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

[palominocorn]

But why does all historical or modern fiction have to be realistic in the first place? It's important for stories with researched, nuanced depictions of oppression to exist, but like... sometimes I want to read a Regency Era novel about a dashing mixed genderqueer person doing crimes and seducing the king's mistress without also dealing with the fact that life was generally not great for real people in that real time. Suspension of disbelief is a thing you need for fiction, after all.

And the thing is, fans generally expect the heroes of their fiction to be... well... heroic. "He fights crime but he also really, really hates anyone who isn't a straight white Christian" makes it harder to make your (presumably diverse) audience see your protagonist as the good guy. Not impossible, but harder. (And I mean... there WERE white Christians who were friends across racial and religious lines in pre-war Europe and America.)

Personally, I haven't watched Voltron, so I can't say how things were handled. The "don't have fantasy-mixed characters talk to realistically-mixed characters about it" seems like an oversight, but without the context I can't really make the call. What I'm getting that is that you want stories in which the characters' marginalizations are examined and shown to affect them. That's a reasonable thing to want! I like those sorts of stories too. But I don't think they should be ALL the stories, and my experience with fiction - especially with the modern and historical fiction you specifically brought up - is that it's very much a parade of marginalized characters being repeatedly marginalized.

The fact is, we need stories in which queer/disabled/non-white/etc characters are shown as regular people doing interesting things. Again - they shouldn't be ALL the stories. But if every piece of fiction involving trans people involved said trans people being misgendered (which is the reality for us in this world at this time)... I'd never read a damn book or watch a fucking movie ever again. Marginalized people need to see world where they're no longer marginalized for race/gender/etc to relax, and privileged people *also* need to see those world so that they know what to strive for.

And in the end, given a choice between "no mainstream stories about people like me" and "mainstream stories about people like me in which my oppression isn't documented", I'd prefer the latter. I've been alive nearly three decades and have a case of bipolar that's old enough to legally drink in the US - and I have yet to see a character with the same in any piece of media that I did not create myself. By your logic, I will continue not seeing myself in fiction unless someone decides to write a story in which the protagonist deals with both the awfulness of the bipolar itself and the horrible, horrible treatment people like me get from society. Because it sounds like you think that someone taking mood stabilizers twice a day in between saving the world and going on wacky adventures is not good enough.

[leahandillyana]

The series you described at the beginning would be a fantasy. There's only how much you could stretch the suspension of disbelief before it becomes a fantasy. Anyways, I wrote about series that aim to be realistic. Take Doctor Who - a series starring a time travelling alien can have a detective lizard lady and her girlfriend in Victorian era without it being particularly weird, why the hell not?
Anyways, you are focusing on opression. I am focusing on "what makes X minority X minority". Did you know that Batman, Batwoman and Harley Quinn are Jewish, Robin I is Roma, Batgirl I become disabled heroine Oracle, Robin II is mixed enough to reasonably suspect a Chinese asassin was his mother, Batgirl II is a neurodivergent mixed race girl, Robin IV is a working class teen mom, Robin V is mixed race, with Middle Eastern ancestry on both sides? Probably not, because the comics barely aknowledge those aspects in most cases (Batman, Batwoman, Harley Quinn, Robins) or those versions don't appear outside comics (Batgirls). I want stories that focus on the characters' minority status in-depth. And that requires intense research by the creators. I almost never see that in Western stories.
Actually seeing a character taking meds for psychiatric disorders would be great, but with Western fiction the portrayal would most likely be a character saying out of nowhere "By the way, I'm bipolar!" and it's never mentioned again, like Batgirl's roommate being transgender (honestly, she says that out of nowhere and it's never mentioned again, not even background gadgets or trans flag or anything, if you missed that one chapter you will never know).
I believe my position is well explained in an essay I wrote on queer representation in children's media: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18208784/chapters/50177957

[palominocorn]

Historical fiction is fantasy when it doesn't deal with bigotry? You're moving the goalposts so much that I'm not even sure they're still in the same city they started in. Honestly, with your comments on this thread, I'm getting a feeling - and, you know, I could be wrong, but I'm going to say this just in case I'm not - that you've been told by a... very specific part of queer fandom that consuming fiction is a form of social justice. That you should only read/watch stuff that's "pure" enough and that if you don't like something you need a social justice reason for it. And I want to say - that's a horrible belief, and the people who say this are pretty messed up. You can enjoy fiction that's problematic, and you can not enjoy fiction without picking it apart for racism and sexism. (I personally have never been able to get more than twenty pages into The Name of the Wind - not because of any bigotry, because I haven't found any in the first chapter, but because the writing is the literary equivalent of nails on chalkboard for me.)

Guess what: I knew more than half of those (and the other half I didn't because I haven't heard of those characters). And this despite the fact that I have read about three volumes of print comics in my life. I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at, honestly. I never said that I don't want stories that focus on a character's marginalized identities. But - and please do correct me if I'm wrong - the impression I'm getting is that you are saying that you want fewer "oh BTW I'm X, let's go back to our regularly scheduled plot" and more in-depth examination.

And the crux of the matter, that I want you to understand - and why Zeno wrote this post in the first place - is that what you're doing, saying "you must put in this much research and effort into writing marginalized characters" is cutting off the nose to spite the face. It will NOT lead to more or better representation. It will lead to people who want to be good allies making less representation in general. They'll look at the research required - and it's a lot - and say no. They'll stick to straight white men, who are safe. They'll try to do the research and publish and get torn apart: on the one hand by conservative bigots screaming about "PC culture" and on the other by progressives screaming that they did things wrong. And here's the thing: you cannot write any marginalized character without people of that marginalized group saying you did something wrong, because no group is a monoloth. The example that comes to mind is Disney's Princess and the Frog: Tiana was bashed for simultaneously being "too much of a Black stereotype" and "not Black enough". Now, Disney's big and rich, they don't care. But an independent writer who self-publishes? That's the sort of shit that makes people give up writing. I've been participating in various writing groups for a decade and a half. I lost count years ago on the number of people I've seen drop out because they got torn apart for being "problematic".

And the sort of person who doesn't care about making the representation good, like the writers of Split? They. Don't. Care. They will continue writing bigoted stuff and laughing at "snowflake SJWs" who get upset. Your insistence that everyone who wants to write marginalized characters do research will lead to worse representation further saturating the market.

Oh, and you haven't mentioned it so far, but I want to head it off at the pass just in case: "but of course people can write about their own marginalization without putting in so much effort" might seem like a good idea... but it doesn't work. When I write about transness, I get called a cishet by people who don't like the way I go about it. This despite me being very public about my gender (and orientation) everywhere. This despite the fact that many of my avatars have a trans symbol on them.

...you know that, for basically everyone except my spouse, kids, and followers of my various abuse recovery blogs, hearing me say "I'm bipolar" a couple of times and then not knowing any more about it is... exactly what happens? I've had partners and roommates whose entire experience with my various disabilities was zilch beyond a quick heads up. Because I wanted it that way. So if one of them goes out and writes a book with a bipolar character based on me and that quick coming out is all there is in there... I can't exactly blame them.

Okay, I read your essay. Again: I have not watched LoK or SU (I struggle with TV-based media for reasons that aren't relevant here). I want to point out, though, that you're specifically pointing at children's media. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a major network to greenlight children's media that includes explicit queerness or disability? (I'm getting flashbacks to Tinky Winky here - sure, times have supposedly changed since the 90's, but the media is extremely resistant to progress.)

Because here's the thing: the people who ultimately make the decisions about what gets made and what doesn't, in the mainstream? The network execs? They care about one thing: PROFIT. A show of entirely straight white people is a safe bet when it comes to profit. A show in which a few characters are queer/of Color/non-Christian/disabled? Riskier, but they can mitigate that risk by not making a big deal out of it. And here's the funny thing: the more people like you complain "ugh, Legend of Korra was so bad because the queerness was shown all wrong"? The more the execs look at that and think, hmmm, guess queerness is riskier than we thought, better make it more straight.

Let people be imperfect, for fuck's sake. Let people try things out. Someone who tentatively puts a mixed race character into their work and hears "oh, neat, I love that X is mixed" is more likely to put more mixed characters in. And if they get more encouragement, they are more likely to explore that mixedness in later installments, or make a different mixed character in a different work and examine that one's experience with race. But someone who puts a mixed character into their work and gets "ugh, you did the mixed experience all wrong"? Like I said: many of them will just GIVE UP. And I, a mixed person with a complicated relationship to race? Feel more alienated.

[zenolalia]

I certainly think that historical fiction of this sort is "speculative fiction," and "wish fulfillment," but those things do not actually constitute a fantasy.