I’m glad you’ve been enjoying this blog!
I think this reddit post does a nice job of summarizing the history of fandom and how it’s led to our current point. But I’m going to go more into how tumblr’s very structure led to a ‘race to the bottom’ sort of enacting of punishment via social justice.
Almost all of this is from personal observation, having been here since late 2010.
To get more into the actual history of it: Racefail ‘09 is the name given to the big, public 2009 debates about racism in genre fiction (published fantasy and sci-fi), which happened primarily on livejournal and private websites. (Racefail was itself the result of the rising awareness of social justice in the real world thanks to the democratization of information via the internet.) Racefail raised a couple of big questions: were non-white (and non-straight/non-cis/non-male) creators being silenced and erased in published genre fiction? And were the stories being told primarily racist/sexist/homophobic and lacking in representation for non-white/Western cultures (and LGBT+/queer/female stories)?
From everything I’ve read I feel like a lot of good came out of these talks; in particular, it greatly raised the awareness of social justice in genre fiction and fandom spaces - which had been there before, but not quite so prominent. But one major bad came out of it: it revealed, via the shitty behavior of one member of the genre fiction community, how social justice could easily be used as a silencing tactic by applying arguments meant to dismantle power structures to individuals who may (or may not!) benefit from those power structures.
Fast-forward to 2010-2012 tumblr. LJ has undergone multiple journal purges and partial restorations, been bought out by a Russian company, and - final straw - changed the way anonymous threaded posts were handled, ending its value as a space for anon memes like kinkmemes. Fandom dispersed. A not-insignificant number of us eventually end up on tumblr, and those of us coming from LJ have brought with us a greater awareness of social justice, particularly lgbt/queer culture and feminism.
At the same time, Facebook has opened its doors to everyone instead of only allowing college students to use it. Facebook has almost single-handedly popularized the notion of making your offline life publicly available online. Gone are the days of keeping your age, real name, and offline identity hidden; we share everything except maybe last names and exact locations.
Tumblr democratizes the fandom experience like never before. Livejournal and forums had moderators; tumblr has none. Communities are gone - instead we have tags where people gather to talk about shared interests. People who previously felt shut out, forced to be ‘lurkers’ because they had nothing to say, could now have a blog and share the work of others via reblogging. The main way to gain social capital is by having the most followers and therefore the most widespread content.
But tumblr is a weird experience compared to other blogging sites because at the time it was the only one with a ‘reblog’ function. any one post can go absolutely viral and the people who see it beyond your immediate circle will lack the context of the rest of your blog. This means that either every single post needs to be entirely self-contained … or get wildly misunderstood. (Guess which one happens.) It also means that that the posts that spread the fastest and furthest are the short, witty ones or - you guessed it - the controversial ones. Finally, people tend to not fact-check - if something is interesting and seems believable, people reblog it uncritically. Tumblr’s dashboard structure actively encourages people to not leave their dash to look at provided external links - you’ll lose your ‘place’ on your endless-scrolling dash, and the little ‘home’ button in the corner is reminding you how many new posts have been created since you last refreshed. You don’t have time to fact-check.
Controversy without context is polarizing - without the original context, people provide their own context and agree or disagree based on a bunch of assumptions. Tumblr is a breeding ground for this. Opinions don’t get more nuanced - they get more vitriolic, more sharp and quick-witted. And with people not bothering to fact-check or click linked information, misinformation spreads like wildfire.
The early experience of fandom on tumblr is one of widespread acceptance.
Possibly because FB does this, people feel safe to share their age, sexuality, and gender on their tumblr profiles - and those identities get more and more specific as people learn more about gender identities and sexual orientations that are off the gender binary. People spread educational posts about queer/LGBT+ culture, feminist theory, and racism alongside fandom posts. The importance of minority representation in the media is a hot topic and posts that criticize media for their lack of (or bad) representation get thousands of notes. Social justice theory - fighting the appropriation of colonized cultures by imperialists, promoting the voices of the oppressed over those of the privileged, the right to be angry because of the oppression and trauma you’ve experienced, not tone-policing people who have been hurt, and not erasing the experiences of others - are widely discussed.
A lot of good came out of this, too, but I believe a natural backlash resulted.
Earnestly working to promote the voices of the least privileged and trying to avoid silencing or erasure, what started as an effort to even out the social strata gradually became a kind of reversed social strata. People who were oppressed on any axis could not be corrected by anybody of lesser oppression - it was considered to be silencing. People could not say their feelings had been hurt by a marginalized person’s word choice - that was tone policing.
And this led to a secondary, and probably lesser conclusion: people who identified as ‘privileged’ - that is, white, cis, straight, mentally well, able-bodied, (and male) - felt guilty for all the privilege they had. and the promotion of marginalized voices over their own - the tendency to tell people, regardless of the validity of their points, that if they were privileged their voice did not matter - to escape their privilege, at least on tumblr.
I think we hit Peak Tumblr in 2012-2013-ish. Non-human and nonbinary identities proliferated. Asexuality awareness exploded, as did other lesser-known sexualities and paraphilias. People wondered what it meant to be trans in a world with no gender binary. People self-diagnosed severe mental illnesses. And this unto itself wasn’t a bad thing! Probably many people learned a lot about themselves from the openness and acceptance.
However: there’s no way to know how much of this was from people self-discovering and how much was from people who realized that unless they had some axis of oppression they could point to they could be silenced. And people were extremely open about these identities as well: despite all of the talk about social awareness, interactions on tumblr suggested that most people still assumed that everyone else was white, cis, straight, able-bodied and mentally well (and therefore completely unaware of social issues and in need of education). And due to how tumblr’s reblogging system could separate posts entirely from the context of the original poster’s blog and personal details, this assumption happened a lot!
Whatever the actual numbers of people who were self-discovering versus self-deluding, this extreme acceptance got its own natural backlash. It wasn’t possible for everyone on tumblr to be oppressed, but everyone on tumblr seemed to be finding some way to be marginalized - they weren’t cis, they were ‘a demigirl’. They weren’t straight, they were ‘gray asexual’.
There had to be some way to distinguish the real marginalized people from the fakers.*
Enter gatekeeping - which seems reasonable enough at first, given the sheer number of people who are claiming to be part of the marginalized club.
People start making fun of ‘transtrenders’ and ‘starselves’ and say ‘heteroromantic demisexuals’ are ‘just normal’.
People call one another ‘cishet’ specifically to erase their gender identity/sexual orientation.
This environment makes tumblr ripe for radfems, who greatly benefit from people putting limits on what identities other people can have. And radfems feed the gatekeeping mentality, leading to more and more policing of one another on tumblr instead of acceptance. Instead of trusting others to be honest about their gender identity, sexual orientation, race or mental health, people increasingly decide the identity and experiences of others based on whether or not they say and do the right things. Conversely, if you say or do the wrong things you are ostracized and your identity is erased using the reverse social strata of tumblr: ’cishet’ becomes shorthand for ‘ignorant asshole’ - and ignorant assholes are not to be listened to.
One no longer has to identify wrongly to have the wrong identity to be worth listening to. One only has to do the wrong thing.
So how does this tie back to debating fanworks vs dissing people? Well: tumblr isn’t just the home of social justice. It’s also the home of fandom, and these two spaces heavily overlap.
Like our genre fiction friend that I mentioned back at the beginning of this long-ass post, tumblr had already begun - with the best of intentions - to silence people for having the wrong level of marginalization. And when radfems and gatekeepers entered the scene, one’s level of marginalization became a function of how you behaved. Now you had to behave right to have the right to be listened to - and fanworks, far from being the exception, are the rule for determining if people behave ‘right’ in fandom spaces.
In other words: debating fanworks/fan opinions and dissing people have become the same thing. If a fanwork is for the wrong pairing, that makes a person a bad person. And bad people are only able to create bad fanworks.
This attitude is how you get things like ‘if you ship [x] you’re straight’ and ‘oh, you ship [x], your opinion on this unrelated social justice issue is invalid’ or ‘i’m not surprised to find that this person is [x]-phobic, they created problematic fanworks.’
And that’s where we’re at today.
Man this is much. I’m sorry for your eyes.
*And in case it isn’t obvious, I think policing sexual orientations and gender identities is nonsense - demigirls and gray-ace people count as much as everyone else.
This is a good writeup, but I feel the need to clarify something about pre-Racefail ‘09 fandom, and the loose web of creative and nerd communities that surrounded it: it was overwhelmingly socially liberal. The presence of reactionaries, social conservatives, and the occasional ranting right-wing nutjob was a lot more tolerated, because toleration was one of the core values of that brand of liberalism. But it was on an “as long as you more-or-less behave yourself in public” basis, and the social norms and power structures of Nerd Culture were reasonably resistant to being co-opted for conservative agendas. Because in the pre-Facebook era, one of the cardinal rules of nerd culture was “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The social norms were extremely hostile to discrimination and double-standards based on the traditional group-identity divisions–race, gender, sexual orientation, religion–because it was explicitly acknowledged that all you knew about someone’s identity status was what they told you, which might or might not be a lie.
The Achilles heel of this kind of liberalism is a kind of false equivalence between prejudice against groups that have traditionally been marked out for discrimination, and prejudice against the unmarked ‘default’ group that’s traditionally been the one discriminating. At its worst, it leads to the hostility-to-chauvinism norm kicking in against highly visible displays of minority-group membership, especially if they don’t pay adequate respect to the value of “no discrimination, not even reverse discrimination.” And because of the marked/unmarked distinction, visible-minority anything gets saddled with defusing the suspicion that it’s playing identity politics, as well as having to swim upstream against whatever unconscious biases might be at play. On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog–but what happens when you want to talk about how awesome playing fetch is in a room full of cat people?
So that’s a tension that exists within liberal social models, and a place where they were genuinely in need of reform. But it was a vast improvement on the environments most of us were coming from, and the tension wasn’t enough to break social cohesion–as long as the norm of toleration held. The one that said “you can believe any damn fool thing you want and get up to whatever ideological antics you feel like, even if I think your ideology is the cancer killing modern society–as long as you aren’t a dick to the other members of the community.”
SJ was not a reform. SJ took a flamethrower to the norm of toleration and the norm of nondiscrimination, and set up a system where social norms on a person-to-person and small-community scale were dictated by adherence to, and active participation in, a political ideology that demands that social power, credibility, and guilt be assigned based on group membership in society-wide conflicts. It’s been a decade-long slow-rolling trainwreck that devastated some portions of LJ fandom from the moment it took hold. Every new development in Tumblr fandom has come, not from perversions of SJ’s underlying logic, but from perfecting its idea of how power should be allotted and deployed, finding new and fun places to apply it to, and dragging us ever further down the slippery slope.
Gatekeeping is a reaction to the inevitable results of making power depend on marginalized-group status, then lashing out so hard against reverse-discrimination taboos that it carves out a giant zone of impunity where horrific mistreatment “doesn’t count” if it’s against majority groups. Antis are just SJ media criticism abandoning its last holdover inhibitions against categorical thinking, the last vestiges of “we’re not saying nobody can write this just that structural oppression makes it very hard not to do it Wrongly” giving up the ghost. They weren’t even the ones who obliterated the distintion between an opinion and a demand for control–that happened a long time ago.
The liberal model of the 90s to mid-00s had structural flaws on top of the inevitable conflicts that come from humans being human. But it was generally a stable system, and it led to a great flowering of internet culture and creativity. The SJ model has been unstable and destructive from its inception–it narrows possibilities instead of broadening them, lifts things up selectively and conditionally and tears them down with vicious finality. Even the art by and about marginalized groups that’s emerged since it gained dominance has been a trickle rather than a flood, produced anxiously under immense pressure to “perform” politically, constantly under fire from both the circular firing squads within SJ communities and from the reactionaries in the anti-SJ backlash. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not even fixing the problems it sold itself as the solution to.
I think if there’s a solution, it’s some kind of liberalism-with-modifications–an awareness of the marked/unmarked blind spot + a norm against double standards that accounts for skewed standards that already exist, and allows more (but not infinite) room for un-skewing them. But after the cultural devastation of the past decade, it would have to come armed to the teeth with defenses against the quasi-totalitarian factionalism that the latest generation of SJ and anti-SJ warriors have grown up with.
