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Cruel little lies
There's an interesting discussion on cultural appropriation and otherness currently going around the fan and pro-writer blogosphere. SF/fantasy writer Elizabeth Bear wrote a post a couple of days ago on writing the "other" in speculative fiction. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rydra_wong has a good link roundup of the posts and discussions that have resulted. If you read only one of them, the one that I've saved and copied and delicious'd and taken to heart is deepad's I Didn't Dream of Dragons, on cultural appropriation and erasure; I would do a disservice to try to sum up the OP's words in my own, so just -- read it. (And there's also a later post of deepad's that is a response to some of the criticisms that she and others have received.)
One thing that I keep seeing coming up over and over again in these discussions is a wide assortment of variations on this complaint:
"So, all storytellers should shut up because they can never tell everyone's story for them, correctly and exactly as that person would tell it, if they could? And we shouldn't even try, because we'll only Get It Wrong?"
"I'm a white male, and this suggests that I'm not allowed to write anything but white males."
... and so forth.
My knee-jerk reaction is "Right, because it's all about you, buddy; way to derail the conversation. Stuff it and grow up." But I remember that not too long ago, when I first started doing a lot of reading about cultural appropriation, I ended up tying myself up in creativity-stifling knots because of precisely that fallacy. I still go through regular fits of guilt-ridden "Am I doing this right? Should I be writing about this at all? AAAUUUUUGH" (though I seem to mostly manage to keep it to myself or channel it into actual, constructive questions to ask people).
I get the general, maybe unfair impression that most (white) writers who post that sort of comment are afraid not of actually screwing up what they write, but of being unfairly accused of doing so. It's like saying "I can't write about space travel! People will accuse me of knowing nothing about physics!" Bzuh? X does not imply Y, at least not if you do your research and don't write such a rushed hack job that it's blatantly obvious that, yeah, you really don't know anything about physics and can't be bothered to learn ... in which case you kinda deserve to be taken to task for it.
That's a frivolous comparison, though, because it's much less important to get your physics right than to try not to screw up when you're writing about people's lives, people's identities. You're not going to break someone's heart if you misremember the Planck constant. And yet people research the hell out of their physics, and then turn around and half-ass the most fundamental aspects of their cultural research, if they bother to research at all and don't just base their "other" characters on media stereotypes, or leave them out entirely. The bookstore shelves in the SF/fantasy section are groaning under the weight of generic Eurofantasy, and science fiction with all-white main casts and stereotyped, flat, undeveloped, ultimately doomed characters of color. And still you have a lot of white writers complaining that, when it comes to writing characters who aren't like them, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Well ... yeah. We all are. Because we've all got the weight of history on us -- the things that we, as a society, have done over the years, and the stories we've told ourselves to explain what we did. And all of that, all together -- it's heavy. It weighs heavier on some, pressing them down and crushing them flat; on others, it's so deceptively light we can ignore it and ignore people who complain about it. We can pretend it isn't there, waving it aside because it's inconvenient or uncomfortable, but whenever we write anything, that history is there, invisible, pressing down, no matter how much we try to pretend it's not. It influences how we write race (and gender, disability, sexuality); it influences how our readers are going to respond to it. Unfair? Yeah, it really, really is. Wouldn't it be great if nobody had to worry about it? Wouldn't it be awesome if we could make it go away? But it's there, pushing our hands towards certain keys on the keyboard, quietly guiding our minds down well-worn tracks that lead to the same tired old stereotypes and cliches. You can ignore all of that and stay within your comfort zone and only write what makes you comfortable -- and that is a loaded, political choice, too. Everything that we do (when we're writing, or just going about our daily lives) is loaded with meaning; it all takes place within that historical, cultural framework. There's no way to separate it out, no way to write in a cultural vacuum, or to expect your readers not to be towing the same massive barge of historical baggage that you yourself were dragging when you wrote the thing in the first place.
You want to get angry at someone -- don't get mad at the people who are doing the hard and thankless work of pointing out the places where history is still fucking us over. Get angry at the ones who did it to us instead. Get angry at all the atrocities and the genocides and all the nasty little lies that we told ourselves to justify it -- all the many ways that we wove our self-justifications into popular entertainment until we, as a society, created a whole rogues' gallery of cruel caricatures that still spring up on the written page whenever we relax and stop watching out for them.
Maybe if we can get angry enough, we can push back hard enough against the weight of history to give ourselves the breathing room to tell different stories, better ones, until eventually the old narratives are pushed aside as they deserve to be.
rydra_wong has a good link roundup of the posts and discussions that have resulted. If you read only one of them, the one that I've saved and copied and delicious'd and taken to heart is deepad's I Didn't Dream of Dragons, on cultural appropriation and erasure; I would do a disservice to try to sum up the OP's words in my own, so just -- read it. (And there's also a later post of deepad's that is a response to some of the criticisms that she and others have received.)One thing that I keep seeing coming up over and over again in these discussions is a wide assortment of variations on this complaint:
"So, all storytellers should shut up because they can never tell everyone's story for them, correctly and exactly as that person would tell it, if they could? And we shouldn't even try, because we'll only Get It Wrong?"
"I'm a white male, and this suggests that I'm not allowed to write anything but white males."
... and so forth.
My knee-jerk reaction is "Right, because it's all about you, buddy; way to derail the conversation. Stuff it and grow up." But I remember that not too long ago, when I first started doing a lot of reading about cultural appropriation, I ended up tying myself up in creativity-stifling knots because of precisely that fallacy. I still go through regular fits of guilt-ridden "Am I doing this right? Should I be writing about this at all? AAAUUUUUGH" (though I seem to mostly manage to keep it to myself or channel it into actual, constructive questions to ask people).
I get the general, maybe unfair impression that most (white) writers who post that sort of comment are afraid not of actually screwing up what they write, but of being unfairly accused of doing so. It's like saying "I can't write about space travel! People will accuse me of knowing nothing about physics!" Bzuh? X does not imply Y, at least not if you do your research and don't write such a rushed hack job that it's blatantly obvious that, yeah, you really don't know anything about physics and can't be bothered to learn ... in which case you kinda deserve to be taken to task for it.
That's a frivolous comparison, though, because it's much less important to get your physics right than to try not to screw up when you're writing about people's lives, people's identities. You're not going to break someone's heart if you misremember the Planck constant. And yet people research the hell out of their physics, and then turn around and half-ass the most fundamental aspects of their cultural research, if they bother to research at all and don't just base their "other" characters on media stereotypes, or leave them out entirely. The bookstore shelves in the SF/fantasy section are groaning under the weight of generic Eurofantasy, and science fiction with all-white main casts and stereotyped, flat, undeveloped, ultimately doomed characters of color. And still you have a lot of white writers complaining that, when it comes to writing characters who aren't like them, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Well ... yeah. We all are. Because we've all got the weight of history on us -- the things that we, as a society, have done over the years, and the stories we've told ourselves to explain what we did. And all of that, all together -- it's heavy. It weighs heavier on some, pressing them down and crushing them flat; on others, it's so deceptively light we can ignore it and ignore people who complain about it. We can pretend it isn't there, waving it aside because it's inconvenient or uncomfortable, but whenever we write anything, that history is there, invisible, pressing down, no matter how much we try to pretend it's not. It influences how we write race (and gender, disability, sexuality); it influences how our readers are going to respond to it. Unfair? Yeah, it really, really is. Wouldn't it be great if nobody had to worry about it? Wouldn't it be awesome if we could make it go away? But it's there, pushing our hands towards certain keys on the keyboard, quietly guiding our minds down well-worn tracks that lead to the same tired old stereotypes and cliches. You can ignore all of that and stay within your comfort zone and only write what makes you comfortable -- and that is a loaded, political choice, too. Everything that we do (when we're writing, or just going about our daily lives) is loaded with meaning; it all takes place within that historical, cultural framework. There's no way to separate it out, no way to write in a cultural vacuum, or to expect your readers not to be towing the same massive barge of historical baggage that you yourself were dragging when you wrote the thing in the first place.
You want to get angry at someone -- don't get mad at the people who are doing the hard and thankless work of pointing out the places where history is still fucking us over. Get angry at the ones who did it to us instead. Get angry at all the atrocities and the genocides and all the nasty little lies that we told ourselves to justify it -- all the many ways that we wove our self-justifications into popular entertainment until we, as a society, created a whole rogues' gallery of cruel caricatures that still spring up on the written page whenever we relax and stop watching out for them.
Maybe if we can get angry enough, we can push back hard enough against the weight of history to give ourselves the breathing room to tell different stories, better ones, until eventually the old narratives are pushed aside as they deserve to be.
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Ah, but. I'm a German woman writing mainly fan fiction about two men, one American and one Canadian. My audience, judging from the Christmas cards I sent out the year before last, is about half American, half British, with a few people from other countries thrown in. Almost every fandom wank I've seen arise over a story was assuming an American cultural background, most notably the racism wanks and those that devolved into politics.
In other words, large parts of my audience have a vastly different assortment of historical baggage than I do. I can't even talk with some of them without putting both my feet in, because we don't operate under the same assumptions. And it's hard to tell where the hot buttons are, because it's not my culture. Americans have a history of slavery to deal with. We have the holocaust. But, you know, I'm supposed to treat racist issues in a sensitive, reasonable way (and they deserve to be treated like that! I want to treat them like that!). On the other side, people keep calling me a tagging-nazi, blissfully unaware (and apparently not caring much) just what an insult it can be for a German to be called a Nazi. I mean, I know it's a figure of speech that most people from the US and other countries won't think twice about before using it. But that's the problem right there. They write it one way, I read it another.
I don't mean to whine here. Just, people keep telling me that authorial intent doesn't matter, that it's the story itself that counts, and only the story. But how am I supposed to know when people read what I write and when they put in a subtext I never even noticed, because their issues aren't mine?
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Muddying the waters still further, I've also sometimes seen people use cultural differences to throw roadblocks in these discussions -- you're not doing that, absolutely not, but "... it's not a problem in my country [so we shouldn't talk about it]" is definitely a derailment technique that people use.
Which is no help at all in addressing your basic point, I know. The only thing I can think of to say is that the only way we can figure this stuff out is to keep talking about it and trying to learn about each others' cultures; I came into this whole thing with some of the American cultural context, absorbed through cultural osmosis, but not by any means the whole picture -- I've learned a ton by reading posts and talking to people. I didn't even realize how much I didn't know. And I'm sure that my picture of German society is awfully flat and stereotypical and media-based, too.
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Also wanted to say I'm a fan of yours, generally, on a very random note, lol.
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By doing research. The same kind of research that goes into writing fic. I see fans asking detailed questions about what kind of snacks Rodney might eat. Or spending hours reading up on American sports. You can spend some time getting the basics.
http://delicious.com/starkeymonster/forcluelesswhitepeople is my list of some basic links to toss at people during discussions of race. If you read a couple of those posts, you would have enough of a sense of what is going on to get the basic gist of what is going on. I'd also say the idea that you will never make a mistake in a discussion about race, is an example of privilege, and a way to avoid having discussions about difficult issues. No one is saying you must be right. People are saying you must be thoughtful.
Also, no one is stopping you from saying to people "Hey. It's a big honking deal to Call a German a Nazi. Pls stop."
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... but then by focusing on that, maybe I'm allowing myself to be deflected from the main issue. In short, really, I wanted to say very good post, and thanks for highlighting this discussion.
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It bothers me to a point that this kind of discussion isn't seen more widely
I wish it was. I never really saw much of this at all before I came to LJ fandom -- I mean, it's not that these conversations weren't going on somewhere; obviously they have been for many years, but it was well outside my radar, and I had quite a lot of friends that I would otherwise think of as very socially active, socially aware (and not by any means all white, either). But these conversations just didn't happen ... still don't happen, usually, with people I know in RL. I don't think it's just Australia, though I do think that different countries probably approach the whole assimilation/erasure thing somewhat differently.
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I don't know that I agree with all of it - for one, I'm not sure I ascribe as much relevance or importance to fiction as you do; I don't know if fiction could turn the tide, I don't even know if it could bail out a bucket in the real world. As a fan and as a creator I want to think that fiction has impact, can be a hand on the cultural millstone - but I don't know if it does. People still carry prejudices when they personally know people who fit into a category they're prejudiced against - people with gay friends are still be anti-gay-marriage - so if personal experience is not enough to overcome these social strictures, what good can a little fiction do?
Then, there's always the problem of being labeled a "special interest" writer; of writing with such a focus that your work is not considered to have wider relevance; of abandoning your comfort zone and going so far into your potential audience's uncomfortable zone that almost no one is willing to walk with you.
There's also the question of which issue - because I don't know if it's possible for a single work of fiction, or a single author, to address everything that's amiss in society; when focusing on one problem you lose track of another. Gender is more my hot-button issue than race politics these days, and while that doesn't mean I intend to ignore these issues, I'm likely going to be putting more effort in gender explorations than cultural diversity.
Which doesn't mean I'm exempting myself from the right to be called out for my multicultural screwups by any means; I'd fully expect to be. None of these arguments are an excuse for ignoring the very real problems of stereotypes and prejudices (conscious and unconscious) so deeply entrenched in our society, and I think it's very important to have dialogues about them, to address them.
I guess all I'm saying is that god, this is a difficult issue!
And you wrote it beautifully, even if I don't entirely agree.
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People still carry prejudices when they personally know people who fit into a category they're prejudiced against - people with gay friends are still be anti-gay-marriage - so if personal experience is not enough to overcome these social strictures, what good can a little fiction do?
But if you think about it from a certain perspective, basically what you're saying is, "let's think about this issue and its effect solely in terms of its effect on clueless white people, and since it won't have the right effect on clueless white people, it's not worth doing."
But the conversation that's going on right now is not about how these stories affect *white people*.
It's like saying "why should I write anything but offensive, flat stereotypes of women?" You should write women as people not because of any potential effect on men, but because *women deserve better*. Women deserve to be able to pick up a book without wondering "is this book going to hurt me because the woman is only there for the exploitative rape scene, or to be handed over to the hero as a reward for his hard work, or to go crazy and tragically die alone because as we all know, women go nuts if they aren't fulfilled by a husband and babies?"
Maybe the point isn't "can this book save the world," but "is this book going to hurt people?" And if it is, then maybe it's not unreasonable to ask the author not to hurt people by misrepresenting them, lying about them, stereotyping them.
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It's really my fault if that doesn't come through in the above post. I'm trying to get the focus off me and my White!Girl!Angst! and onto doing things, making stuff, but I think I'm still flailing a bit in my attempts to do that.
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And sometimes you risk you being taken the wrong way even knowing that your output is problematic. For example when I drew my computer icon (the one with the voodoo creature waving a dead chicken over the computer I used here) I was worried about it being taken as racist, which it is in a sense, since the saying itself that's common in computing contexts relies on this widespread media misrepresentation and stereotyping of voodoo. So when I made that GIP I mentioned that I'm aware that this motif is problematic, that I don't mean it as offense to real voodoo religious practices, just as a play on the media trope, the cliche and the saying. But of course it can also be seen as perpetuating these very things. I just found the image still funny enough to risk offending and having its racism pointed out to me.
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It's perhaps that certain people don't say, "Hey, you've been unintentionally racist/sexist/whatnot here, because the way I read it is..."
They say, "You offended me, you sexist/racist/whatnot bitch! What kind of horrible person writes..."
Not everyone, not even by a long shot. But the loudest ones, and I for one am more than willing to admit I don't have what it takes to deal with that kind of thing.
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Yeah, exactly! There's really no way you can possibly avoid screwing up; I mean, of course you can and should try not to, but we've all got so much crap embedded in our subconscious that it's inevitably going to come out in one way or another eventually, so you deal with it when it happens, and then try to do better next time.
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But, yes, you've presented some very interesting ideas. I just got into writing fanfic a little over a year ago, and being more involved in fandom in general, and I started to see these things. By "things" I mean, that there was even an issue over portraying characters of color with accuracy, or even just the writer being sensitive to cultural histories and whatnot. It's all very eye-opening.
I think it's good that people are have concerns about it, about getting things "right" even though they won't a lot of the time. I guess my cultural context is as a female living in the Southern United States. And, oh yeah, I happen to be black too, but it doesn't really factor a lot into how I view things. For example, am I automatically going to be sensitive about things having to do with slavery? Not so much. I think it's more of concern to me that other people might take offense because I'm not offending over such things, but then, I just feel like people take issue over things just because...
Not sure if that's making any sense. Anyway, in the Stargate fandom, I think there's the concern of getting characters like Teyla, Ronon and Teal'c right, but it's weird, because on the show, they're not thought of in the context of race as we know it. Rather, they're aliens. The thing I do notice and take issue with is when a writer refers to the characters skin color, pointing it out just for the sake of it when it seems to have no relevance at that point in the story.
One wonders if it would be an issue if the reader knew the writer was a person of color. Like, is a white person offended when I refer to a white character's skin being pale or whatever? Am I insensitive if in my writing I refer to someone's fair skin as being a desirable or attractive trait, if it fits the context of my story? No need for the reader to get in a huff unnecessarily, right? Conversely, is it only ok for a person of color to be allowed to write such a thing? Of course not.
I go on the assumption that my readers are mostly white Americans, and quite a few Europeans. Most of my fic is Ronon/Keller, and so far, no ones like, "OMG, you so didn't portray Jennifer true to her culture..." Ok, that's kind of a ridiculous example. My point is that, I got to a point in one of my stories where Jen goes back to her hometown and Ronon meets her family, and my biggest concern was getting the details of Chippewa Falls right. I've also discussed how, since Ronon's on earth now, I could explore the possibility of his race, or how it's perceived, playing a role in the story. While the Pegasus Galaxy seemed pretty colorblind, I didn't think it was realistic to make that stretch and apply to the people of earth...
So, writing about it again now helps to strengthen my resolve to go ahead and put in my story. Sorry for the rambling, but, this post is meant to inspire something like this, no? :)
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And I can relate to what you say about not getting offended, because I'm that way about gender issues a lot -- it's not, in general, a big deal for me; I do think about it, and some things do bother me, but in general I don't feel the same upset that other women seem to get about a lot of things. On the one hand, I feel guilty about it; on the other, I feel a little resentful that others of my own gender expect me to get upset at certain things just because I'm a woman. And sometimes I feel resentful because the more people point it out, the more I notice it, and I liked not noticing it and being able to enjoy some of the shows and tropes that I no longer enjoy... I know it's selfish, but I do feel that way sometimes.
Anyway, in the Stargate fandom, I think there's the concern of getting characters like Teyla, Ronon and Teal'c right, but it's weird, because on the show, they're not thought of in the context of race as we know it. Rather, they're aliens. The thing I do notice and take issue with is when a writer refers to the characters skin color, pointing it out just for the sake of it when it seems to have no relevance at that point in the story.
Yeah, I know what you mean about fan writers gratuitously pointing out the race of the characters (well, the actors portraying them). It makes me twitch. And of course, it's a problem because while it's true that they're aliens on the show, the actors are still PoC, and we're writing these stories in our own cultural context, and fanfic writers obviously have trouble getting past that sometimes. Also, as you pointed out, Earth humans would still react to them as PoC. (You should write that Ronon story! I've run across a couple SG1 stories in which Teal'c runs afoul of Tauri prejudice, but I don't think I've encountered anything like that in SGA.)
All in all, I don't think I've noticed SGA writers sitting around worrying about getting Ronon, Teyla and Teal'c right, so much as they just don't write them much at all, for whatever reason. (Subconscious racism? Difficulty empathizing? Lack of screen time for the characters?) I honestly do think that's changing a little bit, however, since I got into the fandom at the end of season two -- especially on the gen side of the fandom; I think it helps that the show focused more on "Team" in later seasons, and both Teyla and Ronon getting love interests and plotlines didn't hurt. Maybe it's just selective perception, but it seems to me that there's about as much "team" gen fic (with roles for all of the characters), or Teyla and John fic, or John and Ronon fic, as there is John and Rodney gen fic anymore. I was pleasantly surprised when I ran the genficathon last spring; I had specifically set up the rules to encourage a variety of different characters and character combinations, but I was still braced for a deluge of John and Rodney fic that didn't materialize -- people wrote about a nicely varied range of characters, with teamfic and the Ronon-Rodney friendship being particularly well represented. I do love John and Rodney, but I'm very happy to see the fandom recognize that they're not the only characters on the show!
On the other hand, I was really astonished when I discovered that the big moresome pairing in SG1 fandom isn't OT4, like it is in SGA, but OT3 -- Sam/Daniel/Jack. Not to denigrate fans of that pairing, of course ... but Teal'c needs love too! *waves Teal'c fan flag*
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Okay, this is all pre-coffee and on an overload of 14th century Mongol history written by a Jewish convert to Islam for the fourth-generation Mongol ruler in a Persian court. ;-) I'll be quiet now and go read some moe.
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I don't really read
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I think you just put into words what has been causing my brain to explode since I started reading these posts. I love the post by
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In two hours the United States swears in President Obama, people are practically dancing in the streets, and Live Journal Fandom is on Round 5 million of "The EEE-VIL white people are OPPRESSING the 'Other'"????
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Which makes it all the more inappropriate for you to come in here and try to derail the discussion, doesn't it? The only person talking about evil white oppressors is you, so unless you're willing to actually read and understand the post you're replying to, please leave.
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I get the general, maybe unfair impression that most (white) writers who post that sort of comment are afraid not of actually screwing up what they write, but of being unfairly accused of doing so.
Yes. That. I rambled on that very point a while ago, but your thoughts are much more elaborate, and clearer to boot, of course. *g*)
Unfair? Yeah, it really, really is. Wouldn't it be great if nobody had to worry about it? Wouldn't it be awesome if we could make it go away? But it's there, pushing our hands towards certain keys on the keyboard, quietly guiding our minds down well-worn tracks that lead to the same tired old stereotypes and cliches
Exactly.
all the nasty little lies that we told ourselves to justify it -- all the many ways that we wove our self-justifications into popular entertainment until we, as a society, created a whole rogues' gallery of cruel caricatures that still spring up on the written page whenever we relax and stop watching out for them.
An impressive (if depressing) summation. Thanks for this.