well, yeah, if by geek culture you mean men

Wake Up, Geek Culture, in which I think I am reading a geek shaking a virtual cane at people getting their anime too easily, too many people of the ungeeky classes being interested in geek turf, and remix culture because it's killing originality and then I got lost in the Etewaf, which is apparently really bad, but kind of sounds like my perfect life.

...I'm not sure.

I want to approach this from like, multiple are you kidding angles because hello, kind of my entire identity being geek, remix, and also, I like anime and God would I have killed to have access to it in my teens. Or like, knew it existed.

Academics have covered remix culture, and the mainstreaming of geekdom is like, a constant refrain everywhere, so not even going to bother, mostly because he froze me up at the Etewaf horror--very Lovecraftian, that--in which everyone has easy access to everything and that's like, really bad.

Let's not romanticize the past in which we had to wait for years and go uphill both ways to get our manga, okay? That shit isn't nostalgic; that sucked. It sucked. Yes, we had lively discussions waiting for new issues for about an hour and then geeks went to war, and geek war isn't like mundane war; most of us enter with a vocabulary not limited to languages that actually exist and a lot of us grew up beneath the thumb of mainstream contempt and high school bullying and whoo boy did we carry that into every conversation ever? Oh, we did. Harry Potter books had what, a one to two year wait or average? Did you see that fandom? And let me just say, thank God Star Trek II didn't come out during internet culture and have the waiting period before Star Trek III came out: bloodshed, people.

Geek culture was expensive; it was very much the territory of middle and upper middle class who could afford to import direct from Japan or knew someone who could if the titles you wanted weren't here. Even domestic products weren't cheap or easy; it's not that long ago that VHS tapes were this new and exciting thing that allowed recording instead of staring at the television listings for a hopeful glance of something not a rerun of fifties era programming and being really disappointed on a daily basis. Cable still isnt' universally accessible even in the US, and certainly not in rural Texas, much less internet. Working class geek meant used bookstores because hardcovers or even new paperback were for birthdays, Christmas, and when it was something my entire family would want to read (which luckily, we overlapped taste in a lot of things). Buying movies was an event that was considered carefully.

[I'd love to hit a real discussion of classism in geekdom because along with shitty race issues and shitty sexism issues, geek cultural development wasn't just white and male, it was white, male, and specific to certain economic classes as well. It's not that POCs, women, and the non-middle-class weren't geeky or didn't develop their own geek-related culture but geek as it is presented to mainstream culture is--well, white, male, and very obviously both.

[I'm still boggling at people who are utterly shocked that POC and women attended and still attend sci-fi conventions and are interested in the same things that mainstream geek culture is; yes, we've been here all along, and the question you should be asking is not 'where have you been' but 'why didn't I see that?' No one asks that, though. It's weird.]

Geek culture was difficult unless you lived in a city; I was a geek culture of one at my school K through 12 and you think your clique had it hard? Please. I never even met a D&Der until college and a LARPer after that. I met geek culture in college without any geek socialization skills--and we do have them, believe it or not--and I was the geek that geeks didn't like, since I was a feral geek who developed independently in the high school library reading encyclopedias* from 1976 because I'd finished the fantasy section before my freshman year of high school ended.

[* Encyclopedia Brittanica. Accept no substitutes.]

You city geeks had it easy, baby; the nearest used bookstore was one almost-large room and I was buying third rate sci fi where the high point was finding Mercedes Lackey*--say it with me, that was the high point--and Anne McCaffrey* and God help me that shitty Thomas Covenant series that I read in desperation because it's not like there was a lot of choice there. But also Sydney Van Scyoc was awesome with the first time I ever saw a sci-fi matriarchal culture that treated it with such utter, utter normality that I barely noticed I was being taught my first lessons in feminism. Also, no one was raped. New books were the nearest large city--forty miles away--or Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart--and we were so rural we couldn't even get cable, so I never had a meaningful relationship with Fraggle Rock and dear God am I bitter about that.

[I am not saying they're bad; I'm saying, think about a world where my sci-fi pinnacle was Anne McCaffrey.]

Yes, yes, the icky mainstream are all making your geek all less than special; those of us who, let me say this again, were reduced to rapey incesty Thomas of white gold ringness and the Gor novels unironically shelved beside the sci-fi aisle saw the dawn of Amazon.com, hulu, and bittorrent like the second goddamn coming, okay? I waited half my life to fall madly, desperately in love with a million things and Geek!Seperis of the dark days before the internet and access to Amazon would like to say, are you kidding me?

[I won't even go into women in geek culture, because being a feral geek, my early interactions with geek (male) culture were so off that I didn't get the joy and delight of trading sexual harassment for interaction and second class acceptance. My regret, it's legion, really.]

The days when geek culture belonged to the urban middle class male is over; we all own it now. Don't look like that; we're not saying you have to leave. See, we like to share. That's kind of the entire point.

Comments

[blueraccoon]

Okay so this is kind of interesting and at the same time you're killing me a bit because:

I was a voracious reader as a kid. I used to go to the library in the summer, check out ten books, return htem two days later and check out ten more.

For my 12th birthday, my uncle (who is a filker, an actor, a total sf guy, etc) gave me two books. One was A Wizard of Earthsea, and the other was Dragonsong. I didn't care much for the LeGuin, although I did buy and read the others in the Ged trilogy, but LeGuin has never been a huge favorite of mine.

But McCaffrey...holy shit, man. I kid you not, this was like NOTHING I had ever read. I went to the library and the bookstore--and I lived in a fairly affluent metropolitan suburb so there were plenty of bookstores (In high school I spent my Saturday nights at the Barnes & Noble cafe with my best friend having tea and talking)--and loaded up on McCaffrey and read eveyrthing I could, and this was...early 90s, so her stuff hadn't gone completely downhill yet. And then I started reading writers McCaffrey had written with, which was how I got to Elizabeth Moon and Misty Lackey, and to this day I will buy Lackey novels because if nothing else they're still incredibly readdable, and sometimes I need comfort pastel ponies in my books and I refuse to be judged on my literary tastes.

McCaffrey is also, I swear to God, how I met my husband. See above for McCcaffrey --> Elizabeth Moon, who I loved when she wrote the Deed of Paksenarrion (and I now think is kind of a failure of a human being, but ten years ago, what did I know?) and Moon was the GOH at Smith's tiny little "blink and you'll miss it" relax-a-con called 5Con that was still ongoing when I went there. Because Moon was attending, I signed up to work the con, which meant I signed up to work it next year, which meant that when this guy everyone talked about, who'd actually started the con and got it off the ground and everything, came back to visit and say hi to people and be one of our alumni guests, I was already primed to fall in love with him. Which I did, and five years later we got married.

I didn't really get into fandom until I was in college, in which one of my best friends in SSFFS (Smith Science Fiction and Fantasy Society) was massively into BUffy fanfic and told me alllll about it and I was completely lost. And then I started watching Smallville, and then the summer before my senior year my boyfriend-now-husband sent me a link to a Salon article on slash that started with a paragraph from a Killa story (Turning Point) and I was like "hell with the article, give me more of the story!" so I hunted it up online. And then the sequel. and then I read my way through Highlander, the Sentinel, TPM, dueSouth, and everything else I could get my hands on, and wrote my way through Smallville for a very short time, and then wrote my way through Firefly and...

I still have crystal clear memories of my fannish junctions, of the moments that set me on one path or another to direct me toward becoming a geek. Gaming? I didn't do it in high school; tried it once and couldn't get into it. Same in college. Moved out to Seattle, Morgan dragged me with him to a game, I rolled up a character, six and a half years later I play every week or every other week depending on who's gaming and it's the best weekend fun ever.

But I guess I got into fandom through women authors, and then through slash which is predominantly women, and so I never had the guys going "What are you doing here?" I had the women going "OMG YES MOAR PORN" and the women authors writing empowered female characters I could (at twelve) identify with. So my fandom history experience is kind of...different, I guess.

[seperis]

OH, don't get me wrong--I love Anne McCaffrey, trust me, even now. I've read pretty much everything she wrote that wasn't done under her name by her son (and some of that, too, sadly). But before Scyoc, Frank Herbert and a couple of others were my only reference point for scifi fiction outside of movies, so when I say that was the best I could get, I mean, that's a pretty narrow area for a vast field, and I categorize her more on the borderline scifi/fantasy for the most part.

[blueraccoon]

Oh, totally, and I didn't get into a bigger swath of sf/fantasy for ages. Mostly it was all McCaffrey web-spinning - McCaffrey went to Mercedes Lackey and Elizabeth Moon, Lackey went to Mark Shepherd and Rosemary Edghill and other people I don't remember, Elizabeth Moon somehow got me to David Weber but I'm not sure and then I learned the true meaning of a Mary Sue with Honor Harrington (at least Talia had faults. Every Misty Lackey character has at least one (usually one) Big Fault. Spelled out in capital letters.)

And now I read a lot of other stuff, but the mainstays I will continue to buy are my Nora Roberts books because of the romance genre, she's moved away from the rape-as-seduction trope and into rather empowered female characters and I like romance novels. (seriously, the last quartet, I had this whole fear of the last book because the character was the uber-organized, ultra-efficient, in control of everything person, and her romantic lead was a very casual, take it as it goes mechanic, and I had horror thoughts of scenes where she was all "aaah i don't want you, you drive me crazy but--" *and smooches ensue and she loses her ability to think and say no and blah.*

Instead, what I got was them having a date, very aware this electricity is there, and her saying, very specifically to him, "Come upstairs. I want you in my bed."

I think if I'd ever seen that in a romance novel fifteen years ago I'd have dropped it from shock.

(I don't read historical romances anymore; I have no opinions on them.)

But that's the thing, right, that a lot of what I do read is frankly trashy lit. Ilena Andrews, Patricia Briggs, Keri Arthur--they're two of my favorites right now, in the "supernatural romance genre" where the heroine is kick-ass and not really human and is surrounded by all this supernatural wackiness and is just trying to have a Life and get on with things but the werewolves keep breaking shit and the vampires like to play mind games for the hell of it and so...gotta deal. (In order, the three protagonists in those books are a female mercenary and magic user who's a hell of a lot more powerful than she lets on, a coyote shapeshifter, and a half-vampire half-werewolf DON"T ASK ME HOW IT WORKS).

I admit this is trashy lit. I revel in it, because I read for escapism and these books are so very escapist but at the same time they're kind of like "Wow, and I have to pay the rent but I didn't have a witch blow up my garage last night, so at least my insurance premiums won't go up?"

IDEK where I was going with this post so I apologize for babbling. But I feel like in discussing geek culture and "third-rate fantasy" books and segregating the "good" lit from the "trashy" lit we're doing a disservice to those fans, like me, who read the trashy lit and like it.

[azurelunatic]

My 7th grade teacher handed me Dragonsong. Changed my life.

[polarisnorth]

-- totally OT, but hi, fellow Smithie! We still have a con -- it's called Conbust now -- and last year we got Tamora Pierce, Bruce Coville, Jane Yolen, and Annette Curtis Klause to come. It was awesome. I'm also amused that you're in Washington, which is where I hail from.