Maybe I'm a mermaid

I've been thinking about this for a few weeks now, and at one point hoped to get it done for the most recent PoC in SF Carnival #8, but for lots of reasons didn't, though my post does relate to its theme of intra-racial dialogues. In the wake of IBARW2, in which I participated, I joined deadbrowalking, and I've been reading everything that I get linked to, and I've had much more of a sense of myself as a FoC, a fan of color, and what that means to me, and what it means or can mean to others, and what I can use my voice for. I've been trying to use this time to STFU and listen, lest others sense that I have need for some pants. Check out the Carnival, because there are some truly excellent posts in there, without which I don't think I could have clarified my own thoughts.

There's been a debate lately about the word "queer" and who gets to use it and who doesn't and in what circumstances. I'm not interested in commenting directly on that, but in one of the earlier posts that kicked off the debate hth_the_first said in part:

Queerness is the turf of queer fans, not of slashers. You know who gets to say what's so totally gay? Gay people. Not that they will always agree with each other! Not that they will always *disagree* with what straight people think. But the thing is, people who are saturated in queerness and spend our lives thinking about the queer issues -- guys, we get to be the voice of what's SO GAY.

I found myself translating this statement into one about race—who gets to say what is SO BLACK?—and there were a lot of differences that stood out to me.

As a biracial woman, a lot of my experience with race has been one of customization for myself, and then realizing how much customization everyone else is also doing, even while the "community" maintains a unified front for political reasons. So for me, running around claiming the authority over what is SO BLACK feels presumptuous.

But more importantly, or at least, less personally, the SO GAY claim and the SO BLACK claim work in very different ways in fandom, because for slashers SO GAY is positive, while the SO BLACK claim seems to be problematic—see the recent conversations about SGA to see what I mean. The issue isn't one of those who are not black pointing at something and claiming it to be black, but one of those who are not black refusing to accept the PoC fans pointing at something and claiming it to be black. Either way, the voices of those who might claim authority are being ignored or discounted. Either way, as noted in ciderpress's excellent essay (which to my mind should be required reading), the conversation is being controlled by the ones with the privilege.

And it's really to ciderpress, who asks how to get out of this box we're in, that I have a response: we don't shut up. We just keep writing. We just keep throwing ourselves against that wall. Maybe the goal isn't to get the poster of the story with wanky race issues, or the meta that tried to work to ignore sexuality, to get the message, as witchqueen noted in her recent posts about tone. Maybe it isn't even to get the third parties to get the message, as I'd thought at the time.

Maybe it's to remind our fellow non-privileged fen, be they FoC, or queer, or something else (I know some work on class is starting here and there), that they do have a voice, do belong in fandom, do get to speak up when their own squee is being harshed. After all, isn't one of the singular things about LJ fandom that it is a primarily female space, a safe space away from sometimes-condescending fanboys? A lot of talk has gone into the feeling of community, of having a place to speak up and be heard in the same language, that deadbrowalking has brought, that metafandom has brought just because fans from different fandoms can see everything going on, and as new as that is, that has to count for something.

In a sound too low for you to hear

My trunk is certainly stuffed up today.