More on the Trekfail

[eumelia]

The administrator of the original petition organisers (who are now in the process of rebooting) contacted me after I posted
my long spiel on why using a the Kirk/Spock pairing as a "springboard" for LGBTQI representation in Trek, and ostensibly in Sci-Fi more generally, was, well, problematic to put it lightly.

I'm pretty sure he contacted me because of my strong suggestion not to support this homophobic campaign, though I can't say for sure as he hasn't contacted me again after I asked him why he contacted this random angry queer grrl.

He asked me very nicely if I had any advice for him, as the bruhaha of the last week made the entitlement and appropriation issues pretty evident. Not to mention that this brought about a very scary symptom of prejudice regarding LGBT people in fandom.

Seriously people, do we not remember Race!Fail!

I cross posted my entry at starbase_idic and I was happy to get approval from those who commented, though I quickly became irritated with a few who decided to derail the argument into the veracity of the Kirk/Spock pairing.

Something that happened in my LJ as well, I might add.

The point is really not whether there is evidence to support this purely fannish slash pairing, which for the record before anyone decided to come here and shove it down my throat, I agree there is, if you believe that production notes and author commentary have any bearing on canon(1).
The point I'd like to get at is what I explained to the administrator who contacted me:

[...]I think the focus and use of K/S and it's fan history as a vessel is counter productive in the extreme for a few reasons. Namely that [queer] visibility shouldn't be about fan service, which K/S certainly is.

Another reason is that focusing on K/S goes against established canon which is pretty progressive in it's own right, as I mention in my post - woman of colour professional gets together with non-main character hero. I think breaking up a canon pairing in the name of "suddenly we are gay" is counter productive, counter intuitive to the characters and isn't positive queer representation, if anything it looks like the age old trope of "Turning"/"Recruiting".

Aren't we sick of that?
I know I am.
[...]
I use "homophobia" because of the reasons I mention above, of the old tropes that appear to be what this little part of fandom is focusing on.
[...]
I don't think a ship should be used as a spring board for action regarding social change. As a discussion regarding aspects of media, fandom and society, yes, I often discuss meta using ships and fictional characters.

The use of K/S to promote queer visibility in the Trek franchise is counter productive and counter intuitive and changing canon and what is established relationships for the sake of fan service is not good story telling and/or world building, it's a shallow interest in eye candy which isn't equal rights, its fetishization.
[...]

It's been stated before and I'll state it again. Queer people are real. Our problems are real. Media representation has only now begun to evolve beyond Shock! Horror! and/or Accessory for the Straight character. The co-optation of something that really is serious for the purpose of pushing a 'ship and changing the canon for fan service is really quite upsetting.

The idea that Star Trek is the vehicle through which queer representation is going to happen in Sci-Fi is seriously missing the boat. There are queer action heroes in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. They are quite awesome.
Willow and Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena and Gabriel from Xena: Warrior Princess and of course, Captain Jack and Ianto from Torchwood.

Damn, I'm derailing myself.

I'd like to remind the people who organise these kind of campaigns to remember the history of LGBT people in the media and media representation.
GLAAD, my friends.
They are not there for nothing.
The wheel has been around for a while.
Like one of commentator's at my post at starbase_idic said in a very nicely worded PM to me, that they were willing to do their part to promote LGBT representation in sci-fi, in any petition, in spite of their relatively small knowledge of LGBT issues.
That they're willing to be an ally.
If you want to be a good ally I suggest you start by educating yourself. There are huge amounts of information out there and it's really not our job to educate you and/or comfort you in your ignorance.
I suggest you read these as a start: this brilliant entry by rm, What do we want from our allies and think about reading the stuff at various LGBTQI organisations.
Just as a starting point, there is a whole lot more than that.

I'm not in the entertainment business. I am not an insider. I am merely a concerned consumer. My advice to the administrator was as follows:

I think it would be a good idea to distance yourself from the brouhaha that started the negative criticism I and others feel it deserves. I think you really need to change the language and truly make the campaign about representation in sci-fi/fantasy media (of which some exists and you really need to remember that - don't forget that just this month was a very well publicised epic featuring a same-sex relationship between the main and third billed character - Torchwood:Children of Earth - Brokeback Mountain is really not what we should be striving to when it comes to media representation) and not just be about pushing a certain show/franchise/'ship as a vessel for an issue that is so much more than that.

Fandom, like real life, is full of prejudice of many kinds. Using it as a springboard, while useful for creating pressure of numbers, if done "qualitatively" can lead to appropriation and entitlement like that seen in some of the discussion over the past week.

When speaking about this to my brother, who is a fellow Trek fan, he wondered if most people weren't basically opposed to Kirk/Spock in general for reasons of a)Them both being men and b)The chain of command.
Well, the latter was pretty much addressed in the new movie as "fraternisation is an issue, but so long as it's dealt with, in any which way, it's okay".

The former reminds me that fandom, like real life, is not actually a safe space.
Us fans have a certain kind of crazy and it makes us forget that we interact with real people, some of them so different from us we cannot imagine that their lives are not fiction.

Just to conclude this post with some petty fannish rambling.

Nearly every attempt the various Star Trek series tried to do concerning sexuality and gender issues in the show were big, big failures.
The Mirror!Universe? Really, really bad.
That TNG episode with the genderless aliens? Did not come across well at all!
The only episode I can think of that showed some kind of positive same-sex desire in Trek is "Rejoined" and there's a reason everyone mentions that episode.
See the aforementioned "only episode".

That's just my own pet peeve.

We are all real. And who we see on screen should be who we are as well, not a Trope.

Don't fucking forget it.

Footnotes:
(1) Personally, I feel that what JKR did regarding Dumbledore and his post-mortem coming out showed very little respect to the fans and little integrity as an author. If that was pertinent information that had to be canonised... why not put it in the bloody books?! As it stands, it didn't retcon anything in the books and pretty much showed old gay men to be manipulative bastards (perhaps paedophiles) who are unable to find love.
Yeah, I'm bitter that she did that. And I really, really dislike Dumbledore.

Comments

[svollga.livejournal.com]

I'm not in the Star Trek fandom, but I've heard a bit about the buzz arond K/S out there. Thanks for the links, not I'll see what it's all is about.

I entirely agree with you on Dumledore. I am absolutely sure that in books, whatever the author wants to say, they say in the book. All other comments with the aditional information on the characters, plot twists and so on - for me, they show the author's weakness, demonstrate the author as uncapable of saying whatever they were going to in the book.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I'm barely in the Star Trek fandom as well, but I'm enough of a fan to be pissed about this and say so. So, you're welcome :)

I wrote two (http://eumelia.livejournal.com/248143.html) posts (http://eumelia.livejournal.com/248846.html) regarding the Outing... not impressed and now, even two years later, I'm way more bitter about it because the franchise is still going strong in film and it's pretty irritating.

[svollga.livejournal.com]

They want to make K/S canon?
Really?
*headdesk*
I'm all for more LGBTQ-visibility in the media. I'm all for making LGBTQ people the main characters in not-queer-related genres. But changing the canon of existing production, which has such a long history and cultural impact? What for? If you want to see queers in Star Trek - well, petition for it. Maybe they'll make some new original character(s), and hopefully they will be good. If you want to see your beloved pairing made canon... well, better not. It means you're doing things for all the wrong reasons.

After reading your posts, I can't but agree with them :)
Actually, I was rather dissapponted with a lot of things in the books (and I was a devoted fan for years, since the 4th book till the 7th). After the 6th and especially 7th book, I had, and still have, a feeling, that JKR *wanted* to tell us a story about prejudice and how it is wrong, but in the end, she didn't. Because of course, she tell us that sentient non-human is okay, and different mixes of blood are okay, and being different all in all is okay, and nobody should judge anyone on their race and background, but only on their deed... But in the same very book, there is still a long-going discrimination against people - children, actually, who don't have much to say about who they are, and who they parents are, and who are still judged not on their deeds, but on the group they belong to. Yes, I mean Slytherin.
From the very beginning till the very end, everything Slytherin is considered 'dark' and even 'evil'. If it's not, it's at least ambiguous. Nobody asks Slytherin students what they want to do - everyone just assume they are on the dark side, really. And even after we were told the story of Tom Riddle, who was so broken by prejudice in his childhood that he went to the dark side; even after the story of Snape who was mistaken for a dark one while being on the side of light all this time; even after 19 years of the Dark Lords defeat, we still see the same prejudice against Slytherin in the epilogue. I wonder if there is another Dark Lord groing up in the Slytherin Dungeons already?

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Apparently the bruhaha made it clear to some of the organisers that the 'ship focus is a big no-no.
Not to mention the entitlement issues.
So there's an overhaul of the petition. I'm still weary, but we'll see.

Yeah, her whole treatment of Slytherin in general was just painful. I never got why the "Golden Trio" kept suspecting Snape, yeah he's mean, but from Book 1 he's been their greatest protector. A rotten attitude does not negate nobility. Dumbledore being a manipulative divider is not the epitome of goodness, sorry!

[svollga.livejournal.com]

I could never forgive Dumbledore (and JKR) the fact that in Book 1, Slytheron was stripped of their well-deserved victory in the House Cup. It was absolutely and unnesessary cruel to the children who never knew anything about the Stone and staff, and also was a way to escalate the House rivalry to no end.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Dude. This. So much.
From book 1 I could never get what people saw in him, really, because he acts benign and is "eccentric".

The man in black saved the day more times than I can count, while trying to get the students in his House to lose their minds due to prejudice!
Because the other Houses really go out of their way to try and build bridges between them.

here from metafandom - commenting to say a heartfelt 'TY'

[originalpuck.livejournal.com]

The idea that Star Trek is the vehicle through which queer representation is going to happen in Sci-Fi is seriously missing the boat. There are queer action heroes in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. They are quite awesome.

Willow and Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena and Gabriel from Xena: Warrior Princess and of course, Captain Jack and Ianto from Torchwood.

Thank you so much for pointing this out, it was causing me to fall into heavy fits of rage. I'm a queer woman, and I want more queer folk in genre works so bad that I can taste it. GLBT folk are definitely under-represented, sure. But we're not so under-represented that queer folks have yet to be featured.

Which is why the seeming attempts at ignoring the interesting, multi-faceted queer characters that exist has been making me see red. How can an organization be supportive of queers in the media while simultaneously either ignoring or being ignorant of the very characters they're petitioning for. You'd think that researching fan reaction to them would help their campaign. ^^;;

Every time that campaign tried to start in on the 'breaking the gay kiss barrier' I wanted to start shrieking names at them of queer characters that have been there, done that, and gotten the t-shirt(and those would just be the mainstream names, not the specifically queer-oriented genre works). We need more representation, definitely. But ignoring the few characters we do get is not the way to go about it.


Brokeback Mountain is really not what we should be striving to when it comes to media representation

Thanks tons for saying this, too. It's a personal thing, so YMMV and all of that, but that movie drove me up one side of the wall and back down the other side. It was full of tropes, problematic representations, and, IMO, was definitely a gay movie made for straight folks. Then again, part of that could just be due to the reactions a lot of the straight folks around me had to it, which were problematic at best.


If you want to be a good ally I suggest you start by educating yourself. There are huge amounts of information out there and it's really not our job to educate you and/or comfort you in your ignorance.

So much of this. I think some people are great at educating others on the issues (my wife is one of them), but not everyone is or wants to become good at it. And even someone who is good at it, who enjoys it, shouldn't be expected to do it for everyone at all times. This is our lives, so the idea that anytime someone is mildly interested, we should drop everything can get really damn stressful, really quick.

If people want to make pretenses at being allies, they should be willing to put the work in. IMHO people shouldn't be given cookies just because they considered doing the minimal amount of work to be a decent human being and then decided to be too lazy about it, and to try to skate by on very little understanding, until they were smacked upside the face about it.


The fact that I went to the forums there (since I'd heard that they were working to make things better), and saw that one of the biggest LJ instigators of the drama was made a board member at the last meeting does not leave me hopeful. (Neither does the seeming feel of 'I want a strong woman, but only if she fits XYZ stereotypes' make me confident about SEE WISE.) Which is depressing, because when I'd first heard about the campaign I'd gone into an excited 'wait and see' mode. Then, well, the shit hit the fan.

And, while I'm at it, boy is Dumbledore a hot topic. I have mixed feelings on that whole situation. I slash him and Gellert eight ways from next Tuesday, but I agree with the fact that only revealing him to be gay after everyone discovered that he was a manipulative jerk, and after the books had ended, was a bit problematic. Not to mention some of the obnoxious icons, posts, and "supportive" meta that came out of that discovery made me wince daily until the whole thing died down. But yeah, derailing on my part there. Sorry 'bout that! ^^;;

Re: here from metafandom - commenting to say a heartfelt 'TY'

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Wow, long comment :)

Thanks for taking the time to read and write all that, I'm glad this post resonated so strongly with you.

Bah, derailment is what fandom is about, we wouldn't be us if we didn't derail ourselves :P

My own reactions from two years ago about the Outing are linked to my comment above, here (http://eumelia.livejournal.com/418100.html?thread=2454836#t2454836).