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Gatekeepin' it real: On the natural condition of fandom
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7895262" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I think it's normal for membership in a group to be established by displays of knowledge. Just talk to, for example, some baseball fans. Or people who drink wine and consider themselves members of a group who drink wine and not just people who drink wine.</p><p></p><p>I'm not convinced nerd culture has long encouraged gatekeeping. I think that is a statement that is probably impossible to confirm, and I'll note that there is a recognized cultural valuation that has been criticized within nerddom of not doing enough gatekeeping and feeling like you were under an obligation to accept anyone unconditionally regardless of say problems with hygiene and body odor. So if it is true that nerd culture has long encouraged gatekeeping, then I think it's also at least as true that there is also the opposite impulse in nerd culture to not do any gatekeeping.</p><p></p><p>And I think we can explain both through a "reductive and sociological" explanation - nerds were originally an outgroup subject to intense social persecution. Nerds weren't in my day a group you aspired to be a member of because they had social standing or membership in the group accrued some amount of respect. Nerds were group you were forced into much like being forced into a locker or dangled upside down in a toilet. In my day, you became a nerd for the simple reason that bigger more popular people violently forced the label on you both with the social violence of open mockery, and the literal violence of getting together in a group and pounding you bloody. That was what it meant to be a nerd for me growing up.</p><p></p><p>With this reality in mind, I think it's easy to explain both the impulse of the group to want to exclude members from entering it and take the term 'nerd' on as a point of pride and throw it back in the face of the group that had persecuted them, and also at the exact same time to want to throw open the gates of acceptance to anyone who found themselves victimized and an outcast for whatever reason. I would point out the great poetry of the bard John Hughes, when the Pretty Person tries to equate the outcast nerd group culture with her own popular group's gatekeeping culture, the nerd defends his group by stating:</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Consider nerd culture in that context. You finally gets some friends. You finally win some acceptance. You finally feel you belong somewhere. Then a Pretty Person comes along, uses their superior social influence, takes that from you, tells you that you are a bad person, that you need to be excluded from nerddom, and they are the real judge of who gets to belong. And then they tell you that you are the conceited non-inclusive one for rejecting or quibbling with that analysis. Would it have been right for Brian to have after that comment decided, "No, Claire is just too conceited of a person for me to ever be friends with her. I'm going to forever hold that comment against her, and against everyone who reminds me of Claire." No, it wouldn't. It's never justified to treat others the way they treat you, and its certainly not justified to ever judge others based on how some completely different person who happens to share a few similar traits treated you, and it's even less justified to transfer that anger on to that innocent person in an act of misplaced vengeance.</p><p></p><p>But I'd be surprised if there was anyone in the threat wholly innocent of such behavior, or if any of us where wholly immune to prejudging someone as 'a Brian' or 'a Claire'.</p><p></p><p>Let me come at this from another angle. We talk like "gatekeeping" is always a bad thing. But we do that by divorcing it from its natural meaning and having an unspoken qualifier like "unjust", "sexist", or "racist" in front of it. But gatekeeping is still something that is heavily endorsed within society, but when we talk about it we use a different word than the bad word "gatekeeping". We use the word "authentic". We don't act like the search for authenticity is an act of gatekeeping, but it pretty obviously is just as those who ordain themselves experts who can decide who is or who isn't authentic and who is or who can't represent are themselves gatekeepers. One must always be on guard against false experts, the inauthentic, am I right?</p><p></p><p>You wrote: "...but, there is something about a particular strain of nerd gatekeeping that is different. Either in manner, or in degree, or both."</p><p></p><p>And I would respond that that difference is low social standing. How dare a group with such low social standing try to exclude anyone from it. Shouldn't they be looking up to us? The very idea that they don't just makes people bristle.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7895262, member: 4937"] I think it's normal for membership in a group to be established by displays of knowledge. Just talk to, for example, some baseball fans. Or people who drink wine and consider themselves members of a group who drink wine and not just people who drink wine. I'm not convinced nerd culture has long encouraged gatekeeping. I think that is a statement that is probably impossible to confirm, and I'll note that there is a recognized cultural valuation that has been criticized within nerddom of not doing enough gatekeeping and feeling like you were under an obligation to accept anyone unconditionally regardless of say problems with hygiene and body odor. So if it is true that nerd culture has long encouraged gatekeeping, then I think it's also at least as true that there is also the opposite impulse in nerd culture to not do any gatekeeping. And I think we can explain both through a "reductive and sociological" explanation - nerds were originally an outgroup subject to intense social persecution. Nerds weren't in my day a group you aspired to be a member of because they had social standing or membership in the group accrued some amount of respect. Nerds were group you were forced into much like being forced into a locker or dangled upside down in a toilet. In my day, you became a nerd for the simple reason that bigger more popular people violently forced the label on you both with the social violence of open mockery, and the literal violence of getting together in a group and pounding you bloody. That was what it meant to be a nerd for me growing up. With this reality in mind, I think it's easy to explain both the impulse of the group to want to exclude members from entering it and take the term 'nerd' on as a point of pride and throw it back in the face of the group that had persecuted them, and also at the exact same time to want to throw open the gates of acceptance to anyone who found themselves victimized and an outcast for whatever reason. I would point out the great poetry of the bard John Hughes, when the Pretty Person tries to equate the outcast nerd group culture with her own popular group's gatekeeping culture, the nerd defends his group by stating: Consider nerd culture in that context. You finally gets some friends. You finally win some acceptance. You finally feel you belong somewhere. Then a Pretty Person comes along, uses their superior social influence, takes that from you, tells you that you are a bad person, that you need to be excluded from nerddom, and they are the real judge of who gets to belong. And then they tell you that you are the conceited non-inclusive one for rejecting or quibbling with that analysis. Would it have been right for Brian to have after that comment decided, "No, Claire is just too conceited of a person for me to ever be friends with her. I'm going to forever hold that comment against her, and against everyone who reminds me of Claire." No, it wouldn't. It's never justified to treat others the way they treat you, and its certainly not justified to ever judge others based on how some completely different person who happens to share a few similar traits treated you, and it's even less justified to transfer that anger on to that innocent person in an act of misplaced vengeance. But I'd be surprised if there was anyone in the threat wholly innocent of such behavior, or if any of us where wholly immune to prejudging someone as 'a Brian' or 'a Claire'. Let me come at this from another angle. We talk like "gatekeeping" is always a bad thing. But we do that by divorcing it from its natural meaning and having an unspoken qualifier like "unjust", "sexist", or "racist" in front of it. But gatekeeping is still something that is heavily endorsed within society, but when we talk about it we use a different word than the bad word "gatekeeping". We use the word "authentic". We don't act like the search for authenticity is an act of gatekeeping, but it pretty obviously is just as those who ordain themselves experts who can decide who is or who isn't authentic and who is or who can't represent are themselves gatekeepers. One must always be on guard against false experts, the inauthentic, am I right? You wrote: "...but, there is something about a particular strain of nerd gatekeeping that is different. Either in manner, or in degree, or both." And I would respond that that difference is low social standing. How dare a group with such low social standing try to exclude anyone from it. Shouldn't they be looking up to us? The very idea that they don't just makes people bristle. [/QUOTE]
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