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]

Part of the problem (part of MY problem with this, anyway) might be that it insinuates that the experiences of marginalized people are SO different and foreign from the white/straight/male/etc default that you can't possibly grasp what it's like unless you are from that group. Like, way to make me feel like some sort of museum display or exotic zoo animal?

And ultimately... the sort of person who thinks, say, that trans people are sexual predators, isn't going to listen to this line of thought and will keep writing abusive trans people. But cis people who WANT to do the right will, and ergo won't write (or will write and won't share) for fear of being cancelled. So you end up with two types of art about trans people: by trans people (which we both know isn't likely to go mainstream) and shit stuff by bigoted authors (which will sell great and make people think we're all rapists waiting to happen).

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Being engaged with a kind of marginalization which mirrors one's own can be extremely cathartic and educational, as well. It's one of the reasons why some people prefer writing/engaging with fantasy than realistic works. If understanding real world fascism through the lens of Harry Potter fascism is what it takes for somebody to grapple with the horrors of current politics without falling into debilitating grief, then so be it. It's why some trans or neurodivergent folks might resonate strongly with fictional types of non-humanism in ways which aren't actually self-dehumanizing; sometimes you want to be non-binary in peace without thinking about how transness is constructed and oppressed in society, and instead you ant to explore your own gender through the lens of a fictional society of dragons where there isn't that looming binary, or you want to consider your own thought processes as being structured mechanically without the "haha, you're a freak" social weight attacked to it. Sometimes it actually helps us critically engage with weighty and personal experiences when we allow that distance or that veil of allegory.

When it comes to understanding yourself through the context of understanding others, well. There's plenty that could be said about realizing how fucked up your parents were by gaining experience of what somebody's life with good parents looks like, or somebody with body dysmorphia finding solidarity with somebody with gender dysphoria, or even a transmasculine person reading about transfeminine-based queerness as a way to get to know their own feelings about transness without being swallowed by dysphoria and shame.

However a really important experience for me was when I took Latinx Studies. It turns out that a lot of Latinx-American racial theory and narratives... closely resemble East Asian-American racial theory and narratives. And while I have all kinds of shame and hatred and bitterness and regret surrounding my culture and my heritage and my upbringing, that weight didn't carry over into learning about other peoples' experiences being Latinx. So I actually learned things about the politics of immigration and assimilation and stuff... without my trauma brain screaming "NONONONONONO!" and shutting everything out. And yeah, in some way you could say that I used another culture I didn't belong to in order to make things about me (in my own head!). However I don't see how that makes me different from any other non-Latinx student in the class. And, in fact, there were very few people in the class of recent immigrant generational status, which essentially meant that when it came to lessons relating to first- and second-generation immigration experiences versus third+ generation experiences for Latinx folks in the US, it meant that I had more firsthand insights to share about cultural disjoints and assimilationist politics than many of the actually-Latinx-but-third-generation-and-beyond folks who were raised to be much more competent of hegemonic American culture than I was. Despite how interested I am in the social sciences, I always steered clear of anything to do with East Asia or East Asian-Americanism or even family systems because it hit too close to home. But because I started my theoretical basis of immigration and non-black/white racial politics and culture-passed-down-through-generations with Latinx Studies instead of Asian American Studies, I actually know useful things about immigration and racial politics and generational culture. I have a framework in which to understand my dad telling me that as an American, I oppress him, and I have a more profound understanding of the politics of the US-Mexican border than most average non-Latinx folks I know. I makes me better for me and it makes me better at being a respectful ally/activist, because wow, that whole "putting yourself in other peoples' shoes" isn't all that bad of a thing when it comes to building connections and inspiring people to treat each other like fellow humans!

Also learning about queer Chinese identity (as in what queer people are doing in China, not Chinese-American queer identity) in my transnational queer studies class taught me a lot about my own culture (which was obviously never taught to me because why would my parents know about or teach me about queerness??) and gave me a lot of resources to articulate just how the constructions of male and female really are different between the American culture that I know and the non-American culture I was formatively raised in. And some dipshit tumblr activist would tell me "oh, but that's okay, because you are queer and Chinese, so that's your heritage and it's not appropriation or fetishization or disrespectful!" Except that's ridiculously wrong, because according to Chinese people born Chinese, I'm not one of them. Because it turns out that racial/ethnic politics are culturally bound, too! And the queerness that I bring with me, which is backed in the Western view of transgenderism being distinct from queer sexuality, would also be super out of place and even imperialist within the realm of native Chinese queer culture, in which there's not actually a distinction between what Americans would ostensibly identify as "butch lesbianism" and "transmasculinity." So actually, it would be a really ignorant take to extend the logic of "you shouldn't write outside of the identities you are" and say "but you're the race I say you are (Chinese), which matches the race I say those other people are (Chinese, but in China), and you're queer and they're queer (true, but queerness is constructed in different contexts! in relation to different systems!), so therefore if you wanted to write about being a Chinese trans person (in China), that'd be fine!" Which is exactly what they'd do! And in fact, at a certain point, people who engage in bad identity politics on tumblr tend to think so heavily within the realms of race/class/gender/ability/maybe religion that they forget about how very relevant identities such as immigration status/nationality/body type/language/geographic stability/etc are just as relevant. And because intersectionality and the matrix of identity is all about how literally everything is relevant, it quite actually does make significantly more sense to say "okay, never mind with policing individual-level identity credentials, let's just say we should all strive to be humble and focus more on institutional things and naming patterns on that scale."

[stardust_rifle]

Another thing that pisses me off is that it artificially raises the barriers to entry. If you have to do a fuckton of research before writing about something or you'll get dogpilled, then most people won't do the excruciating amount of research.

Having high barriers to entry won't increase the amount of stories featuring marginalized people, it'll do the opposite.

[leahandillyana]

I partially agree with the sentiment. In America, even well meaning non minority creators tend to completely fail to portray how a character's minority status infuences their being, ending up with characters who appear fully assimilated into mainstream society and not facing any kind of prejudice due to their minority status.