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

[aivilo_18]

When I think of warnings, I think of what I look for that could potentially cause emotional harm. Being a past moderator for SVUFiction.com will make you really ultra-sensitive to what to look for when archiving fic for a show that a) is heavily invested in dealing with sex crimes and b) contains a large fan base of people who are sensitive to that kind of subject matter. So I’m, perhaps, a little more OCD than most when it comes to approving warnings in general because that fandom was a freaking landmine of possible triggers.

For the most part, the people who archived with SVUFiction were incredibly open to suggestions I had for warning tags before I approved their work. Yes, that fandom was absolutely *rife* with badly written tripe and sometimes I practically *cried* over the crap I had to approve because, technically, it was grammatically correct. However, the authors and readers in that fandom were, generally speaking, pretty sensitive towards treating each other with courtesy and respect. There were a few big ticket issues I had to come down on, but not too many to ruin my SVU experience. In fact, I’d say it’s the most important fandom I’ve ever been a part of and I’ve met a number of people through it who have become like family to me now.

Going back the topic at hand, when I look for warnings, I look for specific stuff like non-con and sexual violence, or chan/underage stuff, etc. I also look for the less specific signifiers like whether or not the fic is dark or heavily kinked-out and make my own decisions to read and/or approve based on how well I feel I know the author or potential readership. I look for things that, while they don’t pose a threat to me, may pose a threat to other readers (bondage, role playing, knife play, the list goes on). My kink or trigger is not, necessarily, someone else’s kink or trigger and, if you haven’t learned to not make personal assumptions like that *before* waltzing into the SVU fandom, you’ll learn that lesson pretty damn quickly once you’re there. Or be eaten alive.

Speaking specifically of slash and femmeslash, I’ve never considered those, in general, to be in the same field as the above. Or, if someone is going to “warn” for slash because of its potential for possible emotional harm, they should be doing the same for het as well. IIRC, I don’t think we necessarily had warnings for slash at SVUF so much as there were just separate sub-archives organized by rating and then by genre if you can call it that. When picking what type of fic you were posting, you could label it slash, femmeslash, het, or gen and it would be filtered into the correct archive. Maybe they’ve changed how they’re running the site there, but that’s how I remember it. At any rate, I think we warned for all four and, if the author chose to warn for slash in their summary, we didn’t necessarily consider it an error on their part, just a personal choice. Thinking about it now, in the context of your posts and in the context of the whole debat that's going on, I'd probably be a different moderator if I had to do it again, but hindsight is kind of a bitch, I guess.

All that said, personally speaking, I can count on one hand the number of m/f pairings I’ve shipped in the past and none of them are pairings I ship now. I stick to slash and femmeslash. I’m not interested in anything else. I’m not ruling out the possibility of eventually being interested in het again, but…god. I think I find het…icky now? And yet, if I started screaming my indignation over accidentally stumbling across het that wasn’t properly labelled as such, people wouldn’t really get it. Not that that’s stopped me before, mind you.

[seperis]

..so that was brilliant. I forgot (and I have no idea how I did this) how a fandom with a strong and probably necessary tradition of warning due to the source itself would have a different context and environment for content advisories.