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The Allowances of Art
Nov. 2nd, 2019 03:41 pmThere's a topic of conversation that has been rolling around my social media feeds, and which is extremely frustrating to me in ways that I have trouble articulating.
There's this persistent notion that you "shouldn't" write about characters with identities you don't share, because you "can't" understand the nuances of their lives. Sometimes, people will say you should only write about such characters if you've done extremely detailed amounts of research, and others will say it is utterly forbidden.
This is endlessly frustrating to me.
From the perspective of almost any of my myriad marginalizations, it puts people like me in a situation where no one will write for or about us except for ourselves. From the perspective of the marginalizations I don't share it, it leaves me without the ability to use my art as a way of expressing alliance and furthering equality. From the perspective of a writer, it just rings of the same censorship people are always trying to put on fiction, this time with a slightly different set of vocabulary.
I want to be able to read about, say, mixed race intersex people, without having to be the one who writes those stories for myself.
Basically, white/cis/hetero/men/whatever get the opportunity to be the audience. The rest of us are expected to be the creators. And we are expected to create only in extremely restrictive, and even separatist fashions.
I have a hard time expressing why, exactly, this line of argument is so frustrating to me. It seems more like a conflux of little things than any one major flaw.
But it's gettign more prominent again, and it's making me absolutely livid.
Basically, let straight white men write about queer poc so that queer poc like myself can take a goddamn break.
That's not mutually exclusive to "celebrate the art of marginalized people" either. But this expectation that marginalized people do all the hard parts...
Well.
It smacks of, "if you don't like white men being the protagonists of games, go make your own game," in progressive paint.
There's this persistent notion that you "shouldn't" write about characters with identities you don't share, because you "can't" understand the nuances of their lives. Sometimes, people will say you should only write about such characters if you've done extremely detailed amounts of research, and others will say it is utterly forbidden.
This is endlessly frustrating to me.
From the perspective of almost any of my myriad marginalizations, it puts people like me in a situation where no one will write for or about us except for ourselves. From the perspective of the marginalizations I don't share it, it leaves me without the ability to use my art as a way of expressing alliance and furthering equality. From the perspective of a writer, it just rings of the same censorship people are always trying to put on fiction, this time with a slightly different set of vocabulary.
I want to be able to read about, say, mixed race intersex people, without having to be the one who writes those stories for myself.
Basically, white/cis/hetero/men/whatever get the opportunity to be the audience. The rest of us are expected to be the creators. And we are expected to create only in extremely restrictive, and even separatist fashions.
I have a hard time expressing why, exactly, this line of argument is so frustrating to me. It seems more like a conflux of little things than any one major flaw.
But it's gettign more prominent again, and it's making me absolutely livid.
Basically, let straight white men write about queer poc so that queer poc like myself can take a goddamn break.
That's not mutually exclusive to "celebrate the art of marginalized people" either. But this expectation that marginalized people do all the hard parts...
Well.
It smacks of, "if you don't like white men being the protagonists of games, go make your own game," in progressive paint.
