ConMunity Engagement: Feminist Fandoms p3, Bringing Feminism to Mainstream conventions

Women, people of color, trans, queer, and the rest of us folx (aka anyone who is not a straight-white-cis-het-white-male) are changing the landscape of nerd spaces. Besides bringing new markets, or increasing holds in those markets, we are critiquing the ways that nerd-culture is unhealthy. Specifically, these audiences are not interested in the white nerd boy club that was the standard in comics, and other nerd communities. Instead, we seek to change the behaviors that have made these cis-het-white-male-centric spaces unhealthy. This means not being “one of the guys” but changing fandoms and fan spaces to be explicitly feminist, and I mean intersectional feminist, and respectful of all people. While using the term “feminist” to refer to fan communities is in some ways oxymoronic, as they act a microcosm for the rampant misogyny in society, it is that sort of reform that is needed to re-forge them into healthy places.

As comics became blockbuster films, and as more people have grown up with access to manga, establishing feminism in fandoms is one part of the swing back to a more inclusive market in comics. One of these expanding comics-related markets is clothing and cosplay, full costumes or the “undercover” variety. Because costuming, and the skills required for costuming, is/are still coded as feminine and this work has brought many more women into these spaces.

However, cosplay is not inherently feminist. There is still an association between the term ‘cosplay’ and sexy because it revealed how impractical and bizarre costuming choices for women characters in comics are. This mean that cosplay can embody the same misogyny that exists in the comics that they draw from and that was inherent to the nerd community.

So cosplay brings in more women, as do many other factors, but how do we bring feminism to mainstream conventions when women just as capable of supporting the patriarchy as men? I’ve touched on this in my previous blogs but it involves supporting feminist programming, artists, sellers, and bringing feminism into whatever fandoms you participate in. For me this starts at home. Am I being a feminist consumer? I try to be and you can read my rule about buying floppy comics to see what I mean. Some people argue that the idea of a “feminist consumer” is problematic because of the rise of “capitalist feminism,” which some people see as antithetical to the goals of feminism . However, conventions are essentially small open markets where the consumer has a lot of power. It’s also the age old claim of the anti-diversity folks that we “diverse consumers” just aren’t driving the market. So it’s paper paper paper to support the diverse work I love.

Sometimes you love what you love, and sometimes that thing is not easy to reconcile with feminism. My example is Star Trek: The Original Series, I love so much of what it brought to the small screen, but its approach to women and culture is still deeply rooted in the 1960s (for an example revisit The Paradise Syndrome). If the fandom you love has problems that deal with culture, gender, sexuality, or race, consider bringing programming to conventions that addresses those issues. We are at conventions because of our love for the medium, genre, or specific work so if you feel like it needs to be critiqued, you are probably not alone. There will be other fans interested in having a meaningful discussion about intersectional issues, if you didn’t enjoy it so much, you probably wouldn’t be annoyed enough to want to critique it.

My last suggestion is to wear your feminist properties on your sleeve. Be open about it, take up space and be seen supporting properties like Feminist Frequency, Black Girl Nerds, and InSEXts. Encourage your friends to support new feminist properties or bring them to panels that support those creators. Wear your Bitch Planet pins to the con, out in the world, and talk-that-shit-up. One of the biggest comments I’ve gotten after talking to people about Bitch Planet, is “I didn’t know that existed in comics” WELL NOW YOU KNOW. Go do the thing. Also, where possible, don’t take shit from people trying to gatekeep you. Assert yourself, ask questions like “why does that matter?” and interrogate them about their knowledge. I have had to explain my “Feminism is my Fandom” pin more than once but that meant that the other person actually had to engage with what that meant. Part of the patriarchy is controlling knowledge, power, and knowledge as power. We can do it too, it's just a matter of using those tools to our advance our agendas.

These are just a few suggestions but it’s clear from the existence of sites such as themarysue, youtube series like Feminist Frequency, comics like Bitch Planet, and films like She Makes Comics (PS don't believe the IMDB ratings, they're heavily gendered) that feminism exists in nerd spaces. Each of these celebrate women’s long history of participation in the nerd community and demonstrates how feminism benefits both women and men and conventions. It means that people, regardless of gender will have respect and be able to participate in the things that they love without fear of bullying or discomfort. We all attend conventions because they should be safe spaces and to make that true requires feminism and feminist fandoms.

The Rule

Note: This blog was initially written as part of an application for the comic website Panels on 25 Feb 2016. - Paulina

I didn’t start buying floppies until I was 22, just before I finished my first year of graduate school. It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy reading comics, I did, it was that as a kid my parents encouraged the use of the library. Also we were middle class and at the rate that I read manga buying them really made no sense.

Anyways, soon after I started collecting I became interested in the diversity of the comics industry. While not something I had actively cared about before I started collecting, the more I learned about it the more I realized that lack of diversity had kept me from pursuing my interest in American comics as a child. As a 9-year-old girl of mixed-race (Filipino-Polish if that matters to you) it was much easier to pick up manga like Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, or Inu-Yasha and relate to those characters than it was to start reading Batman where 1) there was no clear place to begin 2) it was hard to imagine myself as a stupidly wealthy middle aged white man.

So this got me thinking and after a year of collecting and going religiously to my local shop and grabbing up whatever sounded cool I realized I was adding too many books to my list and I needed a way to pare down the possibilities. (Not that you necessarily should, I just didn’t have the income to support my growing habit). And after some thought I came up with one rule:

No diversity within the comic or its creation, no way its getting my money as a full-priced floppy.

What does this mean?

It means that I don’t buy comics for full price that are made by white males about white males.

What doesn’t this mean?

-It doesn’t mean that those stories are bad.

-It doesn’t mean that the stories I’m left with are good.

-It doesn’t mean I would buy any story that met that criteria.

-It doesn’t mean I won’t ever read those stories.

-It doesn’t mean that I won’t eventually purchase those stories.

It was a way to merge my passions and meet my economic need. I could promote diversity in comics by putting my money where my mouth was and pre-ordering books with main characters who were women and/or people of color and/or stories that women and/or people of color made. To boot, it’s a pretty easy rule to remember and follow.

After I started filtering books by this rule, I realized how many new titles, creator owned and those promoted by the big two, didn’t meet my qualifications. It was a comics Bechdel test and there were months that would go by where no new titles followed my rule AND sounded interesting enough to purchase. Also like the Bechdel test, I knew it isn’t/wasn’t a perfect rule. Furthering the parallel though, it made me think seriously about all those stories that didn’t have women or people of color as main characters or as key creators.

Most of us know that what keeps women and people of color from entering the industry is an intersectional problem that involves the conception and a perpetuation of the idea that those industries “are” middle-class and white and male. This is a problem in almost all nerdy industries. More striking to me was the lack of women and people of color as main characters. What was it about a story that involved a “young boy discovering his destiny as X” that required him to be a) a boy (or male or gendered at all) b) illustrated as Caucasian. Was there some sort of special penis requirement for this destiny that also required the palest of complexions with European features? No, there wasn’t. Instead, these stories revealed a level of contentedness with “industry” standards and a lack of questioning of the ideology of the “typical” comic-book character. The industry assumed a white male audience and so they continued to give that audience stories that they could easily identify with. It wasn’t that white-male audiences couldn’t identify with diversity, we all know they can, it’s just that the industry didn’t think to make them try.

Thankfully, this is changing and every week more titles are coming out from DC and Marvel and Image that mimic the reality of comic book reading audiences. Where the characters and creators are increasingly diverse in age, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class background. But I keep my rule anyways. Partially because my comics are piling up in another state and I’m not adding any books at the moment but also because it’s still a good rule to have. If a comic can’t find a woman and/or a person of color to be a part of its creation, in any capacity, and they don’t have them incorporated into the story in a significant way is it an artistic choice or just laziness?