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kalakiryaThis is my first post for the 2022 Snowflake Challenge - I'm planning on going back to do the others, but this month has been a fairly epic trashfire for our household - but today's challenge grabbed me and wouldn't let go, so here we are.
I challenge you to track your fannish output, and use that information to spend more of your fannish time on characters of marginalized identities.
It's not news that fandom has a racism problem, and is bad at addressing other marginalized identities as well (see Transphobia in Fandom, Ableism in Fandom., Biphobia in Fandom, Misogyny in Fandom, and others). There are a lot of challenges and fests aimed at creating fanworks for those identities (I'm mainly familiar with the podfic-specific ones, which include Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology, Women and Genderqueers First: A Podfic Exchange/WAGFAPE, and the chromatic characters podfic anthology, but I know there are others, for all sorts of fannish activities!), but I know I, at least, tended to make stuff for those fests and then go back to creating material about white cis-men.
Once I noticed that pattern, it made me very uncomfortable, but I wasn't really sure to do with that discomfort. After all, how could I possibly quantify the time I spend watching/listening/reading media, including fannish media? It's in the background of my day, every day. I have over 300 tabs open on my phone right now, roughly 90% of them open to AO3. It's just not feasible.
But I also make podfic. And while the amount of time I spend on every podfic varies wildly (my record is re-recording a five hour podfic twice, for a total of three recordings, which comes to a total of at least 30 hours on a five hour podfic - I have to do a lot of editing passes, because I'm a messy editor who misses things), the final output can be measured in literal hours, minutes and seconds. So I started there, and in 2015 I started tracking how and where I spent my podficcing time. I've done it every year since.
In 2020 I made more than twelve hours of podfic focused on women. That same year only one-quarter of my output was about characters of color, none of which was about Black characters. That's not something I'm proud of. But now that it's something I can measure, I have something to work towards. I was better in 2021. I'm going to try to be better in 2022.
Right now I'm working with three main sets of stats: relationship category that the story focuses on (I use the AO3 categories), gender of the main character (an imperfect measure, defined as "who do I remember as the main character and how do I remember them identifying"), and racial/ethnic background of the main character (a very imperfect measure, currently defined as "who do I remember as the main character and how does the story/the canon/the actor/fandom identify them"). It's messy, and inextricably bound up with my prejudices as a White Middle-class American. I'm not tracking several things I could be,including disability, though I'll try to do that in 2022. But it's a starting point.
So if you're reading this, I challenge you to do the same: track your fannish output, in whatever way you can, knowing it will not accurately measure the time spent but that it's better than nothing (words? square inches/centimeters of art? duration of podfic? weight of wool/fabric? batches of cupcakes? number of icons?). Look at where you're spending your fannish time, and see if there's you want to consciously choose to spend your time on. Then see how you did, and do it again next year.
I challenge you to track your fannish output, and use that information to spend more of your fannish time on characters of marginalized identities.
It's not news that fandom has a racism problem, and is bad at addressing other marginalized identities as well (see Transphobia in Fandom, Ableism in Fandom., Biphobia in Fandom, Misogyny in Fandom, and others). There are a lot of challenges and fests aimed at creating fanworks for those identities (I'm mainly familiar with the podfic-specific ones, which include Awesome Ladies Podfic Anthology, Women and Genderqueers First: A Podfic Exchange/WAGFAPE, and the chromatic characters podfic anthology, but I know there are others, for all sorts of fannish activities!), but I know I, at least, tended to make stuff for those fests and then go back to creating material about white cis-men.
Once I noticed that pattern, it made me very uncomfortable, but I wasn't really sure to do with that discomfort. After all, how could I possibly quantify the time I spend watching/listening/reading media, including fannish media? It's in the background of my day, every day. I have over 300 tabs open on my phone right now, roughly 90% of them open to AO3. It's just not feasible.
But I also make podfic. And while the amount of time I spend on every podfic varies wildly (my record is re-recording a five hour podfic twice, for a total of three recordings, which comes to a total of at least 30 hours on a five hour podfic - I have to do a lot of editing passes, because I'm a messy editor who misses things), the final output can be measured in literal hours, minutes and seconds. So I started there, and in 2015 I started tracking how and where I spent my podficcing time. I've done it every year since.
In 2020 I made more than twelve hours of podfic focused on women. That same year only one-quarter of my output was about characters of color, none of which was about Black characters. That's not something I'm proud of. But now that it's something I can measure, I have something to work towards. I was better in 2021. I'm going to try to be better in 2022.
Right now I'm working with three main sets of stats: relationship category that the story focuses on (I use the AO3 categories), gender of the main character (an imperfect measure, defined as "who do I remember as the main character and how do I remember them identifying"), and racial/ethnic background of the main character (a very imperfect measure, currently defined as "who do I remember as the main character and how does the story/the canon/the actor/fandom identify them"). It's messy, and inextricably bound up with my prejudices as a White Middle-class American. I'm not tracking several things I could be,including disability, though I'll try to do that in 2022. But it's a starting point.
So if you're reading this, I challenge you to do the same: track your fannish output, in whatever way you can, knowing it will not accurately measure the time spent but that it's better than nothing (words? square inches/centimeters of art? duration of podfic? weight of wool/fabric? batches of cupcakes? number of icons?). Look at where you're spending your fannish time, and see if there's you want to consciously choose to spend your time on. Then see how you did, and do it again next year.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 11:12 pm (UTC)Done!
Date: 2022-01-30 10:37 pm (UTC)I've been doing this for years:
* QUILTBAG Characters
* Gender Identities in My Characters
* Romantic Orientations in My Characters
* Sexual Orientations in My Characters
* My Characters with Disabilities
See also Love Is For Children which has Tony as aromantic sexual, Steve as demi, Clint and JARVIS as asexual, and so on.
Tracking does help, but I've found it's even more useful to have a list of traits so you can go down them and pick one, and easily see what you've already written or not.
If you're working with an established canon, then you can look for character/trait lists.
A different approach is to get on somewhere like Goodreads and search for "books about" and then whatever trait(s) you want to cover. Use that to discover new fandoms that already have the kind of content you want to fanfic.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/lgbt
https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/person-of-color
https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/women
>>But I also make podfic. <<
If you are currently looking for stuff to podfic, I invite you to my AO3 page. I have several vision-impaired fans, so I know my readers like having an audio option and thus I always boost the signal when I get a new one.
"The Body Farm" has Joan Watson from Elementary, an Asian woman.
"It's Not Easy" has Rhodey, a black man.
"Everyone Should Be Free to Choose" is the beginning of the arc about Clint&JARVIS in an asexual relationship.
Re: Done!
Date: 2022-01-30 11:06 pm (UTC)Re: Done!
Date: 2022-01-30 11:35 pm (UTC)Yay! I'm happy to hear that. :D
>> thank you for sharing what you do, it's very cool to see how other people are keeping track of what they've done! <<
I agree, it's fun to see what else people are doing.
>> I will definitely check out your works and see if there's anything I can add to my to-podfic list <3
Woohoo!
If you're into original work as well as fanfic, there's a lot more diversity in that. I just threw out a few things that lots of folks would recognize.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-02 08:48 am (UTC)I think more importantly, I'll be adding something similar to my to-podfic spreadsheet so I can tell at a glance what I've been leaning towards and if I need to course correct back out of old habits I'd like to leave behind.