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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2eGBMGI:
wrangletangle:
I recently read the Vox article on the modern rise of authoritarianism within the GOP, and I was thinking about how anti-authoritarian leaning both fandom and queer communities generally are (like, about as anti-authoritarian as large groups of people can generally be). And then it occurred to me.
Both purity wank and radfem exclusionary behavior show strong authoritarian elements. For example, the defining and policing of rigid boundaries, simplistic and violent language, the demonizing of opponents, the reliance on exclusion as a solution to disagreement, the refusal to either have a genuine human-to-human conversation or argue using facts instead of vague impressions, alt-right style echo chambers and conspiracy theory factories (”AO3 was established to protect pedophiles” sounds a lot like “lizard men control the government” in tone, if not quite in outright weirdness - the difference is a matter of imagination more than approach), and the misappropriation of terms that have very specific meanings for distantly related concepts in order to create sound bites to prop up shaky arguments. Both radfems and purity wankers deny history in favor of an absolute morality uninformed by, well, anything that happened more than a year ago or outside their own experience. I could pretend that’s due to the average age of the people doing the wanking, but I don’t think that’s it. Some radfems are my age. They have no such excuse.
It’s possible that we’re seeing activation of authoritarian tendencies, as the researchers describe in the article, due to the same international forces that are activating authoritarians in the political sphere all over the world. I kind of wish we could do a study, but being a pretty strong non-authoritarian, I’m going to consider what happened the last few times we’ve tried to run psych studies on fandom, and then I’m going to back away slowly with my nope face on.
But even without direct studies of individuals, we could look at the rhetoric being used and see how closely it matches the rhetoric of brexit supporters, trump supporters, anti-refugee Europeans, etc. I’m talking patterns - everything from sentence structure, to argument framing, to response language, to punishment methods, to types of action called for, to which emotions are invoked, to frequency of citing specific evidence and personal histories versus generalizations. Slightly going out on a limb here, but I think we may find some remarkable similarities.
As for what we’d do if we did find those similarities, I don’t know. How do you help people fear less and treat other people more like human beings? It seems like they have to want to, or else they just won’t.
Anyway, my point was that radfem exclusion and purity wank stand out in queer spaces and in fandom, respectively, because they are so far outside the average anti-authoritarian position of those communities. For this reason they baffle a lot of us, me included. I think it’s easier to understand them as part of the larger rise in neo-conservatism, even if the individuals in question wouldn’t identify as conservative because the majority of current conservatives reject and denigrate them for being part of minority communities. Their solution to that appears to be purging these minority communities of the taint of impurity that supposedly causes rejection. That’s respectability politics at its ugly core.
wrangletangle:
I recently read the Vox article on the modern rise of authoritarianism within the GOP, and I was thinking about how anti-authoritarian leaning both fandom and queer communities generally are (like, about as anti-authoritarian as large groups of people can generally be). And then it occurred to me.
Both purity wank and radfem exclusionary behavior show strong authoritarian elements. For example, the defining and policing of rigid boundaries, simplistic and violent language, the demonizing of opponents, the reliance on exclusion as a solution to disagreement, the refusal to either have a genuine human-to-human conversation or argue using facts instead of vague impressions, alt-right style echo chambers and conspiracy theory factories (”AO3 was established to protect pedophiles” sounds a lot like “lizard men control the government” in tone, if not quite in outright weirdness - the difference is a matter of imagination more than approach), and the misappropriation of terms that have very specific meanings for distantly related concepts in order to create sound bites to prop up shaky arguments. Both radfems and purity wankers deny history in favor of an absolute morality uninformed by, well, anything that happened more than a year ago or outside their own experience. I could pretend that’s due to the average age of the people doing the wanking, but I don’t think that’s it. Some radfems are my age. They have no such excuse.
It’s possible that we’re seeing activation of authoritarian tendencies, as the researchers describe in the article, due to the same international forces that are activating authoritarians in the political sphere all over the world. I kind of wish we could do a study, but being a pretty strong non-authoritarian, I’m going to consider what happened the last few times we’ve tried to run psych studies on fandom, and then I’m going to back away slowly with my nope face on.
But even without direct studies of individuals, we could look at the rhetoric being used and see how closely it matches the rhetoric of brexit supporters, trump supporters, anti-refugee Europeans, etc. I’m talking patterns - everything from sentence structure, to argument framing, to response language, to punishment methods, to types of action called for, to which emotions are invoked, to frequency of citing specific evidence and personal histories versus generalizations. Slightly going out on a limb here, but I think we may find some remarkable similarities.
As for what we’d do if we did find those similarities, I don’t know. How do you help people fear less and treat other people more like human beings? It seems like they have to want to, or else they just won’t.
Anyway, my point was that radfem exclusion and purity wank stand out in queer spaces and in fandom, respectively, because they are so far outside the average anti-authoritarian position of those communities. For this reason they baffle a lot of us, me included. I think it’s easier to understand them as part of the larger rise in neo-conservatism, even if the individuals in question wouldn’t identify as conservative because the majority of current conservatives reject and denigrate them for being part of minority communities. Their solution to that appears to be purging these minority communities of the taint of impurity that supposedly causes rejection. That’s respectability politics at its ugly core.
