It's 2020 can people please stop pitting transformative fandom and curatorial fandom against each other and recognize that both have their strengths and weaknesses and are important in different ways to different people
it's 2020, and this is literally the first time i've read the term "curatorial fandom", so yeah. you might need to do some work to achieve the affect your desire.
I have no idea what that last sentence means.
please explain the terms:
transformative fandom
curatorial fandom
and then:
what it looks like when they are pitted against each other
maybe an example of when this difference resulted in an unnecessary dispute, or a dispute which was unnecessarily biting
like this is a completely new dialectict to me, and i sincerely do not get what you are trying to say.
Transformative fandom: fanfic writers and fan artists, people who generate new fiction and art from their fandom (stereotypically the way that women interact with fandom)
Curative fandom: people with encyclopedic knowledge of their fandom, they may ruin wikis or may trade trivia as a way of being fans (stereotypically the way men interact with fandom)
when they're pitted against each other you get 2015 era Tumblr discourse about how knowledge testing in fandom spaces is always gatekeeping and REAL fandom means knowing what a show is really ABOUT instead of just betting able to tell off a list of characters. Alternately, being pitted against each other can look like comic book guy turning his nose up at AU fanart and questioning why you'd even call yourself a fan of a series if you're going to ignore everything about it.
There have been lots of heated exchanges about it and there used to be one post that circulated Tumblr pretty regularly that was very sneery about curative fandom because it was 2015 and Tumblr was for transformative works and Reddit was for curating and that was that.
Except that made a lot of curative fans running wikis or learning every little bit of trivia feel bad and obviously knowledge testing people is a shitty thing but transformative fans do it too, that's not exclusively curative, it's just that transformative fans expect an essay response instead of multiple choice.
I actually did my oral BA exam about fandom and it's perception and depiction both by mainstream and other fans.
There are multiple studies that show the unfortunate fact that some groups of fans try to "other" different part of Fandom that they see as more divergent of the social norm, so they themselves will still be counted as normal and not socially ostracized.
This happens both in curative fandom towards transformative fandom and in transformative fandom towards curative fandom as well as towards other parts of transformative fandom itself.
One study found that the likelihood of a fan dismissing other fans as "the real crazies" actually has more to do with their socioeconomic status than what fandom they belong to. The higher the socioeconomic status, the more likely that person was to try and paint themselves as normal by throwing other fans under the bus.
Presumably because they had more to loose in terms of status and/or respect.
Persons of a lower socioeconomic status were more likely to defend other fans and more unashamed about their own involvement in fandom.
Of course mysoginy, racism and homophobia also play a role in the general perception of especially transformative fandom (underrepresented people tend to be more willing to reshape a canon that doesn't include them) but mostly it tends to be about saving face by tearing others down.
Perception is also influenced by depictions of fandom in media. Which tends to be unflattering for the simple reason that media conglomerates desperately want you to forget that the producer -> consumer dynamic of media (and thus culture) production is a relatively new one. Culture production used to be more like fandom. By the people, for the people. (e.g. King Arthur myths: there is no one canon because people just went with what they liked and wrote new parts) But that is something that threatens their very existence, so they paint everyone who engages with their products in any other way than passive consumption in a negative light, so as to make other people afraid of doing the same.
Which leads to people trying to distance themselves from it. Which leads to the aforementioned throwing other fans under the bus.
Some reading materials on the subject (most of them are available as PDFs somewhere)
- Textual Poachers: Television Fans and participatory culture by Henry Jenkins
- Geek hierarchies, boundary policing, and the gendering of the good fan by Kristina Busse
- ‘‘They’re Losers, but I Know Better’’: Intra-Fandom Stereotyping and the Normalization of the Fan Subject by Mel Stanfill
- Are You “Fan” Enough? The Role of Identity in Media Fandoms by Samantha L. Groene and Vanessa E. Hettinger
