free access to imagination
Jul. 18th, 2008 07:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fannishlissThoughts on freedom, feminism and fanfiction, beginning with an excert from Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran:
"I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires... How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?"
I read this book for my book club -- it's a memoir by an academic who taught English Literature in Iran. As you might imagine, Nafisi has a lot to say about freedom and the lack thereof.
It's fascinating and painful to read about the Islamic Republic of Iran, and how the freedoms that women had experienced during the twentieth century were suddenly taken away and replaced by the law of sharia, Islamic law, where girls can be married at the age of nine years, and women can be stoned for licentious behavior -- however that is defined. Nafisi, as an intellectual, American-educated, and secular, believes passionately in the study of English Literature, and carries on teaching in private even after she finally leaves the university.
I hope it's not too trivial to want to apply her thoughts about freedom of the imagination --which were conceived under life and death circumstances, literally life and death -- to the world of fanfiction, but there are some important connections.
In the Iran Nafisi describes, in a country ruled by religious and ideological fanatics, women's bodies are put under the strictest controls. As Nafisi relates, girls and women could be arrested and put in jail for years -- subject to the whim of their guards -- for defying dress codes, wearing makeup, running up stairs, or laughing out loud. The Republic of Iran seemed to find women so threatening. The siren call of a woman's body to inspire lust in a man had to be controlled at any cost -- and at the same time, men were allowed to marry nine year olds or to have more than one wife, while prostitutes were put in a sack and stoned.
My point is that here in fandom we have freedom to write, freedom to use the imagination, freedom to indulge in our lusts and to be women having fun. We can be as porny and obscene as our friendlists find amusing. And I know I'm a utopianist, but I always laugh in delight whenever someone's story posits the union of souls alongside the blissful union of bodies, a world where love ameliorates suffering. I know critics have explored the feminism of the slash community, and I go this way and that. I'm sure some of us are avowed feminists (I am), but are we all?
This book has stirred it all up again. I guess I'm just profoundly grateful that the revolutionary guard haven't beaten down my door. Our freedoms seem trivial compared to the atrocities humans commit every day, but I'm a feminist, and I'm a slashfan, and no one has yet thrown a rock at me for showing my hair or not wearing the chador, and I'm grateful.
"I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires... How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?"
I read this book for my book club -- it's a memoir by an academic who taught English Literature in Iran. As you might imagine, Nafisi has a lot to say about freedom and the lack thereof.
It's fascinating and painful to read about the Islamic Republic of Iran, and how the freedoms that women had experienced during the twentieth century were suddenly taken away and replaced by the law of sharia, Islamic law, where girls can be married at the age of nine years, and women can be stoned for licentious behavior -- however that is defined. Nafisi, as an intellectual, American-educated, and secular, believes passionately in the study of English Literature, and carries on teaching in private even after she finally leaves the university.
I hope it's not too trivial to want to apply her thoughts about freedom of the imagination --which were conceived under life and death circumstances, literally life and death -- to the world of fanfiction, but there are some important connections.
In the Iran Nafisi describes, in a country ruled by religious and ideological fanatics, women's bodies are put under the strictest controls. As Nafisi relates, girls and women could be arrested and put in jail for years -- subject to the whim of their guards -- for defying dress codes, wearing makeup, running up stairs, or laughing out loud. The Republic of Iran seemed to find women so threatening. The siren call of a woman's body to inspire lust in a man had to be controlled at any cost -- and at the same time, men were allowed to marry nine year olds or to have more than one wife, while prostitutes were put in a sack and stoned.
My point is that here in fandom we have freedom to write, freedom to use the imagination, freedom to indulge in our lusts and to be women having fun. We can be as porny and obscene as our friendlists find amusing. And I know I'm a utopianist, but I always laugh in delight whenever someone's story posits the union of souls alongside the blissful union of bodies, a world where love ameliorates suffering. I know critics have explored the feminism of the slash community, and I go this way and that. I'm sure some of us are avowed feminists (I am), but are we all?
This book has stirred it all up again. I guess I'm just profoundly grateful that the revolutionary guard haven't beaten down my door. Our freedoms seem trivial compared to the atrocities humans commit every day, but I'm a feminist, and I'm a slashfan, and no one has yet thrown a rock at me for showing my hair or not wearing the chador, and I'm grateful.
