“As intermediaries, twentieth-century literary agents served as proto-authors, taking on the business or financial side of writing while reserving the aura of invention and originality for the author. The earthly organizational talents of the agent protected the figuratively male author’s profound but delicate spark of genius.” (44)
Caren Irr (Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright, 44)
Love the tone here. :)
“As intermediaries, twentieth-century literary agents served as proto-authors, taking on the business or financial side of writing while reserving the aura of invention and originality for the author. The earthly organizational talents of the agent protected the figuratively male author’s profound but delicate spark of genius.” (44)
Caren Irr (Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright, 44)
Love the tone here. :)
Fan fiction’s abundance, even overabundance, is anti-market in many respects. Along with its free circulation, its very premise that the same characters can be used again and again defies concepts of exhaustion and the tragedy of the commons.
Fan fiction’s abundance, even overabundance, is anti-market in many respects. Along with its free circulation, its very premise that the same characters can be used again and again defies concepts of exhaustion and the tragedy of the commons.
Rebecca Tushnet (“My Fair Ladies: Sex, Gender, and Fair Use in Copyright,” 301)
I am not against interpretation. But what courts recognize as legitimate interpretation, it turns out, has predictable sexual and gendered components– to be a “public woman” is a far different thing than to be a “public man,” just as a “streetwalker” is different from a “man in the street.” Thus, in Leibovitz, a woman’s proud celebration of her pregnant body necessarily invited negative commentary from passersby. We already know that Barbie is sexual, says Judge Kozinski, so her proprietors have no right to complain when someone makes that more explicit. An unchaste doll cannot be raped.
Of course, a plastic doll cannot be raped, chaste or not. Bodies are funny, sex is funny, and anyone who deals in bodies can expect some rude surprises. But in a culture full of disputes over sexuality and gender norms, it should be no surprise that our copyright cases are not exempt from those battles and that women in particular may find themselves mocked mercilessly or exposed beyond what they were willing to reveal.
Rebecca Tushnet (“My Fair Ladies: Sex, Gender, and Fair Use in Copyright,” 293)
The inseparability of sex and gender in practice is one of the things that romance genres make obsessively visible, and one of the ways in which romance is itself pornographic. Romance is always seeking to display the imperative bind between sex and gender without, perhaps, naming it as such. The imperative to visibility in porn is also embedded in the themes of revelation and discovery that shape a romance narrative, always exposing the truth of feelings, desires, and character, and always manipulating the audience’s desire to know what they already know… both romance and porn consume the question of sexed and gendered relationships more for its epistemological context than its content.
Catherine Driscoll (“One True Pairing,” 94)