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[–]commiespaceinvaderModerator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes 218 points219 points  (33 children)

Part 1

To answer this question represents an interesting case in terms of historical study because as a modern historian engaging with this and similar phenomenon, one encounters a phenomenon that has become somewhat rare for us historians engaged in the study of modern history: a social movement that largely produces its own sources which stand in stark contrast to how the group's history is written by those who stand outside the group. Let me clarify further: When we talk f.ex. about the radicalization of New Left ideas after 1968 in the form of the German Red Army Faction and the Weathermen, there will be a stark contrast and difference between how members of these groups write their history at the time they exist and how the society around them portrays them and their history at the time of their activity. However, more often than not there will be an engagement with the phenomenon that tries to place them within larger social developments and that neither relies solely on their mythologized history nor on the demonization of the society on the outside of these groups.

Not so with groups like Furries and other fandom phenomena because by and large, they don't have a huge enough impact on majority society and almost the only attention they receive outside of their own in-group is because they are commonly seen as "weird" or somehow not conforming with accepted notions of gender behavior (see also fans of My Little Pony) and sexuality. So what makes them an interesting study case is the fact that they are to a very high degree a social fringe group of the kind who have tended to leave very little historical records in the past and that we can if so inclined observe such a group writing its own history and mythos as it unfolds. Usually because of the way historical transition works, the only sources left to us on such social fringe groups are those left by majority society that tend to treat them as alien, weird, or even hostile and historians end up knowing little about the self-image and understanding of the group itself. Or in case of modern historians we soon end up with serious academic engagement with these groups that aim to ferret out the larger social and historical place of these groups. Interestingly enough and as far as I can tell, this is not something that has happened with Furries and a couple of other fandoms yet.

So, there apparently is a somewhat "official" chronology of furry fandom in form of this article written by Fred Patten. Patten, a librarian by trade and owner of a comic book shop famous for very early imports of mangas to the US, styles himself somewhat as a fandom history and has written a whole variety of articles about fandoms from the inside of these fandoms. While I don't know if he is a furry, he is certainly furry-adjacent in that he reviews and publishes furry fiction. Patten then dates the official begin of Furrydom to Labor Day Weekend 1980 describing it as such:

At the NorEasCon II World Science Fiction Convention in Boston (August 29–September 1), Steve Gallacci enters an Erma Felna painting in the art show, featuring a funny-animal character in a realistic high-tech military setting (later in Albedo: Anthropomorphics and Command Review). This leads to a gathering of fans to look at Gallacci's notes for a SF comic-art serial about bioengineered animal soldiers in a space war. The discussions show a common interest in SF and fantasy about intelligent animals, such as George Orwell's Animal Farm (fantasy), Cordwainer Smith's "Underpeople" stories (bioengineered animals), and H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy (animal-like intelligent aliens), to name popular examples among the three main types. This becomes an informal series of "Gallacci group" gatherings at Worldcons and Westercons to discuss anthropomorphics in SF, comic art, and animation, and to show off each others' sketchbook art and draw in each others' sketchbooks, from 1980 until about 1985. The group eventually splits into a club grouped around Rowrbrazzle, and the more "formal" furry parties.

Rowrbrazzle btw. was a sort of official furry publication running from 1983 forward and Patten was on its editorial board.

Assuming Patten's account of 1980 NorEasCon II is accurate, it is a perfect example of how groups – from Nation States to baseball teams – write their history by constructing narratives. Writing history is always writing a narrative because we give it a form of having a beginning, an end, a middle part and a coherent and directional development in between. Here it is especially obvious because it can be said with a high-degree of certainty that the participants at 1980 NorEasCon II did not convene to found a movement of people dressing up as anthropomorphic animals. They convened for a discussion group but regardless of their intention, it becomes from an ex-post standpoint the official beginning of Furrydom.

In a similar vein, Patten's article even goes back further to include virtually every instance of animated anthropomorphic animals save Micky Mouse and the Looney Tunes as a sort of "precursor" to Furrydom where the traces of it already emerged early. This is a prime example of what can be termed "group making". In his standard work "Ethnicity without Groups" Rogers Brubaker writes:

Ethnicity, race, and nation should be conceptualized not as substances or things or entities or collective individuals – as the imagery of discrete, concrete, tangible, bounded and enduring "groups" encourages us to do – but rather in relational, processual, dynamic, and disaggregated terms. This means thinking of ethnicity, race, and nation not in terms of substantial groups or entities but in terms of practical categories, cultural idoms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organized routines, institutional forms, political projects and cognitive events. It means thinking of ethnicization, racilization and nationalization as political, social, cultural and psychological processes.

Describing these processes Brubakers talks about the role of "ethnopolitical entrepreneurs", meaning people and institutions who advance the notion of a coherent group in all these fields above. Part of that is to give things a history and one as long as possible at that. Nation States have been described as always existing in the past perfect tense, meaning that by the time they come into existence they will already have existed for some time. Whether this takes place in form of the Germans projecting their own history back to the Germans of antiquity or the Serbs seeking their medieval history or the "New Jerusalem" rhetoric of the Anglo-world. Before you exist, you will have had a history because a history is what creates legitimacy. And you can observe the same in small with the above. Patten projects the history of furrydom back to earlier cartoons because it means that there is historical legitimacy in the movement because it isn't people doing all this the first time. Since we can't see the future, the past is the only reference point we have available to us and so we have to make use of the past in order to justify what we do in the presence. And this is the small-scale fandom version of it.

[–]commiespaceinvaderModerator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes 189 points190 points  (15 children)

Part 2

Another such effort that embodies the struggle for legitimacy and identity of the group and the contrast between in-group and external writing about the group is the International Anthropomorphic Research Project a group of social scientists that has formed in response to the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of furries in the media that focus on the weird and sexual aspects of the group. Interestingly enough, at least some of the people conducting the research as part of the project come from the fandom itself. They even published a volume of partly peer reviewed articles on their studies in which they focus not only on understanding the general population that takes part in the fandom but also focus strongly on highlighting that themes such as inclusion and belongingness, environmental sustainability, and global citizenship (all markers generally thought of as positive) are important within Furrydom. I can neither refute nor confirm their findings because I haven't worked through the published volume but it is definitely something written by people from within the fandom partially explicitly declared as a way to counter common perceptions of the group in the wider media, so definitely something that is part study, part broader identity-building project.

And this is what brings me to the last point: Whether or not we want to accept 1980 as the start of Furrydom, it's rise and public attention is congruent with a more pervasive phenomenon of contemporary times: Fandom as identity in neoliberal times. While "neoliberal" is a difficult term to work with because of its varied use and also its frequent use as a cudgel in debate, there is a cohesive phenomenon we can describe with it, namely the idea of society as a kind of universal market and not, f.ex., a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family and of individual as profit-and-loss calculators. Within neoliberal hegemony, there is no structure but only the neoliberal individual who aims to achieve self-actualisation and self-determination through the market. A central building bloc of this is the superelevation of consumer identity. Identification, meaning where the individual positions itself within society and within groups in society, is not achieved anymore primarily via, say, class, political allegiance, and so forth but via what we consume and how we consume it. While the structure behind class, allegiance etc. has not disappeared, the consumer identity has risen to a massive role in terms of how the contemporary individual defines itself and Fandom is one of the strongest of these consumer identities.

The idea of people gaining their identity in a massive way by what shows they like, what media they consume, what comics they buy, and so forth has been a huge theme in researching modern identity and neoliberal ideology. While I'll link more on that below, what can be derived from that is a different startpoint for furrydom than the official one of 1980 and that can be summarized as: Furrydom became a thing when the neoliberal notions of Reagan and Thatcher became hegemonic and the issue of what media products we consume became defining markers for the derivation of identity.

Sources:

  • Jim McGuigan: The Neoliberal Self. Culture Unbound, Volume 6, 2014: 223–240.

  • Paul J. Booth: Fandom: The classroom of the future. TWC, Vol. 9, 2015.

  • Matt Hills: Transnational cult and/as neoliberalism: the liminal economies of anime fansubbers, Transnational Cinemas, Volume 8, 2017 - Issue 1: Cult Cinema and the Transnational.

  • Jen Harvie: Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. 2013.

[–]PokerPirate[S] 47 points48 points  (2 children)

What an excellent explanation, thank you! I had no idea that neoliberalism and identity were intertwined at all, and especially that it could make an appearance in a discussion about furries.

[–]commiespaceinvaderModerator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes 77 points78 points  (0 children)

I had no idea that neoliberalism and identity were intertwined at all, and especially that it could make an appearance in a discussion about furries.

Expanding on this a bit, the connection between neoliberalism and identity is really an essential part of neoliberalism because its focus on the individual necessitates the super-elevation of consumer identity and aesthetics. While furries are not the prime example of this (though the connection between the consumption of certain media and identity is strong there), Fandom is something that rests on the idea that the consumption of certain media products and how you consume it, really defines you as an individual within a society that is essentially viewed as a marketplace. Less subtle than when car companies market you a product with the idea of a life style choice (drive a Jeep, be cool), when fans of TV show riot in a McDonalds for their desire to be sold a certain sauce, you can see the neoliberal individual fully emerge.

[–]MoQtheWitty 9 points10 points  (0 children)

To go further; I would argue that furry is a subversion of the intertwining of neoliberalism and identity.

Furry, by and large, is not a fandom beholden to a corporation. There is no division of Hasbro nor Procter & Gamble department that analyzes market trends within furry & cranks out merchandise accordingly. Furry merchandise is dominated by a cottage industry of individuals and small 2-10 person businesses (generally compromised of a social clique) producing mostly bespoke crafts & art commissions.

Furries aren't fans of a fiction series or a product, and as long as that remains true, conglomerate corporate interests & the politics that come with them will struggle to penetrate their fandom.

"A lot of people ask, 'If you're a fandom then what is that you guys are fans of?' And the answer, really, is that furries are fans of each other." - Typical furry paraphrasing of Mark Evanier

[–]Kugelfang52Third Reich | Holocaust Historiography | Textbooks 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Great work. Thoroughly enjoyable.

[–]SlavophilesAnonymous 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Identification, meaning where the individual positions itself within society and within groups in society, is not achieved anymore primarily via, say, class, political allegiance, and so forth but via what we consume and how we consume it.

Can you explain? It seems like in the USA, bastion of neoliberalism as it is, identification based on political allegiance, and to a lesser extent race, has only gotten stronger over the years.

[–]commiespaceinvaderModerator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes 9 points10 points  (0 children)

While no hegemony is ever absolute, what I think is important to consider how political allegiance and consumption of certain media products has become linked. I'm tempting the 20-year-rule a bit here but a certain TV station sells you a political opinion for profit or how "culture wars" coalesce around certain popular consumer products (Gamergate). Race is a bit of a different beast but McGuigan especially goes into political allegiance and the neoliberal self.

[–]ArgentStonecutter 5 points6 points  (2 children)

As someone who was on the periphery of the not-yet-called-furry culture in the late '70s, it didn't feel like 1980 was a critical year at the time. It was something that had been growing for maybe a decade by then and there were already fan publications with a significant anthropomorphic content by 1980.

Suiting was definitely not a part of things. There was a bit of funny animal cosplay, but it was in the context of general SF costuming and centered around SF convention costume contests. It was mostly artwork, fiction published in zines, and later the occasional mainstream SF with zoomorphic alien characters (mostly by Alan Dean Foster and C. J. Cherryh). The whole anthro cosplay thing that became "fursuiting" was kind of a fringe thing. I didn't even hear about it until at least a decade later.

[–]gattsuru 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Patten tends to separate the pre-1985 precursors to the fandom as "funny animal" rather than the more recent "furry fandom", such as in his timeline here. It's not an entirely unreasonable distinction, but it does come across as a little arbitrary given how furry-related some of his funny animal examples like Vootie were.

He'd probably agree with you that the 1980 meeting itself wasn't particularly significant in itself, so much as for what happened in the following five to ten years.

[–]ArgentStonecutter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

He's giving more weight to the "Furry" name-brand than I would. Omaha and most of Vootie and everything that revolved around the Prancing Skiltaire and Nicolai's Hegemony campaign that became "Other Suns" was definitely in the "realistic funny animal" wheelhouse that seems to distinguish "Furry" from "Disney". And Skiltaire were created in 1971, even before the 1973 release of Disney's Robin Hood that was a key influence on the Funny Animal side of the fandom.

I would say that three key events in the accelerated growth of furry fandom were the release of three SF novels: The Pride of Chanur in 1981, Spellsinger in 1983, and Quozl in 1989. They mainstreamed the cold-wet-nose theory of alien design*.


* BTW that's a term I first heard used to disparage some (in retrospect rather dreadful) artwork I was doing in college in around 1979 or 1980, but kind of tickled my fancy and is really descriptive of what turned into the "realistic" furries).

[–]kadoen 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Identification, meaning where the individual positions itself within society and within groups in society, is not achieved anymore primarily via, say, class, political allegiance, and so forth but via what we consume and how we consume it.

Thanks for this reflection, I had never thought about this so clearly. In the last cca 20 years, I feel like the internet has expanded this kind of identification by a lot.

[–]10z20Luka 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Furrydom became a thing when the neoliberal notions of Reagan and Thatcher became hegemonic

Just for clarity, you are using Thatcher and Reagan as synecdoches here, yes? Because there were fandoms which predate both Reagan and Thatcher, and I doubt you could point out any specific policy shifts undertaken by these administrations which contributed to the idea of fandom.

Even then, as I type and reflect on that point, I'm not even sure such an emphasis on neoliberalism holds water. Previous posts on this subreddit note the development of fandoms far, far earlier, with fandoms surrounding certain literary genres, series, etc. Seems to me that there is simply a broad correlative trend, involving global capitalism, the promulgation of an immense amount of pop-cultural production, new means of communication, and perhaps neoliberal paradigms.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fpsp6/when_did_fandom_start/

/u/AncientHistory

[–]AncientHistoryModerator | Pulp Studies | H. P. Lovecraft 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The history of furry fandom isn't quite my bag, but while both fandom and sexualization of anthromorphic animals were things that predated neoliberalism, I believe the u/commiespaceinvader is broadly correct about when "furry" became a distinct identity, if not a distinct product. You can definitely point to earlier examples - "Trekkies" from the '60s and '70s being my go-to exemplar - but you didn't get a lot of people running around to actually claim they identified as Vulcans or Klingons in the same way that you have folks today identify with their fursonas. A lot of the right ingredient were there, but they didn't really come together until the '80s.

[–]patch_ofurr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OMG dude, you made my night happy with this awesome post <3

For the construction of legitimacy with a "national mythology" of furrydom that you described, by projecting history backwards, I think you might really like this post at my furry site. (Fred Patten is the star guest writer there). https://dogpatch.press/2015/06/15/museum-of-furry-pantomime/

Are you aware there's a book for this - Furry Nation: https://dogpatch.press/2017/08/21/review-furry-nation/

A sequel is being planned, Furry Planet (I think is the title) and shhh... don't tell but I might be doing a chapter.

Also I tweeted your post here. r/https://twitter.com/DogpatchPress/status/1054629558685581312

[–]Steelcan909England & Scandinavia c.600-1066 | Conversion in Late Antiquity 16 points17 points  (2 children)

Not gonna lie, you are not the flair I'd associate an answer about this topic with

[–]commiespaceinvaderModerator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Contrary to popular perception, I do have interests outside of the history of Nazi Germany ;)

But seriously, it is something I had read a bit about in connection to construction of indentity and fandom and I thought I'd better answer this before all the jokes come in.

[–]clearsighted 27 points28 points  (6 children)

It's highly interesting that the contributor who has presumably devoted his or her life to studying some of the worst impulses of human nature, as were made manifest by horrific Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust, is also apparently an expert on furries.

There is the temptation of making a joke there, and yet, it makes sense, given that marginalized subcultures are often those that are initially and most cruelly suppressed by regimes such as the Nazis. First they came for the socialists, as it were.

[–]commiespaceinvaderModerator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes 68 points69 points  (4 children)

I am far from an expert on furries, it's just that part of my studies is focused on the portrayal of my field in pop-cultural media, which has lead me to to how media is consumed in the latter half of the 20th and in the 21st century and that has lead to some reading about the nature of fandom, identity, and media consumption as a central marker for the construction of identity, which then leads back to how ethnicity, nationality, and so forth are constructed in the first, which also plays a huge part in studying the Nazis in the first place.

Furries tend to come up in the study of identity, fandom, and consumption, well, because their status as a community largely marginalized as "weird" makes them stick out and thus an interesting example of study.

[–]TheLordHighExecuInteresting Inquirer 11 points12 points  (2 children)

Would you be able to talk about far-right/neo-Nazi furries?

[–]commiespaceinvaderModerator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes 9 points10 points  (1 child)

That's a subject I know very little about to be honest and I already tempted the 20-year-rule already in that post and so it would fall a bit outside of our purview here.

[–]Stonevulture 4 points5 points  (0 children)

To the extent that you're looking at modern media consumption and its ability to influence neoliberalist identity concepts, I'd be curious about the role that you feel the Internet plays in that regard. It seems, from a common sense point of view, that the Internet (and in particular sites like Reddit) is a massive accelerant to the formation of communities based on "non-traditional" attributes (i.e. things other than geography, nationality, race, religion, political affiliation, etc.). In fact, it seems like the Internet could contribute to the development of even more granular sub-communities based on not just one consumption or aesthetic attribute, but specific combinations/mixes of attributes as well.

[–]hughk 12 points13 points  (4 children)

It is interesting running Google's NGRAM viewer (word occurrence against publication date). You do see a small peak around 1980, but then falls until 1984 and takes off again in 1991. I only have a peripheral interest in cons, and I disn't think it was really before arround 2000 (which is when it really takes off). Just for fun, I ran it against cosplay and anime and the cosplay/furries tie up well but mentions of anime are many, many times higher.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [–]NoMoreNicksLeft 5 points6 points  (1 child)

    CSI's furry episode was in 2003. But the upswing's already really underway by that point.

    Is there an earlier mainstream reference to this that I'm unaware of?

    [–]hughk 7 points8 points  (0 children)

    To make fun of something, it needs to be fairly well known or the joke will misfire. Note the ngram searcher is looking only at books not at online articles.

    [–]gamblekat 10 points11 points  (0 children)

    I went to a furry con back in the mid 90s that had a panel on the history of the fandom, where a number of the early figures talked about their experiences in the early years. At that point most people encountered the fandom through friends, and friends of friends, so there was really very few people who had a strong idea of where it came from or who started it. My impression was that it largely started as an offshoot of existing sci-fi con culture and then spread through the early Internet once that began to take off in the early 90s. At that point it was a bit of a joke that virtually everyone in furry was a college student from SoCal in some kind of STEM program.

    [–]gattsuru 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    /u/commiespaceinvader has already gotten into the history of the broader fandom, but it's worth noting that this is distinct from the group who actually fursuit. Even a significant portion of convention-going furries do not fursuit or cosplay, and many furries don't go to conventions.

    While the fiction and drawing sides of the fandom came about through interactions in the cartooning, science fiction/fantasy, and comics world, the costuming side came about through costuming, sports mascots, and the (then fairly new) Ren Faire world, and came together a little latter than Gallacci. You can easily find organizations where individual members dressed as animals a long time before that, sometimes very long before, but that's probably not what you're focused on.

    If you go searching, most archivists will point to Robert Hill's "Hilda the Bambioid/Haku Hasin" (often as "Hilda the Bamboid", due to confusion with early MUCK terms) as the first fursuit at a furry convention. However, program notes for the very ConFurence Zero he showed that off at included a "Furry Costuming" discussion block, and there's a few photos of an unnamed and unknown bobcat-style suit that was around as well, along with a handful of records of costumes in furry room meetings before that. And there are contemporaneous photographs of costumers at normal science fiction and fantasy conventions in the late 80s wearing things we'd probably consider partial (1989) fursuits by today's definition. Kitt Foxx had anthro themed science fiction costumes going back to 1981, and still makes fursuits today.

    This boomed shortly thereafter due to a couple major underlying movements. The progression of the internet is the more obvious one: by 1993, there were enough people interested and regularly communicating on the topic that Robert King put together a Fursuit Mailing List (in one of the first public records of the term). Usenet groups like alt.fan.furry and, later, alt.lifestyle.furry likewise were able to spread information, techniques, and tools around to an extent that wasn't previously viable. Combined with Eternal September and increasing norms to not let people on the internet know your name, and it quickly got to the point where very few people knew who was in a given suit; the development of MUD/MUCKs brought a number of roleplayers in.

    The less well-known aspect was the crossover from professionals, best exemplified by Ed Kline. Early suits weren't just made by hobbyists, but they also involved hobbyists working from very near first principles. Cartoon animal sports mascots existed (though only dating back to the mid-70s) but were limited in design, while theme park mascots were very near trade secrets. Kline, among others, brought techniques and tools from movie props and costume design. Similarly, Shawn Keller popularized a carved styrofoam technique for heads that remains the mainstay on cartoony suits. This drastically reduced how intimidating entry to the field looked, and it took off quickly not long after, both with increasing numbers of professional-looking suiters at conventions, as well as greater emphasis on the topic at conventions.

    Albany Anthrocon 97/98 is probably the most useful dividing point for non-furries, by developing a tradition of a public fursuit parade, and bringing it to the public awareness as a result. That solidified the standard furry style and a lot of the norms of behavior for suiting.

    (Furry Fandom Conventions 1989-2015, Fred Patten;Furry Nation, Joe Strike)

    [–][deleted]  (2 children)

      [–]AncientHistoryModerator | Pulp Studies | H. P. Lovecraft[M] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

      That is a contemporary meme which is outside of our 20-year rule on this subreddit.