December Days 2020 #19: A Creative Process

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

bladespark posted something of a fannish roundup or introduction set of things, although they're focused on output created and the processes thereof than more general fannishness, if that makes sense. Sort of the obverse of the coin that focuses on the things that one might request or says are the things they look for in content and fannish content. My brain is helpfully reminding me that there's a tiered hierarchy of sorts in fandoms, and depending on whether your focus in the fandom is primarily curative or creative, who occupies the levels of the hierarchy changes. At least in the transformative fandom and their audience, though, there does seem to be a fence between the people who primarily consume and the people who also create. I'd like to believe, especially in these halcyon days of the Archive of Our Own and all sorts of other sites where transformative fandom flourishes, that it's a very short fence, but it's still there, at least in the ways that these questionnaires seem to focus either on "what do you like to consume" or "what do you like to produce", as if there isn't a giant glob of people in transformative fandom that do both at the same time. Maybe it's easier to separate out the aspects for more practical reasons that I'm not seeing right now. Anyway, onward to the list.

( The List! )

And there we are! There will be a longer AO3 output post around the end of the month with commentary on works, but here's a little glimpse inside how the process works (or doesn't.)

December Days 2020 #20: Not Everything You See Or Hear Is Real

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

cosmolinguist has an interesting post titled "Accentism and the Standardized Language Ideology" which examines the underpinnings of people thinking things that may seem common sense to one group but are nonsensical to another, like Accentism (discrimination based on regional or dialectical speech patterns) is real, but so deeply embedded into a society that it can't be undone. To which Cosmo points out the research backs up the assertion that speaking with a regional accent or dialect results in discrimination, but the second part doesn't follow - it's not a deeply embedded thing in the culture that can't be unseated. Because, as it turns out, there's nothing intrinsic about any accent or dialect at all, and so any connotations that we make about a person's class, wealth, politeness, or any other aspect about them that's not "they have learned how to speak with this particular regional dialect", based on their accent or dialect are learned, not innate.

This leads to Cosmo mentioning James Milroy's paper on "standard language ideology", the idea that nation-states built themselves an identity around standardizing how the language sounds and what words and grammars it uses, and in so doing, have taken away the language from the native speakers to the point where there is such a thing as "bad grammar" or "low-class" or "high-class" accents and pronunciations. Because otherwise, it's spoken language, and whomever is speaking it is the authority on its usage. (This is a really wide-application point to pull out if someone is getting shirty about language usage, neologism, memery, the kids these days, language drift, language shift, or is being excessively pedantic and/or prescriptive about the use of the language.) So much of what is associated with a particular regional accent, or a dialect, or any other variation in language is ideologically loaded, but since we're taught that ideology in grammar school under the auspices of books and teachers and the assumption that there is such a thing as the right way to speak a language, those prejudices get ingrained as relating to language when they are instead relating to everything but language.

The most easy and immediate examples of accentism and things that are supposedly "common sense" are the long-standing insistence that African-American Vernacular English isn't real or acceptable English and that a strong Appalachian or Southern US accent indicates a lack of education, an unshakeable belief in Republican TurboJesus evangelical Christianity, and low economic status. AAVE is a dialect, and a perfectly-comprehensible one to anyone who knows how to speak it. It, and basically every other immigrant dialect, has been the subject of a systemic campaign to erase them in favor of what we usually call "broadcast" English in the States, the specific pronunciation and regional accent of a national newscaster, which is, generally speaking, a lower Great Lakes regional accent.

And I would like to think that all the people who are plugged in to watching the state of Georgia's Senate races in the States and wondering whether it will elect two Democrats and the closeness of how things turned out in much of the South would put the lie to the idea that everyone with a southern accent is a TurboJesus hick, but the struggle is not only real, it's still going on, in memes that talk about the "United States of Canada" versus "Jesusland", which are memes that I has seen around in 2000 and 2004 as well, with the election and re-election of the last Republican administrator. And as much as people try to design infographics that show how deeply intertwined voting is and the purple-y ness of it all and how much structural issues like gerrymandered districts and voter suppression laws and tactics determine the outcomes of elections in places with racists determined to uphold white supremacy, the belief that the South can be talked about monolithically persists. Because it is cognitively easier to believe the red and blue maps and to assume that the elected representatives of any given area actually reflect the viewpoints of the people that elected them, rather than having to stop and think about how everything is way more complex than that.

So, I suppose, this leads to an interesting question to ask.

What other ideas in society have a "well-known solution" that is "neat, plausible, and wrong"? (H.L. Mencken, emphasis mine)

( I thought about the gender pay gap, how about you? )

There are so many other things like these examples out there in the world, things that are incredibly arbitrary, like what counts as masculinity, who's part of being white and who's not, Western music theory and judgement on what is good music is based almost solely on the compositions and styles of white German men as extrapolated by on-the-page racists with specific, articulated, loud, racist intent and actions, and whether or not stocks go up or down based on what happens outside of the bubble that is Wall Street. All of these "standardized ideologies" work best, as Cosmo noted, when they're seen as immutable and irrefutable, things that just are, rather than things that were constructed, are being maintained, and can be deconstructed or changed into something else. One of my favorite fannish podcasts, Starship Therapise, talks about the "Westworld Construct" when they talk about the social contract, and that a significant amount of what we think of as always true is consensus, rather than having any sort of cosmic reality that persists when you stop believing in it. (The ep on the Westworld Construct links to this specific book called The Social Construction of Reality, so if you're looking for some light reading, here you are.) This has definitely been a year where we've seen a lot of incidents that remind us of the consensus nature of reality, even if most of those incidents reminded us how many people are willing to accept a sub-par reality instead of striving for one that's better for everyone.

Here's hoping that sooner, rather than later, we can deconstruct the harmful ideologies and put, in their place, ideologies that help everyone.