Help me, Obi-Fan!

[rivkat]

Okay, so I am going to this conference, and Madhavi Sunder and Anupam Chander have a paper, The Right to Mary Sue (28 pages long, pdf), which will be published in a major law review.  They use Mary Sue as a shorthand for much fan fiction, and also they argue that self-insertion into copyrighted works is a good thing.  I am very sympathetic to their argument towards the rehabilitation of Mary Sue, though I have serious doubts about using her as the representative creation of fan fiction.  Part of this may well be the usual fear that fandom will be misrepresented or misunderstood by outsiders.  Chander & Sunder are very sympathetic – in fact, I think they overstate the liberatory potential of fan fiction – but there’s always that worry.

Anyway, I have an opportunity to offer comments, and I have plenty about Mary Sue as feminist heroine and slash as feminist liberation of the original text.  What I lack, shamefully, is a comparable ability to discuss race in fan fiction/media fandom.  Chander & Sunder argue that fan fiction allows marginalized groups to insert themselves in the text or reorganize the narrative around themselves, and couple that with discussion of the underrepresentation/misrepresentation of characters of color in TV/movies, but how often does that happen with race?  We have plenty of gender-swaps; does anyone know of a race-swap story?  Any good discussion of Teyla and Ronon as characters of color in SGA fanfic? 

Things I already know I want to show them: Mimisere’s Jesus Walks (found a copy on YouTube, by the way; that result came up before any LJ result).  Remember Us, the archive.  (No SGA section, interestingly.)  Coffeeandink from 2002.  Them Mean Ol’, Low-Down, Lando Calrissian Blues.  Blaise Zabini is black (oh darn, am I going to have to explain FandomWank to them?).

I have been reading cultural appropriation posts with interest, but I didn’t realize I’d need to try to do some outreach.  So if anyone has links to good discussions of race in fandom that could help explain us – the good and the bad – to some smart, capable people, I’d really appreciate it. 

Comments

[monimala.livejournal.com]

Oh my God.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to just randomly spam your LJ, but I KNOW Anupam Chander and I believe Madhavi is his wife (whom I've never met)! LOL! His family and mine go way back. I haven't seen him since I was a kid and I had no idea that his area of legal expertise forayed into things like the copyrighting of fan fiction and that he was interested in the cultural implications of it. It's truly a small world. That's fascinating.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

They're wonderful folks. They both do intellectual property, and they're fan-types but not in fandom, so that's how they got into it, I think.

[monimala.livejournal.com]

I'm on the verge of e-mailing Anupam to say "Hi, longtime no see!" Fan fiction is a huge debate in intellectual property law these days isn't it? So, I guess it makes sense.