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

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

It's interesting, to your point, that they're using race as difference given the, hm, liminal to our typical categorization schema of the characters and/or actors. Rachel Luttrell is pretty pale-skinned and her features aren't particularly ethnic -- especially given the wig, I would have guessed she was Chicana if someone had asked when I first started watching the show. I also would have pegged Jason Momoa as mixed-race, since he doesn't look stereotypically black -- and, in fact, he isn't black, he's either Hawaiian or more generally Pacific Island in his heritage, I thankfully haven't stored that information to long-term memory.

So, to sum up my blathering, they're using race as a marker of difference, but using less-specific/less-common racial markers as the identifiers of that difference.

It's an interesting dance -- does Teal'c at-sign on his forehead make Christopher Judge seem less black as well? (I don't think so, and tend to get weirded out at the racial coding of the Jaffa from the little of SG1 that I know, but that's another post.)

[ladyjax.livejournal.com]

Rachel Luttrell is pretty pale-skinned and her features aren't particularly ethnic -- especially given the wig, I would have guessed she was Chicana if someone had asked when I first started watching the show.

Interesting because the first time I saw Teyla I immediately thought she looked like some of my cousins who are mixed. Meeting Rachel in person I realized she's not all that pale.

As far as Teyla's hair goes, this season I figure a sister on the expedition hooked her up with some Dark and Lovely and they had a beauty session. ;)

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

this season I figure a sister on the expedition hooked her up with some Dark and Lovely and they had a beauty session

That one, you *have* to write! :)