It's funny the things call fandom or not! It often puzzles me. What's the definition? Surely if we're enthousiast about something and spent a lot of hobby time discussing and creating for it, it's a fandom? I really don't like it when "fandom" is used as a word meaning "American women who write slash fanfics about media shows" as it seems it sometimes is.
Having more in common with the boys than with the women, that's something I knew as well. Mostly out of lack of social graces. There's a part of fandom on LJ among women which is all networking and... I don't know how to characterize it, but it seems something very female, and it feels great being part of it, for once, and at the same time it feels something alien which I can't recognize myself within.
But word! I also was interesting in things that the male fandoms didn't often give me, the focus on the interpersonnal dynamics, the shipping! There's this SF fen monthly gathering I went to (and still do) which at one piont was ending as all the girls (5 or 6 out of 25 at the highest point ^^) in a corner talking about Buffy while the others were totally puzzled and mocking us!
It's funny, I also discovered my sexual attraction to women by drawing naked and sexy women XD
As for fan fiction in a lot of ways I do see it as being in part of a larger feminist/queer tradition of revising and reclaim mainstream material. You know, I really love that aspect of fanfics, too. It's sort of different, transversal to the pure fannishness. But it's something I love being able to find in fanfics. That's the kind of thins I'd be afraid of losing with a more mixed fandom, it's true. But maybe, as sakanagi said, it's more about the values within the fandom. Some fandoms are just progressive and tolerant enough to make that dynamic works.
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Having more in common with the boys than with the women, that's something I knew as well. Mostly out of lack of social graces. There's a part of fandom on LJ among women which is all networking and... I don't know how to characterize it, but it seems something very female, and it feels great being part of it, for once, and at the same time it feels something alien which I can't recognize myself within.
But word! I also was interesting in things that the male fandoms didn't often give me, the focus on the interpersonnal dynamics, the shipping! There's this SF fen monthly gathering I went to (and still do) which at one piont was ending as all the girls (5 or 6 out of 25 at the highest point ^^) in a corner talking about Buffy while the others were totally puzzled and mocking us!
It's funny, I also discovered my sexual attraction to women by drawing naked and sexy women XD
As for fan fiction in a lot of ways I do see it as being in part of a larger feminist/queer tradition of revising and reclaim mainstream material.
You know, I really love that aspect of fanfics, too. It's sort of different, transversal to the pure fannishness. But it's something I love being able to find in fanfics.
That's the kind of thins I'd be afraid of losing with a more mixed fandom, it's true.
But maybe, as