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FanLib Part Three: From Henry Jenkins to Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom
May 28, 2007

And when the fanfic writers are ticked off - and, boy, are they ticked off! – they put their tools to use. Go here to the new Life without FanLib community to track the latest and view the icons multiplying faster than tribbles.

Said one user on a livejournal site, “I have to laugh at the story ‘FanLib.com helps these readers find each other and gives them a space to share what they've created.’ I think we're doing that *just fine* on our own, thankyouverymuch.[sic]”

I hate to break it to FanLib but these women have no problem finding each other and/or assembling spaces.  It’s something they managed to do in the dark ages of snail mail, long before the advent of the Internet.

(Icon courtesy of Lavenderfrost.)

T-shirts?  They don’t need no t-shirts. Or anything else offered by FanLib. 

Quips a woman known as Lizbee, "I mean, what did they expect us (fandom) to say? 'Thank you, O Unknown Men With No Fandom Backgrounds, for bringing an air of legitimacy to our forty-year-old tradition of women's writing!  Without you, why, we wouldn't have known what to do with ourselves! My, what a big TOS you have!'"

What writers do value is the freedom to create without limits imposed by TPTB - standards and practices, the MPAA, and/or television suits. From a post on Henry Jenkins’ blog: “[Fanlib] is mass-market circulation; 'normalization' into a masculine worldview and publishing economy; and assimilation into a single dominant website with rules codified and enforced by an external authority.”

Women also picked up on a striking dissonance because, no matter how hard he tries to present himself as MOFFT(member of the fanfic tribe), Chris Williams' remarks are riddled with MadAve-speak and with assumptions about what the Silicon Valley/LA corridor entertainment industry THINKS is a "value proposition" (his words) for fanfic writers.

On his blog. Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and participatory culture theorist, Professor Henry Jenkins said:

To add insult to injury, [FanLib] surrounded itself with self congratulatory rhetoric about taking fan fiction into the ‘major leagues,’ which showed little grasp of why fans might prefer to operate in the more liberated zone of what Catherine Tossenberger, an aca-fan who spoke at Phoenix Rising this weekend, calls the 'unpublishable.'…FanLib had done its homework by the standards of the VC world….[but] they simply hadn't really listened to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction.

There are, in addition, many insightful posts written in response to Jenkins' remarks.

Update:
Chris Williams issued a mea culpa and his extensive answers to fan questions are now posted on Jenkins’ blog.

Update:
No one’s buying it.  Scroll down Jenkins’ blog and read the dissections of Williams’ post.

Update:
It just keeps getting better. Workers of the World Unite: An Old School Marxist Analysis of FanLib vs. Fandom

Posted by Mary McNamara on May 28, 2007 | Comments (0)