![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What You Did
Mar. 5th, 2009 01:30 pmHow best to address any of this, re “RaceFail ‘09”? Best would, inevitably, be to not address it at all—but that would frankly be out of fear, given the way my stomach twists whenever I click on yet another related link. The ever-increasing level of polarization between perceived oppressors and the perceived oppressed, between creators and consumers, between writers and fans, is depressing in the extreme—particularly so because everyone on either side shares aspects of all those qualities/job descriptions—and to have gone from commentary and analysis to banning, shunning and outing so quickly and viciously is also a real testimony to the way that the Internet can hyper-metastasize any form of tribalism, in all possible directions.
I was thinking the other day (as I do) about the concept of “soul-murder”, that Talented Mister Ripley spasmic urge to annihilate another human being for infringing on our privilege or deconstructing the identity we’ve set up for ourselves, the things and habits we define ourselves through. In a lot of ways, fannishness is about the self-created “right” to choose our own families, extended groups of people we may not even “know” in person, but often somehow find ourselves willing to defend to the virtual death against an encroaching sea of antithetical opinion. It’s about finding “safe space”, and keeping that space “safe” at the cost of hurt feelings, hurt pride—but knowing when not to let it all spill over in RL, where actions have consequences far beyond the passing sting of someone talking what you perceive to be shit about you/yours/the stuff you like.
Still, to paraphrase that dude on YouTube, when the topic at hand is so closely related to What You Are, it’s obviously damn hard to concentrate on What [Someone Else] Did, to the exclusion of all else…and I get that. But that goes vice versa, BTW. Very much so.
I’m white. I have a vagina, I got married, got pregnant, chose to have a child. These are things I can’t change about myself—and, frankly, wouldn’t want to. When you assume I have “white privilege”, I can’t argue that; when you assume I have “class privilege” because I went to university and never went hungry except when I allowed myself to, I can’t fault you on that, either. If there really is such a thing as “Mommy privilege”, ie being seen as a “real” woman because I bred, then I suppose I have that; yes, I come in a perceived pair with a guy, so my straight marriage gives me “straight privilege”, too. All this and all that.
If I sound dismissive of my great good luck in fitting into each of the above categories, that would be because not only has it never been any different for me, it never will be. So I’m not going to even begin to try and pretend otherwise, because I have no control over that. What I DO have some control over—and do, therefore, try not to do—is making the mistake of assuming I know a damn thing about any of you, beyond what you choose to tell me about yourselves. And that goes double for what I think I can “figure out” about you by reading what you’ve written, particularly when what you’ve written is fiction.
Man, I won’t lie: I write about the stuff that I write about because A) it arouses me, sometimes literally, and B) it’s not “me”. I like to mess with the default, be it a given source material’s, or my own. If I really love something, I like to break it down for parts and play around with it ‘til I figure out what made me love it so much in the first place, and what of that I can use as grit to grow a fresh new pearl of my own. Sometimes the origins are pretty obvious, even when I’m done—and believe me, all you gay dudes out there are perfectly free to tell me how little you like my fetishization of the “other” when it comes to a sexuality you have to live inside, while I just get to visit there and play around, then go back to my safe straight reality (in which I could very easily potentially get raped for being female, shot for seeming to have money, have my kid stolen, used as a sex-toy and buried alive—because guess what, no one is safe, ever. EVER)…
But the idea that any author should only ever be allowed to write from their own point of view—God, that’s not simply depressing. It’s inhuman.
And the reason I say that last part is that I truly believe that without the ability to even vaguely relate to another person’s reality, we will be screwing each other over and killing each other until Kingdom Come. Which we’ll probably be doing anyways, but—what keeps us from doing it every damn day is that ability to mess with the default. And anything that makes you, personally, too uncomfortable to risk doing that diminishes our ability to do it, as a species. That’s what I believe.
Now, I'm sure my argument comes across as specious and personalized, privileged, whatever, but I'm sure not saying any of it because I want you to be “nice” to me, or “my friends” (who, by the way, are not my friends, just because we’re all white, speculative authors who happen to have been published). I don’t consider myself “nice”, particularly. I’ll own whatever I do or say; I’ll own what I’m doing now. However, while I absolutely applaud setting up your own press, educating people, trying to cultivate the next Octavia Butler, etc., I don’t see the point at all in boycotting writers, books or publishing houses, let alone acting as though a whole genre is out to put you “in your place”, or every published speculative writer is all in this together, guilty by association as though we were one huge hive-mind—are you kidding me? Is there any way you can’t hear how that sounds?
Amended to add: Okay, how about this: "The stupid, it burns." "Way to build a fail boat and ride the fail ocean wearing a fail bikini." "OH GOD, sit down and SHUT UP." Have you ever had these things said to you, just for stating your views? Making a case? Saying anything, on any subject, because whatever you say will by DEFINITION be wrong, no matter what? Did you like it? Did it make you want to hear them again? Or just wait for an opportunity to say them to somebody else?
Like the guy in the mask who blows up big public buildings, I know I have: Each and every part of that paragraph, right up to and including the end. Which made me neither special nor unique...just human. And wrong.
And now, I suppose, I’ve gone and made it “all about me”, like every other privileged white author out there. But again—you know?—
—I really don’t see how any opinion anyone has/states, about anything, can ever be anything else.
I was thinking the other day (as I do) about the concept of “soul-murder”, that Talented Mister Ripley spasmic urge to annihilate another human being for infringing on our privilege or deconstructing the identity we’ve set up for ourselves, the things and habits we define ourselves through. In a lot of ways, fannishness is about the self-created “right” to choose our own families, extended groups of people we may not even “know” in person, but often somehow find ourselves willing to defend to the virtual death against an encroaching sea of antithetical opinion. It’s about finding “safe space”, and keeping that space “safe” at the cost of hurt feelings, hurt pride—but knowing when not to let it all spill over in RL, where actions have consequences far beyond the passing sting of someone talking what you perceive to be shit about you/yours/the stuff you like.
Still, to paraphrase that dude on YouTube, when the topic at hand is so closely related to What You Are, it’s obviously damn hard to concentrate on What [Someone Else] Did, to the exclusion of all else…and I get that. But that goes vice versa, BTW. Very much so.
I’m white. I have a vagina, I got married, got pregnant, chose to have a child. These are things I can’t change about myself—and, frankly, wouldn’t want to. When you assume I have “white privilege”, I can’t argue that; when you assume I have “class privilege” because I went to university and never went hungry except when I allowed myself to, I can’t fault you on that, either. If there really is such a thing as “Mommy privilege”, ie being seen as a “real” woman because I bred, then I suppose I have that; yes, I come in a perceived pair with a guy, so my straight marriage gives me “straight privilege”, too. All this and all that.
If I sound dismissive of my great good luck in fitting into each of the above categories, that would be because not only has it never been any different for me, it never will be. So I’m not going to even begin to try and pretend otherwise, because I have no control over that. What I DO have some control over—and do, therefore, try not to do—is making the mistake of assuming I know a damn thing about any of you, beyond what you choose to tell me about yourselves. And that goes double for what I think I can “figure out” about you by reading what you’ve written, particularly when what you’ve written is fiction.
Man, I won’t lie: I write about the stuff that I write about because A) it arouses me, sometimes literally, and B) it’s not “me”. I like to mess with the default, be it a given source material’s, or my own. If I really love something, I like to break it down for parts and play around with it ‘til I figure out what made me love it so much in the first place, and what of that I can use as grit to grow a fresh new pearl of my own. Sometimes the origins are pretty obvious, even when I’m done—and believe me, all you gay dudes out there are perfectly free to tell me how little you like my fetishization of the “other” when it comes to a sexuality you have to live inside, while I just get to visit there and play around, then go back to my safe straight reality (in which I could very easily potentially get raped for being female, shot for seeming to have money, have my kid stolen, used as a sex-toy and buried alive—because guess what, no one is safe, ever. EVER)…
But the idea that any author should only ever be allowed to write from their own point of view—God, that’s not simply depressing. It’s inhuman.
And the reason I say that last part is that I truly believe that without the ability to even vaguely relate to another person’s reality, we will be screwing each other over and killing each other until Kingdom Come. Which we’ll probably be doing anyways, but—what keeps us from doing it every damn day is that ability to mess with the default. And anything that makes you, personally, too uncomfortable to risk doing that diminishes our ability to do it, as a species. That’s what I believe.
Now, I'm sure my argument comes across as specious and personalized, privileged, whatever, but I'm sure not saying any of it because I want you to be “nice” to me, or “my friends” (who, by the way, are not my friends, just because we’re all white, speculative authors who happen to have been published). I don’t consider myself “nice”, particularly. I’ll own whatever I do or say; I’ll own what I’m doing now. However, while I absolutely applaud setting up your own press, educating people, trying to cultivate the next Octavia Butler, etc., I don’t see the point at all in boycotting writers, books or publishing houses, let alone acting as though a whole genre is out to put you “in your place”, or every published speculative writer is all in this together, guilty by association as though we were one huge hive-mind—are you kidding me? Is there any way you can’t hear how that sounds?
Amended to add: Okay, how about this: "The stupid, it burns." "Way to build a fail boat and ride the fail ocean wearing a fail bikini." "OH GOD, sit down and SHUT UP." Have you ever had these things said to you, just for stating your views? Making a case? Saying anything, on any subject, because whatever you say will by DEFINITION be wrong, no matter what? Did you like it? Did it make you want to hear them again? Or just wait for an opportunity to say them to somebody else?
Like the guy in the mask who blows up big public buildings, I know I have: Each and every part of that paragraph, right up to and including the end. Which made me neither special nor unique...just human. And wrong.
And now, I suppose, I’ve gone and made it “all about me”, like every other privileged white author out there. But again—you know?—
—I really don’t see how any opinion anyone has/states, about anything, can ever be anything else.
