[mod post] A community by any other name...

[whyareyoulikethis]

Who would have thought the least controversial part of us launching this community would turn out to be the biggest sticking point? We agonized about the site layout; we tortured ourselves over our editorial mission, our style guide, the type of content we wanted, our identity as a project. The title? An offhand decision. What were we? Fans who spaz and are fantastic. A hideous portmanteau was born and we moved onto larger issues, such as rock-paper-scissors on who had to make our Twitter account.

Anyway, since Dreamwidth support requests are apparently totally public (ha, who knew?), as you maybe have already heard, SPOILER ALERT: we're changing the name of this community/project.

One thing I'm going to admit upfront is that this was not a wholly unanimous decision. We tried to find a solution that would both address this issue respectfully and not compromise some of the reasons why we started this community in the first place. As you can see from stopitsomemore's thoughts below, I don't know if we quite made it (or if that was even possible). We did talk a lot about this; we talked about whether we should even include stopitsomemore's dissenting opinion in this post along with mine, considering the possible wank it might well engender. However, in deference to both transparency and the strong feelings of our Editor-in-Chief, I've decided to post it. I don't expect everyone to agree with this post and how we handled this, but I do think in the end it serves us all better to put our cards on the fandom table.

So, without futher ado, a side-by-side reasoning of our thoughts on the issue are below, like some sort of fandom episode of Crossfire, only where stopitsomemore and I have actually been fairly amicable about all this and neither one of us wears a bow-tie:

In looking at the feedback to Fanspastic- and by "looking" I mean "obsessively stalking the internet to the degree normally reserved for bitter people whose exes just got engaged one month after they dumped you"- the criticism that came up a few times- and in one direct email to us- was the name of the comm, because "spastic" and "spaz" are ableist terms. I was actually the person who came up with the name Fanspastic. It was at least partially a case of American cultural bias at work-- it never occurred to me that "spastic" was an ableist word, and furthermore a much more loaded and offensive term in the UK and elsewhere. Our use of it was, to badly paraphrase Shakespeare, a case of negligence and not intent. That said, ignorance is no excuse, and the last thing we want to do is hurt folks. We don't want to make this a place where some fans feel inherently uncomfortable. We don't want to be the kind of people who can't admit they're wrong. We also don't want to be remembered as the community that would have been really cool if only it hadn't been run by a bunch of privileged ableist toolbags who followed Amanda Palmer directly to Fandom Wank (do not pass Go, do not collect $200). We thought it best to address this as soon as possible, so we'd like to apologize to anyone who was offended, hurt or otherwise pissed by the name Fanspastic. Furthermore, we are indeed changing the name of the community. (We are not, however, going back and obliterating all mention of the old name from previous posts; that seems like a disingenuous sweeping of things under the rug.) We also have to thank the folks at Dreamwidth for letting us rename the comm and fix this mistake with a minimum of hassle when they didn't have to. To that end, you can now refer to this place to Fangasmic. (Please correct me if I'm wrong, but only thing I can think of that's offensive about orgasms is like if someone comes in your eye. I've been told by stopitsomemore that shit burns.) — whyareyoulikethis

I've never considered myself to be a particularly politically incorrect or a socially tone deaf person, but the dispute over the titling of our site hit me out of left field. Long before the project went public we soft-opened, recruited amongst friends, sampled it out to people whose opinions we trusted and solicited their thoughts and suggestions. At no point during the month-long process of building infrastructure did anyone who was read in on the project pause and say, "Hey, that site name might be offensive." In fact, I'd bet that for a lot of the people reading this post right now, the fact that "fanspastic" might be offensive will be as surprising to them as it was to us. (See whyareyoulikethis's note on further discussion for that.) The question of whether or not intent in fact colors the reality of a term can be argued until the end of time, and I'm hardly qualified to talk intelligently on the subject. I do know that the desire to sidestep every potential landmine can cross the line into the absurd. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, but the impossible task of trying to offend no one is neither a law nor is it feasible. At heart, the issue can be summed by saying I'm less concerned with offending people, and if I'm going to do a good job managing the content on the site, I have to be. At the same time, my job isn't to decide what the title of the site is, nor to look out for what will make it most accessible, most serviceable, most popular and well-regarded among readers. That's whyareyoulikethis, and that's why we're renaming the project. To say I hated this decision would be putting it lightly. I resisted this move because it feels like we are betraying one of the fundamental reasons we wanted to launch this project to begin with; fandom is so preoccupied with never offending anybody that attempts to have a discussion oftentimes are smothered from lack of oxygen or blow up; I wanted us to be different. If we were going to give in on something as basic as our site name, what was next? But I also understand why we're making this move. You can ask me about this in a year, I may still be pissed we did this, but I will also be grateful if in a year, our site is around, and flourishing, and you are reading it because it wasn't lost in a dust-up right out the gate. — stopitsomemore

Please note, we're still in the process of changing the name and the other assets of the community, hopefully we should be fully transitioned by the end of the week.

Comments

[quinara]

I saw your comm originally linked from metafandom, but couldn't read the post because the comm name made my skin crawl (and that's as an able-bodied person who has never had any ablist abuse thrown their way; I can only imagine how other people felt when the name appeared on their reading lists). I'm impressed to see how quickly you remedied the situation and look forward to popping in in the future!

If we were going to give in on something as basic as our site name, what was next?

Oh, the apocalypse I'm sure. (Seriously though, surely you recognise how very not basic your name is? It's what represents you pretty much everywhere: it's on every page of your site, it's in every link address, it's what people see at the start of every tab they open to you - people are going to remember that word next to your little globe long before they take in your profile page and the the rhythm of your posts. It sums up what your comm stands for, whether you like it or not. If you want to make it a slur, make it a slur, but that slur is going to define you more than any comment you make about how it's 'not important'.)