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Nele Noppe

Standing out in the crowd: my OSCON keynote | Infotropism - 0 views

  • In 2006, the FLOSSPOLS survey (a broad survey of open source usage and development, funded by the EU) found that only 1.5% of open source contributors are women.

Nele Noppe

Ada Lovelace Day: Two ground-breaking open source projects | Infotropism - 0 views

  • Some open source projects, like Ubuntu and Drupal, are known as more women-friendly environments. Ubuntu’s code of conduct, for instance, set expectations about appropriate behaviour and help foster an environment where women feel more welcome and less threatened. DrupalChix say that Drupal has 10% women on the project, thanks to the supportive environment that group helps create.

    But to the best of my knowledge, there are only two open source projects in the world which a) have a significant number of developers, and b) are majority female. They are An Archive Of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works) and Dreamwidth.

  • Though I’m loath to draw sweeping conclusions from these two projects, I do see commonalities that might help answer the eternal question of “How do we get more women into Open Source?”

    • Start with women from day one, in leadership and other roles.
    • Stand for something that women actually care about, and don’t be afraid to state it up front and loudly.
    • Make efforts to recruit women regardless of technical experience.
    • Recruit from existing, active, creative communities who know how to communicate and collaborate online.
    • Offer training, peer support, and activities to teach coding from the ground up.
Nele Noppe

Project MUSE - Cinema Journal - Should Fan Fiction Be Free? - 0 views

  • This situation deserves scrutiny, especially because fan fiction is becoming [End Page 118] increasingly visible to non-initiates through major media outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom, indicating that the genre is moving away from the margins of American and British culture
  • The mainstreaming of an alternative form of cultural production is nearly always synonymous with commercialization;
  • Over the past decades of sharing their transformative works, fan fiction readers and writers have generally felt wary of commodifying a form of cultural production that is essentially derivative and perhaps subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.
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  • Digital appropriation artists have developed a number of monetization models: royalties, distribution agreements, reasonably priced licenses that permit remix practitioners to sell their appropriations legally, and small-scale compensation intended only to reimburse remixers for their outlay. Although fan filmmakers and game modders have experimented with these models, fan fiction writers have not conducted similar experiments in marketing their works.
  • Fanfic authors who think that selling appropriative art is always and absolutely against the law are mistaken. No such case law exists, and many appropriating artists make money from their work today without constantly encountering legal trouble.
  • Why, then, do fic writers resist earning income from their output? Many scholars of fan studies claim that fan fiction is, and must remain, free—that is, "free of charge," but also "free of the social controls that monetization would likely impose on it"—because it is inherently a gift culture, as Hellekson describes in this issue. In fact, even the fan organization, the Organization of Transformative Works, one of whose goals is to redefine fan works as transformative and therefore legal, states: "The mission of the OTW is first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy."
  • Therefore, writing fan fiction for personal gain—financial, psychological, or emotional—aligns with the fact that self-enrichment is already inherently an important motivation for women to produce and consume fanfic. For some women, belonging to an affinity group or discussing stories with fellow writers and readers is not the primary reason for engaging with this type of fiction.
  • The rewards of participating in a commercial market for this genre might be just as attractive as the rewards of participating in a community's gift culture; and the existence of commercial markets for goods does not typically eliminate parallel gift economies.
  • If fans successfully professionalize and monetize fan fiction, the amateur culture of fic writing will not disappear.
  • Although fans have legitimate anxieties about fan fiction being corrupted or deformed by its entry into the commercial sphere, I argue that there is far greater danger of this happening if fan fiction is not commodified by its own producers, but by parties foreign to fandom who do not understand why or for whom the genre works, and who will promote it for purposes it is unsuited for, ignoring the aspects that make it attractive and dear to its readers.
  • However, an even greater danger than this is that fan fiction may not be monetized at all, in which case no one, particularly women authors, will earn the financial rewards of fanfic's growing popularity. Only the corporate owners of the media properties that fic authors so creatively elaborate on will see economic gain from these writers' volunteer work.
  • if women can formulate a model for the monetization of their artworks, the gap will be narrowed.
  • In the absence of such experimentation, women writing fanfic for free today risk institutionalizing a lack of compensation for all women that practice this art in the future. Woolf asked of her forebears, "What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?" Will our generation answer that we have been giving our talents away as gifts, rather than insisting on the worth of our work?
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Nele Noppe

Rebecca Tushnet's 43(B)log: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? - 1 views

  • Look, I get the idea that there is One True Standard of aesthetic goodness. What I don’t get is the further conclusion that if we only got rid of the dreck we’d have more of the good stuff. I guess it’s yet another expression of the romantic idea that Art comes out of nowhere, rather than in reaction to the creator’s surroundings.
Nele Noppe

ジュディス・バトラー講演会 -Undoing Gender- - 荻上式BLOG - 0 views

  •  
    「ペドフィリア--幼児を性愛の対象にしてしまうことですが、日本ではオタク文化によって、それが社会的に広がっているんです」というふうに司会者が続けたのを聞いて、オイオイ、そのまとめは違うだろっ!  現実の幼児に欲望を向けるペドフィリアと、オタク的欲望や萌えはまったく違うものだ。なのに司会者はそれを完全にごっちゃにしてしまっている。元の質問は知り合いが書いたもので、まったく違うニュアンスの質問だったのに。

Nele Noppe

The right of making available - 0 views

  • The concept of open source, as with intellectual property generally, is based on the fact that my possession of a copy of a program doesn't interfere with your possession of a copy of the same program.
  • The general term for that is "nonrivalrous,"
  • Who is supposed to be doing the open sourcing here? For those of us who aren't Cylons, there aren't many copies. Bodies are rivalrous
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  • Open source is a great idea, but it's always important to ask who's supposed to be providing the free stuff. As I've said elsewhere, when you start to compare fields that get intellectual property protection (software, sculpture) with fields that don’t (fashion, cooking, sewing), it becomes uncomfortably obvious that our cultural policy has expected women’s endeavors to generate surplus creativity but has assumed that men’s endeavors require compensation,
Nele Noppe

Mary Sue - FSFwiki - 0 views

  • What attributes the character may have are variable; what causes annoyance is the introduction of a cuckoo into the canon's nest, some bigger, brighter, louder character who steals the limelight from the characters the reader chose to read about, the intrusion that distorts the text.

  • However, sexism does play a central role in the phenomenon, because the performances towards which fans show loyalty are products of a sexist culture. The typical Mary Sue is female, because of the marginalisation of women in the texts and performances from which most fandom derives. The laws of canon are largely patriarchal, and female fen therefore find their position at odds with their loyalty to the fandom in a way that male fen do not.

    The backlash against Mary Sues only exacerbates this underlying sexism, because the hatred felt against intruding female characters intersects with and reinforces, to a degree, the misogynist tropes that provoke it.

Nele Noppe

Fan fiction - FSFwiki - 0 views

  • Because men majoritarily control the market economics, fan fiction becomes an alternative, sometimes central area of cultural production for women.
  • Men also produce fan fiction, but because their relationship to the market is different from women's, under the patriarchal mode of production, their fannish endeavours do not share exactly the same characteristics. There is significant overlap between women's fannish networks and men's, but sexism necessarily colours the interactions between individuals and/or groups from each class.
Nele Noppe

cupidsbow: Women/Writing 1: How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, by cupidsbow - 0 views

  • feminist theory
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ.
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  • scratch the surface and the result of those practices is that women are seriously disadvantaged.
  • If the "wrong" people overcome the prohibitions and manage to write, the work is often made to vanish, usually through the ordinary, polite workings of class privilege. The widespread blindness to the work is based on illogical assumptions that are accepted as reasonable and never questioned. In fact, questioning the silence is considered rude and boorish,
  • certain topics are considered more important than others, based on an idea of how "universal" they are, and therefore art about them is innately more valuable.
  • that books can be misread due to assumptions about the author, so for instance, before Wuthering Heights was known to be written by a woman, it was considered by critics to be about the nature of evil, and afterwards, it was considered a romance.
  • [Pollution of Agency and the Double Standard of Content are clearly aspects related to the general contempt in which fanfiction is held by the wider writing community--it's just porn; it's all about men doing boring domestic stuff; they aren't even men, they're written like fourteen year old girls; only crazy, obsessive stalkers write that stuff; it's all so derivative and unoriginal, such a waste of talent.]
  • This is when works or authors are belittled by assigning them to the wrong category, or arranging categories so that all the "wrong" people don't fit the prestigious ones.
  • When a work by the "wrong" person actually makes it into the canon of Literature or Serious Art, it is only because they are one of a kind who produced this one thing out of the blue.
  • because successful women's writing is isolated from its influences, it is often accused of having a poor or informal style
  • Anomalousness.
    She wrote it, but there are very few of her.
  • Lack of Models.
    While it's clear that women don't write in a vacuum, the disappearance of so many "wrong" works from the mid- to long-term literary record means that each new generation of women artists has to find or make a new network of their own.
  • Responses.
    This is another fascinating chapter, which looks at the ways in which women have faced the silence and decided to write anyway.
  • Fanfiction writers may conceive of what is being made in different ways (art, craft, fun, porn, and so on), but there is no question, at least within the bounds of the subculture, that we can write! That is quite a different expectation to that of the wider world,
  • Aesthetics.
    This chapter discusses the impact of not having a visible female tradition on art in general. For a start, it means that many of the representations of women within art are deeply flawed, as they are based on stereotypes. It also means the hierarchy of art is skewed so that the "masculine" values are at the top, all others at the bottom, like so:
    "high art" [means] man, mankind, the individual man, individuality, humans, humanity, the human figure, humanism, civilization, culture, the Greeks, the Romans, the English, Christianity, spiritual transcendence, religion, nature, true form, science, logic, creativity, action, war, virility, violence, brutality, dynamism, power, and greatness.
    ... "low art": Africans, Orientals, Persians, Slovaks, peasants, the lower classes, women, children, savages, pagans, sensuality, pleasure, decadence, chaos, anarchy, impotence, exotica, eroticism, artifice, tattoos, cosmetics, ornaments, decoration, carpets, weaving, patterns, domesticity, wallpaper, fabrics, and furniture. (p. 114-5 Russ quoting Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff)
  • Another consequence of the focus on a male value system, is that associations are made between things like size and quality (the number of pages in a book, for instance, affects how prestigious it is); hence short stories [again: fanfiction!] are not all that important compared to novels
  • Women always write in the vernacular.
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • is the non-capitalist aspect of fanfiction actually a method of silencing the artistic voices of women? And does it take away what should be legitimate opportunities for us to earn an income from what we create?
  • it's easy for people outside of fanfiction fandom to dismiss the whole thing on a number of grounds
  • There is no doubt in my mind that fanfiction offers an amazing network for women writers, and given the advantages of the internet, it would be almost impossible to make this writing disappear en masse as has so often happened to women's writing in the past.
  • most of them described by Russ: yes, she wrote it, but we don't really know who "she" is; yes, she wrote it, but she totally shouldn't have (only perverts/stalkers/sluts/thieves write it); yes, she wrote it, but it's not important (because it's not about high culture ideas, it's unpaid, it's vernacular, it's just porn, it's derivative, it's bad); yes, she wrote it and it's actually good, but it's a one-off fluke and it's not really fanfiction anyway (it's a homage, a pastiche, a post-modern experiment, it won the Pulitzer); yes, she went on to write successful original novels in spite of her fanfiction beginnings (but she's not like all the others who do it, and let's not talk about it anyway, because it opens us up to copyright violation lawsuits).
  • very hard to combat, as people are sure these biases are "common sense".
  • Do we really want to be part of a culture that endorses a silencing of women by keeping us in our places in the ghetto? Or is this beyond the purview of something we do for fun, as a hobby?
  • It seems to me that part of why fanfiction can so easily be written off is because we so carefully police it, keeping our work in the unpaid ghetto along with other women's crafts.
  • Not just because of the "silencing" issue, but because of the female poverty issue
  • Then again, fanfiction's market isn't the commercial publishing market--fanfiction is part of the long-tail economy of the internet, so the same rules don't apply.
  • I still think that the fanfiction community is the most amazing women's art culture I've ever experienced, and quite possibly the most amazing there has ever been, just in terms of sheer numbers and output. And perhaps that is enough; perhaps one of the foundation-stones of the fanfiction community is that it doesn't have to engage directly with capitalist imperatives, and messing with that ethos might unbalance everything.
  • I do feel angry, though, that this amazing outpouring of female talent is written off as nothing but derivative porn written by a bunch of crackpots. It makes me want to punch things and scream at the world, "Are you all asleep, or just deliberately stupid?"
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