On the accessibility of fandom fests

[noracharles]

This is a post about the accessibility of fandom fests for people with social anxieties.

October 24th, 2009: kaz on access_fandom: Challenges, challenges, challenges
It's a great post, go read :-)

I would like in particular to quote this:

If you have written anything of the "we will be kind of unhappy if you drop out without a good reason >(" variety, in fact if you haven't explicitly made it clear that dropping out is acceptable, I have probably worked myself up into such a state about this that I cannot, actually, think about the challenge without starting to cry. - kaz

because it is relevant to what I have to say.

Yuletide is moving to a new archive, because the old archive is kaput. Some members for a variety of personal reasons want to withdraw their fics. The move of old fics hasn't even started yet, but speculation and rumors about how it would be handled started as soon as the move was announced.

January 4th 2010: astolat mod of yuletide: About the AO3 and the yuletide move

If you want more details about the move, there will be a detailed explanation including optional tech geekery on the yuletide_admin livejournal at least a week before we actually run the import (the move was delayed until after Yuletide so we could do this in a more sane way), and all authors will be notified at all of the email addresses on their yuletide story or stories, and will have the option to claim, orphan, or delete your work. (I'll field questions on that post, but please hold 'em until then!) - astolat

I like how she makes her position clear, that the move is necessary, but does not lay on the guilt. I have not followed the communications from yuletide regarding the move very closely, because I am not a member, but I have no objections to any of the official communications I have seen. On the contrary, I am pleasantly surprised.

The problem is that supporters of yuletide have taken it upon themselves to wage a campaign of social pressure on members not to remove any fics from the archive.

Please note: This is my, possibly inaccurate, summary. I do not speak for anyone but myself. Please go to the source to form your own impression of what people are really saying.

January 2nd, 2010: merricatk: Ravings of an emotionally unstable fan. Warning, ableist content in comments, may be triggering.

merricatk provides us with some background for context: She is a member of yuletide, and wishes to withdraw her fic or at least be better informed about her privacy options. She has a history of not functioning well in fandom social circles, and has accepted that certain things she just can't take part in. For her own health and well-being, she has decided to withdraw her fic from public archives and repost it in her own journal.

Having heard the rumor of yuletide moving, she went looking for information, and supporters of yuletide were calling members wishing to withdraw names. (merricatk seems to think they are official representatives of yuletide, but from what I have seen that is not the case.)

I wish they weren't using the word orphan. It's too poetic, it puts to sharp a point on the abandonment, it makes me feel terrible. I have abandonment issues. Call me a thief for taking my story back and I can deal with it. Say I'm making my story an orphan, I'll cry.

[...]

I'm perfectly aware that my feelings--and all this is nothing but my feelings--are indefensible. But I don't like it when the powerful people come and tell me how unreasonable I am not to want to do things their way. Not ask, just tell.

I can live with being disliked, considered a screwball, or an angry, shitty, classless, selfish jerkass, and I can live with people believing the lie that I'm doing this because I hate OTW and/or A3O. I can live with the whole rest of the world considering me irrational.

January 3rd, 2010: fandom_wank: Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics. Warning, ableist content in post and comments, may be triggering.
fandom_wank users discuss the yuletide archive move debate, including merricatk's post.

There are many very funny snarky comments, but there are also a few opinions I find objectionable:

• That merricatk does not have the right to talk about her anxiety, because the pain she feels is lesser than the pain other people could have potentially felt had other authors agreed with merricatk in the warnings debate some months ago that writing warnings on all their fic was an insurmountable task and a barrier to future writing inspiration and motivation and had they furthermore disagreed with merricatk that it was appropriate to take other measures, such as removing their fic from public archives. Or as they say: merricatk does not feel empathy, so deserves no empathy.



• That merricatk does not have the right to talk about her anxiety, because her feelings are stupid and inconvenient.

Dear reader, should merricatk's opinions on anything influence your opinion on whether supporters of a fest can create an atmosphere which excludes people with social anxieties from taking part in fests?

And, dear reader, if accessibility is only for the good people with disabilities, and merricatk is a bad person with a disability, does the fact that she used herself as an example of a fan with social anxiety crying over a fest mean that you should not care about the other fans with social anxiety

• possibly being triggered by the atmosphere of social pressure surrounding the yuletide move
• possibly being scared away from seeking information from the actual official representatives of the fest
• and possibly being scared away from ever participating in a fandom fest in the future?

How can we do better?

I think the mods could not have anticipated the way the discussion flared up. I knew from casually looking through the yuletide comm that information about the move was forthcoming, and that the mods were very busy with yuletide 2009 which has only just finished. And I think astolat reacted very quickly, pouring oil on the troubled waters and making it clear that it would be possible to withdraw. I do not blame the yuletide mods in any way.

Future mods of fests could consider having an official policy of asking supporters not to answer member questions, except to refer confused members to the rules or FAQ. This might cut down on supporters going against a fest's policy of non-confrontation and low guilt and anxiety. Enforcing rules without causing anxiety attacks is a very tricky matter, and random supporters should not be encouraged to enforce rules through social pressure.

Supporters of fests, who are understandably eager to have everyone follow the rules, could consider whether referring the confused to the rules or FAQ, or letting them know that an official announcement will be forthcoming wouldn't be the most constructive thing to do.

I can't blame anyone for snarking in a comm like fandom_wank, because it is not a safe space, and it has rules against confronting the people under discussion. But I think that people who think that an appropriate response to "You are frightening me" is more confrontation, or pointing and laughing, need to examine their ableist privilege.

---

This is a post about the accessibility of fandom fests for people with social anxieties.

It is not a post about whether there are rules about withdrawing fic from yuletide, whether the rules were made clear when people signed up, and whether the archive move releases users from their promise to leave the fic in the archive.

It is not a post about whether social anxiety is real, and whether social pressure including guilt and name calling can trigger anxiety attacks.

It is not a post about the warnings debate, and merricatk or noracharles' role in the debate.

You must log in to comment. LiveJournal and most LiveJournal-based sites have OpenID: check the "OpenID" radio button in the comment box, and write in your identity URL in the text box, for example "myusername.livejournal.com". You will be redirected to log in to your own journal site, and with a simple click of a button you can give permission for dreamwidth to display your OpenID username with your comment. It's very simple and requires no set-up or filling out forms of any kind.

I will not be able to moderate any discussion that takes place here continuously. Try to stay on topic, and don't allow the discussion to be derailed.

Comments

[laughingrat]

Yeah. I was about to edit my comment (after reading the entirety of your post, sorry, that bit that jumped out at me was SO OMG TRUE that I had to stop and reply to it at once) and say that really, it seems like the solution is for people to stop acting like dicks. Of course, with human beings, and privilege, it's never that simple. The trouble is that Kaz's (is she the same as Merricatk?) response, as quoted above, is real and very upsetting for her. Pressure to conform or perform can be incredibly triggering, and it seems like it's one that most people have little understanding of or patience for. That just makes it harder for her to be honest about her situation--which took considerable nerve--and actually receive support. And of course the people who actively disagree with her position, the folks who want the Yuletide archives intact or feel it's unforgivable to drop out of a fest, are likely to be even less understanding than folks with no investment.

And yet their feelings are legitimate too. That's the hell of it. Of course, ableist BS and namecalling, that's not legitimate; there's no need for people to be hateful. So like you (it seems), I wonder if the hugeness of this could've been averted by people not being horrible in response to someone's clear declaration of her needs and feelings. And ableism does seem to be wrapped up in all of that ("good" vs. "bad" disability), plus the general attitude I pick up, IRL and on the net, that feelings are dumb and talking about feelings makes you a messy, incontinent, icky person, someone to be marginalized.

Well, that was an awful lot of text to basically restate what you already said, eh? :-P

[noracharles]

No, kaz and merricatk are two different people. I just wanted to show that other people than Merricatk have talked openly about this problem, and I don't want to have to use myself as an example.

I was just reading giandujakiss's post I hesitated to post this because I fear the wrath that may rain on my head, but.... which was linked from metafandom, and it makes me so sad. Giandujakiss is right that there has been a wave of resistance against AO3 and the yuletide move, and that it's very frustrating for supporters to feel the community they love and may have helped build crumple based on unfounded rumors and deliberate misinformation. But the ableist way she contradicts carose59, using words like sane and rational, when carose59 quietly points out that anxious people were not given information, only the disquieting rumors, it's upsetting me.

I really like your summing up of my point, I think it needed to be stated in a concise and humorous way, so thank you for that. Indeed, rules are necessary, and we all understand why yuletide supporters care very much about keeping the fics in the archive. There's just no need to be horrible about it.

I guess this is officially off-topic, sorry

[laughingrat]

The hostility to AO3 really puzzles me, and some of it has been couched in anti-intellectual ways that (naturally) get my back up. For some of the people around in fandom ten-fifteen years ago, though, there's apparently some serious baggage around the academic/non-academic fen conflict, so that explains their position at least. All news to me but I can see how it happened.

Oh, the argument against the use of "orphaned" to describe some works keeps nagging at me. Someone's probably told the OP this already, and you probably know it yourself, but that word wasn't chosen to make anyone feel bad. It's how professional archivists and restorers refer to works which are technically under copyright, but in which it's impossible to contact the copyright holder. I assume the analogy is to fanworks which someone wants to preserve (by archiving, ferinstance, in a stable archive like AO3), but the writers of which are unreachable, have left fandom, etc.

Whew, I feel better now that I've typed that.

Re: I guess this is officially off-topic, sorry

[noracharles]

Ha! Yes, I understand why you needed to get that off your chest. I'm certain that the word orphan was used exactly in the sense and for the reason you say.

I don't know if she knew that when she talked about how the word made her feel. The meanings of words, and the intentions people have when they use them matter very much to me, and I especially can't stand rejections of words based on anti-intellectualism - but when the topic is how the reader feels when reading a word, and perceiving that word as applying to herself, then an explanation of the intention of the writer is off topic, as you say :-)

I don't think the verb "to orphan" is offensive or ill-chosen, but in the emotionally charged atmosphere, with name calling and guilting going on, it is understandable that emotional connotations to words can strike anyone much more strongly than they usually would. This word especially conveys the feeling of the work as an extension/product of the author's self, and the severing of that connection between author and work as something traumatic.

Re: I guess this is officially off-topic, sorry

[laughingrat]

Oh yeah--I bet she didn't know that. No, I don't think she herself was being anti-intellectual, sorry, there were like two different branches of thought going on in that comment and they wound up smooshed together... I was sort of delighted to see that AO3 uses the word, actually, because the first time I'd ever heard it used that way at all was in film preservation journals. It's not really used that way outside certain circles--which, then again, gets into issues of accessibility, educational accessibility this time, which is part of what older fans are worried about with OTW and acafen. There's always going to be accidental sidelining when people with mixed educational levels/interests in theory speak together, but there has (apparently) been some serious, even deliberate badness go down in the past. I speak with zero authority on the matter because I just learned this today myself. ;)

Wow, now it's REALLY off-topic. *headdesk*

Oh, but yeah--I see what you mean about the word potentially adding to the emotional cocktail. I wonder if the clinical nature of the word had been explained before they trotted it out? I bet not--the assumption being that people would just get it. And it IS a good metaphor, but the way it's normally used is not in such an emotion-rich context, either.

Re: I guess this is officially off-topic, sorry

[carose59]

There's nothing wrong with the word orphan, it just hits my abandonment issues. I was actually thinking about what term I'd use, if I had to come up with one, and what I thought of was, Stories that have been set free. Because the author can't/doesn't want to be involved with AOOO, she has chosen to set her story free for fandom to enjoy, no longer attached to her.

(And, see, if the story really loves you, it'll come back to you. And if it doesn't, it was never really yours. *g*)

Re: I guess this is officially off-topic, sorry

[noracharles]

LOL. That's actually really beautiful :-)

Re: I guess this is officially off-topic, sorry

[doire]

Manumitted? Or does the word manumission carry too many echoes of slaves? Perhaps emancipation. Sadly I don't think either of these will have the right nuances for current ears.

Re: I guess this is officially off-topic, sorry

[snakeling]

As an ESL, I find manumitted not transparent at all. Orphan is a more common word, and even if you don't know the specialised meaning, you can grok it from context much more easily.

I find emancipate easy to understand, but then it's a Latinate word, and I'm a French-speaker. I'm not sure it would be clear to a speaker of a non-Romance language. I do like "set free" :)

(frozen) (no subject)

[saraht]

when [personal profile] carose59 quietly points out that anxious people were not given information, only the disquieting rumors

It's not that I'm not sympathetic to the goal of making fandom more accessible to people with disabilities, including mental ones. (Though it should be noted that merricatk does not identify, in this post at least, as someone with an actual mental disorder. Perhaps she is; I don't know. People reading that post couldn't know, either.) I think your overall concern is valid.

However, if there are people who, due to anxiety, literally cannot deal with "disquieting rumors" about changes in organization of a fannish social activity--who cannot wait for the facts to come out or consult those in charge for the facts but rather are significantly harmed and/or driven away and/or feel compelled to behave unpleasantly in public just by "disquieting rumors"--I fear that, unfortunately, fandom is not a suitable environment for them. Such people seem to me to be seriously ill and to need to be in supportive and structured environments for healing. There is no way the sharp edges can be taken off fandom enough for it to be safe for them. Fandom does ultimately presume a certain baseline capacity to manage one own's feelings and behaviors, and I don't think it can function without that presumption. I am absolutely not trying to suggest that such people should be blamed for a temporary or permanent lack of that capacity, or do not deserve sympathy and kindness, but without that capacity they are very likely to be unnecessarily hurt in fandom, or to hurt others without meaning to.

I don't think the correct response to "You are frightening me" is mockery or cruelty. But the correct response, in wider society, can't always be "okay, I will stop what I'm doing, regardless of the basis of your fear and regardless of how limiting your fear is to me."

(frozen) (no subject)

[noracharles]

This discussion is to try to identify ways in which fandom fests may be inaccessible for fans with anxiety issues, and solutions to accessibility problems.

It is also to get people to refrain from taking out their frustration about the behavior of individual persons with mental health issues on all people with mental health issues by using ableist language or refusing to consider how their own behavior makes fandom less accessible to a number of different people in different ways.

If I suggest that supporters of a fest should refer the anxious and confused to an official FAQ or let them know that an official statement is coming -- how do you think it is appropriate to say "Well, I can't control what rumors there are in fandom, maybe those fragile fans should just go away. Problem solved"?

You can control the behavior of saraht. I suggest you tell saraht to stop using derogatory ableist terms to score points in discussions, and to be quiet or be helpful when saraht sees a confused fellow member of a fest or fandom event, rather than assume their anxiety is faked for drama, wank and lolz.

I suggest you tell saraht not to advice members of oppressed minorities not to participate in wider society because it's just going to be painful for them anyway. We're not here to talk about how painful and hopeless it all is, we're here to discuss how to do better.

[giandujakiss]

Hi there. I saw your post linked from toft's and I'd like to ask about it. Because I do see your point about the use of the word "sane" in the comments to my post, but not the use of the word "rational." I outlined the kinds of views I believed were irrational views - not emotional reactions, but opinions and factual conclusions. (There was another thread in my post where I talked about this again, specifically, i.e., that I should not have used words like sane, but that I stood by words like "irrational" to describe opinions like, for example, that OTW is trying to homogenize fanfic or has a secret agenda.) If you think the use of words like rational is ableist, I'd like to know why.

[noracharles]

I do not think the words rational or irrational are ableist. I think that the idea that when a person is irrational, she is also delusional, and can be written off as insane and her emotions and experiences discredited is ableist.

I was specifically referring to your exchange with carose59, not your post.

In your irrational replies to carose59 you said that she did not really experience not being able to find the information she was looking for, because the information was made available to her later. Therefore her experience of not being able to find the information she was looking for and feeling anxious was false, and she was insane.

I quote:

So ... your complaint is that even though they will warn everyone that will be affected in advance of anything that affects them, and have warned everyone that was affected in advance of anything that affected them, they ... didn't properly consider people who participated years ago?

Wow, you've totally convinced me that your objections are rooted in sane, reasonable problems with the move. Good job there.

If that is not how you meant it, I am of course glad and relieved. But you should be aware that that is how what you wrote came across to me.

[giandujakiss]

No, I didn't mean that she hadn't experienced that problem - I think part of the issue is my post was never about Merricat - it was more about tzikeh's exchanges with the person who though OTW had secret motives and were hacks - and I didn't realize at the time I was talking to Merricat. So I took her objections as an objection to Yuletide's policies and communication schedule - not as, I gather she says now, an explanation of her feelings and difficulties. But I do hear you on the use of the word sane and, by extension, conflating irrational with insane.

[noracharles]

Thank you for explaining.

[giandujakiss]

No, thank you for your post :-)

[noracharles]

I am sincerely glad you found it useful, and I thank you for letting me know. These confrontations about unconscious privilege are painful and difficult for all concerned, and I know the experience from both sides of the divide.