Some Notes On … is a sectionwhich features my autoethnographic fieldnotes as I document my thoughts throughout different parts of my PhD project. Here, I write about the text resources discussed in our podcast episode.
I learned a lot through this discussion especially since I’m not familiar with the communities and cultures they describe. Balanced triads – each person is in a relationship with the other two people; V relationships – one person is in a relationship with two people who don’t have relationships themselves. These queer relationships are about love and not reproduction. All the people in the relationship offer different perspectives and strengths and skills to each other. They also have a different notion of family from normative nuclear families. Found families is an important concept.
In the episode they talk about the fanfic genre of OT3s (or one true threesomes) and how different kinds of polyamorous relationships are depicted in fiction and real-world media. In fandom, OT3 is like OTP (one true pairings) with threesomes – the pairing of threesomes that you love best in fiction.
In fiction, OT3s work best in longform mediums like TV shows and book series where there’s more time and space to explore different facets of the relationships. Alternatively, in fanfiction, you’re creating an alternative canon based on a fictional world someone else has created.
Examples of potential triads include Harry Potter, The Hunger Games (lots of YA!), and Star Wars. Imagining polyamorous relationships opens up the potential for so many different kinds of relationships rather than the Team Edward/Team Jacob debates of yore.
The fact that these representations seem to be predominant only in fanfic and not in mainstream media means that most people – young people and adults – can’t imagine other ideas of being in the world. Even I only encountered polyamory a few years ago on a dating app.
The hosts point out the absence of this in speculative fiction particularly. They believe that SFF doesn’t build alternative family and relationship structures for the most part – only economic and political alternatives. The two person family/romantic/sexual unit is the default which you would think speculative fiction has so much room to explore. In 2020, you would think there would be more explorations of relationships especially in fiction to reflect it becoming more mainstream in the real world.
Is polyamory a queer thing, a millenial thing, a generational thing? Where is it more acceptable as the norm and where is monogamy the default? The norms hurt certain groups of people so they step out of these normative structures to explore other kinds of relationships and families. Seeing representations of this, as with other marginalised cultures, helps both the dominant and marginalised cultures – to understand themselves and others better.
(I’ve already used this episode as a text for Episode 4, so I’m supplementing the notes I made then with these new ones. For the old notes, click here.)
Fanfiction fills such an important need in terms of representation which is absent in mainstream media – particularly fic written by fans from marginalised groups.
Fanfic is an example of communal writing where betas act as voluntary editors of fic. There’s also implications on the intersections of class, fanfiction and gender. So much time and labour are offered for free. This happens for love of the work and the community but people also need to pay the bills. On the other hand, capitalism wants you to commercialise everything and some things are just for the fun of it.
They talk with Francesca who more recently has been at the centre of online controversy in the midst of the Black Lives Matter discussions on Twitter and her and AO3’s complicity in racism. Fanfiction can be progressive and inclusive towards certain groups but hostile towards others – queerness and gender is centered but race is othered.
I like that fanfic offers a space for these alternative stories and perspectives and cultures which defy the normative dominant ones, but I also wish it wasn’t the only space in which these stories thrived. Fanfic isn’t accessible to everyone even on the internet; you have to discover it yourself. Mainstream media can also be inaccessible but more accessible than fanfic.
Fan entitlement – fans may not have institutional power but they are now able to respond to the media and critique decisions. Can fans influence mainstream decisions? Is the new Star Wars trilogy an example of fan or media company feedback?
(I’ve already used this episode as a text for Episode 4, so I’m supplementing the notes I made then with these new ones. For the old notes, click here.)
“Women like the show too much and in the wrong way”
What’s wrong with fanfiction that focuses on a lot of sex and romantic relationships? It’s a perfectly legitimate form of expression and exploration of self-identity. Fans are writing/reading things they’re interested in which centres their perspectives and desires in ways which mainstream media doesn’t.
What is taboo in fanfiction often differs from what’s taboo in mainstream fiction. This is also historically contextual and can change. For example, slashfic, real person fic was taboo but now less so within fandom. Wincest – incest fic in Supernatural might be considered taboo in mainstream and possibly even in fandom.
Archive of our Own was started by fans to own the platform where they wrote. They designed the structure and software from scratch. However, the initial group of co-founders had their own blind-spots and biases which undergirded the framework of the website which has now become such a mainstream space for fanfic online.
Definition of fan works differs based on different perspectives and interpretations. Fan works take any elements from the original fictional world and play with it – inspired by or based on any piece of media. I think fanfic is a huge topic of conversation within fandom and mainstream conversation and even fan studies. I’m more interested in critical commentary such as fan podcasts and even Tumblr posts or other social media posts which analyse characters, worlds, events, themes etc.
As one of the hosts points out, mainstream media seems to discover fanfiction anew every few years in a way that is vaguely if not outright derisive. They point out that slashfic used to be very taboo. Even fanfic itself used to be seen as something shameful. In mainstream minds, there’s a stigma against fanfic where it’s perceived to only be about sex; a view which is exacerbated by mainstream media critics and hosts who find and highlight the raunchiest examples of fanfic they can find. I don’t read a lot of fanfic so only know what’s normative and marginalised within that space through research I’ve read which in turn is also subjective and reflects a limited number of experiences.
Now, less people seem to object as much as they used to and fanfic seems to be more acceptable and accepted. It’s increasingly more from a sense of curiosity and sometimes even attributing their own interpretations which don’t take into account the nuances and complexities. For example, KPop fandom disrupting Trump’s rally being celebrated without including/understanding the prevalence of anti-blackness and racism within the KPop fandom. In slashfic, m/m slash is more dominant than femslash or slash featuring characters across the gender spectrum. Perhaps this reflects the lack of these representations in media. Or it reflects the hierarchy of marginalisation even within seemingly progressive spaces. Can things like fan podcasts push back against this marginalisation a little bit maybe? Especially those which foreground an intersectional analysis?
Can we survive capitalism is a superbly pertinent question especially these days of the pandemic! Even India is becoming more capitalist from a more socialist country and the results are awful. Whose lives matter? Whose comfort matters? Who needs to sacrifice for whose comfort? Over-consumption is a way of distracting people from what’s actually going on in the real world including issues of social, political and economic justice. Overall, people are blind to where your goods and your food comes from. You don’t have the context in late-capitalist societies. This is true in India too where even small rural societies are impacted by capitalism. Development projects like dams, canals, electricity, water, mining cause millions of people to forcibly migrate. At the same time, people in urban areas don’t think about where our services come from.
Capitalistic structures prevent class solidarity. Current example of this during the pandemic where a person tweeted their disgruntlement about going to work for Amazon when others were getting money for staying at home (hbomberguy’s response pointed out how much money Jeff Bezos makes every day) – pitting the marginalised groups against each other to prevent coalitions.
Commodity fetishism exists in science fiction too with illusions of branding and advertising. Dystopias seem to deal with class warfare and exploitation more than other speculative fiction. The Hunger Games features oppression through divide and conquer. There are examples of class warfare in Game of Thrones too and social uprisings in Star Trek and Doctor Who with the Ood.
How does speculative fiction imagine alternative economies? How does it imagine capitalism? What are the different economic and social systems in SFF which are an alternative to capitalism? I just don’t know of enough examples, I think. They describe how in Star Trek, it’s seemingly a post-money economy but not everywhere in the universe. Star Trek features a post-scarcity society, a sort of socialist utopia where people aren’t obsessed with things and have gotten rid of basic human needs. A post-scarcity society implies endless resources or immortality.
As one of the hosts points out, we can’t seem to imagine a post-capitalist society without some miraculous invention/system which takes care of current issues and needs. Does that make it more unrealistic or just real in fiction? As the same host points out, we have enough resources now but those resources are concentrated in the hands of the very few rather than being redistributed amongst other people. Are there examples of this in fiction? Does this seem more unrealistic than a magical solution? Utopian and dystopian post-capitalist worlds seem to be the norm – not worlds in-between who have eliminated some needs but not all.
Capitalism and colonisation – stealing resources from a group of people and using them to create more wealth only for a certain group along racial, class, gender lines or in science fiction, along species lines. Capitalism and environmental destruction – unsustainable production and pollution. Thinks like fast fashion and food – who pays the social and environmental costs for things like this and who benefits? Capitalism as an unsustainable system where you’re growing and growing and at some point you need to stop; same with environmental destruction. But we’re fobbing off the problem for the future even though it’s impacting people terribly all across the developing and developed world.
During the pandemic, the idea of essential service workers changed but the class dynamics remained. Those who could afford to be in jobs that allowed them to work from the safety of their homes heralded those who had to put themselves into danger like NHS doctors and nurses or dismissed others like supermarket workers – all in a way which doesn’t involve radically restructuring society to benefit the ones who do the most important work in society. The false idea of meritocracy is still the dominant ideology which guides us.
Labour which isn’t acknowledged or paid in a capitalist society include parenting, emotional labour. The costs of the pandemic are impacting women’s work more than men. A better way of capitalism would compensate people for educational labour, healthcare labour, and caregiving labour accordingly instead of paying people who do so little so much.
How do we imagine worlds beyond capitalism?
One of the hosts thinks we still have ages to go before we topple capitalism as an economic system – which makes it even more important to imagine alternatives in our fiction so it’s something which seeps through to mainstream consciousness. This reminds me of the Accidentally Left-Wing Twitter account which presents some of these “dangerously radical” ideas such as abolishing rent and tuition and healthcare costs and universal basic income – ideas which essentially seek to protect everyone and provide them with the tools to live their best lives. Even things like access to parks, food and money in the UK during the lockdown – will post-pandemic speculative fiction address this collective trauma in ways which explore the class imbalances and imagine alternatives which bridge the gap?
Vic James talks about her own books where magic is a form of wealth and wealth inequality. Magic is concentrated in the hands of the 10% of society and the remaining people have to give ten years of their lives to contribute to their society through physical labour. There’s an unequal distribution of power, which James believes is similar to mortgages and student debt. People are locked into economic relationships born out of necessity not choice. The story came to the fore in the wake of the Occupy protests as well as her own concern about her personal lack of wealth and a grim future. She drew on the history of inherited wealth and class imbalances in British society. There is now a new form of aristocracy where wealth now is completely locked away in offshore bank accounts from the context in which it was created. There is no circulation of wealth to boost the local or national economy only to boost individual self-worth.
Access to education also depends on class. Class can’t be seen devoid of other contexts and intersectional identities. What sort of work gets you a lot of money? Not artists even though art is so important to so many people – something you see during the pandemic. The conversation draws connections between SFF and the real world in ways which make sense to current contexts. The rich keep getting richer sounds like a cliche but it’s true and ever-present and seemingly insurmountable. Lack of awareness about the impacts and causes of wealth inequality means that average people are seduced by the wealth and power of the elite because they don’t see the source of the conflict in their lives. They want to join the elite without realising they’re closer to being destitute than enormously wealthy.
Jack offers a sex-positive representation in a mainstream children’s TV show like Doctor Who. Jack was Eugenia’s first encounter with such a positive representation of being open about and enjoying sex. As a first-gen Chinese-American, she didn’t encounter these ideas in real life. Jack offers a representation of a pansexual man who is attracted to men, women, other species
Jack is from the 51st century so the labels for gender and sexuality that limit us today no longer exist then and are more fluid and flexible as seen in Jack. This idea takes advantage of a sci-fi show and all the potentials it offers. There are different conceptions of bodies as well. Jack makes an off-the-cuff remark of being pregnant once and doesn’t go into it. This can signal new possibilities in future worlds where technologies overcome present limitations where only trans men can be pregnant, not cis men. What does time and space do to the human body?
Need representations of alternative relationships and family structures in children’s media as well. Jack has a found family in Doctor Who and another one in Torchwood. The mere presence of diverse sexualities and families in children’s media doesn’t require adult supervision just like the mere presence of heterosexual couples and normative families doesn’t. It can allow children to imagine and accept different ways of being in the world.
Absence of representation of polyamory or alternative relationship structures when you’re young means that you won’t be able to articulate your own desires or imagine another way of existing in the world.
“Polyamory advocates honest, open, inclusive and egalitarian relationships between multiple partners.”
Consent, knowledge, and communication is important for all relationships but so much more important in poly relationships. Idea of poly relationships in mainstream imaginations is being all about the sex (just like fanfic) and lack of commitment. But poly relationships require deep commitment and may not always focus on sex. What about ace/aro poly relationships? Poly relationships share similarities with monogomous ones – setting boundaries and open and constant communication. However, poly partnership is about both emotional and physical needs and require people to be mindful, self-aware, and self-reflexive for it to succeed. Even though it’s becoming more mainstream, it’s still a marginalised culture (though more people are open about it now, at least in my encounters).
“This open and expansive interpretation of love and relationships may not be for everyone. It requires a great deal of self-exploration and constant communication. Whether one agrees with polyamory or not, it is difficult to dismiss the essential pillars it is built on. For good communication, generous love and equality among partners are worthy goals in any relationship.”
Polyamory challenges societal conventions, norms, systems and expectations because they don’t work for you, particularly the imbalanced power structures in most traditional relationships. Poly relationships offer a way to get different needs and desires met without placing the burden of these on a single individual who may not be able to fulfill these. Co-habiting and raising children with different partners is an unfamiliar family structure but people can make it work.
“People who practise polyamory can create families and that is a proven fact,” Ley said. “Is it more difficult? Maybe. Because there aren’t many examples out there and they face stigma. However, things like co-living, parenting or long-term plans can benefit from polyamory, because you are likely to have a support network and a community and not just rely on one person to do all this with.”
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. If you would prefer the original, unedited version, please let me know!
[Intro music]
Welcome to Marginally Fannish, a show where we aim an intersectional lens at some of our favourite media and their fandoms.
[Intro music]
My name is Parinita Shetty and you’re listening to the seventeenth episode of Marginally Fannish. In this episode, I talk to Marita Arvaniti about alternative relationship and economic structures in fandom, media, and society.
Fanfiction experiments with different kinds of characters, themes, and stories which are often absent in mainstream media. Fanfiction offers a space for those people who lack access to traditional publishing structures to find an audience for different kinds of ideas. Fans can write any kind of story they want without worrying about whether it will sell. This freedom from capitalist consumption allows fans to imagine alternatives to current systems. However, fandom isn’t without its class politics. The open accessibility of fan texts offers empowering possibilities. At the same time, creating fan texts requires different kinds of skills, costs, and access to technology. Moreover, online fandom features a large number of fans from marginalised groups who offer their time and labour for free. Not everybody can afford to do this work just because they love it. This limits the diversity of voices who can participate.
Nevertheless, fandom exposes people to ideas they may not have encountered in mainstream media and society. Fanfic exploring polyamorous, asexual, aromantic and platonic relationships allows people to imagine family structures other than the heterosexual nuclear family default. Such stories can challenge and expand ideas about the conception of families. Traditional family structures negatively impact women, queer, and poor people in different ways. Developing alternate family structures isn’t just a queer, feminist, and socialist project but also involves a process of decolonisation. Maybe that’s why so many women, including myself, have ongoing fantasies of communes which allow us to envision the kind of lives and communities we want to build.
Find our conversation about all this and more in today’s episode.
Happy listening!
[Intro music]
Parinita: Today I’m so happy to welcome Marita Arvaniti to the podcast whose tweets never fail to make me laugh. Marita took a wrong turn on her way to a theatre career in Greece and ended up as a PhD student in the University of Glasgow. Her research examines the lasting effect theatre has had on the birth and evolution of contemporary fantasy literature with a focus on fairyland fantasy. She holds a BA in Theatre Studies from the National Kapodistrian University in Athens and an MLitt in Fantasy Literature from the University of Glasgow. When she’s not researching or serving drinks and watching shows for free at a Glasgow theatre, she’s the Publicity Officer for Fantastika journal and a committee member for GIFCon. In today’s episode, we’re first going to talk about how relationships beyond the heterosexual nuclear family default are represented in media and fanfiction. Then we’re going to focus on class by looking at alternative economic structures in science fiction and fantasy. So both Marita and I are immersed in different aspects of online fandom. What have been your experiences as a fan and with the issues that we’re exploring today?
Marita: Well I’m mainly in fandom as a fanfic writer, I guess. I do that these days. [laughs]
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: It’s been very strange. I wasn’t involved in fandom for a very long time – for like a solid five years between 2015 and 2020. And before that, I wasn’t that active. But with current everything this year, I’ve just been churning out 10k word fics.
Parinita: [laughs] Amazing.
Marita: So it’s been very strange. It’s always strange coming into fandom as a person who’s not English, I think? [laughs]
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: Obviously the different language becomes something that you learn through fandom. And I know that a lot of the way that I speak and write and think in English has been very deeply influenced by the fanfic that I used to read. Predominantly fan spaces were the main source of English education for me from one point onwards.
Parinita: How long have you been reading fanfiction?
Marita: God gonna show my age now.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: Gonna just out myself. Um … 2005?
Parinita: Okay.
Marita: Probably. So that’s a solid fifteen years.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: I have proof that the first fanfic I ever wrote was at age nine.
Marita: With my amazing drawing skills and my colour pencils.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: I just called it Hermione’s Diary because I was nine. [laughs]
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: And my mum has kept it somewhere. And occasionally brings it out if she needs to judge me and my life choices.
Parinita: [laughs] Oh but I love that! And it wasn’t online either. It was just something that you did. My first fanfiction was also Harry Potter fanfiction. Which I wrote when I was older than you – I don’t know if that makes it more or less embarrassing. I liked writing fanfiction at that time. I don’t think there’s anything embarrassing in it anyway. It was a sitcom version of Voldemort and the Death Eaters. [laughs] But I think I’ve lost it. It was on Mugglenet. And it’s not there anymore. But like with you in terms of language, what you developed with fanfiction; for me I think it was more the place and the setting and the context which I was writing was very foreign to me. Because when I grew up, English was my first language. So that wasn’t as much of a hurdle as much as it was just writing in a setting that’s so different and not even being able to imagine that I could write something set in India. Like Harry and Hermione and whoever – all the Death Eaters or Voldemort or whatever set maybe in an Indian magical school system or whatever.
Marita: Yes.
Parinita: Just because I grew up reading mostly British and American children’s books so my idea of stories was very Western. A lot of the fanfiction that I read as well, I don’t know if the writers themselves were from different parts of the world like me who were setting it deliberately in the West. But at least as a teenager I didn’t really read much in terms of diversity. It was very much playing with the same characters that existed. Which I think has changed now.
Marita: I think that’s definitely changed and you see it in the sort of fantasy children’s books that become popular.
Parinita: Um hmm.
Marita: Or get published and are everywhere in bookstores. I read a lot of children’s fiction in general.
Parinita: Me too.
Marita: And it’s delightful to see different things getting published … just not you know all the Brits.
Parinita: [laughs] Yeah.
Marita: And the weird public school situations. Not that I don’t like that. I’m a huge Diana Wynne Jones fan; I will defend her to the end of my days. But it’s good to have the alternative.
Parinita: No, absolutely. But also making it your own. Because you know for us in India even now we have a lot of the colonial education system going on. So when I went to school, we also had four houses because it was a Catholic school in Mumbai. I think ours they were named after saints and not the founders [laughs] of the school. That wasn’t weird to me. But I was listening to a podcast and it was an American podcaster and they were talking about how to them it was so weird. Well, the concept of boarding school itself was weird but also the house system was really weird. Which I took for granted. So I guess yeah just having these similar things but in different contexts.
Marita: Yeah. I was also thinking about what you mentioned earlier about not really having the space before fanfiction to write what you know and write what’s familiar to you. And I have another self-own for you that you can laugh at.
Parinita: Oh! That sounds really cool. I would actually absolutely want to read that seriously.
Marita: [laughs] It was very self-indulgent.
Parinita: Yeah but that’s what like I really like about fanfiction. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, right? I think that the perception of fanfiction is still a bit dubious. People who aren’t in that space are still a bit sceptical of it. Also because I think in one of the podcasts that I listen to, they were saying that – mainstream media, especially in the West, in the UK and the US talk show hosts and things.
Marita: Um hmm.
Parinita: They tend to find and highlight the raunchiest stories that they can find. And then confront the actors whose characters it was written about.
Marita: Oh god!
Parinita: I think Sherlock was one. Which they’re obviously doing it just to make it this thing that deserves comment and maybe mockery and ridicule. Which is not great. But I think that explains the idea that fanfiction is only about sex and really explicit sex exists. Which it isn’t. I mean a lot of it is but not all of it is.
Marita: Yes.
Parinita: And there’s a lot of other experimental things as well, right?
Marita: Yeah for sure. And you see that in fanfic spaces that talk about fanfiction. It’s always about the transformative work. It’s about transforming the text; it’s not about necessarily just you know dicking down.
Parinita: Yeah. And also I don’t think there’s anything wrong with explicit sex either.
Marita: No.
Parinita: Because like you were saying that it’s indulgent, yes; but so is writing most stuff that you’re not writing with an audience in mind, really. Anything you’re writing for yourself. Which is what I love about fanfiction. When I wrote that Voldemort and the Death Eaters sitcom thing or whatever, I wasn’t thinking in terms of what makes a good story or what other people want to read. I just wanted to write something that I would have fun reading. And it really helped me develop my skills. Because the kind of stories that I write now – I write books for kids – and it’s very much in the same vein. I have never been one who was really interested in relationships and shipping anyway either in fic or in mainstream media generally. I think it’s a great way to experiment and to write things you don’t see represented in media that you want to explore.
Marita: Yeah. And it’s also a way to tie it to the second half of our projected discussions for the day. It’s a great equaliser because you don’t have to go through the publishing grinder.
Parinita: Yeah!
Marita: You can just put yourself out there. And in many cases, they would be thoughts that might not be published or be able to be published either because of their content or because of you as a person who lives in a society and has or does not have the ability to go through the long process of trying to get a book deal. So I think whether it’s like whatever the rating you give your fic is – if it’s lemon or lime or not citrusy at all (this is to alienate the children listening to your podcast, they won’t know what I’m talking about.)
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: It’s always offering different perspectives and allowing you to explore and play with a text in a way that’s free from capitalist consumption.
Parinita: Yeah. Which I think is really interesting. I know we’re going to talk about that more a little later but yeah for sure. It’s basically people who don’t have access to the traditional publishing structures, right? Or even if they do, publishers who are the gatekeepers don’t think that there is room for those voices or those voices won’t sell or whatever. So in fanfiction you can write whatever you want based on anything you want and that’ll reach people; even if it reaches five people or even two people, that’s more than you would have otherwise. Publishing wouldn’t have been able to get your voice out there at all.
Marita: And you see it on the flipside of that. In authors who are published authors but are still active fandom members who write fanfiction. You can see such a divide in the content of theirs that gets published by a traditional publisher and the content of theirs that gets uploaded to Archive Of Our Own. I’m thinking of a lot of fandom wank from … recently there was the whole Tamsyn Muir situation with her Homestuck fanfiction
Parinita: Hmm.
Marita: And then you have authors like Naomi Novik who’s super popular in fandom but doesn’t want her fanfic author pseudonym to be associated with her published work.
Parinita: Ah. Yeah that’s really interesting because in one of the podcast episodes that I was listening to as well, they mentioned a writer who writes for a TV show that has a big fandom. I don’t think they mentioned what TV show it was. The writer is part of the writing team for the show, but also writes fanfiction for that show. Because that fanfiction wouldn’t have been on TV. They wouldn’t have produced that as a story. So she just goes and writes it in fandom itself.
Marita: That’s wild. I love that. I actually love that so much.
Parinita: [laughs] So yeah. I like that apart from everything else or I guess with everything else, fandom also seems to explore relationships that are beyond the dominant structures like I mentioned earlier. And this is again based very much on my research and fan podcasters and things mentioning it. Because I’m not very well-versed within the fanfiction community. I don’t know tropes and genres and stuff through first-hand experience. I haven’t read fanfiction in ages. I’ve read stuff that other guests have recommended to me, but I feel like if I start that, I’m going to lose my entire life to that again.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: [laughs] I have a very obsessive personality. Which is why I never got into Tumblr too much either. Because once I started, it was like oh my god so many hours! [laughs] So many hours!
Marita: [laughs] As I said, I have recently fallen back into fandom, reading and writing however many words per week. And it’s very interesting when you go into a new fandom – based on my experience as someone who’s done that recently – how quickly you find the communities of people writing the things you want to read.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: Like within two weeks, even though the person who introduced me to my current fandom likes to read very different things from what I like to read, within literally a few weeks I was in five Discord servers with a bunch of people and we were all writing OT3 and exploring polyamory through fanfic and things like that. I was like yup you know what, I just feel like that sometimes.
Parinita: So do you just want to quickly say what OT3 means for people who’ve not come across that term? Even I only came across that term through the Be The Serpent fanfiction episode.
Marita: So OT3 is One True Threesome. Or I guess three-way or thruple or three people. Anyway.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: And you can also find an OT4, you can find an OT5. Once you start adding people it can never stop. [laughs]
Parinita: [laughs] Yeah I find that really fascinating. Because when I was in the fanfic community – which was years ago when I was a teenager – that’s when slash fic was the most popular and that was the most mainstream thing. At that time, I think it was taboo in more mainstream sections especially mainstream media. But people have said it was a way for queer literature to fill the missing gap in mainstream literature. So slash is basically, for people who don’t know, male/male or female/female pairings traditionally. And now that’s changed. So now I love that that’s taken off and yeah they’ve just gone wild with it which is fantastic.
Marita: Yeah no I completely agree. It’s very interesting to see how things that, in my case, from personal experience – how you can see them sort of suddenly show up in mainstream media or suddenly show up in fandom spaces. And you’re like, “Ah! That thing.”
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: So OT3s specifically or OT-whatever else, is basically the same thing as an OTP only with more people involved. Which is a very good explanation of polyamory in general. [laughs]
Parinita: Yeah. [laughs]
Marita: And I first came across it in the Merlinfandom.
Marita: Because you have the four main characters and the narrative wants you to ship Arthur and Guinevere.
Parinita: Um hmm.
Marita: And to sort of but not really see the flirty banter with Arthur and Morgana. But then obviously fandom realises that the real emotional crux of the show is Arthur and Merlin.
Parinita: Oh absolutely! Like I said, I’m not even a shipper really. That’s not how I engage with media. But when I watched Merlin, I was like, “Oh yeah, these two – definitely! What are you talking about?” I like the women and things but this is like … I don’t know if they meant to do it, but there was so much more chemistry between Arthur and Merlin than with any of the other characters.
Marita: [laughs] Yeah, a hundred percent. And Merlin’s one of those shows that really capitalised on that in a way that was slightly insidious but like that’s not the point of this conversation. I can rant about the Merlin fandom for ages. But one of the things that I noticed in the fandom was that there was the option of shipping Arthur and Merlin and Guinevere and Morgana. And there was also a relatively prevalent tendency to just throw all four of them together. And be like, “Hello you’re all dating now! Figure this shit out.” Which I do not recommend. Do not try that at home.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: But yeah it introduced me to that as a possibility when I was a wee bairn.
Parinita: [laughs] No that’s so interesting. Because yeah fanfiction seems to be so much more experimental and open to ideas in terms of relationships than not only mainstream SFF but also mainstream society. Because like you’re saying, that’s the first time that you encountered that idea. For me, it was not even through fanfiction because I think OT3s and stuff weren’t really so prevalent at least in my nook of the fandom – ten or fifteen years ago. I don’t know how recently they’ve become more a part of fandom. But when I was within that, I didn’t come across that. So for me slash was this … not revelation I don’t want to say … but where I was growing up, even though I grew up in a big city in India, it was still very narrow in its scope of different ways of existing in the world and different kinds of relationships. So that was my first encounter with even like gay relationships.
Marita: Yes.
Parinita: Or just that idea of, “Oh wait not everyone is …” And it was so normalised as well which was very cool. And now I love that polyamory seems to be the new frontier that’s being explored. [laughs]
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: Because otherwise, if these representations are not predominant in mainstream media let alone mainstream society, most people – young people and adults – wouldn’t be able to imagine other ideas of being in the world, right? Even I only encountered polyamory I think a few years ago in like 2016 or something – just the concept of it on a dating app.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: Because on OKCupid there seems to be a huge community there of people who want to explore polyamorous relationships. And that was my first … I’m personally not interested in exploring polyamory. I’m really boring and very monogamous. [laughs]
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: Very vanilla. But I was very curious about it. So whenever I would be talking to people, I would use them as this educational resource. [laughs]
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: And I would keep asking them questions like, “Oh so how does it work? So what do you do? Oh no, I’m not … I don’t want to.”
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: And then they’d obviously stop talking to me because they’d realise I was using them as an educational resource. [laughs]
Marita: Ever since I was very young, my reading has been very queer and different versions of queer. I’ve ended up in a situation where I’m other people’s either their gay Yoda or their polyamory Yoda.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: I’m like, “Yes, yes, come to me, child. Ask me thy questions. I will try to answer.”
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: Even though I do think that’s completely unearned. Because I don’t know what I’m doing.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: I’m just reading fanfiction and dating. [laughs]
Parinita: Yeah. I mean that’s life, right? That’s adult life in a nutshell. I don’t know what I’m doing. We’ll figure it out.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: But in science fiction and fantasy specifically, I think there’s so much more room for alternative family and relationship structures. Not fanfiction but mainstream SFF. But I don’t really see a lot of things exploring that. Off the top of my head, I can’t even think of any except how in one of the Woke Doctor Who episodes they mentioned Captain Jack in Doctor Who who is this pansexual, open to different kinds of relationships character. And they call him Captain Jack Sex Jesus. [laughs] Because he’s basically into everyone, regardless of even species. Because he’s from the 51st century. So the labels for gender and sexuality that limit us today no longer exist then according to the show canon. So it’s all more fluid and flexible. But I think that’s the only example that I can think of. Which I think is important to showcase that and normalise that in children’s media specifically. Because when you’re a kid, you don’t really know how the world works, all the rules yet for grown-up life. And you’re still figuring it out. So if you see examples of that, you’ll be like, oh yeah this is just another way of existing in the world.
Marita: No, you’re absolutely correct. I was preparing to have a spiel, but you turned it around.
Parinita: Oh no I’m sorry I stole your spiel!
Marita: No, no! The mention of children’s media because it is still much more sterilised than adult SFF. Because I’m thinking in adult SFF, you have things like Sense8for example, the Wachowski’s Netflix TV show that features different layers of LGBTQ identities; it features a lot of different kinds of polyamory as well. And then you have N. K. Jemisin whom I love and would die for if she asked me to.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: In both of her main trilogies, both in her Inheritance trilogy and in The Broken Earth, polyamory is present and practised. And often at the core – LOL that’s a Broken Earth joke.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: [laughs] At the core of the relationships that guide the book.
Parinita: Hmm.
Marita: I remember reading her Inheritance trilogy and realising that yeah, the mythology of that world is based on a pantheon that’s queer and polyamorous specifically. And you know feeling very gratified. Very #seen. [laughs]
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: And I did not expect to see something like that in such a successful, mainstream SFF series.
Parinita: Hmm yeah. She’s on my list. I’ve read the first book in her first trilogy. But I need to find out more, maybe haunt libraries or just get more books of hers.
Marita: I have them, I can give them to you.
Parinita: Yeah that would be great!
Marita: [laughs] Even Young Adult SFF is starting to be diverse and more embracing of polyamory.
Parinita: Hmm.
Marita: There’s not a lot but I can think of a few books where it ends in an OT3 kind of situation.
Parinita: Oh right!
Marita: My brain’s literally drawing a blank right now. I think one’s Adaptation? I’m – I’m just – the brain’s not working. But I know I’ve read them.
Parinita: I know. I read constantly. I’m constantly reading but if someone asks me what is the best book that you’ve read in the recent past,
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: I don’t know. What are books? I have no idea.
Marita: Have I even read a book?
Parinita: [laughs] Yeah. No so that’s really cool that that’s happening because I think that in mainstream imaginations, poly relationships seem to be all about sex and lack of commitment. It seems to be a trope if they’re represented or spoken about, mostly from what I’ve seen. And I don’t know as much as you do just in terms of queer readings of anything even in fic or just mainstream SFF. But they seem to be very trope-filled and very stereotype-laden. Poly relationships is one thing but asexual and aromantic relationships as well. They don’t exist either. That’s something I’ve come across even more recently, I think within the last year or two. And again, because of the internet and fandom and Tumblr screenshots that are everywhere.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: Because I can’t go into Tumblr, so I follow it through Facebook and Twitter. But yeah just the representation of these. And then I think younger people who are aggressively online do have more of the words and the vocabulary for these feelings, which is great. I mean it’s true, it is more accessible but you still need an internet connection, technology. And also you don’t know which space to access. You stumble upon it or you know somebody who introduces you or … there’s still a pocket of people that it attracts and not a mass of people.
Marita: Yeah. No, I completely agree. And it’s also a lot of the content we stumble upon online, we end up absorbing information without any kind of context.
Parinita: Um hmm.
Marita: Or you see something and you sort of do a cursory Google search about it and you end up with very uneven and unequal depth of knowledge and depth of information. And again, as you said, you need to have an internet connection for that; you need to have you know in many cases, a personal computer so that you don’t have to use the family one.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: Because in my family, we didn’t have a computer until very late because we’re not very particularly well off financially.
Parinita: Yeah, same.
Marita: So I used to log on to Hi5 – do you remember Hi5?
Parinita: No! I don’t think we had Hi5.
Marita: It was Facebook pre-Facebook basically.
Parinita: Oh right!
Marita: And I used to log onto that from my friend’s computer and I would have to go to her house after school because it was at the time where it was starting to be important to have a presence online.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: I didn’t have a computer. [laughs] And then we got a computer, we got a family one that my parents used and that I used and so that was a different kettle of fish. [laughs]
Parinita: Yeah. I just actually today just before we started recording came across this tweet about how this person said like, I can’t believe the youth of today can just go on their phone and start reading fanfiction immediately. I had to log on to my computer when my family wasn’t around and print out pages of it to take with me on holiday.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: They don’t know how lucky they are. I was born in the wrong generation.
Marita: [laughs] I’m not going to lie. I have in my field of vision right now, because I’m in my parents’ house, I’m in my childhood bedroom right now. In my field of vision is my fanfiction binder.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: In which I’d printed all the fanfics that I really liked.
Parinita: Oh my god.
Marita: And kept them.
Parinita: I love it! I wish I’d thought to do this. So we were the same. It was me and my mum growing up. And it was a computer that both she and I used but it was largely me who used it because ever since we got the computer – I think we got it when I turned sixteen – and I used it to do everything. I was a very online teenager and a very online young adult and even now I continue to be super online. But I didn’t even think of my mum coming across it and stuff. Because she just didn’t use the computer in the way that I did. But I know I had so many favourite fanfiction that I wish I’d saved. A binder would have been a great thing.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: And I just never thought of it. But yeah. For me what’s cool about representing different kinds of relationships like poly or even asexual and aromantic relationships is the possibilities that it opens up to different kinds of family structures. Which you don’t really see in society. And it’s both a queer and a feminist project, right? Just different kinds of family structures.
Marita: Yeah. It’s a process of decolonisation as well because the family structure that we understand as the nuclear family is very white, is very capitalist, is very heterosexual and so on and so forth. And even within whiteness, it is primarily Anglo-American.
Parinita: Um hmm.
Marita: The nuclear family doesn’t represent Greek family structures that well. It becomes so impossible to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Not to wildly paraphrase Mark Fisher but it does become easier to imagine the actual end of the world than it does to imagine the end to capitalism.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: Or alternatives to normal that we are experiencing or we were experiencing prior to 2020 I guess.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: And fanfiction and speculative fiction and those sort of highly imaginative creative spaces are a way to introduce alternatives. And I’m thinking of Ursula Le Guin specifically right now. All of her different societies with very different sex and gender equations?
Parinita: Um hmm.
Marita: Can you say that? Is that a phrase? [laughs]
Parinita: You can make a phrase out of whatever you want. I believe in you! [laughs]
Marita: Thank you. But yeah all of the balance between genders and the balance between relationships is something that she plays with so much in her work. And she has that one structure that has been adapted into fanfiction very often into polyamorous fanfiction specifically. Which is the planet of O. [?] In which you have morning people and evening people and a relationship is between two and two. So you’ve got two morning people and two evening people. And they sort of enter into a polyamorous relationship in which they’re all sort of romantically involved but they’re not all sexually involved.
Parinita: Right.
Marita: And I remember reading about this in a Merlin fanfic. And then reading about it again in different fandoms in which people take that structure and play with it and imagine the cast of a very different TV show most often set in our own world and our own reality. And imagine that very different way of approaching relationships as something that is the structural norm.
Parinita: That’s so cool because yeah like you said, it’s so rare to see that representation. But the fact that it exists in fanfiction just allows you to see different possibilities. Because the current way that the family structure is … like you were saying, the nuclear family isn’t great. And in India, in the cities and stuff, we are moving towards that. We’ve traditionally had a joint family thing in certain … we have so many different cultures and there’s so much diversity in India that I can’t speak for all of them. But mostly there have been a lot of traditionally joint families and that’s problematic as well. I’m not saying we should go back to that because it’s very patriarchal. The wife moves in with the husband’s family and sometimes you change the wife’s first name as well. So you lose all sense of your identity. It’s not just your last name, you lose your first name as well. But now in cities, at least, a lot of them are moving toward nuclear families. But that’s not really helpful for everybody. It’s not I think a thing that’s sustainable especially when both partners are working. If it’s a heterosexual relationship and both partners are working and they have children, it still falls on the woman to do most of the work.
Marita: Yeah.
Parinita: And that’s something that there’s more conversation about, especially now with the lockdown and the pandemic. About how much more work women are doing and mothers are doing and how much professional work they’re losing out on because it comes to them. Even in what you would have thought were egalitarian relationships, they’re not really feminist relationships as they’ve found out because they still tend to do a lot of the work. Me and my friends, we have this constant ongoing joke of a future commune where
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: We’ll build … and I’ve discovered that a lot of people seem to have this idea.
Marita: Oh god the dream!
Parinita: Right?!
Marita: The dream.
Parinita: Just go and grow your own food and just have a slower pace of life and live with people that you like.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: And some of them may be single and some of them may have partners and children. Because it’s so impossible for just a couple to raise a child. It’s so difficult. I’m currently living with my boyfriend’s family, with his mother. He has a sister who’s just had a baby and she has another daughter as well, and they live nearby. So I love how much the families get involved in childcare and just other stuff like shopping for groceries and stuff. Because just one person doing everything is so impossible. Even if it’s a couple. They’re a couple but they’re at work and things so it’s just this different idea of how you can raise a child, how you can be a family. It’s not just romantic relationships, it’s also platonic relationships that are important. So just challenging that notion I think is so important.
Marita: I think it’s very funny how widespread the notion of starting a commune with your friends is.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: Especially in lockdown.
Parinita: Yeah. Ugh yeah.
Marita: That’s just the daydream. I just want a house with some land and at least four other people just existing around me.
Parinita: Yeah, right?! Whoever I’ve spoken with, it’s mostly been women who seem to want to this as well.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: Which hmm I wonder why this system that was set up by men doesn’t seem to be working for us. That we want to escape it.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: We’ve been focusing on the positive aspects of fanfiction in terms of how it exposes us to different ideas. But of course while fanfiction can be progressive and inclusive in some ways and towards certain groups, it can also be hostile towards other groups as well, right? I’m thinking specifically – again I’m not a huge part of it but I listen to a lot of fan podcasts, follow Twitter conversations and things. So recently there was this whole discussion about A03 and racism. And how there was this online controversy in the midst of the Black Lives Matter discussions on Twitter and AO3’s complicity in racism. Where queerness and gender are centred, there are more opportunities for that, but race seems to be othered.
Marita: I have sort of complicated feelings about that.
Parinita: Okay.
Marita: It’s definitely not my space really to talk about because I am very white. [laughs] And I don’t have as deep a critical look into AO3’s practices etcetera etcetera as I’d like to have to be able to form a more informed opinion etcetera etcetera.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: I definitely think a lot of the criticism that has been made is absolutely fair and very, very much correct. I do think in the response of AO3, I can see where some of that is coming from. Like the argument that nothing can be all things to all people.
Parinita: Hmm.
Marita: And especially if you’re an archive essentially. A lot of the proposed suggestions that I’ve read from people arguing that AO3 is racist and should adopt some different policies. A lot of the policies I’ve seen suggested do not seem feasible to me.
Parinita: Hmm.
Marita: Like we as you said, we’ve talked a lot about the positive that fandom and the fanfic communities as positive spaces. But they are absolutely a space that’s rife with bullying and just general very hateful speech and very hateful mentalities and a lot of targeting of people etcetera for various different things.
Parinita: Right.
Marita: And I think that taking away a lot of that and giving mods more power and making it more structured and less in very, very, very big quotation marks “free” could very much lead to people getting banned over silly things. And a lot of purity culture specifically. I know that’s what a lot of queer people are worrying about around AO3 because you tend to create content that might be questionable in various ways. And I know that there’s a lot of concern about that. Adding the ability to delete comments is great. I love that. Turning off and on comments is also great. It’s just that we have those theoretical conversations and we don’t actually talk about the work.
Parinita: Right. Yeah that’s really interesting. I think conversations are important just to raise awareness about issues and to maybe start thinking about how things can be solved. And again, I’m saying this more as someone who’s been an observer of the conversations without having any sort of investment or stake in it because I just don’t frequent A03 really. So for me it’s just been this abstract, theoretical thing, as you said. So even in terms of feasibility and stuff, I’m really ignorant and I’m just trying to learn from the different perspectives. But what you said about it in terms of just even the work, I think that’s really interesting in terms of fanfiction and just moving on to what we were talking about in the other part of our conversation which is the class politics of fanfiction and fandom in general. Where a lot of it, like you said, is against the capitalistic structures of mainstream media where you’re just writing things because you love it. You love the community, you love the text and you’re playing with the characters. Or you’re frustrated with the text and you’re playing with the characters. Plus there’s this whole community of beta readers who act as editors and things.
Marita: Um hmm.
Parinita: Which I think is great because that’s what the community is. But at the same time, because fanfiction largely has women and nonbinary people, the more marginalised groups … there is so much time and labour that’s offered for free. And it is for the love of the work and the community but people are still … I think there’s that in terms of accessibility there as well. Who can afford to put in so much labour and effort for free for something that you love and who might want to, but may just not be able to because either they don’t have the time or they’re tired from the job that they work in that might not be great but they have to do because they have to pay the rent. And they have to pay the bills, right? And of course, on the other other hand, capitalism wants you to commercialise everything. And some things should just be fun. But it’s just there’s more nuance to that. It’s not just one or the other.
Marita: Yeah. It’s sort of similar to me to how people talk about academia.
Parinita: Hmm.
Marita: Because I’m self-funded and I work. And for the last year I tried to do my first PhD year full-time while at the same time working full time because I needed to be making over 900 pounds per month in order to just be able to pay my tuition and my rent.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: And it is for the love of the work because I love what I’m doing. With fandom as well, it is for the love of the content and for the love of the community etcetera. But it is still work.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: I am very lucky that I was furloughed during lockdown. I could afford to stay at home. I had a very, very strong academic block. And I couldn’t create the content for my PhD. So I turned to fanfiction. But I had that opportunity because I was furloughed. And because it was the end of the year, so my tuition fees were more or less paid. I would not have had that opportunity if I was an essential worker and I had to keep going to work every day. And like fandom in particular it’s so interesting because on one hand there’s so many young people who are not working, who are in school, who are children. [laughs]
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: Working and creating and just existing in the space. And then on the other hand, you have the older fandom who has a very different dynamic to it. They have very different ways of interacting with the process of creation and the process of being active fan members. And you have responsibilities and you have a family and you have a career and you can’t just be, “Oh I’m just going to use my savings this month and I’m going to spend the entire month writing PWPDrarry fanfiction.
Parinita: [laughs] Yeah. No, for sure. Even fan podcasts, because that’s my current fandom I guess. I’m a fan of fan podcasts because I listen to so many.
Marita: [laughs] Same.
Parinita: But that’s such a labour-intensive process as well. Like you mentioned, I don’t come from wealth either. I’ve been lucky in terms of scholarships so I get a small stipend which isn’t enough to live on in the UK but it is something. And I have some money left over from my master’s scholarships that I’m currently using to live. And I realise how incredibly lucky I am that I get to do, like you’re saying, I’ve merged both academia and fandom into my work. Which sometimes can be quite problematic because I don’t know where my PhD ends and where my real life begins. And that’s also – I love to blame capitalism for everything – but that’s also this cult of productivity. Where you feel like your self-worth is tied to how productive you are so if you’re not doing something all the time, you feel like you’re not worthy of things that you get. So that’s definitely a problem where I tend to overwork. But that’s also such a, as we say in India, “first world problem” where you can sit at home and I’m working on my laptop. Whereas Jack, my boyfriend, he was an essential worker – he was working at an Amazon warehouse during the lockdown. So he was going to work every day for eight hours and he’d be on his feet. He was doing manual work lifting things and stuff. Whereas I was sitting at home maybe working for the same time, but I was sitting and doing something that I loved and I’m being paid for it. Not a lot. But I’m being paid for it by my university because I’m doing it as a part of my university project. Whereas other people, other fans, they’re doing fan podcasts and they’re doing them so much more frequently, but how do they get the money?
Marita: Hmm
Parinita: How do they justify that? There’s Patreon and things like that. They ask for donations and stuff but it’s still such a … yeah, you need to be earning enough money from what you’re doing to be able to do what you love.
Marita: Yeah. I work for a fan podcast right now. I do some scribing so I write the transcripts for episodes. And I get paid for that. Which I did not know was going to be a thing. I was very surprised when they told me. Which in and of itself is fucked up to realise that
Parinita: Yeah. [laughs]
Marita: I was not expecting to get paid for the labour that I knew I was going to be doing.
Parinita: Yeah. And it is a lot of labour. I do transcriptions for each of my episode. And it is a lot of work.
Marita: It’s so much!
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: The term fan podcast is really strange because it is a fan creation and it is a part of fandom, but it’s not free in the way that fanfic is free. Because it takes so much more different types of labour and different types of cost etcetera.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: The difference between different podcasts showcases the kind of people who can afford to have the more expensive equipment. And they end up with more polished podcasts and their polished podcasts end up getting picked up by distribution groups like Multitude or Maximum Fun etcetera. And then you have more fan fan podcasts primarily from people who are less privileged in their creative and fan endeavours. And you end up with a Patreon maybe if you’re lucky.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: Which is just … you were right, it is capitalism’s fault. Everything comes back to blaming capitalism because it is their fault.
Parinita: [laughs] Yeah because then it also limits the diversity of voices in podcasting, right? I’ve done some research in terms of not fan podcasts but podcasts in general. And it does seem to be – at least the more successful ones, the more popular ones which in itself is not a great metric for success but I mean that’s what you get the money and you get picked up like that – is they’re largely Western, a lot of them are American and a lot of men, and pretty white. There is, of course, diversity especially specifically in my project, I try to look for more diverse voices in terms of different identities but it’s still really Western focused. I don’t know of any Indian fan podcasts, for example. That doesn’t seem to be a thing because it is so much work and sometimes if you’re so tired of doing your full-time job and commuting and whatever that you can’t think of going home and just working. It’s still a privilege to even be able to podcast. And I think there’s just not this idea of there can be a different way of living and making a living, I think. Because there are such limited avenues which are getting even more limited now because of all the recession that the lockdowns have led to all over the world.
Marita: Yeah. I’ve been listening to podcasts and consuming a lot of podcasts for a while now. And it has been really interesting to see what gets picked up and what doesn’t. And a lot of work in fan podcasts and fiction podcasts etcetera. What ends up becoming a big thing and who gets to quit their job and become a podcaster full time. Which is still wild for me to consider. Like Harry Potter fandom is very, very big on that because it has a lot of dedicated fan podcasts and people becoming Harry Potter podcasters and that’s their job.
Parinita: I know! It’s so beyond my realm of possibility or imagination. I would love to do that. I would love to be making this podcast full-time which currently I am, but it is for the PhD project. I can’t imagine doing this – like I want to, but I don’t know how to be able to to do this going on after my PhD because then nobody is going to be paying me to do this. So I will need to be doing other jobs to do it. And like in India, I don’t know how it is in Greece, India is very work-obsessed. There doesn’t seem to be a work-life balance. That’s not really a thing that most people worry about.
Marita: As you know, we’re famously lazy in Greece.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: We’ve never worked.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: I’m kidding obviously, please continue.
Parinita: I mean India has some of those stereotypes as well. But for me, I had to get out of India – when I moved to Glasgow for my master’s – to be able to imagine that oh wait, people stop working at 5 and their commutes are not two hours? They don’t spend two hours then travelling back home? And they have weekends off? What?! They can take time off? Just a leave of three weeks or whatever and that’s their annual leave? I mean obviously we have leave and things but it’s just so different. My mother, she had to drop out of college and stuff so she’s been working as a secretary and an administrator at different companies since she was 18. So for her it’s always been a grind. She’s worked through fevers very proudly. She’s like, oh I have a fever, I feel like I’m dying but I’m going in to work. So I grew up with that idea of work and that’s how it is in India. You’re expected to be on your phone and whatever, be accessible to the employer at whatever time in most regular jobs, I guess salaried jobs. Which now especially with the pandemic and things, I’m like I don’t think that that’s the kind of life I want. I think that society is deeply broken.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: And maybe a revolution doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.
Marita: [laughs] I love how we started our conversation not addressing the elephant in the room which is that everything is broken down because of the pandemic. And then not even an hour later, we’re both like, yeah so society is broken. Capitalism is the pits.
Parinita: [laughs] I mean I knew about society being broken before the pandemic.
Marita: Yeah. It’s no surprise.
Parinita: But I think the pandemic has thrown everything into such relief. We’re hanging on such a balance with everything. When the lockdown just happened in the UK, the first three weeks were ridiculous! People were stockpiling – who could afford to, obviously. Me and Jack were talking about it – who can afford to stockpile? Who has the room? We were living in a tiny flat in Leeds. Even if we had the money to stockpile, where would we put these things? Who are these people? Where are they putting all the stuff that they’re buying? And even in terms of the class dynamics with the essential workers; another term for them had traditionally been “low-skilled” jobs. But suddenly they’re the most important people in the economy because they’re the ones stocking your toilet paper on the shelves.
Marita: So it’s very interesting experiencing the pandemic from two different countries.
Parinita: Um hmm.
Marita: Because as soon as I came to Greece, Greece did not have many cases.
Parinita: Right.
Marita: Greece was not affected more or less by the pandemic. And then they decided – well they didn’t decide, then they had to open borders because so much of our economy is tourism and is the exploitation and the selling out of our islands. So we had to open our borders and as soon as that happened, cases skyrocketed. And suddenly Greece is in the shit. Even though it had more or less escaped. Because there was no feasible way or at least the government didn’t think there was no feasible way for us to survive financially without welcoming a bunch of tourists who did not care for maintaining social distance, did not pay any attention to the policies in place. I was at an island which in and of itself I did not expect to be able to do.
Parinita: Yeah.
Marita: But I was on an island and I went to this bar that was supposedly open air so it was working. And people were just piling in and I had to leave almost immediately because I panicked. And everyone was so unconcerned like corona who? And it was obviously mainly tourists. And mainly people who could afford to be messy in a different country that would not have to care for them if they got sick.
Parinita: Yeah I mean like you’re saying, the two different countries and how they’re handling the pandemic. For me, even though I’m a brown immigrant in the UK – which is pretty low on the totem pole in this country – I’m still pretty privileged because I’m within academia which has its own problems but I’ve been quite lucky. I’ve been in a really nice protected bubble mostly because I’m really oblivious to things that are happening. Maybe I have had microaggressions and racist things happen but I’ve just not been really observant so that’s great that I’ve not noticed them. So I’m pretty privileged here. In India, I’m so much more privileged; even not being in Mumbai because India is still in the middle of a really bad wave – the first wave – and the cases are increasing and things. And Mumbai, my city is in lockdown, and my mum the way that she’s dealing with it all. And she’s also one of the more privileged ones because she has a house, she has a job.
Marita: Yeah.
Parinita: I don’t know if you came across this at all, but there was a huge migrant crisis and by migrant I mean really deprived people who work in different parts of the country; who come from villages but work in cities and construction sites and in industries and as labour. And they were just abandoned by the government. In the beginning, in March and April there were just these awful photographs of people walking thousands of kilometres in the summer sun and collapsing and dying because there was no transport. The lockdown had been announced overnight and there hadn’t been any things put in place to get these people who can’t afford flight tickets or whatever anyway to get them to their homes. They’d been completely abandoned because they obviously don’t matter, right? They don’t have the money so why would they matter? Whereas people who were middle class and upper middle class and wealthier who were stuck abroad, they were flown in via planes. But these poor people stuck in the country in another state weren’t. So it’s just like how much your life matters depends on the wealth that you have. I think in one of the podcasts, they were mentioning about how society now has just created this different kind of aristocracy. At least earlier, at least here and in India, there were horrible feudal landlords but they were spending money in the society that they lived in. Whereas now, you’re taking all the wealth that your employees are creating and then you’re stashing it away abroad. With Amazon what was it, every second he [Jeff Bezos] earns some ridiculous amount of money.
Marita: Oh god! I saw a thing today that was literally the world’s billionaires and how much their wealth has increased in the pandemic. And literally it was that. And it was a sign that said your death is their money.
Parinita: Yeah! Absolutely. But also I think these conversations are more mainstream now, at least if you’re on a certain part of Twitter which I think both of us inhabit – that pocket of Twitter and Facebook – where they’re talking about these things. But a lot of people seem to be completely cut off from this. I remember there was this a tweet where a person who works in Amazon was complaining that he still had to go to work but there were other people who were sitting at home and getting paid. In the UK they’re paying people who are furloughed, right? Well a lot of people who are furloughed, not all. And so he said that, oh these people they’re sitting at home and not doing anything and making money whereas I have to go to Amazon warehouse. And then someone responded to them saying Jeff Bezos is making a million dollars every day or every week or whatever it is. Instead of fighting other people who are just trying to live their lives and might have other problems, why don’t you actually target the people who are completely robbing the world of its money and its resources?
Marita: I just ugh it gets me so angry!
Parinita: Yeah. [laughs]
Marita: Ugh.
Parinita: But that’s why I think there needs to be more representation of this in science fiction and fantasy. I know coming back to that, but I think media representations that’s the reason they’re so important. That they allow you to see a different world but also make connections with your own contexts and how that applies to your world. Because most people I think seem to think that they’re closer to Jeff Bezos than being homeless. Which is so untrue! If you miss a couple of months of rent, you’re going to be kicked out of home unless you have someone else to depend on. It’s not like if you get two extra months of payment, you’re going to suddenly be a billionaire! For most people at least.
Marita: As we were recording this podcast, I got an email from work reminding me that that’s my last furlough payment in August. And I will not be getting paid moving forward. So that just felt very prescient and current.
Parinita: Oh no, that’s terrible!
Marita: Yeah.
Parinita: Ugh!
Marita: They sent it to us in an email that started with an announcement that all of management was getting a raise.
Parinita: Oh my god!
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: Oh my god. Ugh!
Marita: Just in case you needed more capitalism sucks.
Parinita: No, no that’s why we need to start a revolution, right? Earlier when I said a revolution seems like a good idea, I was completely underplaying it. I am ready for a feminist, socialist – intersectional feminist socialist revolution.
Marita: Let’s go.
Parinita: [laughs]
Marita: Let’s go. I am ready. I have been doing push-ups in lockdown so I can punch now.
Parinita: [laughs] That’s great. My skills are very, very limited. [laughs] But I’ll build them, I’m eager to learn. I can write children’s books, I can keep the kids entertained, I guess. [laughs] That’s what you do, right? That’s all you need to do.
Marita: Good. You’ll be responsible for our children.
Parinita: [laughs] This was such a fun conversation even when we were calling for the downfall of patriarchy and capitalism. [laughs]
Marita: That’s what all good conversations do.
Parinita: Yeah well, especially in 2020, of course.
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: There’s no good conversation without that. Thank you so much for being a part of this project and for really giving your time and your expertise with things that I know very little about. And it was such a fun conversation. I think all my podcast episodes going forward need to call for a revolution.
Marita: [laughs] Well, if you need the literature, as I said, I do have a Les Misérables fanfic about it.
Parinita: [laughs] Yes! Coming out of this PhD project if anything, it’s contributed to anything in coming close to the downfall of patriarchy and capitalism, that would be pretty good. And like no pressure! [laughs]
Marita: [laughs]
Parinita: No pressure on our episode at all.
Marita: I will make sure to cite this podcast when I inevitably make my attack on the ruling class.
Parinita: [laughs] Thank you so much.
Marita: Thank you for having me!
[Outro music]
It’s been awhile since the last episode was published. I recorded this episode in August 2020 but it took a total of six months to get it out into the world. I blame 2020 for all of this! I have five more episodes which I recorded with some excellent people over the last year. But as much as I would love for everyone to be able to listen to them immediately, I really can’t predict when they’ll actually be ready for publication. My partner Jack edits the episodes while simultaneously handling a full-time job in a warehouse in the middle of a pandemic and just general worldwide political turmoil. So life may get in the way of our plans and the next five episodes may be irregularly scheduled as well. For this, I blame capitalism! I’m really sorry about the wait and if you’re still listening, thanks for sticking around! You can’t imagine how much I appreciate it. And thank you Marita for your conversation and teaching me so many new things. And thanks, as always, to Jack for managing to edit episodes even while juggling two medical emergencies and a background of cicadas.
[Outro music]
I’d love to hear from you and talk to you – so any feedback, comments or critiques are very welcome! Get in touch with me on social media, leave a comment on my blog, or email me at edps@leeds.ac.uk. If you’d like to follow the podcast or the PhD project, visit my website marginallyfannish.org. Here you’ll find the podcast episodes, transcripts, episode resources and links, and my research blog. You can also receive updates on Facebook or Instagram at Marginally Fannish or on Twitter where I’m @MarginalFannish. I share episode resources on social media so you can find a bunch of excellent fan podcasts and essays to look up. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with anyone you think will enjoy it too.
Thanks for listening! Tune in again next time for all things fannish and intersectional!
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