Assorted Thoughts
Jan. 30th, 2025 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kdsburneraccount I have been thinking about the past. (I know, bad sign) Mostly about interactions I have had with people in the past, and how people have nuances to them. One can be capable of being aware of their white privilege in a fandom but also be an asshole to people. And also a hypocrite about some of the things they espouse. But also acknowledge that shortcoming. But also not act on courtesy. It's a whole thing. Yes this is about what I was alluding to in a post that I recently updated. Like I feel a little bad, but then remember I really did not do much, other people were hurt worse, and being kind of right about things like fandom racism does not mean they are exempt from that behavior.
I think it is pretty frustrating to go looking for academic papers about racism in sports fandom and not finding a lot because of the nature of 1. sports fandom being insular in a conventional "fandom" context and 2. academia also being white and 3. fandom academia really not talking about race? But yeah I was reading a paper about Sports RPF fandom and it was by (yes) a white woman who was (yes) in Hockey and F1 RPF fandom. Straw in haystack, fork in kitchen. (Link)
Anyways I read the paper, it was alright. I raised my eyebrows at the proposal of fandom being a "quasi-utopia" for non-white male fans before reading the paper and seeing that they clarified their stance that it was relative to irl sports. Like alright... that I can agree with. I dunno, it had some good points about how RPF is usually said to be aggressively fictional, but also being "realistic" is a sign of good research, which leads to a bit of a slippery slope. Also saying that slash fic is more "homoindifferent" than homophobic and serves as a way for mostly female fans to bond, especially since a lot of writers inject themselves into the male characters. Yeah. There were some good points that I was aware of but never could put into words as eloquently. This is why they get published in academic journals and I don't!
It did make me think about the possibility of writing and academic paper and getting that published. That would be cool! But maybe somewhere way down the line, when I can have more time to dabble with writing formally and not worry about being inexperienced. Gather research information, and whatnot. I dunno, I think it's cool to have papers to refer to other, older papers. At the same time it can become a bit of a perpetuation of some ideas, and also the whiteness of academia can lead to the perspective being kind of narrow, especially since the fandoms that I'm in are predominantly about people of color.
I had a doc I started working on a few years ago trying to answer the question of why Hockey RPF was more popular than literally any other North American sport RPF. Most of my sources literally being Tumblr, the occasional Reddit post, whatever LiveJournal posts I could find. Not very professional, but a lot of academic papers are kind of hard to find online and I guess you could consider it research in the sense of interviews or something. (I did end up having a correspondence with someone who could be considered a known figure in fandom? But yeah)
It is fascinating to see people be willfully obtuse about the popularity of Hockey RPF by claiming that it's "physical" and "exciting to watch" as though that is only unique to the sport of hockey. Especially when looking at how NFL fandoms then and now were quite often centered on the white men in the league. Like- okay. We can start at the very beginning with the concept of "migratory slash fandom," which is apparently how a decent subset of early hockey fans got into hockey. Because apparently a lot of them were based in the Midwest and Chicago and Pittsburgh were cooking at the time, and I guess they needed to get away from bandom. Apparently. We should probably inquire why they decided to gravitate towards hockey of all sports (and yeah there has been a lot said about the subconscious bias to whiteness in migratory slash fandom). So I mean. I think it's kind of obvious. At some point it's a bit of a feedback loop where the big fandom keeps churning fic and more people are drawn in by the fic and continue contributing. But also people are drawn to whiteness in fandom.
Not to generalize fandoms (I will now generalize) but I guess it is interesting to see demographics of fandoms depending on the site. Hockey Twitter has the reputation of largely being white. NBA/NFL Twitter are seen as more "black," but there are probably some edgy white teens on there. Baseball has a bit of both, though it has the largest boomer population from my observation. I will say that the NFL fandom has received an influx of Taylor Swift fans (see the large amount of Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift fic posted to AO3 in the past year), but that hasn't really muddled "NFL Twitter" and the effect is more on Tumblr-fandom adjacent spaces. And making that just a little more Hockey RPF fandom-adjacent.
But again, maybe it's the whole "oh those sports are seen a certain way by non-sport fans so it's harder to get into" but also the blackness of both sports can be seen as a contributing factor to why some would be hesitant to get into those sports. Not to defend the NFL and its handling of CTE. But hockey also has that problem. And I don't really see people angrily demanding the NHL to fix it. I think the blackness of the NFL is kind of a factor in that, though, because hockey players are predominantly white and grew up well-off enough to afford playing hockey? It's the whole black narrative of "making it out the hood," I guess, which can feed into some pretty negative stereotypes about black people.
But you do see Swifties becoming NFL fans because their favorite singer is now at games. So I dunno! I don't think certain sports are hard to get into, even if some fans are like "eww that's for boys!!" (And of course this feeds into some whiteness in the fandom which isn't necessarily bad but when the league is 54% black it gets awkward to see only one black person in the top 10 most tagged characters. And it's mostly because of their relationship with a white character. I think there is a lot that can be said about how some interracial relationships are presented. However, I don't know if I'm authorized to speak on that. We will proceed. I might come back to this thought.)
I guess you can also kind of see this in the rise of popularity of women's basketball? Though I go in that tag and it is... very white. Yeesh. Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers are doing what Joe Burrow did for the NFL fandom. It is something.
I think it is pretty frustrating to go looking for academic papers about racism in sports fandom and not finding a lot because of the nature of 1. sports fandom being insular in a conventional "fandom" context and 2. academia also being white and 3. fandom academia really not talking about race? But yeah I was reading a paper about Sports RPF fandom and it was by (yes) a white woman who was (yes) in Hockey and F1 RPF fandom. Straw in haystack, fork in kitchen. (Link)
Anyways I read the paper, it was alright. I raised my eyebrows at the proposal of fandom being a "quasi-utopia" for non-white male fans before reading the paper and seeing that they clarified their stance that it was relative to irl sports. Like alright... that I can agree with. I dunno, it had some good points about how RPF is usually said to be aggressively fictional, but also being "realistic" is a sign of good research, which leads to a bit of a slippery slope. Also saying that slash fic is more "homoindifferent" than homophobic and serves as a way for mostly female fans to bond, especially since a lot of writers inject themselves into the male characters. Yeah. There were some good points that I was aware of but never could put into words as eloquently. This is why they get published in academic journals and I don't!
It did make me think about the possibility of writing and academic paper and getting that published. That would be cool! But maybe somewhere way down the line, when I can have more time to dabble with writing formally and not worry about being inexperienced. Gather research information, and whatnot. I dunno, I think it's cool to have papers to refer to other, older papers. At the same time it can become a bit of a perpetuation of some ideas, and also the whiteness of academia can lead to the perspective being kind of narrow, especially since the fandoms that I'm in are predominantly about people of color.
I had a doc I started working on a few years ago trying to answer the question of why Hockey RPF was more popular than literally any other North American sport RPF. Most of my sources literally being Tumblr, the occasional Reddit post, whatever LiveJournal posts I could find. Not very professional, but a lot of academic papers are kind of hard to find online and I guess you could consider it research in the sense of interviews or something. (I did end up having a correspondence with someone who could be considered a known figure in fandom? But yeah)
It is fascinating to see people be willfully obtuse about the popularity of Hockey RPF by claiming that it's "physical" and "exciting to watch" as though that is only unique to the sport of hockey. Especially when looking at how NFL fandoms then and now were quite often centered on the white men in the league. Like- okay. We can start at the very beginning with the concept of "migratory slash fandom," which is apparently how a decent subset of early hockey fans got into hockey. Because apparently a lot of them were based in the Midwest and Chicago and Pittsburgh were cooking at the time, and I guess they needed to get away from bandom. Apparently. We should probably inquire why they decided to gravitate towards hockey of all sports (and yeah there has been a lot said about the subconscious bias to whiteness in migratory slash fandom). So I mean. I think it's kind of obvious. At some point it's a bit of a feedback loop where the big fandom keeps churning fic and more people are drawn in by the fic and continue contributing. But also people are drawn to whiteness in fandom.
Not to generalize fandoms (I will now generalize) but I guess it is interesting to see demographics of fandoms depending on the site. Hockey Twitter has the reputation of largely being white. NBA/NFL Twitter are seen as more "black," but there are probably some edgy white teens on there. Baseball has a bit of both, though it has the largest boomer population from my observation. I will say that the NFL fandom has received an influx of Taylor Swift fans (see the large amount of Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift fic posted to AO3 in the past year), but that hasn't really muddled "NFL Twitter" and the effect is more on Tumblr-fandom adjacent spaces. And making that just a little more Hockey RPF fandom-adjacent.
But again, maybe it's the whole "oh those sports are seen a certain way by non-sport fans so it's harder to get into" but also the blackness of both sports can be seen as a contributing factor to why some would be hesitant to get into those sports. Not to defend the NFL and its handling of CTE. But hockey also has that problem. And I don't really see people angrily demanding the NHL to fix it. I think the blackness of the NFL is kind of a factor in that, though, because hockey players are predominantly white and grew up well-off enough to afford playing hockey? It's the whole black narrative of "making it out the hood," I guess, which can feed into some pretty negative stereotypes about black people.
But you do see Swifties becoming NFL fans because their favorite singer is now at games. So I dunno! I don't think certain sports are hard to get into, even if some fans are like "eww that's for boys!!" (And of course this feeds into some whiteness in the fandom which isn't necessarily bad but when the league is 54% black it gets awkward to see only one black person in the top 10 most tagged characters. And it's mostly because of their relationship with a white character. I think there is a lot that can be said about how some interracial relationships are presented. However, I don't know if I'm authorized to speak on that. We will proceed. I might come back to this thought.)
I guess you can also kind of see this in the rise of popularity of women's basketball? Though I go in that tag and it is... very white. Yeesh. Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers are doing what Joe Burrow did for the NFL fandom. It is something.
