Extremely long meta-post, yay!

[melannen]

Okay, there's been some discussion threaded through metafandom lately about class in fandom, and the extent to which fandom status is based on class and not merit. This seems to me to be missing the point, because isn't a meritocracy a class system? I've run into literal meritocracies mostly in dystopian novels and high school, and if anything they're the most stifling, stratified class systems ever, because social mobility is *impossible*; one's inherent worth cannot be changed or overcome the way economic or social issues can.

Of course, chances are that the discussion is using the word 'class' in a different and more specific sense than I am, one that probably has to do with money and inheritance and Marxism and Bahba and postmodernism and identity politics and a bunch of other stuff that I don't feel qualified to talk about. So yes, there is a class structure very evident here (and to be fair it's been acknowledged in most of the discussions): people who get virgule and people who don't, but the distinction there is not so much money or time or even merit but *language*, because academic language is intentionally obtuse and doesn't bloody get the concept of 'define your terms' has a vibrant life outside of fandom: I can't pick up the sufficient nuance for a word like 'class' through fandom the same way I have 'slash', even though they're equally vital in meaning.

But that paragraph was not so much relevant to the discussion as my attempt at making an excuse for why I feel like I'm too lower-class to just dive into the discussion. q-: My actual point is one that's also been made repeatedly, but not, I think, in the same way: The defining external factor in fandom class is *not* money, but *time*. This should not be a revelation; fandom is a *hobby*, by definition it's something we do in our free time: no free time, no hobby. Shocking.

The arguments that fandom access is based on money get my goat particularly because I don't *have* money. No, not exactly a BNF here, but I've never felt that *money* was the limitation on my participation. And my internet is paid for by my mother, but that aside I have probably spent far less than $50 on fannishness in the past year. And even that was spent not because I felt I needed it to be fannish, but because I had the money and wanted to give back to the community. In fact, I've always felt that getting involved in internet fandom removed limitations that I'd previously had due to lack of money.

People who talk about spending thousands of dollars a year on 'necessary' fannish expenses are people who have that money to spend. My free income was $3 a week until I went to college, whereupon it increased to $500 a semester in scholarship money. That's *it*, and I was raised to save at least a third of it. And I had no access to cable television. Fannish access was used books (basically whatever SF I could find) and whatever got acceptable reception on network television. [watch this space for a discussion about how fandom is the thinking person's equivalent of flea market culture.]

And then I got into online fandom, and suddenly? I have access to all the reading material I could desire, and it's enough to pick and choose; I can find out what happened in the episodes that I can't catch in reruns and even read transcripts and see screencaps; I can learn the characters and plot-arcs of shows that are only on cable, well enough to talk about them with people who do have cable (and it is possible to write a fic in a fandom where you've seen *no* canon, and get complimented for your in-canon characterization. I've done it.) Oh, and then there's just being able to *talk* with people, having access to a greater community, publish my ideas and fanfic, which is amazing and beautiful, because no *way* am I spending my entire disposable income for the year on a con or a few zines. Online fandom is actually the first place *ever* where I *haven't* felt that a lack of spending money excludes me from pop culture. And from there (if I had the personality and/or the time, anyway) I can make the connections that make money issues even *less* relevant, because for all that economics might have an invisible effect, it's undeniable that we as a community make an *effort* to make it not matter. Even someone who is as generally asocial fandom-wise as I -- all it takes is a casual mention that I don't have access to canon, and I get offers to get it to me free, or for little more than the cost of postage (and I really need to get back to laylah about those HL dvds...) (And to some extent paid-lj is a marker of fandom status, not economically, but because these days I assume that anyone with a free account is too low-status for an lj fairy to donate them time). In other words, if you can afford internet access, you don't *need* to be able to afford anything else.

All any of that requires is an obsolete computer capable of accessing the internet, a crappy dial-up account, and a happy-go-lucky attitude toward spoilers (it would be interesting to try to correlate spoiler-phobia with economic class...) Of course there are some limitations; vidding, for example, generally requires at least broadband and Windows XP; and making high-quality fanart generally requires buying high-quality art supplies. And becoming a supplier of content takes money -- having your own domain or archive, or capping or ripping, or running a lexicon site, for example, requires extra outlay. But you know what? In my corners of fandom, none of that really has any bearing on fandom status: the content-suppliers are either mostly invisible, or better known for their fic or meta than their other activities. And all you need to publish fic or meta is a free lj account. Sure, it would be nice to be able to buy all the DVDs I want, but a) I'm too busy reading fic to watch them anyway, and b) I'd mostly be doing it because I feel guilty about living off the kindness of others. And sure, you might get a head start if you're willing to burn money, but that doesn't automatically correlate to better status long-term.

Or to economic class, for that matter. What originally got me thinking about this are the differences between my sister's fannish experience and mine: she's about as close as you can get to identical socioeconomic background, the only difference being that at the time we were getting into this, she was a poor grad student on a fellowship, and I was a poor undergrad on a scholarship. (Now we're both bums living off our mother, but anyway.) She, however, was much more willing to spend money on fandom; she's one who needs all the dvd box sets and 40 gigs of hard drive space just for clips and her own domain and every episode as soon as it comes out and on videotape. I just mess about on lj a lot. The difference in fannish experience? Well, I think she's higher status than I am; she thinks I'm higher status than she is. The *experience* has been different, because we're different people with different things to offer, but it has nothing to do with money spent or our social background. (And I couldn't define what that is, really-- we're white, American, and probably lower-middle-class by family income and socialization, although with the house there's nearly a million dollars in assets and both my parents had masters' degrees. Also we're liberal geeks, which messes up classifications anyway.)

Not to deny that rl circumstances have an effect on fan status, but it is *not* money, it's free time. And not just free time, but a specific *sort* of free time. *Flex* time: most of the extremely high-status fans are the sort who have access to the internet pretty much constantly, with an hour or two off for commutes or classes or doing the work you're actually being paid for; ljs will be updated any time of day, people are on AIM constantly, e-mail answered conscientously. (It's interesting to ponder how much this has changed with the decline of mailing lists: I would think they would be much more conducive to checking once or twice a day than the current message board format that's popular.) Weekends off aren't going to let you keep up at the level that's necessary for becoming a really high-status fan; neither is checking lj before work every day.

This is another thing I picked up on through discussions with my sister; she commented that my fandom flist has *much* more interesting real lives than hers does. I think that has less to do with our fandom tastes than our friending policy; our flists are equally smart, thoughtful, pleasant and well-written. But I'm far more self-conscious about fandom status than she is, so I'm much more likely to flist people with a similar lj rank-- that is, between 10 and 100 friend-ofs, and similar posting frequency and comment numbers. My sister just flists people whose ljs she likes (which, granted, is a much healthier policy, but my friending issues aren't the point here. Watch this spot.) That means that her flist is skewed to people with high merit and high fandom status/visibility; mine is skewed to people with high merit but comparatively *low* status. The creative, intelligent, articulate people on my flist aren't as high-status as their merit should indicate: and the obvious reason is that they spend their time other ways. (I think at the time we had the discussion, three of the fandom people I read were at archeology field camp, another couple were studying abroad, two were trying to get original novels published, several were occupied with very interesting, non-white-collar jobs, or busy organizing for cons, or politically or socially active, or working on a third or fourth college degree. Not terrifically adventurous, but it all takes time away from fandom.)

That said, there's a few professions/lifestyles that turn up with extremely high frequency among high-status fans; they correlate somewhat but not exactly to socioeconomic class. There's students, mostly university level, and academics; people who work white-collar jobs that let them surf the internet most of the day; people who work at home; and people who don't work. These lifestyles are conducive to not just a lot of free time, but to spending most of that free time in a sedentary fashion, either because you're stuck in the office or dorm or with the kids, because you can't afford to go out, or you're physically unable to have a more active hobby. When I first starting regularly reading a lot of bnf ljs by surfing the flists of communities, I was startled by the proportion of highly popular, highly prolific writers who are homebound to one extent or another-- some of them have essentially made fandom their career, and many of them are not from bourgeois backgrounds. Many of the rest are university students or academics. Few of them are exactly swimming in cash.

Conclusions: Money and socioeconomic background are not nearly as correlated to fandom status as quality of free time. Generalizations are fun. q-:

And then there's the part of the discussion which asks why fic never addresses issues of class. Tosh. Fic constantly addresses issues of class. It probably addresses issues of class as often and as realistically as it addresses gender issues. For heaven's sake, there's a whole *genre* of hookerfic, and if *that* doesn't play around with a character's class status....? Any fandom where social class is important in the canon will have a very strong strain of fanfic which deals with it, frequently in AUs (and I was highly amused by the dS AU that recast all the working-class characters as English professors. Yummy meta-fic.) In fandoms where it doesn't come up very often in character interaction (like Stargate, which deals with class on a galactic scale rather than a national one, and the Jossverse, where everybody's suffering from liberal guilt ... ooh, I just found another reason the SW prequels never sat right with me: everybody acts upper-class, even the slaves), it doesn't come up as much in the fic, frankly because it would often feel out of character. In fandoms where it *is* important-- BG, HL, HP, real SW, dS, PotC, etc-- it comes up a lot. Certainly at *least* as often as queer issues do. Even in XF, where everybody's an FBI agent and class is implied through interaction rather than stated in canon, many of the better fics take into account the class differences in their pairings.

Maybe fewer people discuss class in meta. Partially because (as I have discovered) it's really hard to openly discuss class openly without either using esoteric terminology or risking unintentional offence (my government 100 class spent a whole month discussing what, if anything, 'race' is. Head explodey.) And maybe it came up more often in older fic and fandoms -- SGA, my newest fandom, is annoying me with its tendency to make John's father either a military officer or upper-middle-class, when the simplest interpretation is that he joined ROTC to pay for college, and stayed in so that he could fly -- on the other hand, there's also been lots of SGA fic dealing with the class divisions between the military and the scientists. And yummy AUs that play with class. So. Maybe it's just somewhat invisible, even in fic that deals with class, *because* we take class for granted in a way that we no longer take gender for granted, *because* we don't discuss it endlessy in meta, *because* it's not x-rated -- but it's definitely there in the fic.

That's my meta-rant for the month. Now, on to the important questions, [Poll #544172]