I'm Free, I'm Free!

[zen_monk]

 I am so done with that research essay which ended up being 25* pages that i wrote in about two days no sleep. UGGGGGHHH NO MORE WRITING.**

*Research essay is about fandom and the push and pull between assumptions of race within fandom participants, of cyberspace being perceived as ideally without the boundaries of territory and race, and the push for diversity in media.

**IN HINDSIGHT MY THESIS WAS TOO BROAD.

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!

And *chinprop* your research essay sounds very very interesting.

[novel_machinist]

I mean, the thesis sounds SUPER interesting!

[zen_monk]

It's been a lot of Henry Jenkins' media sociologist essay/personal blog trolling, Lisa Nakamura references, and news articles about diversity in books/media while using references like the Rue debacle in the first Hunger Games and Marvel's tendency to use white people to emulate the struggle of the oppressed.

It's mostly around how the invisibility of race in the internet fosters digital racebending/whitewashing, how the assumption of white as the default narrative leeds into internet life, and how to combat that is to encourage divesity in media/literature and to encourage diverse fan interpretations to combat white as default.

in hindsight i thought it was way too broad and I only used Nakamura as a theory reference (when I could've used the other pdfs my teacher gave me) but i thought it was an alright essay.

From Jenkins, i used: If the internet is used the breaking of borders between national borders, language, and temporal lines, then it facilitates an intelligence collective that prioritize the sharing and contribution of communities that unites people. He is a fandom specialist and talks a lot about textual poaching (nooooo i forgot textual poaching!!).

From Nakamura: when online, there's the perception of the internet and online communities to be the "ideal place" for removing the pressures of real life prejudice- i.e. racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and so on- so that people can communicate through common interests and information. The problem is, that what it does is that it encourages assumptions that adhere to hegemonic powers, which includes being White as the default person and also being in the West. So unless race is specified, people would largely assume the person they're communicating are white people. This tends to get into trouble when I used a Jenkins example where he recounts how an Asian American colleague had received a racist joke about Asians from an online friend, and when he mentioned that he doesn't like it as an Asian person, the friend white friend was like "well, this wouldn't have happened if I knew you were Asian. You were passing as white!" And then Nakamura goes into digital yellowface and blackface (but focusing on the former) where people who roleplay or emulate anime characters onto avatars is done to assert a kind of identity empowerment, but by some people affecting an "Asian" personality, they are playing themselves in a kind of internet tourism where they see it as affirming their identity without the baggage of racism or prejudice that would be attached to those identities in the communities they live in (like America).

And that what this does for internet users who are folks of color/non-white is that their race and ethnicities are erased because they're subjected to the assumptions of their internet communities but it's like, they have to be pressured to seem visibly racial online when that's not really something that people want to do.

and so from Nakamura's theory about a "raceless internet," how does that affect fan spaces if they are bound by intelligence collectives? How does that color how fandom perceives and incorporates their media, formulating fanon and canon interpretations?

And it's 25 pages of that.

[zen_monk]

it IS, and I had no sleep for two days on that one, sobs.

*in which i replied the entirety of my thesis to vieralynn's replay, in case you wish to peruse.