so the history of warnings 101, continued

This is an update to my last post on the history of warnings.

Specifically: legionseagle posts here about the ongoing use of warnings as social control in some book fandoms and is still a realistic and pressing concern for writers.

I wrote the attached story in April this year inspired by the April fanfic challenge of the Lord Peter yahoogroup dealing with the detective stories of Dorothy L. Sayers, but in the end did not post it to the list because of the then rule that all fic featuring a same-sex pairing (even if it otherwise fell within the PG guidelines of the challenge as a whole) could not be posted on-list but only linked, and if it were linked the title bar had to prominently include the work "SLASH" so that list members who objected could avoid it. I decided I didn't feel comfortable complying with that restriction, so didn't make it available to the list.

On a Harry Potter yahoogroup when Half-Blood Prince came out (2006?), someone who tried to analyse the Tonks/Lupin relationship in terms of Queer Theory was told that doing so without posting a warning in the subject line was equivalent to breaking into other list members' living rooms and fornicating there.

Furthermore, there's a (current) warnings policy posted by an individual describing her own policy which some people are promoting as a sort of aspirational gold standard in the current debate, which, among a lot of other stuff I don't agree with, suggests that the policy's author considers "dialog concerning abortion" is too much of a hot potato to be including in fic even when warned for.

So in some of the corners of fandom in which I am active (book fandoms, you'll note) there is an active and on-going use of warnings as a mechanism of conservative social control, which shapes my response to warning discussions rather profoundly.
edited at (to clarify status of warnings policy quoted) 2010-07-07 03:42 am (local)

ratcreature links to her comment in the last warning debate regarding the history of warnings in Sentinel in this comment. Direct link to the warning comment in zvi's journal here.

ETA: spiletta42 would like this to be added as a clarification of her warnings policy, link is here. Her specific complaint can be found in comments.

Added:

facetofcathy here links to a comment in her LJ regarding slash warnings by an anonymous user here.

ranalore here talks about her negative experiences with warnings as social control. She also covers some ground on the difference between labeling for content and labeling for physical accessibility. There was a lot of conflation of the two and they have very different requirements as well as challenges to implement.

ithiliana here posts some of her recollections.

feanna here shares some of her experiences with warnings.

allegraconbrio here shares very recent warning discussions in the Glee fandom.

tazlet here states she did a warnings panel at at one of the last Z-cons.

aivilo_18 here brings her views as a moderator for SVUfiction.com, which is brilliant. Knowing in concrete LJ is very multifannish doesn't change the fact I keep forgetting we're working in a structure of many fandom traditions. That fandom is one I could see being very sensitive to content advisories since the context of the fanfic and source would require it both for advertising and warning purposes. I wonder what kind of difference it makes if you went from a fandom with warnings used for social control and one that needs them because of the nature of the source.

ineptshieldmaid here talks about warnings in context with Narnia and other fandoms and their uses.

If anyone else wants to share personal experience on warnings either historically or in their current form, please feel free to add a link and I'll organize these. I am going to go out on a limb and say that this topic is far from dead and I'd like to have a reference post to consult later.

I'm going to say this in case it needs saying; the new (and much better) reasons for warnings are not incompatible with avoiding the historical (and in some fandoms, current) use of warnings as social control. We can do both, and from what I'm reading, we can do it in a way that satisfies vidders that warnings will not be used for specific institutional exclusionary purposes, only personal use.



Level with me - at what point do the words "specific institutional exclusionary purposes" become something that reads like, IDK, normal, when I'm pretty sure they were never meant to meet and is there a double negative in there? Someone, for the love of God, give me a phrase that doesn't sound like a drunk grad student playing cultural anthropology scrabble.

I am going back to porn today.

Comments

Merely popping in to recall...

[tazlet]

leading a panel on warnings at one of the last Z-cons, where it appeared many people arguing for warnings and their willingness to embrace them was because of their value as 'advertising.'

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[cereta]

I've been arguing that for years. I want stories labeled for slash because I want to be able to find slash. Yes, I like or stories to be labeled for character death or child harm so that I can avoid them, but I like non-con "warnings" because I want to be able to find those stories.

This is why I think "warning" is a really, really BAD umbrella term: because it assumes that the only goal for some things is avoidance.

(I should add in all of this that I have no problem with writers/vidders/whoever limiting the information they provide, although I do think a general "I choose not to label for content" is a good practice. The only time I've ever gotten pissy about lack of content information is when the creator has implied or even outright said that it was in some way bad of me to filter my readings or to simply avoid their work if they're not going to provide certain information. And those people are pretty few and far between.)

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[cofax7]

This is why I think "warning" is a really, really BAD umbrella term: because it assumes that the only goal for some things is avoidance

Yup, it's a problem. I think warnings for slash are homophobic, but there are plenty of people who would never read anything I wrote if I didn't label my Jack/Daniel stories as such. It's a conundrum!

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[cereta]

I don't even think most things are that much of a conundrum. Bookstores and libraries and anthologies separate works by genre; jacket blurbs almost always give away pairing. I think conceptualizing a slash label as a warning for people who want to avoid that icky gay stuff smacks of homophobia, but a label that gives people more information than a one-sentence blurb is just...information. Writers can give and withhold information as they choose and for many reasons, but I think this conversation would be a lot less fraught if we didn't use "warning" for everything.

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[tazlet]

This is why I think "warning" is a really, really BAD umbrella term: because it assumes that the only goal for some things is avoidance.

I'd probably find it easier to overcome the sickening feeling that a core value was under attack if we were talking about 'catagories' instead of 'warnings.'

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[ratcreature]

Or "content labels".

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[allegraconbrio]

I think "Contains: elements in story that may be what you are looking for or to be avoided"(YMMV) is a really elegant solution to getting information out there that serves two purposes. For most authors I would think that would be a good thing. I don't click on stories without a decent enough amount of information in the header so I can make some kind of educated decision about what I am getting myself into, I need info to decide if I am interested.

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[darkrose]

I'm in favor of "contains", but I know that during the last iteration of this debate, telesilla got blasted for suggesting this, because someone might not read that part of the header if it doesn't say WARNING."

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[allegraconbrio]

Well, all I have to say about that is if someone who does have triggers for content is not reading closely enough to understand what the word contains actually means, then, well too bad. I've been triggered by fic and I am pretty damned careful to, you know, actually read the headers.

That sounds harsher than I intend, but really. I've actually done some work related research in labeling (lots of studies, lots and lots of studies) and there is some merit in Drug, Nutritional Supplement and food labeling to the hypothesis that using the word WARNING (in bold caps, at least 12 point font size, blah, blah, blah) for things like say an aspartame warning for phenylketonurics (sp?) is preferred over another word like CAUTION because the word, the font, the size of the font will grab a consumer's attention and people who need the warning are not used to looking for it in a certain format. And sure, changing the tradition of using the word warning would be a transition period. But people who need the heads up about the content of a fic would I imagine be smart enough to understand what the word means.

I would hope. I am sorry that happened last year. Last year was brutal. *sigh* I do think it is good that we are all still talking about this. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[medie]

Yeah, I don't particularly like using the word warning for anything. I'll use it in terms of this discussion, but with my own work, you'll usually find it under 'note:' instead of warning. It eliminates some of the negative connotations (also sidesteps that whole one person's warning is another's draw) and makes all the same information available.

Re: Merely popping in to recall...

[alixtii]

I think it comes down to it being that as long as the "advertisements" are mandatory on the part of the author, they're warnings, no matter what we call them.