Amid the usual flurry of other things – not least organising
session proposals for the 2014 Kalamazoo IMC – I have been thinking about
inclusion and exclusion and how they work in fandoms. It seems to me that being
a fan is not the same as being part of a fan community, or that at the very
least, being the former doesn’t guarantee membership of any given iteration of
the latter. In Textual Poachers (1992),
Henry Jenkins wrote about the conventions of interpretation common to fan
communities, and those conventions have been shown to be the basis of identity
work within those communities – reading the ‘right’ way means you are in (e.g.
Bury 2005). I’ve been looking at the ways that discourses which exclude people
from fan communities get attached to discussions of race and racism on westeros.org. When threads which raise
problematic issues around race in either George Martin’s novels or HBO’s Game of Thrones are raised, community
members tend to respond by challenging the fandom of the original poster using
discourses that align very closely with those identified by Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva in his Racism Without
Racists (2006). The eurocentricity of the fictional world is justified in a
few main ways (in varying order):
1) the
personal choices of Martin as the creator of that world – the OP is constructed
as not a real fan for criticising Martin’s choices.
2) the
monochrome Middle Ages argument which says that the works are based on medieval
Europe which was populated by whites and that therefore only a majority white
cast of characters should appear – the OP is not a real fan because s/he is
more concerned with political correctness than the authenticity of the story.
3) dismissed
as unimportant without a reason, or on the basis that it’s made up and not ‘the
real world’ – the OP is pathologized as an over-zealous, ‘rabid’ fan who cares too much.
4) said
to be non-existent – the OP is constructed as ignorant, or as having not paid
enough attention to the text, and is, in either case, not a real fan because
s/he lacks knowledge.
The first and second
fit very closely with Bonilla-Silva’s Abstract Liberalism framework which, he
says, consists
of “using ideas associated with political … [and] economic liberalism in
abstract manners to explain racial matters” (28), “the idea of individual
choice is used to defend whites’ right to live and associate primarily with
whites” (36). This argument is used to justify writing and reading about whites
and cultural heritage – the Middle Ages – which is identified as white. The
second is a clear example the “Anything but Racism’ rhetorical strategy
Bonilla-Silva identifies; history, rather than racism or exclusion, is used to
explain eurocentricity. The third and fourth fit closely with the framework of
Minimization. For Bonilla-Silva this “suggests discrimination is no longer a
central factor affecting minorities’ life chances” (29); on westeros.org, minimization suggests that
the experience of the OP, or any who takes that perspective, is either not
important, or not real.
Westeros.org is far
from the only fan site where this happens – I’ve found very similar patterns in
other fantasy fandoms, especially on forums for games like World of Warcraft and Dragon
Age. I’ve written before about using Bonilla-Silva’s work to explore
RaceFail 09 – a project that’s on the backburner right now but will come to the
front later this year I hope. It’s not that there are no voices challenging
eurocentricity as the default setting in fantasy and the racism that results,
but the arguments are ongoing, and in some places they are being fiercely
resisted.
Bonilla-Silva,
Eduardo. 2006. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the
Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. New York:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Bury,
R. 2005. Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York:
Peter Lang.
