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

[ineptshieldmaid]

I've only been in fandom for the last two/three years. I've seen quite a lot of warning-for-slash - strangely, mostly on SPECIFICALLY SLASH COMMS. It makes sense to warn/advise/give some kind of note for slash on narnia_fiction - Narnia attracts both rabid 'cest slashers and straight-down-the-line Lewis fans of the religious persuasion. But Narnia tends to attract a young crowd of writers who feel self-conscious about *all* their content, or so I assume, since I can't think of any other reason to warn for slash on narnia_slash.

Thing is, in my fandoms, it's almost as common to warn for het. Hetfic, when written by ordinarily-slash-writers, usually comes with disclaimers like "het - I feel dirty now!". It was actually the ridiculousness of being ashamed to have written *het* that made me stop warning/noting het/slash/femslash myself.

It's ridiculous to attach shame to any pairing type. But it's also reasonable if an author wants to warn/otherwise note for pairing types - there *are* fangirls out there who aren't comfortable reading het (it took me ages to be comfortable with het, actually - both because I'm not comfortable with the objectification dynamic and because it used to hit more of my personal Issues buttons than slash did), and those who aren't comfortable with slash. A friend of mine (a *bi* friend of mine) is massively triggered by femslash at the moment.

Usually you can figure it out from the pairing notes - but, as someone on my flist, a recs compiler, noted recently, a fair chunk of people trawl fandoms for specific types of fic (eg, kinks) even if they don't know the character. If you see a pairing Sam/Jamie, how are you to know what gender Sam and Jamie are?

Which is not to say that anyone should HAVE to warn for slash/het/femslash/other. Or that communities should ban/restrict access to a particular pairing type. These things would be bad! But a lot of the discussion seems to drift toward saying that *authors* who warn for slash *are inherently homophobic* or pandering toward homophobia, or otherwise bad people. I gather that the rec-list-compiling friend I mentioned before has copped some antagonism for her choice to warn for slash, which just doesn't seem sane to me. There should be no more policing of what types of warnings you *can* put on your fic than there is of what types of warnings you *must* put on your fic.

[seperis]

Thank you for this! I liked this perspective on it.

Usually you can figure it out from the pairing notes - but, as someone on my flist, a recs compiler, noted recently, a fair chunk of people trawl fandoms for specific types of fic (eg, kinks) even if they don't know the character. If you see a pairing Sam/Jamie, how are you to know what gender Sam and Jamie are?

Especially this. We're all multifandom, so the old reasons may not apply anymore for some things.

[ineptshieldmaid]

We're all multifandom, so the old reasons may not apply anymore for some things.

Yes, this.

Also, picking up on what I said about the *age* of Narnia fans - I think warning for various things, including pairing type and specific acts (I used to see blowjobs warned for a lot, for some reason) might also be part of the individual fanwriter's development. Narnia fandom, when I joined it, seemed to have a really high consciousness of itself as doing something RISQUE! NOT NORMAL! SEXYCOOLDIRTYEXCITING! DON'T TELL YOUR PARENTS! And so on those comms you could find *everything* warned, from hetkissing to bdsm.

I can't speak for my fellow Narnia fen, but personally, my warnings policy has developed as I've matured as a writer and become more comfortable with myself as a consumer and producer of textual porn. In my early fics, I warned for various things, including slash and underage sex: the ideas were new and still slightly shocking to me, so it seemed natural to put up warnings - as a caution to others and perhaps a sort of apology to the world.

I stopped warning for slash at about the point that I realised how silly it was to warn for slash on slash comms - but I usually kept a genre tag in there or similar for posting on general Narnia comms. Then the warnings debate came up last year, and the concept of triggers came to the forefront of my mind; and now I'm working on a policy for things I *won't* warn for (which includes one of the AO3's Big Four, putting me in the Chooses Not To Warn camp) and things I will. I've got to go over my entire back-archive and redo the ratings, and re-format the warnings fields, which I will do. Point is: time has changed my warnings practice and policy. What I warn for and how is tied in with my own maturity as a writer and how confident I am in my *identity* as a fangirl and pornographer.

In short, I see warnings discussed as three things: in context of triggers; in context of navigation; and in context of censorship. There's a fourth dimension to them, which I think is by no means as *systematic* as any of the above, and that is as a group-identification process, an expression of the fact that the author and his/her colleagues are doing something SEXY AND SECRET. That's... not something which should drive warnings-policy formulation (except possibly at the community/archive level, where a comm could reasonably declare that it will contain [various things] and readers should be aware of that). But I think that authorial/community self-consciousness could be behind some of the less favoured warning types - especially when the fen in question are too young to have been involved communities/lists which excluded or marginalised slash.

ETA, before someone misunderstands me

[ineptshieldmaid]

When i say that my warnings policy is tied to my maturity as a writer, I do not mean that mature people should all warn like me. I mean that, as I've matured, I've thought more about what I'm doing as a fanwriter and how I want my warnings policy to reflect that. As I mature still further I will probably make new decisions and change my policy and practice again.

By no means do I mean that all mature people warn, or that no mature people warn for slash, and so on.

Return of ETA

[ineptshieldmaid]

I see you've linked to me above!

... you've spelt my name wrong. :)

Re: Return of ETA

[seperis]

Fixed! *facepalm*

Re: Return of ETA

[ineptshieldmaid]

:D Second time it's happened today, actually! Ineptshieldmaiden would've made more sense - the reference is to Eowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan - but I think LJ had a character limit when I adopted the name.

[ithiliana]

I really love your points here, especially the discussion about change over time as a writer (me too!) (that first deliciously wicked feeling about writing about omg sex! and I was in my late forties but raised in very repressive environment).

I also like what you and others are doing here which is emphasizing the extent to which different fandoms, and I know from LOTR experience, different parts of large fandoms (hobbit vs. Gondorian fic for example) have different communal philosophies and traditions which people internalize (even with individual resistances and differences). VVC is multifandom event, and that makes a huge difference.

[ineptshieldmaid]

I also like what you and others are doing here which is emphasizing the extent to which different fandoms, and I know from LOTR experience, different parts of large fandoms (hobbit vs. Gondorian fic for example) have different communal philosophies

I think that's what makes this debate so hard :s. Especially for community/event administrators. And there are some things which I'd say it's probably appropriate for authors to warn for, but which can easily become *very* problematic when administrators REQUIRE warnings. Slash and kinks are the obvious ones, but I was thinking on the bus about *my* personal triggers, and they're ones for which I could never, ever require or even politely request that the communities I moderate incorporate warnings. Ask a Narnia community to warn for religious themes? *I* wouldn't post to a community which required that warning, and it's my own damn trigger!

[(Anonymous)]

Seperis linked to this. I have to say that thanks to the prolic amounts of Genderbending fic, especially ones where A discovers that B makes an attractive male/female due to change, starts a relationship and they continue after B is turned back into original gender, that warning for het is necessary, since even with pairings, you end up with John/Rodney (SGA) het, for example.Since Rodney's first name is nominally gender neutral leaning to girly, (Meredith) there is little chance of telling Girl!AU het, Shapeshift het, and Slash!AU apart.