Oh, I've been working, so I haven't even gotten past the introduction. I may or may not have additional thoughts once I've read the piece; I do know that I have traditionally had a high level of resistance to people marking someone else's subcultural experience as somehow inauthentic.


...now that I have read it, I am troubled by some of what's going on there. As in, the substantial body of literature on gifting and informal economic transactions that she's overlooking to go with this "white man keeping" metaphor.

To some extent, we can characterize online female fan communities as the Indians in this Hydean analogy, and the media producers pushing these ancillary content models as the "white man keepers" of online fan culture who have failed to understand that it is the reciprocity and free circulation of fan works within female fan communities that identifies them as communities.

Um. That's kind of loaded language there, and the thing where female fandom (inasmuch as such a thing exists) is being consciously identified with native peoples, that thing makes me uncomfortable. I think it's problematic to compare the experience of media products not being tailored to one's preferences (which can certainly be a legitimate problem, don't get me wrong) to, you know, centuries of genocide and cultural marginalization.

And...there are limits to how willing I am to take apart, in public, an article written in another discipline. But that part stuck out for me.