2015 podfic by racial background
May. 26th, 2016 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kalakiryaThis post came out of a number of things, most notably the discussion around race in fandom this year. There's been a lot of meta on it, some of which I agree with, and some of which makes flames appear on the sides of my face. I don't want to get into the discussion: I like keeping my fannish activities non-rage-inducing.
That said, a lot of what people were saying resonated. The ships and characters that fandom fixates on do tend to be very white. They also tend to be very male, and very m/m slash oriented. Which is not a thing I'm happy with.
In January I did an analysis of the shipping breakdowns of the podfic I'd produced the previous year, and the results were very disappointing: while I'd thought that I was doing a decent job of podficcing women and non-m/m stories, that wasn't borne out in the stats. I resolved to podfic more non-cis-male-centric stories, and so far I think I'm doing a decent job (that said, I haven't run the numbers yet, and I'd thought I was doing alright before!).
In January I didn't do a racial breakdown, though. Partly for time, partly because it's more complicated (more categories!), and partly because I had a pretty good idea I wouldn't be happy with the results. But that's a really, really terrible reason. So I did it anyway.
In order to get my numbers, I looked at the same set of podfics that I used for 2015's shipping and gender breakdown: all the completed podfics I posted in that year that I made solo. ("Completed" means that I left out "and never been kissed", which is a 160K white/white m/m slash story that I'm nearly done with which is going to kill my stats for this year.) I only counted the main characters (here defined as "when I think of the podfic who do I remember it being about") and used the canonical (or, lacking that, fannish) racial background of the characters (I had always thought that Nita and Dairine Callahan were Hispanic but apparently that is not canonically correct, so here they're counted as white). That produced this bar chart:
aaaaaaaand the main take away is damn that's very white. That is not what I wanted to be doing. That is just over 95% of my output.
Another note on this chart: I've used American classifications of race and racial backgrounds. I'm American, and this is about my podfic, and my relationship to my podfic. If I were doing this a bit more scientifically, I would do it differently. But I'm not, and can only speak to my own perspective of my work. Also, I've been lead to understand that "latin@" is [one of the] preferred terminologies/spellings for the background of the characters in question - Mia Toretto and Letty Ortiz from the Fast and the Furious series - but I'm continuing to refine my understanding of who prefers what terms.
For the purposes of curiosity, I broke it down by gender identity again.
Soooooo when I do make podfic about non-white characters, it's almost invariably women. Which, while I'm not upset to have podficced more women than men, I don't like that all those columns are empty.
I'm not getting involved in the fannish discussions on race and society and social justice. I have my own, very strong, feelings on that, but I don't want to talk about them. I do want to spend more of my time creating fanworks that prioritize non-cis-male characters of color.
I do want to add the tiny, tiny caveat that podfic, as a medium, is more limited than fanfic or fanart or many other fannish works. While we can create original fannish works, and I have, for the most part, we transform fanfiction, and therefore we are limited to the fanfiction that others choose to make. (Not!pods - "original fannish work" - weren't included in either of these breakdowns. I'm sorry to say that they mostly would have made my numbers worse anyway.) That's an explanation, but it is most certainly not an excuse. This year I've been more dedicatedly looking for stories to podfic that center non-white-cis-male characters, and while I've been a bit depressed by the results, I've also found some wonderful, lovely stories in fandoms I don't spend a lot of time in, about characters that I love but hadn't focused on as much. I'm not "eating my vegetables," I'm finding that an all-meat-and-potato diet was boring and not nutritious, while beets and brussel sprouts and beans and yams are fun and interesting and absolutely delicious.
That said, a lot of what people were saying resonated. The ships and characters that fandom fixates on do tend to be very white. They also tend to be very male, and very m/m slash oriented. Which is not a thing I'm happy with.
In January I did an analysis of the shipping breakdowns of the podfic I'd produced the previous year, and the results were very disappointing: while I'd thought that I was doing a decent job of podficcing women and non-m/m stories, that wasn't borne out in the stats. I resolved to podfic more non-cis-male-centric stories, and so far I think I'm doing a decent job (that said, I haven't run the numbers yet, and I'd thought I was doing alright before!).
In January I didn't do a racial breakdown, though. Partly for time, partly because it's more complicated (more categories!), and partly because I had a pretty good idea I wouldn't be happy with the results. But that's a really, really terrible reason. So I did it anyway.
In order to get my numbers, I looked at the same set of podfics that I used for 2015's shipping and gender breakdown: all the completed podfics I posted in that year that I made solo. ("Completed" means that I left out "and never been kissed", which is a 160K white/white m/m slash story that I'm nearly done with which is going to kill my stats for this year.) I only counted the main characters (here defined as "when I think of the podfic who do I remember it being about") and used the canonical (or, lacking that, fannish) racial background of the characters (I had always thought that Nita and Dairine Callahan were Hispanic but apparently that is not canonically correct, so here they're counted as white). That produced this bar chart:
aaaaaaaand the main take away is damn that's very white. That is not what I wanted to be doing. That is just over 95% of my output.
Another note on this chart: I've used American classifications of race and racial backgrounds. I'm American, and this is about my podfic, and my relationship to my podfic. If I were doing this a bit more scientifically, I would do it differently. But I'm not, and can only speak to my own perspective of my work. Also, I've been lead to understand that "latin@" is [one of the] preferred terminologies/spellings for the background of the characters in question - Mia Toretto and Letty Ortiz from the Fast and the Furious series - but I'm continuing to refine my understanding of who prefers what terms.
For the purposes of curiosity, I broke it down by gender identity again.
Soooooo when I do make podfic about non-white characters, it's almost invariably women. Which, while I'm not upset to have podficced more women than men, I don't like that all those columns are empty.
I'm not getting involved in the fannish discussions on race and society and social justice. I have my own, very strong, feelings on that, but I don't want to talk about them. I do want to spend more of my time creating fanworks that prioritize non-cis-male characters of color.
I do want to add the tiny, tiny caveat that podfic, as a medium, is more limited than fanfic or fanart or many other fannish works. While we can create original fannish works, and I have, for the most part, we transform fanfiction, and therefore we are limited to the fanfiction that others choose to make. (Not!pods - "original fannish work" - weren't included in either of these breakdowns. I'm sorry to say that they mostly would have made my numbers worse anyway.) That's an explanation, but it is most certainly not an excuse. This year I've been more dedicatedly looking for stories to podfic that center non-white-cis-male characters, and while I've been a bit depressed by the results, I've also found some wonderful, lovely stories in fandoms I don't spend a lot of time in, about characters that I love but hadn't focused on as much. I'm not "eating my vegetables," I'm finding that an all-meat-and-potato diet was boring and not nutritious, while beets and brussel sprouts and beans and yams are fun and interesting and absolutely delicious.
Can't make gold out of straw
Date: 2016-05-27 10:39 am (UTC)Re: Can't make gold out of straw
Date: 2016-05-27 01:05 pm (UTC)I have considered the breakdown of who's on my screen and in my pages, and that's a little bit of my point: fandom uses that as a reason for not embracing women and characters of color, but that's not an excuse. We've embraced characters with little screen time or page space before - MCU's coulson got a tv show out of it, and SPN's Gabriel's actor makes v regular convention appearances bc fandom (incl me!) adores both the actor and the character - but that's largely only happened with white male characters. I, in my own fannish experience, am trying to push past that. The fact that TPTB don't put many non-white-men in our media is not a reason for our fannish experience to be defined by them. We can choose to focus our attention on side characters, we can choose to focus on untold stories, and we can choose to broaden our interests beyond what's presented to us on a platter. In my fannish experience, I tend to embrace side characters anyway - they're more interesting to me, for the most part. I'm also aggressively multi-fannish and an ardent multi-shipper. I'm trying to spend more of my fannish time in fandoms like spartacus, the fast and the furious, and elementary, which already give space to non-white-male characters, and fandom has followed suit and has created some very good fannish content that centers those non-white-make characters. Your fannish experience is your own, and I wouldn't dream of taking it away. Everyone engages in fandom in the ways that make sense for them, I don't know how or why you engage in fandom in the way you do, and I'm not questioning it. I am saying that right now I have the energy and mental space and enough frustration with the mere scraps that TPTB have seen fit to give me that I am choosing to change the patterns of my fannish experience.
Re: Can't make gold out of straw
Date: 2016-05-27 01:09 pm (UTC)Uh, re-reading my reply, and it's coming across as more aggressive than I meant it to be /o. I can't edit rn, but just for the record, I didn't mean to be that bitchy /o.
Re: Can't make gold out of straw
Date: 2016-05-27 08:29 pm (UTC)I suppose we can create new characters of color. Perhaps I should write a Sherlock fic where Mrs Turner is Indian. And there is always room for a male black doctor. I loved the Vulcan specialist in Star Trek.
Keep fighting the fight.