March 6th, 2009
by
Liz Henry
This discussion started as, and continues to be, about cultural appropriation and racism, as coffeeandink points out so well in RaceFail: Once More, with Misdirection.
I’m posting this because I’m very perturbed at Kathryn Cramer’s actions today. She threatened several people with legal action, including Tempest, oyceter, at least two more people I’m not sure I should name, and also Aqueduct Press. She has also written to LiveJournal, and people’s ISPs, to accuse them of defamation and harassment and to try to get their journals taken down or their accounts closed. I am very angry at Cramer’s use of legal threats to try to silence people on the Internet.
In these discussions, many people are becoming angry with her to the point of wanting to googlebomb her name. I understand the anger there, but I don’t like answering non-consensual stealing of people’s identity and words with further non-consensual tampering with identity. I appreciate spiralsheep’s outline of events, and really good documenting complete with screen caps – but I don’t like the google bombing of her name. Just unearth the things she has said, if you feel inclined, and link to that. For example, this participation in the discussion at tnh’s journal: Pseudonymity as Monopoly money; or this deleted post from January 15, Aliases are for People on Wanted Posters. I would say that especially in the context of the discussions about race, racism, and fandom, her comments are perturbing to say the least.
Cramer continues to delete and move entries in her blog, which blurs our ability to construct a picture of what was said when. Her legal threats, and attempts to get other people’s entire journals deleted, is at the same time, laughably clueless and likely to be effective in intimidating some people to take down her name and links to her.
She should let the criticism stand. Any criticism that is extreme, or goes over a line in anger, humor, bitterness, she should let stand and let other people, including her friends and colleagues, judge for themselves, and let her other works stand on their merits as well.
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
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Filed under fandom | Comments (5)
I said it elsewhere; I’ll say it here too:
Kathryn Cramer seems quite enamored of her own authenticity and the “rights” she thinks it bestows upon her.
so many presumptions, all of them quintessentially white and american.
I hope that most people realize that she’s digging her own hole by deleting her LJ and rearranging her blog. looks like authenticity didn’t work out so well for her, eh?
I really don’t think she’ll shut anyone up, or get any satisfaction. What she’s doing is spreading the news of her fail further and further afield.
If angry words and ugly opinions were actually actionable, Rush Limbaugh would be in jail by now…
[...] much the same suggestion and, so far as I am aware, not retracted it. Kathryn Cramer has apparently threatened legal action against the authors of posts such as this and this, which point out earlier bad behaviour on her [...]
I wasn’t involved in the hoo-hah, but this truly is not a career-enhancing move for Cramer. She doesn’t quite get show-biz publicity rule #1: “Bad publicity is better than no publicity” and publicity rule #2: “Don’t piss off the core fans”. I have to assume that those rules apply in the publishing industry. SF readers are likely to be more likely to be offended by ham-handed censorship attempts than other readers – if only because there’s a large “libertarian-ish” component in fandom.
And then to go on and on about how pseudonymous commenters are eeeeeevil and rude – Get.A.Life., KC! There are a lot of people who go pseudonymous for job reasons, without other motives, simply to be able to make comments on controversial subjects and make it “impossible” for boneheads to attribute those comments as official policy for the employer of the commenter. KC cites some improper uses of anonymity – corporate or political sock puppets – so what, that is a fraction of the anonymous blogging public.
Plus, KC does forget the cardinal rule – deleted pages can be retrieved via lookback caches. It is a wise policy to avoid racist snark (see rule #2a, don’t piss off the potential audience).
NancyP, pseudonymous SF reader, white, who happens to be interested in alt.SF of all sorts, including foriegn-language, experimental, genre-crossing, English language POC-written, feminist, LGBTI/queer, etc SF (and non SF fiction).
[...] for speaking positively about you, it’s also true that ever since you outed Coffeeandink, demanded an apology from her for telling people you’d outed her, talked a lot of racist crap about the ‘lizardoid minions’, threatened to sue her for [...]