elisem | (Reply)

From:

I am still pondering that essay. It has to do with growing up hard-core fundie Lutheran, finding ways to escape that involved reading, and more particularly, reading science fiction, and then a long time later realizing that escapees who were brought up in communities of Received Wisdom and Required Conformity might wind up applying some of those frameworks and assumptions and navigational skills to the communities they fled to when they escaped, the communities that they may feel saved their lives.

Somewhere in that paragraph is the place where I should mention all the extremely intense negative reactions to the word "scifi" during certain decades. Seriously, fighting words, you know? Which is ... not how it is at all, now, when there are podcasts and TV networks that say "scifi" and "skiffy." ("Skiffy" was, at one time, a contemptuous and derogatory term that fans used to make fun of non-fans who called science fiction "scifi." That's, um, not what it is today.)

But back on leaving one community and entering another, i.e. fundie Protestant religion and fandom-as-it-was-in-the-early-80s, which was a helluva journey. Finding out that anthropology was A Thing is part of it, as is realizing that participant-observer stuff is fraught with peril, especially if you don't realize that that is what you're doing. Or probably should be doing. If you're not observing in certain ways, it's just... uncritical participating? Something.

There's also how, when I got there, fandom was so very obviously not really One Big Thing, despite the ... suggestions? assumptions? doctrine? that it was. I remember zine fans (note the modified term!) complaining that now they had a modified term applied to them when once they had roamed the Earth as giant thunder lizards of fanac, browsing on hecto jelly and twilltone, and what on Earth was fandom coming to, anyway? Not to mention the way people had applied a modifier to Trek fans or Trekfans or don't-you-dare-say-Trekkie-Ghu-dammit-we-are-Trekkers!-fans.

Anyhow, there were a lot of fights over words.

The above is why the essay is not finished yet, because gaaaah.