Existence is its own justification.

The ongoing discussion about diversity in fiction is, well, ongoing; that's sort of what ongoing discussions do. (Also, I have been neck-deep in edits for the past month, so the fact that I used "ongoing" three times in the prior sentence feels deliciously naughty.) On the one side, you have people saying "representation matters." On the other side, you have people saying that the urge for diversity in fiction is "selfie culture" (and somehow that's bad?), and that fiction should show us new things, not just be "a representative of the self," and that it's "jarring" when they encounter "minority characters" who don't somehow fit a list of cultural and social ticky-boxes that would justify those characters existing as anything other than straight, white, male. "Cis" doesn't even need to be spoken. There's no way a trans* character could exist for any reason other than to talk about their genitals, and that would be the ultimate in jarring, thanks.

And people wonder why I spend so much time wanting to set the world on fire.

I think it's very telling that the people who say it's wrong to want representation in fiction are almost overwhelmingly white. If I want to read about white people having amazing adventures and doing incredible things, being heroes and villains, simple and complicated, handsome and hideous, loved and hated, all I need to do is pick up a book at random. There is a literally 90% chance that I will get all those things from whatever book I've chosen, especially if I'm going for the "classic literature" of the science fiction/fantasy/horror world. 90%! And that may honestly be low-balling the number! If I were a straight white man, of course I wouldn't see any issue with representation in fiction—I'd be on every page I turned! Even as a straight white woman, I'd be on a lot of pages, even if half those pages would have me either naked or screaming (or both, if I had happened to grab a Gor book). There's no problem with representation here!

But I've never been a straight white man. I've never been a straight white girl, either. I was a bisexual kid with a lot of questions and not very many answers, and it wasn't until I encountered ElfQuest that I actually felt like I saw myself on a page. No, I didn't think I was an elf, although I sort of wished I was, because elves are awesome, but it was Cutter and Leetah and the rest who introduced me to the idea that I could love boys and girls, and not be a bad person. I wasn't indecisive or wicked. I just had a lot of love to give, and my set of criteria for who got it wasn't based on gender.

Let me restate that: I was already bi. I had already been attracted to girls, guys, and a kid in my class who went by "Pup" and refused to be pinned down to either gender (and my second grade teacher never forced Pup to commit either way, which was pretty damn cool of her, given that this was the 1980s). Books did not make me choose my sexuality; books told me a) that my sexuality existed, and b) that it was okay, it was natural, it was not proof that there was something wrong with me. And especially in grade school/middle school, sexuality is invisible in a way that very little else is. No one knew I was queer until I came out. It wasn't even a matter of openly hiding it; sex wasn't on the table, I didn't feel like sharing, I didn't share. No one knew that I was different. Everyone thought that when they read their books about little white girls having adventures, they were reading about me, too.

You know what's not invisible? Race. "I don't see race" is bull. When we read those books about little white kids having amazing adventures, we knew that it was white kids having adventures, because adventures are for white people. At the age of eight, we all understood that our non-white classmates were not represented in the books we read, and very few of us had the sophistication to jump to "this is a lack of representation." Instead, we jumped to "I guess Oz doesn't like black people." Because books shape your view of the world, books remake you in their image, and the books we had said little white kids go on adventures, little kids of any other race are nowhere to be seen.

This is a problem.

So some of us grew up, and for whatever reason—maybe it affected us directly, maybe it affected our friends, maybe it was just pointed out—we started trying to show a world that looked more like the world we actually lived in, where everything wasn't a monoculture. And for some reason, this is being taken as a threat. How dare you want little Asian kids to go on adventures. How dare you want queer teenagers to save the world. How dare you imply that transwomen can be perfectly ordinary, perfectly competent people who just want to not get eaten by the dinosaur that's been eating everyone else. That's selfie culture, that's diversity for the sake of diversity, that's wrong. And after a great deal of consideration, I have come to this conclusion:

If that's what you think, you can go fuck yourself.

That's not politic, and it's not nice, and it may cause a couple of people to go "what a bitch, I'm done," but I don't fucking care. Because I am tired of people needing to thank me for making an effort. I am tired of receiving email that says it was distracting when so-and-so turned out to be gay, or asking why I have Indian characters in three separate series (and the fact that having an Indian woman show up and never speak a line is apparently enough to put Indexing on the same level as Blackout for some people just makes me weep for humanity). I am tired of "oh you feel like you're so open-minded" because I write about gay people, bi people, poly people, people who are exactly like the people that I know. I want to be unremarkable for my casting choices, and only remarkable for my characters being awesome (because let's face it, my characters are awesome).

A lack of representation in fiction leads to a lack of self-esteem, because selfie culture is important: we need to see ourselves, and the people who keep trying to dismiss that as somehow selfish or greedy or narcissistic are the ones who've had a mirror held up to them for so long that they don't even see it anymore. White becomes so generic, so default, that it's not mentioned when describing a character ("blonde hair, blue eyes" vs. "oh, she's black, of course, that's the biggest thing"). Humanity is huge and diverse and amazing, and saying that only a small, approved sliver of it belongs in fiction is a dick move. If diversity is distracting, it's because it's so rare.

We can fix that.

Tags: be excellent to one another, cranky blonde is cranky, writing

etcet

December 6 2013, 18:58:08 UTC 3 years ago

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As an aspirant/hesitant would-be author (and fit white cis het American male), I want to do this well, but I also don't want to step on toes with my ignorance. I'm Scalzi's Lowest Privilege Difficulty Stetting with a really sweet homebrew alternate-clothing skin, and I'm aware that I'm not well-equipped to speak for less-privileged others beyond the realization that I'm ill-equipped to speak for marginalized others.

I have this worry that doing representation badly is worse than not at all, and I'm probably wrong about that, but I don't want to be presumptive or mansplainy... basically, I want to be a good ally in the representation mines, not a self-centered fuckup distracting from (or, worse, adding to) the problems that exist.

Which, as much as anything, is why I write about sapient robots and hummingbird-sized dragons and a sadistic cybernetic squid-thing who prefers to chill on the ceiling. I want my characters to be complex and interesting and subversive, not problematic.

Sensitivity to marginalized folks is hard, but it's the right thing to do; being aware of, if not entirely immersed in, the ongoing ongoingness of the conversation both stills my keyboard/pen/tongue, and makes them quiver with the need to speak. Being loud and rude to those with privilege is something I'm adept at; being expressive and evocative of those without is a large space I only dimly see the outline of; reaching out to (and trusting) those who inhabit this space as their lives to say "stop doing it wrong like that" is where I'm trying to be now.

Lotta words to say, "Man, I wish awareness of privilege could spread via toxoplasmosis, too." (so, yeah, hi, I'm that guy from tumblr *waves*)

oneminutemonkey

December 6 2013, 22:29:02 UTC 3 years ago

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Don't be afraid. Be bold. What I've learned from experience is that if you write from the heart, and first and foremost, treat your characters like actual people instead of tokens or ideals, and if you do research and use common sense, it's hard to go spectacularly wrong.

And if you do go wrong, a heartfelt apology is rarely a bad idea. When you see the various Fails in action, it's usually because someone screwed up and/or got called out, and responded from the gut rather than thinking it through.

lenora_rose

3 years ago

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Existence is its own justification.

Error

My experience

Do read the comments