instructive to see the infrastructure of professional fangirls mobilised in its production. These supposedly well-educated, well-read, well-connected white friends who think of themselves as liberal and anti-racist and feminist and fair, and good representatives of fandom at large.
Which fans, though? The ones who don't ever want to rock the boat, because it is both entertaining and profitable to have one hand holding on to the dominant canon creators? The ones who will prioritise the creativity of white men over any real world harm they cause anyone else?
They call themselves fansplainers. Perhaps they should be held to account and explain themselves.
