Evelyn Evelyn, fandom, and joke culture.

You might be familar with the controversy surrounding Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley’s project Evelyn Evelyn. If not, here’s a summary.

Basically, Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley wanted to do a vaudeville project. Nothing wrong with that. But then they invented a backstory about how it’s really being performed by conjoined twins (who used to be involved in child porn) who they plucked out of relative obscurity, convinced them to come out with the record, dressed them up in black and purple. It’s a lot of spectacle. In performances, they giggle about the whole thing. And it has raised some legitimate concerns about ableism, not helped by some of Palmer’s fairly flippant tweets, like this one:

"setting aside 846 emails and removing the disabled feminists from her mental periphery, @amandapalmer sat down to plan her next record."

Well, fuck that. I’m both disabled and a feminist, and damned if I’ll be removed so quickly.

To be honest, I was never a fan of the fake backstory, even without any of this. And it irritated me that all the music and entertainment blogs lapped up the PR without even thinking. An Emperor’s New Clothes feeling.

So far, Jason Webley (one of the members of the group) has made a blog post explaining himself. (By the time you read this, Amanda Palmer might have hers up, but it wasn’t there at the time of writing.) And as things on the Internet tend to do, it has accumulated comments. It’s like playing Derailing for Dummies bingo: "You just like to be offended!" "You’re not REALLY disabled, you’re on the Internet!" "You’re oversensitive/overemotional/overreacting/taking things too personally!" And then there’s one that doesn’t appear on the Derailing site, but should: "STFU, it’s Art!" And another: "Quit with the drama!"

The first particularly irritates me because it enables a lot of blind fandom — or fanboying/fangirling, to be more accurate. The real argument behind so many of these comments is "I’m a fan, and all criticism is hating, so shut up!" It dismisses any comments that aren’t fairly glowing.

And as far as the "drama" argument, that’s a classic way to dismiss anyone’s legitimate grievances. It’s not far removed from "You just don’t get it, so shut up!" In this argument, all criticism is drama, worthless overreaction. You should shut up and laugh!

It’s yet another symptom of what I like to call "joke culture." Think about it. What’s one of the most common criticisms leveled at feminists? That they don’t have a sense of humor. And somehow, this is one of the worst insults anyone can receive. Mean? No problem. Insensitive? You go ahead and be like that. Not having a sense of humor? You’re fucking inhuman!

See, it isn’t just any sense of humor that these people mean. What they’re really saying is that "You don’t have MY sense of humor." And this sense of humor is determined by society; the way oppression works a lot of the time is that those who are oppressed are set up as jokes for public amusement. If you’re not particularly enthused by the idea of being a public joke, you’re forgetting your place and obviously don’t have a sense of humor.

It happens in big and small ways every day, too many places to count. And this project is one of them. Yes, that’s right. Take off your fandom goggles, get your fingers off the comment button. The entire marketing push here is that there are these Cute, Quirky, Vaguely Gothic conjoined twins who are Offbeat because of this, and they make Cute Throwback Music that you should like because it’s so quaint, see? Their bio states that they were abused by child pornographers, but the way it’s described, it’s just another bullet point in their Backstory of Wacky Misadventures. It’s taking the whole (apologies for language) "freak show" part of history, aestheticizing it up, and selling it to people for profit.

The sad thing is that none of this was even necessary. You’re Amanda Palmer; you have enough free reign to do pretty much whatever you want, and you’ll get fan support. How easy would it have been to announce that you were doing a vaudeville music project with Jason Webley, drop your star-studded list of guest vocalists, and watch the publicity fall in your lap? It would have been so easy to get this right, and you didn’t.

And to all the knee-jerking fans out there: Turn off your fandom and turn on your brains. I’m not asking you to agree with me. But if you’ll just look at yourselves for a minute, it’ll become quite clear who’s being defensive. Criticism does not prevent you from being a true fan of something. In fact, true fandom allows for criticism, and welcomes it; fandom that doesn’t is just fanboying and fangirling.

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

Join the Conversation