The Allowances of Art

[zenolalia]

There'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.

Comments

[22degreehalo]

Yeah. I can't speak to any specifics of what you're talking about, but I'd had similar experiences of understanding myself through other kinds of people.

Ever since I first discovered it when I was around 11, I've written and read a lot of slash fanfiction. As a teenager this lead to my discovery of many parts of the LGBT+ community, where I also tried to contribute as actively as I could, and which felt like the most comfortable place for me. As I identified as bi (and cis), that all seemed to make perfect sense.

But as time went on, it became more and more clear that I was actually on the asexual spectrum. I was scared of that for a lot of reasons, so it took a lonnnng time to admit that I wasn't just full bi. And then, even worse, I came to realise that I might actually be aro/ace. I HATED the idea of this with every fiber of my being. It felt so lonely and awful and like I was destined to be miserable and alone forever (not to mention that I was finding it really hard to find work at the time and was super scared how I'd manage to support myself without a partner).

Unfortunately, I had that revelation riiight around the beginning of the ace discourse. Which also coincided with the rise of antis and fujoshi discourse.

Suddenly I was second guessing everything. Why was I spending all my time thinking and writing about gay/bi men when I wasn't either? Did that actually make me a terrible appropriative fetishising straight piece of shit?

To some extent, I still don't know exactly why I tend to be drawn to those stories. (Partly, I think it really is just lack of complex, interesting f/f relationships that aren't already canon.) But the fact is, I could relate to a lot of it. The feeling of not fitting in with the majority? Of knowing that people around you want you to do something, but you can't? That they specifically want you to get into a nice pretty heterosexual family that will make them look good to the neighbours? Of trying to make yourself feel something and failing? Of wondering if you're even capable of romantic love or attraction? all of these were my experiences.

But writing about gay/bi people is easier, because it didn't hit quite so close to home. I could still imagine a happy ending that was counter mainstream but didn't feel like giving up. I could still imagine someone else understanding and caring about me above everyone else. For me, it was still too hard to see that when it came to being ace and aro.

As for why it was usually men? Partly the same deal - I know I'm supposed to relate to women, so it's especially jarring when I can't. Reading about cis women having sex in particular made me more and more self-conscious about my own asexuality.

Not to mention that I have also realised over time that I likely have ADHD inattentive, and while I think I'm probably not autistic, I definitely relate to those experiences a lot. And there's a LOT to that a big part is how it makes wlw spaces not comfortable for me: part of the reason I don't especially relate to women is that most women are neurotypical! But the current feminist politics on tumblr leans heavily into 'women are all BEST FRIENDS who HAVE EACH OTHER'S BACKS, don't be #notliketheothergirls, men are all bad because they never do chores and aren't emotionally available' (neither of which I'm great at either? :/) so... wlw spaces are sometimes rly uncomfortable to me right now because I don't feel that innate female bonding and attraction and then feel guilty and feminist because of it.

AND: part of ADHD for me is that I'm just... super self-conscious 24/7 around other people. I'm constantly trying to stamp down on my weird traits and just be Normal, even though ordinary conversation and ways of hanging out are really tiring and difficult for me. But I honestly have never seen this properly expressed in fiction? Usually neurodivergent characters are portrayed as not caring if they look or act weird, and female neurodivergent characters are just rare altogether. Instead, I found these feelings were way better depicted in stories about people feeling ashamed of their own queerness, and in stories about men dealing with toxic masculinity and finding it hard to express themselves.

So tl;dr, growing up I had these feelings of difference but found a way to deal with them in a way that was healthy and productive - I actually have helped out with several different LGBT+ activist things! But this whole idea that you're only supposed to write about people like yourself really fucked me up, because that wasn't what I needed at the time, and in fact might well only hurt me more than anything. But as usual tumblr decided that rhetoric is the only thing that matters, not real-world consequences, and you're only entitled to do something that goes beyond that extremely narrow view of acceptable behaviour as long as you can write up three full essays of intricately detailed and analysed information as to why, yes, you do actually Need it. :/

[zenolalia]

I'm still working my way through the rest of this discussion so I don't have much to actually say in response to your points here (other than, thank you for articulating them!), but I do want to point you to this fic I wrote a few years ago, which is specifically about how two neurodivergent characters are perceived by the people around them, including by a third ND character--a young woman who is highly concerned with assimilating to normative society, and who offers the main two advice on how better to do so. It's short, and barely a drop in the bucket, but as you mentioned an absence of ND characters who are aware of their divergence from the norm and care about it, I thought it might be worth offering.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/4785884