Kate's Fannish Gender, concluded

[dreamer_easy]

I fear my attempt to get across my thoughts on fanboy and fangirl have been a flop, with many readers thinking I was labelling actual men and women, rather than trying to make the same distinction that exists between maleness and masculinity. This is partly due to other peoples' assumptions, and partly due to my utter lack of clarity on the topic. Ah well, I remain both a fanboy and a fangirl, concurrently or consecutively.

More to chew on:

motiveforce ponders gendered fandom and the geek male.

Frightening Fangirls: On Being a Male Fushigi Yuugi Fan


Sadly, the thread in doctorwho about n00bz girl germs has vanished.

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I disagree somewhat with your analogy, as these are words people use to describe themselves with pride. They're not just outsider stereotype sthat insiders are uncomfortable with (like the stingy Jew or the athletic black guy or the Chinese math whiz).

Which one non-gender-specific word would you use to describe a fanboy, other than 'fanboy'?

Anyways, don't bring up new interesting points and then say the horse is dead and we should stop flogging it. ^^;

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

Er, I guess you may flog whichever you like - but me, I'm outta it. :)

And I agree that these are words people use to describe themselves and those analogies aren't, directly, although I do wonder if, the Bell curve book aside, the black athlete stereotype is uniformly rejected. I suspect there's a lot of literature out there about this, and I don't want to get into that discussion - deep waters, too personally ignorant to comment, and no wish to drown.

I admit that in choosing them I was trying to avoid the issue of gender in favour of clarity. I imagine comparisons on the subject of nationality aren't terribly likely to get a great deal of repurposing, principally due to the fact that we don't speak the same language, although some national-stereotypes do get quite a bit of overuse (words starting with 'French', anyone?). But I think one can think of similar examples that get the same sort of twist, like the n-word-that-ends-in-er, has-two-g's and-an-i and is very rude for outsiders to use, PC, intellectual, working-class, gentleman, lady, Parisien, Anglo-Saxon, snob, various terms implying 'immigrant', various terms implying 'not immigrant', socialist, geek, Valley Girl or chav.

People prefer to exist within a group or social category, crap or not. I reckon it's called self-stereotyping or validation or informational influence or something. You'd have to ask someone who knows about social psychology, which I don't.