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I feel very weird about the stuff getting thrown around about the rich white milieu of DC-area private schools in the 1980s, because I went to one of them (not the ones in the news) and while I have no doubt that bad stuff did happen at ours, it's clear that our reputation as the progressive, granola-y, lefty option was deserved.
The Darker Side of Slash Fan Fiction: Essays on Power, Consent and the Body, ed. Ashton Spacey: Fandom can address racism, misogyny, and ableism, but it can also contain those things, and there’s a lot of slash that contains disturbing topics, including violence, dub-con, and A/B/O where biological differences as destiny is fetishized rather than criticized. These essays go into some of these complexities, generally with fandom-positive views overall. From an essay on asexuality in slash: “when sex is out of the picture, the core of slash fiction is all still about equality; about placing the conversation about body, relationship, power and love in a setting where heteronormative patriarchy cannot reach.” I liked the essay about the futanari genre originating in Japan, in which a person assigned female at birth also has or gets a penis/phallus without changing her gender identification, often retaining a vagina. “Futanari as a trope creates a space in which the queering of bodies allows for a wider scope of female homoerotic imaginations at the same time as it reinforces a heteronormative paradigm of power, as articulated through the privileging of the penis in sexual actions. Futanari simultaneously queers the body and resists queering symbolic power.” I also liked the dub-con essay; though there’s nor really much in there that isn’t also on Tumblr, it’s nice to have another academic essay work through the complexities of a fantasy whose meta-structure is the author/reader’s control over a diegetic lack of control: “What may be at the heart of dub-con’s appeal is the conflict between the erotics and anxieties of uncertainty.” Also, “dub-con makes no attempt to hide the contradictions between what we find erotic and what we believe is acceptable. The depicted relationship is usually unequal and deeply problematic, and while the scenario may be presented as culturally normal within the context of the story [here I think is mostly a reference to A/B/O], a dub-con narrative does not allow a reader to believe that this is fair or correct…. Every dub-con narrative explores not only the murky waters of consent in fan fiction …, but the very nature of consent itself nd the myriad ways in which it is obtained, ignored or abused.”
I have to object to the A/B/O essay’s argument that the initial A/B/O trope comes from Amok Time in ST:TOS, in which Spock “is a slave to his biological urges” and the episode hangs on biological determinism and “a biological imperative that the characters cannot escape.” I’m ok with the geneaology, but a key plot point of Amok Time is that Spock need not, in fact, mate or die; he does neither (but rather lives long and prospers). Watch for the contradiction in this bit: “If we think back to Amok Time it is obvious that the female T’Pring takes the role of the omega of the episode, with Kirk and Spock acting as two opposing alphas … Kirk … remains the alpha of the USS Enterprise, whereas Spock continues as his second in command (beta), or, as some could argue, as his omega. This inherent inequality is crucial in A/B/O slash fiction; ruled and defined by their biological roles, human alphas and omegas traditionally interact in an inflexible [way].” The genius of deterministic fantasy is that it makes us see biological destiny even when its absence is staring us in the face, and the essay’s slippage on this point I think says something about the attractions of A/B/O, though I too find far too many examples of the genre fetishizing and accepting uncritically this supposed biological imperative. Culture is regularly harder to change or see through than nature!
Mark Engler & Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century: Both an intellectual history of strategic nonviolence and a tour through what makes it in/effective, this is a timely read. To win, activists don’t need to convert their direct opponents, and it can be counterproductive to try to love your enemy; instead, you convince others to support you by provoking conflicts that make onlookers sympathize and join. The authors contrast the organization ideology, as theorized by Saul Alinsky, that looks to build political strength within existing structures and sustain itself through small victories on concrete policy issues, with the movement ideology, which looks to create transformational change, as theorized by Frances Fox Piven. Piven argues that poor people especially have few resources for regular political activism; their power instead largely comes from the ability to withdraw consent and disrupt the regular operations of the system—rent strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, parades through streets. More modern theorists include Erica Chenoweth, who has calculated that active engagement of 3.5 percent of the population is enough to make big social changes. Building that committed minority has to be a priority; it’s through them that movements change public opinion. Active engagement means (1) showing up for marches, phone banks, etc.; (2) voting and prioritizing the movement’s issues in voting; and (3) persuading others through conversation/argument/action in whatever way is available to them.
The goal isn’t to persuade everyone, especially not with kindness—ACT UP, for example, was offensive to many (they interrupted meetings and threw blood on people) but still put AIDS on the public agenda, and a majority of whites thought that the Birmingham protests were a bad idea. ACT UP’s outrageous tactics kept the movement in the public eye, exposing the fundamental injustices of official policy, which made the backlash ultimately less important than the cultural change. Indeed, backlash was part of a necessary polarization in which fence-sitters decided which way they were going to jump, activists became more commmitted, and opponents also became more extreme and isolated from the mainstream. Having a radical group also made the moderate groups seem more reasonable. (The scary thing is how much of this the right in the US has understood, I hope not too late for us; post-November 2016, it’s pretty distressing now to read how conservatives are in an “impossible bind” because anti-immigrant statements energize the base but turn off more mainstream voters.)
It was particularly interesting to read about contemporary activists’ reactions to MLK in Birmingham and Gandhi’s Salt March—in both cases, they accepted tiny substantive concessions and activists thought these were defeats, but the effect on the public agenda vastly overwhelmed the minimal substance. The perception of success can be more important than success itself, which is why it can be useful for the movement to set and exceed its own goals (X marchers, a bigger march next year, etc.). Media coverage matters a lot, too. Successfully grabbing the spotlight often requires disruption of the usual, sacrifice of some sort by the protestors (such as going to jail; suffering makes onlookers pick a side and galvanizes previously lukewarm supporters), and escalation (bigger protests, bigger demands). This can produce serious injuries or even deaths, but as one advocate of strategic nonviolent protest pointed out, “Ché Guevara didn’t abandon guerilla warfare because people were getting killed.” Helpful to all of this is a “culture of mass training,” where new members are instructed on the relevant principles. Bill Moyers, believe it or not, also wrote about the importance of psychology: activists have to feel like they’re doing something, especially in the down times after big protests where the euphoria has dwindled.
Movements that use violence are empirically substantially less likely to succeed in the long term, but there’s an important caveat: what matters is whether the wider society considers an action to be violent. And we know which groups get the benefit of the doubt about whether they’re violent and which are perceived as violent or incipiently violent just because they exist in public. The authors argue that because violence can taint an entire cause, it’s not a good idea to mix and match tactics. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be more radical subsets of activists—ACT UP wasn’t violent, it was just a lot more confrontational.
How do you go from movement to lasting change? Not everyone can, as Egyptian protestors discovered to their sorrow. The authors suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood, though well established as opposition, didn’t lead the protests against Mubarak because they were doing ok under the existing system—they had something to lose by being more confrontational. But once Mubarak was gone, the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational strength allowed it to influence the new governing bodies that were put into place.
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin:A study of Putin’s various personae as he maintains power, less focused on biographical facts than on how Putin governs and the intellectual background of the kinds of things he says and does. Putin allows elections; they’re not free and fair but they are supposed to maintain the pretense of consent, though the authors suggest this won’t work forever. All the things done to destabilize Western democracies were first tested and refined in Russia, particularly heavy media manipulation and pollution of the information environment so that people wouldn’t trust anything and would become indifferent to politics. They argue that Putin is fundamentally a statist—someone who believes in the state as an entity to which the people owe loyalty, but which does not owe them protection. Instead, the state protects Russia as a whole, not Russians—and in particular, Putin wants a multiethnic Russian state, though he’s been willing to coopt ethnic nationalists to serve his interests.
Private companies, too, need to be enough under the control of the state that they can be used to serve state interests, and not allowed to plunder without restraint. Plunder with restraint is fine, and is in fact extremely useful because it means that Putin has evidence that can be used to bring down any oligarch who goes against him; Putin’s version of capitalism is about having the right connections in government, not about competing to provide the best/cheapest things to customers. Putin invested heavily in getting good information about private companies, which meant that they could be made to pay their taxes—an innovation in post-Soviet Russia—but also that they were vulnerable to government pressure. He got into power, the authors argue, in part because he presented himself to the then-battling oligarchs as someone who could be an honest broker among them, who would not dispossess them as long as they played ball.
The oil boom let Putin hand out enough goodies for this to work well, though the authors doubt whether it is sustainable in the long term, especially since younger Russians tend not to have as much of a survivalist orientation as Putin and others like him who were much closer to the horrors (and ultimate triumphs through suffering) of WWII. The structural problem with Putin’s rule of consolidated power held together by the risk of blackmail is that it just can’t work on a scale as large as the Russian state over time. The system is too large, and he can’t oversee everything but no one else has the authority to act definitively even if they appear to do so based on the formal law. Everyone distrusts almost everyone else; Putin only trusts people he’s known for a very long time who’ve proven their ability to get results. But that’s a recipe for stagnation. There’s no new generation learning the ropes as they come up, no institutionalized system for transferring power even at the mid-level. And the system is also based on putting everyone powerful at risk of losing everything if they misbehave—“everyone’s wealth is deliberately tainted. Rumors or stories in the press about corruption can be used to bring people to heel, to curb their political or personal ambitions, and to remind everyone else of how much they have to lose. Everyone in the system is depicted as dirty.” We shouldn’t be surprised, the authors note, that people in the inner circle try very hard to get their money and their families out of Russia, where it’s harder to hurt them.
The Darker Side of Slash Fan Fiction: Essays on Power, Consent and the Body, ed. Ashton Spacey: Fandom can address racism, misogyny, and ableism, but it can also contain those things, and there’s a lot of slash that contains disturbing topics, including violence, dub-con, and A/B/O where biological differences as destiny is fetishized rather than criticized. These essays go into some of these complexities, generally with fandom-positive views overall. From an essay on asexuality in slash: “when sex is out of the picture, the core of slash fiction is all still about equality; about placing the conversation about body, relationship, power and love in a setting where heteronormative patriarchy cannot reach.” I liked the essay about the futanari genre originating in Japan, in which a person assigned female at birth also has or gets a penis/phallus without changing her gender identification, often retaining a vagina. “Futanari as a trope creates a space in which the queering of bodies allows for a wider scope of female homoerotic imaginations at the same time as it reinforces a heteronormative paradigm of power, as articulated through the privileging of the penis in sexual actions. Futanari simultaneously queers the body and resists queering symbolic power.” I also liked the dub-con essay; though there’s nor really much in there that isn’t also on Tumblr, it’s nice to have another academic essay work through the complexities of a fantasy whose meta-structure is the author/reader’s control over a diegetic lack of control: “What may be at the heart of dub-con’s appeal is the conflict between the erotics and anxieties of uncertainty.” Also, “dub-con makes no attempt to hide the contradictions between what we find erotic and what we believe is acceptable. The depicted relationship is usually unequal and deeply problematic, and while the scenario may be presented as culturally normal within the context of the story [here I think is mostly a reference to A/B/O], a dub-con narrative does not allow a reader to believe that this is fair or correct…. Every dub-con narrative explores not only the murky waters of consent in fan fiction …, but the very nature of consent itself nd the myriad ways in which it is obtained, ignored or abused.”
I have to object to the A/B/O essay’s argument that the initial A/B/O trope comes from Amok Time in ST:TOS, in which Spock “is a slave to his biological urges” and the episode hangs on biological determinism and “a biological imperative that the characters cannot escape.” I’m ok with the geneaology, but a key plot point of Amok Time is that Spock need not, in fact, mate or die; he does neither (but rather lives long and prospers). Watch for the contradiction in this bit: “If we think back to Amok Time it is obvious that the female T’Pring takes the role of the omega of the episode, with Kirk and Spock acting as two opposing alphas … Kirk … remains the alpha of the USS Enterprise, whereas Spock continues as his second in command (beta), or, as some could argue, as his omega. This inherent inequality is crucial in A/B/O slash fiction; ruled and defined by their biological roles, human alphas and omegas traditionally interact in an inflexible [way].” The genius of deterministic fantasy is that it makes us see biological destiny even when its absence is staring us in the face, and the essay’s slippage on this point I think says something about the attractions of A/B/O, though I too find far too many examples of the genre fetishizing and accepting uncritically this supposed biological imperative. Culture is regularly harder to change or see through than nature!
Mark Engler & Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century: Both an intellectual history of strategic nonviolence and a tour through what makes it in/effective, this is a timely read. To win, activists don’t need to convert their direct opponents, and it can be counterproductive to try to love your enemy; instead, you convince others to support you by provoking conflicts that make onlookers sympathize and join. The authors contrast the organization ideology, as theorized by Saul Alinsky, that looks to build political strength within existing structures and sustain itself through small victories on concrete policy issues, with the movement ideology, which looks to create transformational change, as theorized by Frances Fox Piven. Piven argues that poor people especially have few resources for regular political activism; their power instead largely comes from the ability to withdraw consent and disrupt the regular operations of the system—rent strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, parades through streets. More modern theorists include Erica Chenoweth, who has calculated that active engagement of 3.5 percent of the population is enough to make big social changes. Building that committed minority has to be a priority; it’s through them that movements change public opinion. Active engagement means (1) showing up for marches, phone banks, etc.; (2) voting and prioritizing the movement’s issues in voting; and (3) persuading others through conversation/argument/action in whatever way is available to them.
The goal isn’t to persuade everyone, especially not with kindness—ACT UP, for example, was offensive to many (they interrupted meetings and threw blood on people) but still put AIDS on the public agenda, and a majority of whites thought that the Birmingham protests were a bad idea. ACT UP’s outrageous tactics kept the movement in the public eye, exposing the fundamental injustices of official policy, which made the backlash ultimately less important than the cultural change. Indeed, backlash was part of a necessary polarization in which fence-sitters decided which way they were going to jump, activists became more commmitted, and opponents also became more extreme and isolated from the mainstream. Having a radical group also made the moderate groups seem more reasonable. (The scary thing is how much of this the right in the US has understood, I hope not too late for us; post-November 2016, it’s pretty distressing now to read how conservatives are in an “impossible bind” because anti-immigrant statements energize the base but turn off more mainstream voters.)
It was particularly interesting to read about contemporary activists’ reactions to MLK in Birmingham and Gandhi’s Salt March—in both cases, they accepted tiny substantive concessions and activists thought these were defeats, but the effect on the public agenda vastly overwhelmed the minimal substance. The perception of success can be more important than success itself, which is why it can be useful for the movement to set and exceed its own goals (X marchers, a bigger march next year, etc.). Media coverage matters a lot, too. Successfully grabbing the spotlight often requires disruption of the usual, sacrifice of some sort by the protestors (such as going to jail; suffering makes onlookers pick a side and galvanizes previously lukewarm supporters), and escalation (bigger protests, bigger demands). This can produce serious injuries or even deaths, but as one advocate of strategic nonviolent protest pointed out, “Ché Guevara didn’t abandon guerilla warfare because people were getting killed.” Helpful to all of this is a “culture of mass training,” where new members are instructed on the relevant principles. Bill Moyers, believe it or not, also wrote about the importance of psychology: activists have to feel like they’re doing something, especially in the down times after big protests where the euphoria has dwindled.
Movements that use violence are empirically substantially less likely to succeed in the long term, but there’s an important caveat: what matters is whether the wider society considers an action to be violent. And we know which groups get the benefit of the doubt about whether they’re violent and which are perceived as violent or incipiently violent just because they exist in public. The authors argue that because violence can taint an entire cause, it’s not a good idea to mix and match tactics. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be more radical subsets of activists—ACT UP wasn’t violent, it was just a lot more confrontational.
How do you go from movement to lasting change? Not everyone can, as Egyptian protestors discovered to their sorrow. The authors suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood, though well established as opposition, didn’t lead the protests against Mubarak because they were doing ok under the existing system—they had something to lose by being more confrontational. But once Mubarak was gone, the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational strength allowed it to influence the new governing bodies that were put into place.
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin:A study of Putin’s various personae as he maintains power, less focused on biographical facts than on how Putin governs and the intellectual background of the kinds of things he says and does. Putin allows elections; they’re not free and fair but they are supposed to maintain the pretense of consent, though the authors suggest this won’t work forever. All the things done to destabilize Western democracies were first tested and refined in Russia, particularly heavy media manipulation and pollution of the information environment so that people wouldn’t trust anything and would become indifferent to politics. They argue that Putin is fundamentally a statist—someone who believes in the state as an entity to which the people owe loyalty, but which does not owe them protection. Instead, the state protects Russia as a whole, not Russians—and in particular, Putin wants a multiethnic Russian state, though he’s been willing to coopt ethnic nationalists to serve his interests.
Private companies, too, need to be enough under the control of the state that they can be used to serve state interests, and not allowed to plunder without restraint. Plunder with restraint is fine, and is in fact extremely useful because it means that Putin has evidence that can be used to bring down any oligarch who goes against him; Putin’s version of capitalism is about having the right connections in government, not about competing to provide the best/cheapest things to customers. Putin invested heavily in getting good information about private companies, which meant that they could be made to pay their taxes—an innovation in post-Soviet Russia—but also that they were vulnerable to government pressure. He got into power, the authors argue, in part because he presented himself to the then-battling oligarchs as someone who could be an honest broker among them, who would not dispossess them as long as they played ball.
The oil boom let Putin hand out enough goodies for this to work well, though the authors doubt whether it is sustainable in the long term, especially since younger Russians tend not to have as much of a survivalist orientation as Putin and others like him who were much closer to the horrors (and ultimate triumphs through suffering) of WWII. The structural problem with Putin’s rule of consolidated power held together by the risk of blackmail is that it just can’t work on a scale as large as the Russian state over time. The system is too large, and he can’t oversee everything but no one else has the authority to act definitively even if they appear to do so based on the formal law. Everyone distrusts almost everyone else; Putin only trusts people he’s known for a very long time who’ve proven their ability to get results. But that’s a recipe for stagnation. There’s no new generation learning the ropes as they come up, no institutionalized system for transferring power even at the mid-level. And the system is also based on putting everyone powerful at risk of losing everything if they misbehave—“everyone’s wealth is deliberately tainted. Rumors or stories in the press about corruption can be used to bring people to heel, to curb their political or personal ambitions, and to remind everyone else of how much they have to lose. Everyone in the system is depicted as dirty.” We shouldn’t be surprised, the authors note, that people in the inner circle try very hard to get their money and their families out of Russia, where it’s harder to hurt them.
From:
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As a reader and writer of slash fan fiction, I can’t help being particularly interested in your review of the book on that topic. It’s always a little strange to read about fandom from the point of view of the academy, since I’m a little skeptical about the motivation behind the production of that kind of work in the first place. The academic writer needs to achieve promotion and tenure, so the pressure to conform to current standards of scholarship in any field (popular culture studies and/or queer studies, in this case?) must necessarily trump a more subjective approach to fandom. I can only hope the academic writer is a fan, since it’s a lot more fun being one than writing about it!
From:
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