...that boat has flown: Geeks

radtransfem:

kwery:

anlamasanda:

occupythedisco:

I think the reason I find geek culture so obnoxious at times to engage in is because the people are for the most part the same privileged dips that inhabit mainstream culture, but with the added detriment of a victim complex. They’re still largely white and center their race, they’re still largely straight and center their sexuality, they’re still largely cis men who center their gender. They challenge nothing about the status quo and what bodies get to be placed at the center of it, they offer nothing radically different to the typical narratives about which groups of people are and are not important and they can be just as hostile to groups who try to find a place in their space as the mainstream is, in some cases even worse. But for some reason they think the fact that they like Battlestar Galactica instead of Monday night football makes them radical alterna-gods who are too good for this sinful Earth.

I object to this sort of terminology, which itself centers those straight white cis men by defining “geek culture” as the culture they produce. False generics all over again. Is it going to be “geek culture” and then, let’s see, “queer geek culture”? “Men” and “trans men”, “literature” and “women’s literature”, “Americans” and “Asian Americans”. Echh.

This particular instance might be carelessness, tiredness, whatever… but for some reason this happens a lot in critiques of mainstream geekdom, these kinds of erasure from writers who purport to decry its exclusivity and privilegefail. I have no idea why.

Yeah, this: yo hey hello there Tumblr, I’m a woman and I’d call myself a geek without a second thought, can we either put some effort into explaining how the dude-flavoured variant of geekery ought to be generalised into the whole or please stop doing that?

My friendship groups and subcultures of choice geeky as get all out. We hang out and read a lot and play games and obsess about marginally different kinds of loose-leaf tea, and I’d say that when we browse Tumblr for pretty shit and read blogs about kink and follow fandoms over LJ and AO3 we’re participating in some pretty well developed geek culture right there.

For me the power of men to hold the territory of “geek” is so strong that I’ve moved away from the label. I don’t feel able to reclaim it or to use it to describe myself. Especially as “geek” has such strong cultural male coding that I’ve seen it used as a subtle way to missex trans* women, in that simply describing a trans* woman as a geek is enough to imply that she is “really a man”. This has been done to me.

At the same time, yeah, you’re right, there are definitely geek cultures that are women’s cultures, and/or different to the (cis white straight) male geek culture described by occupythedisco, and I don’t think that just because I don’t feel able to reclaim it that gives me the right to say anything about others’ reclamation of it, including implictly by erasing those reclamations. Sorry!

So what kinda language works here? “Dominant geek culture?” “Mainstream geek culture?” “Ciswhitestraightmalegeek culture?”

Ugh, I’m sorry about the missexing :| I can definitely see that from outside, the perception of what a geek is in a very narrow way, and that ‘exclusively male’ is deeeeefinitely a part of that coding. For me it’s entertaining (and I guess also culturally transgressive) to claim certain friendship groups of mine as ‘geeky’, but that’s useful because none of the common cultural tropes of geekdom can get much traction against us. We don’t have any vulnerabilities that the cultural coding aims at, and so for me at least calling myself a geek is a way to assert that my unapologetic enthusiasm for $interest in a way that sits outside mainstream social norms.

So, yeah, I’d rather add a bunch of adjective to geek as appropriate: ‘white het dude geek culture’ or ‘gamer geek culture’ or whatever. Not mainstream, necessarily, although I don’t know if I’d trust my opinions here and I’d like to hear other people’s. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that there’s a dominant culture amongst gamers that’s very dudely, but the internet’s pretty huge, there’s a huge number of spaces that are very definitely geek cultures of their own and that’re decisively female-dominated: Tumblr and LiveJournal and Etsy and myriad fanfiction hosts.

I think my view here is shaped by a couple of things. One of them is that tea and cooking and foreign languages are pretty feminine interests, and by calling myself a geek about those things I’m claiming that I enjoy them in and of myself and in my own way and in a way that sits outside (goes beyond, maybe?) any kind of cultural or social obligation I might feel.

Another is the tendency for people to talk about female-normative fandom spaces like they’re shocking hidden underground clubs. Googling pretty general search times for most popular media will find you fanfic and fanart and unapologetic fandom communities: they’re not hiding, they’re just not part of the hegemonic view of who’s allowed to express interest obsessively and so they’re not looked for and acknowledged a lot of the time.