Realism

[rivkat]

I’m interested in the “people who can verify I’m real” meme I’ve seen going around, connected to the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax. I’m trying to sort out my thoughts about it, because in many fannish cases I’m not sure why it’s relevant. I mean, if you’re performing “this is what an X looks like” online, then your “real”/offline identity or performance is likely to be relevant, and more so if you’re asking people to act or change beliefs based on your online performance. If you’re inserting yourself into a political movement and getting real activists involved in trying to help you, then yes, it’s relevant. If you’re asking for money, then yes, it’s relevant. If you’re asking people to meet you offline, then yes, it’s relevant. But a lot of people I read mostly post fannish stuff with occasional personal or even political content—and then I’m not sure how much offline identity means, especially when what you’re performing online is a privileged or locally privileged identity, like cis white American woman. Suppose I don’t have a partner or kids (to whom I occasionally refer)—does that change what my book reviews or stories mean? I kind of hope they speak for themselves (and I am certain that they reveal a lot more about who I am and/or who I think I am than I intend).

Flipping it around, would it matter to me if fans I think of as women were actually men? Would it matter to me if fans I think of as having kids/being pregnant didn’t or weren’t? In a lot of cases, probably not, if all they’re doing is performing a life. Then again, if I found out someone who performed being Jewish wasn’t—kind of like the sister in The Prince of Tides--that would skeeve me out.  There's something here about "always punch up," but I'm not sure how to get at it.

Anyway, solipsistically I assert that I am as real as these words.

Comments

[lotesse]

This is a really interesting point! - and I wonder if the meme's not in some way connected to the shift in internet identity politics over the last, idk, five years? Pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, I knew almost no one who ever used their legal name online, but now! Using a legal name carries a certain cachet nowadays. And fandom's this holdout space of anonymity that keeps having to push back against "real life" social networking "features" like the short-lived geographic location markers on lj.

[fanaddict]

Fandom may be the hold out for a reason. Let's hop on the way back machine... I was a really active member of the Sentinel fandom under my real name (using my grad school email - dear G*d was I naive) and so were many people (this was back in the dinosaur age of email lists). Over the years, I've seen most people in fandom drift into pseudonym use, certainly I did the first time I was having a suddenly contentious discussion with someone for no reason I understood and then I was privately warned she was the type who got offended easily and then "outed" people's fannish lives. I have absolutely no shame is liking fannish things, slash included, but it's not a discussion I want with, say, my mother-in-law...

Personally, I think even using your real name on non-fannish activity is risky because employers search for stuff like that these days and so many people have stuff google-able that wouldn't be good for potential employers to see.

I also think, to go back to the original post, that to me it's the ideas that should stand out, not the Big Name espousing the ideas. I intentionally "divorced" my previous RL identity despite at that time - 15 years ago, ack! - having a positive rep and being relatively well-known. My ideas should stand or fall on their own merits.

On the other hand, it can feel like betrayal if relationships go beyond fannish interaction and some significant detail is omitted/changed (obviously doing some sort of social experiment like the "Syrian Gay Girl" is appalling at all times). A friend was very emotionally invested with a guy online only to learn it was a woman pretending, who got in too deep emotionally and couldn't figure out how to get out. So certainly our responsibility as people not to harm others shouldn't be excised along with our RL names.

Anyway, Cogito ergo sum, or to paraphrase Descarte: I think, therefore I am. My ideas are proof enough of my existence I hope.

[rivkat]

Yes--I too used my real name very early on in listserv culture, whoops. And there are a lot of fine distinctions: pure pseud, or pseud plus very minimal info (I am female, I am American, etc.) I think can stand on its own, but then there's the risk that the interaction will change over time. It can be harmless to pretend a different identity (though I don't think it was ever harmless with Gay Girl in Damascus), but then what if you get involved with someone? That's a problem.

[vito_excalibur]

I was thinking about this. It's definitely less relevant in fandom, yes.

[zvi]

I haven't seen too many people asserting their existence, but those I have have been marked from the mediafandom default of cis white het currently able bodied female. And a lot of us have been making a lot of noise to assert our existence in fandom the past few years. So.

[rivkat]

Fair enough--my thoughts on this are far from clear, and my sense of who was doing this particular kind of verifiability assertion may be completely wrong. As I have other conversations about this, I realize that part of my reaction comes from the fact that some of the axes around which some of us identify aren't really "verifiable" by physical presentation, such as survivor status and mental illness.

Also, in this space, I trust identity representations by default. And I'm not sure how much work "X knows I'm really real" does, since I'm lazy enough that I wouldn't try to confirm that in almost all cases. And in the really big disasters, sometimes X is in on the gig, and sometimes X has innocently or not-so-innocently conflated "I have had multiple interactions with this person online over an extended period of time" with "I know this person is real." I'd never tell someone not to do it if they felt it appropriate. But I wouldn't want it to be a social default, either. But I could be wrong about that; I've been wrong before.

[zvi]

Additional thought: because this is a transnational space, there are many, many people in my social circle I presume I am never going to run into due to distance. However, the fact that I am not going to run into them doesn't mean that no one in our mutual online social circle is physically proximate to them, and, also, because being on the internet for social purposes by default indicates you are privileged on a global economic scale, even people whose normal base of operations are geographically distant from me sometimes make it to my local area, for broad (or even narrow) definitions of local.

I just don't think the internet is remote from embodied life in a way where your distinctions hold commonly true?

[rivkat]

I don't think the internet is remote from embodied life.

I think we may be making different intermediate assumptions, because I'm not sure we're talking about the same things. Are you saying that you or someone you know offline can often confirm the offline identity of someone you hang out with online, so verifiability is often possible? If so, we agree, except that I was trying to say that (1) I am including in my definition of "identity" things that might not be confirmable by meeting someone offline, and (2) in the truly deliberate manipulations, it often turns out that other people either get involved in the manipulations themselves or overstate how much they've actually been able to verify; I suspect the latter happens mostly by accident and is then hard to back down from. So both of those can destabilize verifiability.

[elements]

I think the meatspace veracity of someone's performed identity is necessary only when that person is trying to speak for that identity in some way. That could be on a very big level (I am the only out blogging lesbian in Syria) to smaller (Trust my advice about breastfeeding because I'm on my third kid and know how it's done) to one on one (Yes I am a guy and in love with you and we should totally meet up, er, someday). And the degree of impact on the world at large influences how much that authenticity matters. Yes, it's devastating and awful for the people involved in a performed-gender relationship gone awry, but it's between those two people. It's a whole different ballgame when you're trying to stand up for an experience, be it "this is what a gay male relationship is actually like from a person in one" or "this is my experience living in a war zone."

The main way this stuff seems to affect fandom most often is gender. I have significant sympathy for people with gender identities dissonant with their bodies using the internet to explore being taken at face value for who they feel they are inside, and really wish that philosophy were more pervasive in fandom. I've personally know of three cases of a woman performing being male online in fandom off the top of my head. One was a huge wank back when I was young in fandom, and the person was honestly trans or very genderqueer but people basically ran this person out of fandom over the whole "but he's *really* a woman!" thing without much recognition of that. The only person who I felt that truly betrayed was the person they'd been in an online relationship with, and even then it was only because they'd talked as if it was going to become a meatspace relationship. And in another case I think the person just got in over their head in terms of everything snowballing. Especially when gender is so fluid and performative, insisting that someone's body and meatspace lived identity match their online performed gender doesn't make much sense to me. But I would feel very differently if, say, Minotaur had turned out to be a ciswoman.

The only other real fandom problem I can think of is sockpuppets.

[elements]

Actually, now that I let myself think about all the wank I've seen (which I try to forget), there are a lot of other issues. I'm thinking about all the crap Harry Potter fandom went through in the early years of its being big. Things like fundraising drives, where you need to be sure that the person drumming up money is legit, were huge.

I've always had a bit of an extra level of trust, I guess, with people I've spent time with in person. But not just when I saw a body with their nametag at a con. When you've crashed on someone's couch and can't help but be aware of their real last name on the doorbell, it's a lot easier to feel OK sharing similar levels of detail back. I wouldn't list just anyone as someone I would vouch for as being not just real as in existing, but real as in being who they present themselves as. For example even though I've met you once, if it hadn't been in an RL context I wouldn't consider you someone I could vouch for. But even if I hadn't met you, I do know more and trust the judgment of other people who would vouch for you. But people who've lived in the same city with me for years, or who I've known through various transatlantic visits for nearly a decade, I could. And it would be up to the people taking my word for them as to whether they thought my word, and my standards for getting to it, were enough for them.

[rivkat]

I think we can trust people we've met too much, and a lot of things aren't necessarily verifiable by in-person meetings (e.g., what will this person do with the money?). I understand the desire for verifiability, but I'm not sure how well it intersects with some of the things we in fandom regularly care about.

[rivkat]

Good points--I think one indicator that often goes along with a harmful performance is the presence of sockpuppets, which showed up with the current "lesbian" blogger scandal too. I've read stories about women who thought they were in relationships with men who "interacted" with people in the men's families, friends, etc.--all sockpuppets.