By accusing them of misogyny simply because they are men
I don't believe that's at all what is happening here. The fan fiction community is female-dominated, and a lot of female fans have self-defined it as a primarily female space. And so of course when there's an attempt to monetize fan fiction by a company whose board is all men, it's going to make gender a factor in the ensuing discussions.
I think most of the gendered discussions around this are part of a longer conversation that's been going on via metafandom. Recently a female fan posted an essay called "How fan fiction makes us poor" about how our community might be encouraging women to give creative work away to fandom, rather than developing our skills in more commercial directions.
Following that, there were several posts and threads about whether it's ethical for fans to make money from fan fiction (by "filing off the serial numbers" to sell it as original, or soliciting donations, or putting ads on personal websites, or selling printed books). And the general drift was that commercializing fan fiction would probably damage the community.
But just a few weeks after those discussions died down, here comes FanLib, from outside the community, introducing commercialism into it anyway. Most of those recent discussions about "How fan fiction makes us poor" speculated about whether the gender balance of fic fandom, predominately female, was a factor in the development of fanfic's "gift economy". So in the wake of those conversations, when a male-run company tries to make money off fan fiction, it seems almost like a confirmation of the idea that gender is a factor here... that for some reason women don't exploit the financial potential of their creative work. And clearly fan fiction has financial potential, since FanLib is spending $3 million to try to profit from it.
Sorry if that's more than you wanted to know, but I hope the context might make it more clear why this is has come up so often in the course of talking about FanLib.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-05-26 09:22 am (UTC)I don't believe that's at all what is happening here. The fan fiction community is female-dominated, and a lot of female fans have self-defined it as a primarily female space. And so of course when there's an attempt to monetize fan fiction by a company whose board is all men, it's going to make gender a factor in the ensuing discussions.
I think most of the gendered discussions around this are part of a longer conversation that's been going on via
Following that, there were several posts and threads about whether it's ethical for fans to make money from fan fiction (by "filing off the serial numbers" to sell it as original, or soliciting donations, or putting ads on personal websites, or selling printed books). And the general drift was that commercializing fan fiction would probably damage the community.
But just a few weeks after those discussions died down, here comes FanLib, from outside the community, introducing commercialism into it anyway. Most of those recent discussions about "How fan fiction makes us poor" speculated about whether the gender balance of fic fandom, predominately female, was a factor in the development of fanfic's "gift economy". So in the wake of those conversations, when a male-run company tries to make money off fan fiction, it seems almost like a confirmation of the idea that gender is a factor here... that for some reason women don't exploit the financial potential of their creative work. And clearly fan fiction has financial potential, since FanLib is spending $3 million to try to profit from it.
Sorry if that's more than you wanted to know, but I hope the context might make it more clear why this is has come up so often in the course of talking about FanLib.