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

Thanks for the pdf!

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

Having looked at the article, my question would be, are characters of color really the issue? The authors make a speculative leap- something I have a lot of sympathy for, but it seems like a lot of weight is placed on it without (at least at first glance) an acknowledgement that it *is* a leap- and say that *slash* should be viewed as self-insertion. If that's how they're looking at slash, so that a female writer is inserting herself into the text even in the absence of female characters, then one issue re race would surely be whether people of color are *writing* fan fiction (which, of course, they are). Must a person of color insert herself as a character of color?

There is a chapter in my still-unfinished book on Potter fandom about HP in Taiwan, which raises similar issues about ethnicity and the text to some they discuss. It's not a patch on the Indian case they discuss(I hadn't even heard about that!) but they could probably cite it. Email me if you want me to put them in touch with the author of the chapter- idlerat at gmail.

Re: Thanks for the pdf!

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. The way I put it is that they are using fandom/Mary Sues as a metaphor for an operation one can perform on mass culture, but that raises the question of whether it is an operation that *is* being performed with respect to race. (And slash becomes suspect as not liberating enough!)