...that boat has flown: Geeks →

kwerey:

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?”

3 months ago  /  609 notes  /  Source: occupythedisco