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

[kitzen-kat.livejournal.com]

Buggrit! I missed the splooge about girl germs! I believe they look like these lovely critters (http://www.giantmicrobes.com/) which fountaingirl showed me.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

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

Well, I saved my cached copy of it, but I didn't have all the collapsed subthreads.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Slip me it in email! korman@spamcop.net

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I like the maleness/masculinity comparison. We give behaviours gender associations if we see them in one gender more than the other, but they aren't caused by or exclusive to the actual gender of the person exhibiting the behaviour.

If there is a correlation between gender and behaviour, I don't think it's sexist to acknowledge it. It's just science, or statistics, or something.

What's sexist is to assume that one behaviour or one gender has more value than the other-- for a male fan to be insulted if his fascination with character relationships is called 'fangirlish', or for a woman to be insulted by someone calling her dress sense 'masculine'.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

Done.

That thread got fandom_wank (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/731783.html)ed, too.

[gdwessel.livejournal.com]

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

Awww we don't get to see yet another of the Haters' bullshit. Don't worry, it's like crack overlords: knock one down 3 more will pop up in its place.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

I've been reading these gender threads, and trying to pin down where I fit on the fanboy-girl spectrum.

I do not get obsessive about details and continuity, for their own sake. But I like to know where I can find the information if I want to join in a conversation with people if the topic comes up. In other words, I can play the role of detail geek if it helps me establish a relationship with other fans. I guess that's fangirl-ish

I do not squee over actors, characters, and their 'shipping within a show. But I do get a squeeful lump in my throat when I think about the broader, philosophical implications of a story -- its worldview. Not sure which gender that fits, if either.

I amuse myself by working out theories behind the details we're shown -- not sure, but this may be fanboyish ??

So slightly more fangirlish, I think, maybe...

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

If you're like me, where you fit on that spectrum depends on what you're doing at the time. :-)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Thanks hugely!

From what I saw, I must say the fandom_wanking was even more desperate than I thought - a light-hearted and courteous discussion. The fandom_wank poster had to considerably distort the content to make it sound like an actual flamefest. There must have been soem savage stuff somewhere in those buried comments to get such a mild thread yanked from doctorwho.

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

They got a fun Doctor-sandwich thread going out of it, so it wasn't completely pointless.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I <3 those things. They should make an E. coli, I'd buy one.

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

Correlation fine.

There's no problem with acknowledging a correlation, where one exists, and it must be said that correlations are often great fun. If frequently useless.

However, not to sound like a living cliché, correlation != causation.

So sure it is OK to acknowledge a correlation. The problem if there is one arises sometime after one allows that correlation to inform one's choice of vocabulary ("so good a basketball player, you could almost believe he was black", "Jewish rich", "stingy as a Dutchman").

The reason why this is a problem is not to do with your personal choice to make an (undoubtedly wry and probably terrifically apposite) reference to an observation that you may have made... the reason is that language outlives the context in which it was coined. Which means that, much later on, people not armed with that particular piece of understanding are going to be left wondering wtf that was about. Whereas perhaps you yourself were being incredibly witty and insightful, the only artifact that will be around in a couple of years is the actual word/phrase.

I agree with your assessment of where the sexism comes in. I just think it's hopelessly optimistic to expect to be able to frame a set of observations concerning fan behaviour, using language that relies entirely on comparison with perceived gender differences, or tendancies if you will, without someone eventually taking the golden opportunity to overlay their perceptions of relative value on top of that. Of course, I probably think that because I'm completely oversensitive on the topic of gender, ahahahaha, and not at all because I may think that describing group (a) using metaphor relating to stereotype (b) is just an invitation to hours of red-herring conversation.

I'm not trying to pretend that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is worth taking literally; the use of language allowing sexism doesn't in my view necessarily mean that people are forced to think it - but it's ridiculous to claim that there's no influence between the language you use and the way that you view things, since there quite clearly is. So why waste one's time relating something to gender, when the concept in question could be described clearly and succinctly in one word without resorting to evocative and inaccurate gender-based tomfoolery?

Answer: Why, because it sounds better that way. Why? Because of all the baggage that metaphor is carrying with it. And there we are back at step one, regarding a loaded metaphor, which we will then promptly explain away as the result of innocent observation, as though there's such a thing as innocent observation.

Horse. Dead. Flogging A. Homo sapiens, you can keep it.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

That's true for all of us, I think (At least, I hope!).

Spectrum sliding! Mind-bending fun that has a smaller risk of ankle-breakage than ice sliding (or Dalek-fleeing)!

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

why waste one's time relating something to gender, when the concept in question could be described clearly and succinctly in one word without resorting to evocative and inaccurate gender-based tomfoolery?

Well, besides gender, the -boy and -girl suffixes carry a strong connotation of childishness (or, if you're feeling generous, "a youthful spirit"), which, I think, is missing in the simple term "fan."

Yes, I know "Fan" originally comes from "fanatic," which already implies a lack of maturity and sense of proportion. But as you point out, original meanings and origins of words often fall by the wayside, as years go by. Today, "fan" is often used to mean "aficionado," so fanboy/fangirl has cropped up to fill the void left behind.

I'm all for gender neutral words, however, as long as they don't get so cumbersome they turn into tongue-twisters.

What do you say we try "Fankids" or "Fanbrats" on for size?

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

"Whobrats" is already being used as a derogatory term for the fans brought in by the new series. It'd be interesting to see if those new fans reclaim the term!

That's a good point about the "fanatic" meaning of fanboy and fangirl, but keep in mind those two terms aren't synonymous.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

It's odd to characterise this as the creation of new terms to categorise fannish behaviour, when in fact the terms arose organically from fandom and have been around for decades. From what I've been able to gather, fanboy was a putdown referring to immaturity; fangirl arose later as a partial parallel. Neither began as attempts to categorise fans or their behaviour.

[cherrypep.livejournal.com]

Umm... decades-old language is pretty new!

I would be interested in knowing the difference between creation of terms within fandom to categorise certain behaviour, and terms that 'arise organically' from fandom and which are used as a putdown relating to certain behaviour. Because... distinguishing observed immaturity from behaviour? How, other than behaviourally, does level of maturity get externalised in such a way that others feel the inclination to put it down?

The tooth fairy didn't bring the terms, is all I'm saying. Whether organic, biointensive or biodynamic, the words come from somewhere and arose for a reason. :-)

[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. ^^;

[ide-cyan.livejournal.com]

"Fan" can also be an abbreviation of "fancier".

[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.

[jamesbowman.livejournal.com]

If you're like me, where you fit on that spectrum depends on what you're doing at the time. :-)


Shouldn't that be who you're doing at the time. :)?

Or is that just a tad 51st century of me?