(no subject)
Mar. 30th, 2007 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
merrilyAt work today, everyone was in hate with the world. I am soothing myself with pancakes and ice-cream and beer, which was the least nutritious and most sugar-coma-inducing dinner I could think of. (And I am using my Jim&Pam!glee icon in order to remember that fun things can happen at work. Proof! Right there!)
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I finished reading Justine Larbalestier's Battle of the Sexes a week and a bit ago, and am still mulling things over from it. O fList, if I had a Fandom-Required-Reading list, this would be on it. The book is about gender roles and gender conflict in sci-fi, from the 30s to the present. It's useful as a survey of writers--particularly as documentation of what women were writing what when, but I especially appreciated Larbalestier's insistence that she needed to study sci-fi explicitly as <i>community</i>.
I mean, it was necessary for what she was doing (how else to include letters and editorials as source material?), but I find her approach personally satisfying. It's what we all do, after all (and by "we" I mean those of us who read, write, vid, draw or otherwise are part of fandom efforts), by dint of having lj accounts and being online. And yeah, mostly that's because the interweb makes the magic happen, but the point is that sci-fi (which gave birth to fandom) has always been a genre where barriers between creator and consumer are minimal. The Interweb just speeded things up.
I like that we have a heritage of dialogue. I dunno what it means, that we have a heritage of dialogue, but I suspect that, as a result, there are less fandom writers who end up with their heads in ovens than there are in (since I'm already using this horrifying image) poetry.
It also means that we have fanon details that border on absurd and spread virally, but hey. It can't be all sunshine and John Sheppard on a unicorn manips.
(<lj user=tardis80> made this.)
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I finished reading Justine Larbalestier's Battle of the Sexes a week and a bit ago, and am still mulling things over from it. O fList, if I had a Fandom-Required-Reading list, this would be on it. The book is about gender roles and gender conflict in sci-fi, from the 30s to the present. It's useful as a survey of writers--particularly as documentation of what women were writing what when, but I especially appreciated Larbalestier's insistence that she needed to study sci-fi explicitly as <i>community</i>.
I mean, it was necessary for what she was doing (how else to include letters and editorials as source material?), but I find her approach personally satisfying. It's what we all do, after all (and by "we" I mean those of us who read, write, vid, draw or otherwise are part of fandom efforts), by dint of having lj accounts and being online. And yeah, mostly that's because the interweb makes the magic happen, but the point is that sci-fi (which gave birth to fandom) has always been a genre where barriers between creator and consumer are minimal. The Interweb just speeded things up.
I like that we have a heritage of dialogue. I dunno what it means, that we have a heritage of dialogue, but I suspect that, as a result, there are less fandom writers who end up with their heads in ovens than there are in (since I'm already using this horrifying image) poetry.
It also means that we have fanon details that border on absurd and spread virally, but hey. It can't be all sunshine and John Sheppard on a unicorn manips.
(<lj user=tardis80> made this.)