You see, I got a PhD partly by showing how care for survivors of sexual violence is baked into the #AO3 design and code.
There is a recognition in fanfic communities (especially the ones coalescing around AO3) that we are mostly women and non-binary people and therefore structurally disproportionately likely to be survivors of sexual violence.
And that recognition is baked into our values as a community, and into our community practices & infrastructure.
We've been using content notes and trigger warnings since the days of LiveJournal. Fannish communities are how those practices entered mainstream usage.
We've been using content notes and trigger warnings since the days of LiveJournal. Fannish communities are how those practices entered mainstream usage.
The reason we warn for sexual violence (or dubcon) in fanfic (or one of the reasons) is because we know that *lots* of us have experienced it. We want to give those community members the opportunity to make an informed choice - to give informed consent - to the things they read.
This grew organically as a practice on LJ and then was deliberately taken over and built into the infrastructure of AO3 in the form of archive warnings.
If you don't know, AO3 has 4 archive warnings, and two of those are specifically to do with consent (underage, and rape/non-con). You can also choose to not use warnings but you have to make that explicit so people know to proceed at their own risk.
Warnings are enforceable: if you have said no archive warnings apply to your story but they actually do, readers can complain, and the AO3 Abuse team can make you change your tagging (to either the relevant warning or to "chose not to use").
That is both a design decision and an operational decision that was made and prioritised. It was put in the code, and organisational structures were put in place (i.e. the Abuse team) to facilitate it.
That's because we as a community recognise that a huge number of us are survivors, and we have made the conscious choice to prioritise survivor wellbeing in our infrastructure, organisational structures, and practices.
And, and I cannot stress this enough, WE HAVE COMPLETELY FAILED TO DO THE SAME WHEN IT COMES TO RACE. Except, failed is the wrong word. We have refused.
We have refused to recognise that a huge number of us are not white. That non-white people experience and continue to be traumatised by racism on a day-to-day basis. That racism is reproduced in fannish spaces, in fannish writing.
We are continuing to refuse to recognise and prioritise these things. It's not that we can't. If we can do it for survivors of sexual violence, we can do it for non-white people. The solutions literally exist, we have done it before. We are refusing to.
That in and of itself is a reproduction of racism and a privileging of whiteness in fannish spaces. We are doing it to our fellow fans.
Now, what's the difference between sexual violence and race? Why have we prioritised survivors in the ways we have, and why are we continuing to fail non-white fans?
The difference is that we can externalise the cause of one of these things but not of the other.
We can say "we're mostly women and non-binary people, sexual violence is committed mostly by men, therefore everyone in our group is likely to be a survivor and no-one is likely to be a perpetrator." (Which, not true. But we can tell ourselves that story.)
We cannot externalise the cause of racism in the same way because many fans are white, benefit from white privilege and the invisibilisation of whiteness, and therefore from the reproduction of racism in fannish spaces. We are the cause.
Prioritising the needs of non-white fans in the same way we have prioritised the needs of survivors of sexual violence would involve taking a long, hard look at *ourselves* and dismantling the operation of whiteness and white privilege in fandom.
And to do that, we'd have to admit that these things exist and that white fans benefit from them in the first place. And at that point white fragility kicks in and we refuse.
So that's where we're at. It's not that we can't prioritise the needs of non-white fans the same way we do those of survivors. It's not that it's (technically) hard. It's that it inconveniences us and we don't want to.
