gender – My Life, or Something Like It

Curating Communities in the Digital World; Spoilers, it’s nothing new.

Over the past few months in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t help but feel like there’s been an increasing awareness paid to community. What it means to be part of one, how do we come together as one, how do we build one in an increasingly digital age?

So many questions that people are now asking themselves as though they’re waking up from a haze. For so long people have been going through the motions of life and only truly living in the wisps of what community is supposed to be. People love to blame the internet and social media for destroying historical meanings of what it meant to be part of a community—but many of these people have ceased to evolve to see what modern day communities are actually like.

Then COVID struck. Slowly, then encapsulating the world. With the physical spaces we used to gather no longer being accessible, people fled to the internet to try and make whole the social spaces they were deprived of. The very people who claimed that these spaces were the death of all community are now struggling to try to figure out how to use the internet as the vast saviour of all things social.

And yet, they still don’t understand.

Now that I’ve passed into the post-comps-dissertation-writing-I-swear phase of my PhD, it’s hard to not see things align in an eerily timely and useful way. While I write about gender and power dynamics for my dissertation, I’m effectively writing about how communities are built and developed online. How their ideologies are developed and perpetuated; how we make meaning in digital spaces. As my academic mantra has been for a while: People, Technology, Culture.

I’ve had the pleasure of receiving a series of graduate research scholarships to develop a community for the UW Games Institute from the ground up in a digital space—predating the COVID epidemic, but accelerated in kind by its appearance. I’ve had in-depth experience with thinking through how to build the culture we want to have, and how to reinforce the culture we already had, through an entirely virtual medium.

This has given me new perspectives not only on how simple it can be to consciously choose the framework you want a community to develop around, but equally how easy it is for people to overlook the simple things that can easily breed discontent and toxicity if overlooked.

As per usual, this is going to come back to World of Warcraft (shocker, I know). I spent the morning talking to my current GM of HKC, whom I’ve known for over 13 years now. We talked about our community, the world of gaming culture, and most notably, the recent scandal with Method.

This scandal sadly has come at no surprise to me, as one who researches within and participates heavily in the competitive gamer world. The stories relayed through this news blast aren’t unique—in fact they’re far more common than many want to believe—but the more these stories come to light, the more…hopefully…we’ll come to see a change in the gaming “community.”

I’ve been lucky that I learned to navigate these worlds earlier, and have surrounded myself over time with people who support the kind of virtual space I want to be a part of, but many aren’t so lucky. That spine, was an important part of my conversation today. We have a strong and long-lasting community within Hello Kitty Club. But despite our size, we aren’t free from risk of drama (nor have we not had our share of it in the 10+ years I’ve been a part of its leadership).

IMG_20191102_175037-01 — HKC BlizzCon 2019, HKC + Friends through the years (when we each joined Blizzard, approximately)

What struck me today was the willingness to work towards creating systems to stop, acknowledge, or offer recourse for situations in the same wheelhouse as what happened with Method (and others) before they even start. We aren’t some international gaming juggernaut, and yet, the importance of creating safe spaces for all members of your community, is no less important to us.

Over the years, there’s a reason why people keep coming back to HKC. Many guilds rise and fall. People disappear without a word. But for some reason, people keep coming back to us and remember us long after we’ve parted ways (or changed servers), and I can’t help but keep coming back to the question of community. We’ve evolved over the years but there’s something about our core, our attitude, our values that seems to strike a chord with people. Something we hope to soon put to writing to ensure that that energy can continue to thrive beyond the current leadership.

I mean….let’s face it, we might leave this game eventually right? (*awkward laughter*)

In the meantime though, I’m proud to be part of who HKC is today. We acknowledge our own missteps in the past but equally are learning from them in order to build a better community in the future. Even if it’s just in our one small corner of the Discord & Azeroth universes.

MVIMG_20191102_191748 — HKC BlizzCon 2019, closing ceremonies

#GamerGate, Tech industry sexual harassment leaks, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and through this current Method scandal. All of these things happen everywhere, across the globe, but they are changed systematically at the small community level.

We work together to fight intolerance and misconduct at a local level and it can have a rippling effect that spreads across the whole of the industry. It’s human nature to gravitate towards what others are doing successfully. We must continue to fight, no matter how helpless it may seem by learning about these big-news items.

All news is local news, and the biggest of scandals start with the smallest of problems.

Build your communities with care and you’ll see them grow. Let them populate unchecked and you’re just setting yourself up for disaster. I’m sure Method meant well, but at some point you need to let go of old ways, evolve, and stand up for what’s right.

Change is an individual choice. Choose to build better communities, adopt more inclusive values, choose to listen to others.

Choose a better future by acting as though it were already here.

Through the Looking Glass

Popular media often serve as a reflection through which we view culture. Like mirrors at a funhouse, they can distort as much as they can show true. We’ve talked about it in class, and I’ve otherwise previously discussed on this blog (here and here), how pulp magazines can be interpreted as presenting a certain way of enacting American life. A very particular way of being a ‘proper’ citizen. As much as the stories, characters, visuals, and advertisments served to train a population to see the world a certain way, so too did the stories, characters, visuals, and advertisments reflect aspects of the world that already existed.

This week, we read topics on gender and race depiction in pulp magazines. While we have discussed these themes throughout the course, this week they take primary focus.

1889n4og4e6c5jpg — A mural from *BioShock Infinite*, featuring racial stereotypes of ‘undesireables’ and ‘societal moochers,’ that “proper” citizens of the game’s flying city of Columbia are supposed to protect against. This echoes a general theme of racist representations throughout the game, associated with the dominant white and affluent citizen body.

Nathan Madison explores racism in pulp magazines thoroughly in Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920-1960. In particular, we read about “The Yellow Peril,” or rather the representation of stereotypes and orientalism within the covers of 1919 and 1935’s pulp magazines. Some of the imagery and quotations are quite jarring and unfortunately illuminating, not only for the cultures of the time, but also how long-lasting the tropes were. Towards the end of the chapter, Madison revisits the political nature of anti-foreign (particularly Chinese) climate surrounding these magazines from 1882-1930s. Laws prohibiting inter-race marriage, revoking citizenship from American women who ‘dared’ marry a Chinese man, limits to Chinese immigration.

He states on page 83:

In such an atmosphere, what do the stories found in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and the 1930s tell us about Americans, and, specifically, about their views of Asians and foreigners in general? It is difficult, and rash, to simply assign racism to such a time period that differs from the current in so many ways. One reason for this difficulty, aside from the error of attempting to impose early twenty-first century political correctness upon those living in the early twentieth century, is the contradicting evidence of racial tolerance, and even racial acceptance, on the part of many Americans at the time. For every act of the federal government that attempted to impose immigration restrictions, there was an outcry from many denouncing the racial intolerance such acts legalized.

Continually we return to the complex nature of history and scholarship. It is not enough to simply see these works and stories as reflections of rampant racism at the time. However, as Madison points out, the tendancies were there. It is hard to judge the past based on the morals of the present, and yet in many cases, I would argue, we should. As much as it ‘was different’ in their time, it does not mean we should forgive and forget what happened. In many cases these very damaging stereotypes and racial beliefs created an indoctrinating effect on the populace which persists to this day in many, albiet sometimes more subtle, ways. Amongst the stories that perpetuated the “yellow peril” within the pulps, others did try to subvert it, even to the point of having Chinese protagonists, even if stories like these were more rare.

world-war-2-propaganda — World War II Propaganda Poster

What concerns me about this side of pulp magazines is the overt propagandan nature of “yellow peril” narratives. Madison ends the chapter discussing how the discussion of “yellow” versus “white” races changes leading into World War II, thanks in part to a shift in a percieved gobal villain. He notes, however, that the legacy of this time continues much longer after the fact. We see the effect of orientalism repeat through a variety of funhouse mirrors throughout history, as people from the psudo-mythological East are demonized or exoticised to promote the master-narrative, especially in the contemporary U.S.A. these days. Propaganda narratives like the “yellow peril” catch like wildfire in cultural memory and have damaging effects on the landscape. When everything around you, from the news, to advertisements, to the entertainment you consume, tells a different version of the same story, it becomes increasingly difficult to fight against it.

It’s insidious as hell, and exactly why diverse opinions and representations continue to be important in media, and in scholarship.

Today is International Women’s Day, and I cannot fathom closing out this post without briefly mentioning the looking glass mirrors of gender roles in pulp magazines. That being said, I’ll be brief, as I’ve talked about gender roles briefly before.

Much like racial tropes and stereotypes, the representation of gender roles and “types” of women are equally present within pulp magazines. While there are examples of women who break the mold, often women serve as narrative elements, part of the backdrop to serve the story’s progression. Object of affection, of scandal, of motherhood…representations of women in pulp magazines echo a much longer history of one dimensional or restricted depictions that women continue to fight against today. What I did find interesting in this week’s readings, however, was the fact that many of the writers and editors of the “girlie” pulp mags were in fact women themselves. While it is less shocking to read that women also made up a sizeable portion of the readership, I am curious as to the motivations of these women to participate in these kinds of narratives. I don’t care for the ‘morality’ of their involvement, but rather the desire to perpetuate stories of women they knew weren’t wholly true? Sex sells as they say, and I suppose writing as ‘an insider’ would provide that extra oompf that would rack in additional sales. Alas, as is pointed out, little about the authors and editors themselves is known, and tracking down any motivations for their involvement is unlikely.

All that being said, I get a kick out of the list of “do’s and don’t’s” for writing into Spicy Detective. “A nude female corpse is allowed, of course.” Naturally.

Screenshot 2018-03-09 at 12.46.35 AM — *Pulp Magazines Project –* “Birth of Girlie Pulps“

The sad part is, while things are changing in contemporary media, they haven’t changed all that much. Here’s hoping that as consumers of media, and as scholars, we can do better, with both race and gender.

Gendering History

If you’ve even dabbled into the discussion of gender and history, you’ve more than likely stumbled by a mention of a lack of female representation in the documented past. It’s something that’s come up in pretty much every course that deals with the past throughout university. Documentaion of women’s affect and even their presence in history is lacking because they just weren’t the ones who were writing it down.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Women were writing, and they were participating in documentation, but not quite as much as their male colleagues. Additionally, it was only usually women of power or money who had any time or ability to write anything at all. We see this even as early as with Sappho, the ancient Greek poet. She was a wealthy citizen, and as a result, had the privilege to leisure time and thus was able to write. While there are very few documented female voices in history, there are even fewer of the average women who would have lived alongside their much more represented male counterparts. Even when women may have written their perspective, carved their story, or have been celebrated in their time, historians have traditionally washed away female participation from the record. Anything which presents women as vocal individuals in their own right, in their own lens, detracts from the male domination narrative you see.

It’s not all that cut and dry, however, as there are plenty of women’s studies and history classes to teach the messiness of such a subject. Where we can tackle however, is something that we discussed in class this week, namely the male-washing of the Western genre. While industrialization allowed for more and more women to gain access to reading and writing, the legacy of their participation in the literary market would go overlooked.

As we discussed in class, the Western genre in its earliest days, when looking at the pulp magazines themselves, had high female engagement. Not just in reading either. Women were writing stories too. While scholarship on Westerns focused on literary sources, skewed towards male authors, the truth remained that the Western genre developed through simultaneous and mutual involvement in the genre. It’s no surprise that in the 1950s and 60s, eras desperately trying to embolden gender roles against an influx of new thinking, that scholarship would erase the presence of female participation. Naturally, it would seem to them, women would have come to the genre only for the romance. Women didn’t want to see the guns or action stories, nay (or perhaps neigh), they only wanted to read about stories where subservient (or perhaps wild-then-tamed) women fall in love with dominent men and start a new life in the West. They couldn’t possibly be interested in the same “men” stuff *insert chest bump here*.

Does my sarcasm read strong enough? It’s so incredibly infurating as an academic to look back and be faced with misled and unfounded historical scholarship. We are now taught to look at the entire picture. To preserve all that we can about a text or an artifact, in hopes that even if we can’t analyze the whole picture, someone, someday, might. When faced with situations like this, one cannot help but be infurated by the scholarship of dominant male authorities, which changed official analysis of history to fit their own goals. Nevermind that the female-driven/written pulps lasted longer than their guns-blazing counterparts. Nevermind that the blended magazines came first. Nevermind that women had any active role whatsoever.

I regret that I’m getting fired up about this more than I intended to, but it strike a chord with me. I have, thanks to my training through a very forward-thinking parent, I’ve always grated against imposed gender roles. Why should boys get all the fun stuff? Women have always been interested in things beyond romance and beautification, but because gender roles (albiet ever shifting) shame them for it, they either train themselves not to be interested, or find an excuse for something societally acceptable within them to like. It makes me hurt, not only for contemporary audiences and issues, but also for the women in history who have had their voices silenced or ignored–or worse yet, attributed to a male counterpart. There is a place for everyone in this analysis, in this field, and it’s up to us to go back and return life to those who we can find within these pages. To give back credit where it is due, and to change scholarship on history to better represent the truth of gender (and race) participation.

I’ve visually referenced Westworld twice in this post–a brilliant TV show (which if you haven’t watched it, stop, drop, and binge it all right now), created by the joint efforts of a male and a female, produced by a female, and containing an amazing cast of strong-willed, well rounded, and well-written female characters. In the sci-fi/western/drama category, it’s everything an inclusive audience should want, and it’s no wonder it was critically recieved accordingly. It deals with complex issues of romance, action, drama, abuse, artificial intelligence, ethics, free will, and consumerism (alongside so much else), against a backdrop of stunning visuals, breathtaking sets, and a moving score. It’s a show, for me, which proves that Westerns can be for everyone (well, except maybe not kids in this case). I can only imagine, that in the age of pulp magazines, a well written Western would have the same effect on its audience as Westworld has today. A good story need a blend of a variety of elements, and the best way to accomplish that would have been to incorporate blended perspectives and angles into a magazine.

If for nothing else, the lesson of male-washed Western genre scholarship calls for us to use a critical eye when looking at other pulp magazine genres, as well as literature more broadly. Just because it’s not obvious, or its been overwritten, doesn’t mean female voices aren’t there–that female participation isn’t there. Sometimes you just need to dig a little deeper, find meaning in the blank spaces, and help to try and uncover what history has tried to erase. We cannot hope to move foward in our own scholarship, if we continue to accept ingrained and perpetuated biases about the people we study.

The cycle has to end somewhere, why not with us?