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This started as a response to a tumblr post about "multiple creators having to publicly out themselves or reveal past traumas in order to get fans to stop yelling at them for representing a certain minority/concept in fiction" which I felt was being too simplistic.
Basically: people should be able to write about their own experience without having to out themselves. Enforcing a narrow idea of who is 'allowed' to write certain stories (or assuming that only privileged people would even want to) hurts everyone.
But I also think criticism should be allowed to sometimes bring up the privilege of creators/actors etc, even when there's a chance they may be in the closet. We just need to be more careful about how we do it.
And I didn't like the implication that there should never be any backlash or concern over this sort of thing.
Note: I scrolled through the OP's blog and they mentioned there was complex cultural stuff going on with the Jamila Jameel thing making it a poor specific example. But that doesn't really affect their argument or mine.
1) I think it’s reasonable to generally encourage own voices etc, or be personally reluctant to trust certain kinds of authors to handle certain topics. But the way to do that is to just consume and promote works that you know are by the relevant group, not attack works that seemingly aren’t.
2)There are certain casting choices where I think it’s reasonable to complain on principle. Like if, say, a cis woman is cast as a trans man character, even though there’s a small but non-zero chance that the actor is actually a closeted trans man. But such criticism should bear in mind the possibility that you’re wrong about the actor and hold up even if you are, and shouldn't say someone is definitely cis/straight etc when all you can say is that they're not known to be anything else.
Like if it turns out that Eddie Redmayne is a closeted trans woman, and the creators of The Danish Girl knew that, I'd say it was still bad to cast someone who was publicly seen as a cis man in the role of a trans woman. So someone could acknowledge the possibility that Eddie Redmayne is actually a woman while still criticising the casting.
If you think it would be ok if the creator/actor etc was X, then that's different, and requires a more thoughtful approach. Like you might complain about the pattern of (seemingly) straight writers creating popular works about queer people, but at most just make a tired sigh about any individual case, which isn't going to do any real harm to the author if they are queer but closeted.
3) There’s messy situations where people do have a problem with the actual portrayal, and find it so offensive they assume it must have been created by a transphobic cis person etc, but then the author comes out and says they were drawing on personal experience and it’s all a mess. See: I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. I mean this would happen a lot less often if so much criticism didn’t assume a simple Problematic-vs-Good Representation dichotomy, and there was more space to acknowledge differing reactions and unfortunate trends without jumping so quickly to This Should Never Have Been Made.
But like... we need to give marginalised people space to work through their reactions to things that hurt them, even if it’s in confronting or controversial ways, in both art and criticism. How we can do that while minimising the hurt we do to each other is a question I have yet seen any simple answers for, though we should all keep trying anyway.
The second OP describes themselves as a "pro-shipper", and while I'm certainly not an anti I do think some pro-shipper/anti-anti rhetoric leans to much into being against any public criticism or negative reactions to media, at least those that bring up social justice issues. I'd like to be able to discuss and critique the things I consume without being being stifling or stifled, and it's not always straight-forward even for me as a random blogger, let alone for more visible critics.
EDIT: Too tired to articulate it but a very important aspect I didn't mention is the power relationships involved. Me criticising Eddie Redmayne up there is one thing, a BNF going after some no-name queer teenage fan for drawing Rule 63 art is quite another.
Basically: people should be able to write about their own experience without having to out themselves. Enforcing a narrow idea of who is 'allowed' to write certain stories (or assuming that only privileged people would even want to) hurts everyone.
But I also think criticism should be allowed to sometimes bring up the privilege of creators/actors etc, even when there's a chance they may be in the closet. We just need to be more careful about how we do it.
And I didn't like the implication that there should never be any backlash or concern over this sort of thing.
Note: I scrolled through the OP's blog and they mentioned there was complex cultural stuff going on with the Jamila Jameel thing making it a poor specific example. But that doesn't really affect their argument or mine.
1) I think it’s reasonable to generally encourage own voices etc, or be personally reluctant to trust certain kinds of authors to handle certain topics. But the way to do that is to just consume and promote works that you know are by the relevant group, not attack works that seemingly aren’t.
2)There are certain casting choices where I think it’s reasonable to complain on principle. Like if, say, a cis woman is cast as a trans man character, even though there’s a small but non-zero chance that the actor is actually a closeted trans man. But such criticism should bear in mind the possibility that you’re wrong about the actor and hold up even if you are, and shouldn't say someone is definitely cis/straight etc when all you can say is that they're not known to be anything else.
Like if it turns out that Eddie Redmayne is a closeted trans woman, and the creators of The Danish Girl knew that, I'd say it was still bad to cast someone who was publicly seen as a cis man in the role of a trans woman. So someone could acknowledge the possibility that Eddie Redmayne is actually a woman while still criticising the casting.
If you think it would be ok if the creator/actor etc was X, then that's different, and requires a more thoughtful approach. Like you might complain about the pattern of (seemingly) straight writers creating popular works about queer people, but at most just make a tired sigh about any individual case, which isn't going to do any real harm to the author if they are queer but closeted.
3) There’s messy situations where people do have a problem with the actual portrayal, and find it so offensive they assume it must have been created by a transphobic cis person etc, but then the author comes out and says they were drawing on personal experience and it’s all a mess. See: I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. I mean this would happen a lot less often if so much criticism didn’t assume a simple Problematic-vs-Good Representation dichotomy, and there was more space to acknowledge differing reactions and unfortunate trends without jumping so quickly to This Should Never Have Been Made.
But like... we need to give marginalised people space to work through their reactions to things that hurt them, even if it’s in confronting or controversial ways, in both art and criticism. How we can do that while minimising the hurt we do to each other is a question I have yet seen any simple answers for, though we should all keep trying anyway.
The second OP describes themselves as a "pro-shipper", and while I'm certainly not an anti I do think some pro-shipper/anti-anti rhetoric leans to much into being against any public criticism or negative reactions to media, at least those that bring up social justice issues. I'd like to be able to discuss and critique the things I consume without being being stifling or stifled, and it's not always straight-forward even for me as a random blogger, let alone for more visible critics.
EDIT: Too tired to articulate it but a very important aspect I didn't mention is the power relationships involved. Me criticising Eddie Redmayne up there is one thing, a BNF going after some no-name queer teenage fan for drawing Rule 63 art is quite another.
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Like - these fanatics cannot imagine that someone might write/design a certain story in a certain way because he/she has own legacy with the topic - and the person in question just has its own opinion and perspective about it that just doesn't fit the narrative of those self-called SJWs.
I dislike that pretty much also in political and social discussions, if you have a non-mainstream opinion on these things.
If you don't say "I identify as X, my sexual orientation is X, and my mental health legacy is X, so shut the fuck up now", it's always getting assumed that you're a dirty old white heterosexual schmock who wanks on a "Mein Kampf"-book.
There are some people out there which fit this diversity framework, but they don't like to talk about it because either they don't have all things straightened out with themselves, because they fear violent backlash from their surroundings if they know about his stance in the spectrum or simply because they want to be perceived as the character who they are and not as "oh, the homosexual trans man who kicks the ass of the whole movie industry".
If you follow this current SJW logic, a pute entertainer cannot even depicture a mechanic in a movie because he has no idea of the job, not even knows how to hold a certain tool correctly.
(Where are the complaints about such things being depictured unrealistically?)
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Antis use point two in order to 'complain on principle' because someone who writes, say, underage on AO3 definitely doesn't *seem* like a CSA survivor because they're clearly a *pedophile* in the rhetoric. Worse, you get the whole 'only survivors can write this content' which is also a huge pile of...idek, to be honest. It's definitely not great that this is the take antis have as well.
And the problem is, this issue doesn't just affect like one or two minority groups, but also in the realm of anti rhetoric it also affects like - being pressured to disclose if you're in the kink community, or if you're into certain kinks, or if you're a CSA survivor, or an SA survivor and so on and so forth, and it's these specific point above that get co-opted to create very aggressive environments that basically create 'if you're not X minority, then you're a pedophile/rapist/etc.' It's pushed forward by TERF/SWERF agendas, it's political, and it's pretty horrific to be involved in it in any manner.
But like... we need to give marginalised people space to work through their reactions to things that hurt them, even if it’s in confronting or controversial ways, in both art and criticism.
This is true, but this is also 100% what antis say to justify hate campaigns. Like I see this said way more by antis than I see it said by anyone else. And 'even if it's in confronting or controversial ways' is also 100% used to justify 'go kill yourself' messages; after all, that's confronting *and* controversial. At the moment, these arguments are used more and more to justify death threats and doxxing, than I see them used to justify *not* hurting people. So while it's true that people need this space, it's also complicated by the fact that this is very empowering specifically for bullies and abusers. Abusers love to be told it's okay to work through their hurt in controversial and confrontational ways.
And the fact remains that someone who is say, queer and POC but *also* an anti, calling someone like me who is queer and white who is a CSA survivor a 'pedophile' for writing underage (which I've done like once, but oh well) or a 'rapist' for writing dubcon, goes a very long way on these points and arguments, feeling perfectly justified, because their hurt is valid and they believe that hurt justifies them censoring other people's content by trying to destroy the person who created it.
So yeah, I have complicated feelings about this, because I experience - sometimes on a daily basis (at least if I dare to go on Twitter) - what antis have turned all of these very compelling arguments into, and I know what it's like to be personally obligated through bullying and abuse to disclose painful truths about myself, just to not be called some of the most horrendous things on earth, by people who just can't conceive that I could have been *hurt* by those people vs. *being* one of those people. It's... It's pretty unspeakably awful.
And of course, antis get woke points/clout for taking up all of these points, because obviously they are valid points that make sense if you're only specifically talking about say, the Eddie Redmayne situation (or like any media situation where it's obvious that a Sea of White has portrayed POC in literally the worst ways possible because they just didn't include any POC in the creation process). It's just, a person who is on a crusade to destroy people who write kinks they don't like can literally use those *exact same points* to prop up their status as a puritanical moral panicking bully and abuser. And they do.
And I think that's also why the kickback has been particularly aggressive this time around from the 'we shouldn't have to account for ourselves or be forcibly outed to justify art' camp. Like, there is a large number of queer folk occupying minority spaces who are hurt by antis co-opting these arguments to justify cruel and unusual levels of behaviour in their quest to eliminate content they don't like and think shouldn't exist.
(I completely agree with your point 1 by the way, that's the only one that antis haven't really aggressively co-opted yet because it doesn't work in their agenda of destroying people).
The answer isn't to say that people don't have a right to work through their hurt in confrontational ways either; I'm just offering my perspective as a queer disabled CSA survivor who is regularly the victim of antis (for writing content that survivors frequently write) who sometimes use these exact same arguments to justify their positions. It's...just...complicated, which you already know <3
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First: it is absolutely intolerable that you get pressured to disclose being a survivor because of what you write. I know you know I know that but...just saying it anyway. I've had less extreme experiences along those lines and it was indescribably awful.
You make a very good point about it mattering who exactly is getting criticised, and how. Which is something antis actively erase, even though paying attention to social power is the basic point any social justice analysis has to start from or it's automatically useless. I am going to think about it then edit my post, because it doesn't go without saying.
The way good arguments get coopted to justify harassment etc makes it so hard to have a productive conversation. And unfortunately it goes both ways. Look at the coopting of "cancel culture" by white male celebrities, which of course then gets used as an excuse by antis to say anyone criticising it is the equivalent of a whiny white male celebrity etc. Did you know "politically correct" originally gained popularity as a way for feminists etc to gently poke fun at themselves for being too rigid? And look at the way nazis grabbed onto the idea of free speech, to the extent that people now view the very phrase "free speech" as a right-wing dog-whistle. How do we have a productive discussion of free speech in that context? :(
I don't have much personal interaction with antis so it's less immediately fraught for me, but I totally get why you'd have an intense negative reaction to any arguments which superficially resemble theirs.
My immediate emotional reactions are a bit different, from years of being made to feel like a bad person for mentioning that I thought Stargate was maybe a bit racist etc, and I do worry fandom could swing back to that. Especially since I've seen older anti-antis who very explicitly think fandom's approach back then was 100% ok. Though in more recent years I've also been made to feel bad for defending the existence of ~problematic subjects in porn, and I do also have the worry we'll swing further into anti-ness than we have already. I worry in two directions /o\
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This is very much my experience with anti-shippers as well, though not nearly to that brutal extent.
There's a bonus level where if you've disclosed that anything you write is based on personal experience, then people bullying use what you've disclosed as a way to work out how to hurt you worse because they know your trauma triggers.
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That is a very succinct tl;dr for this post, yes :) I hadn't explictly thought about this as me worrying about a return to Cult of Nice but it absolutely is.
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i don't know if you've read this article about the attack helicopter story situation, but i found it helpful in sorting some things out in my head in a general way. (specifically, that most people don't know how to separate the artist from the art (or even the writer from the narrator), nor do they comprehend that them not liking something doesn't automatically make it bad, for whatever value of 'bad' they're using that day. honestly, i thought that was all reading comprehension 101, but i acknowledge how very wrong i was about it.)
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not liking something doesn't automatically make it bad
This seems beyond the vast majority of media analysts/reviewers etc I've encountered :/ I must admit I struggle with it myself sometimes.
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Yeah, I feel this.
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nods sadly
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To take The Danish Girl as an example. It's entirely possible that Eddie Redmayne - or a cis woman - could have played Lili Elbe in a compelling way that resonated with trans audiences. In a world where trans actors had equal shots at cis roles, this might not be a big deal, but we don't live in that world, so Redmayne having the role means a trans actor couldn't. That's a real issue of limited numbers of roles available, because the people writing the roles are not the same as the people playing the roles. With books, there are systemic problems in the publishing world that mean own-voices books often face more barriers and receive less marketing support, but at the same time, anyone can theoretically write a book representing their experience - they don't have to wait for someone else to write the role and then compete to get it. Whether that book gets traditionally published or widely read is a different factor, but live-action media are a collaboration between writers, director, actors, and others in a way that books are not. I saw a lot of discussion of whether Redmayne should have been cast; I have seen no discussion at all about who wrote the script (Lucinda Coxon; I don't know if she's cis or trans).
Which brings me to: The Danish Girl was, I think, a bad movie that did a lot to dequeer both Lili and Gerda and push them into a heterosexist, transphobic narrative that is not reflective of what we actually know about their lives. I also found the way Lili was written really...off...more like crossdressing fetishism in some ways, but I'm not a trans woman so I don't know if that's just me. Casting a trans woman as Lili would not have fixed the massive problems with the script. For that matter, someone else (trans or cis) might or might not have written a better script. Identity of writers or actors doesn't guarantee quality. (And if the historical reality HAD been what the movie showed...well, we'd have to deal with that, I guess, people are complicated and historical figures held all kinds of views we side-eye today? But when the historical reality is changed in those very specific directions, it feels hostile.)
(In case you can't guess, The Danish Girl made me really angry, although it least it sent me down a really interesting historical rabbithole about Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener.)
So there's (i) access to work opportunities for marginalized people, (ii) physical representation in the sense of people playing characters who share their identities, and (iii) representation of stories that resonate with the people they're written about. The first two are fairly easy to measure, although not uncomplicated. The third isn't - different things resonate with different people regardless of whether they share identity with the actors/authors, and people who don't share an identity and can do also create things that resonate.
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Agreed on all points. I haven't seen the movie, but yeah.
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Maybe someday someone will write a good queer historical novel about them that doesn't suck.
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For the record, I'm not a survivor of sexual assault (which I'm fairly open about), but had I been I have zero doubt that would have been weaponised against me (it was in fact weaponised against my bully before she went after me). The fact that I am not and write darkfic was used as a club repeatedly for months.
I don't think we should not talk about representation in the media, but I do think that assuming that the person writing is or is not #ownvoices is getting us down a bad path. The pressure to disclose, and the pressure for everyone to have exactly the right talking points and buzzwords is really harmful, and it's most harmful TO the #ownvoices creators. It's also harmful to the quality of the art produced. I've heard more than one person say they're afraid to write about their own identity for fear of getting cancelled and/or forced to disclose.
A lot of it is about the debate space, where a lot of this is happening on tumblr and twitter, as context gets stripped away and short, angry and clickybaity are promoted by the algorithms. And the whole dog pile thing.
I've been thinking a lot about how to ethically talk about representation in fandom lately. There was a lot of discussion of it at WisCon, plus the latest round of discussion of racism, which came right on the heels of that.
The twin problems I have around using specific works and creators as examples in this community are 1) a specific works is much more illuminating when you're trying to highlight damaging tropes, you can just show so much more when doing basically litcrit on a fanfic, rather than talking about generalised problems. 2) it's also painting a target on the author's back in a way that I find genuinely unethical in current fandom climate. Criticism of a specific work will spill over to attacks on the author. If one has to talk specifics, maybe doing it in a locked space would be better?
My conclusion has been to de-centre any particular work from the discussion, especially if we're talking about work by peers. Naming and shaming is just never going to be good inside this community. It's not going to make people listen and change. It's either going to cause doubling down, or just leaving the community (some think the latter is fine; I do not). Talking more generally about trends you're seeing, emphasising not engaging directly with the author of the work, getting friends to say "hey buddy, what you doing?" in private.
With public works, where it's more talked of as punching up, I have fewer qualms about discussing specifics, but I would still like to NOT assume that someone isn't from a marginalised community right off the bat, and not jump on twitter cancel bandwagons. A lot of people went after the Attack Helicopter piece without having read it, based on hearsay. I also think that talking to each other, talking to the person, and talking to the studio all feel like different things, but I haven't really worked out how to balance that.
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Yeah I am a survivor and have had some incredibly bad experiences with antis where it went from "listen to survivors! They all say non-con fic is bad!" to "Oh, well...you may be a survivor but if you disagree with me then...". Unlike winterbird I don't write anything very controversial, and am also less visible as a writer, so haven't had to deal with anyone coming after me personally. But the rhetoric still does my head in.
On the other hand before that I had some bad experiences during the warnings debate, including someone who didn't like warnings deliberately attempting to trigger me out of spite (my reactions are inconsistent and complicated, something antis have no space for in their rhetoric) But at least those people didn't claim to be protecting me :/
I don't think we should not talk about representation in the media, but I do think that assuming that the person writing is or is not #ownvoices is getting us down a bad path
Yeah, agreed. Ownvoices and/or otherwise marginalised, which still affects things like your vulnerability to the consequences of being canceled.
I have had very similar thoughts about critiquing specific works! And it's frustrating because sometimes a fic is a PERFECT example of a trope but if I bring it up suddenly the conversation is about that fic, not the trope. So yeah, I mostly make locked posts or rant to friends on discord etc.
What counts as punching up is messy. Afaict a lot of the nastiest online fights happen between professional writers with various amounts of success, online clout, and privilege and there's definitely power differentials but it's hard to draw a neat line. Like...I'm a 'professional writer' in the sense that I sell narrative games I made as a hobby at a rate of like 10 a year. There is a continuum from those even less successful than me to the creators of a huge AAA game like The Last of Us 2. How big does a game have to be before I'm not talking about a peer? I think that line does exist but it's not unambiguous.
But yeah either way there's a lot of unwarranted assumptions and people feeling obliged to weigh in on The Current Controversy whether they really understand it or not. Which is an impulse I am still working on myself, though heavily pruning my twitter list helped.
I also think that talking to each other, talking to the person, and talking to the studio all feel like different things, but I haven't really worked out how to balance that.
Yeah. Though in creative communities these lines all blur. Just the other day I ranted about something that had bothered me in the games community on a game dev discord and the person I was ranting about turned out to be in the room >.> (They were pretty nice about it and took my criticism on board but I felt like a jerk)
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The "who is a peer?" thing is so blurry, you're right! I think half my flist has SF/F or romance stories published in one venue or another. As far as I know, Isabel Fell could be one of them (I'm pretty sure I'd have heard, but she COULD be). And some of the people who called at that story had multiple actual Hugo awards under their belts (rather than the 1/500,000,000th variety), some people were presidents of professional associations. That's not punching up, and it's debatably not even if it were just within non-pro-writer spaces (which are where, exactly, given how many side hassles we all have?). But where's the line. The multiple Hugo people are also often simultaneously in fandom. Is Naomi Novik my peer? Is her fandom pseude? I've publicly criticised both before, not feeling like I was risking a dog pile, but that could have turned out differently if I'd been unlucky or leveraged it differently. We're all sharing space to some extent.
I have similar problems with critiquing individual actors themselves (especially mid list or lower ones) for agreeing to take roles. Like, if Redmayne had turned down The Danish Girl, the same writing/casting/directing/producing team would likely have hired another cis guy. (Though there have been cases of an actor turning down a role and insisting on diverse casting, and getting it, but they're not that common.) The problems with that movie weren't the front man, so much as *points to comment above.* (I don't care about Redmayne one way or another, maybe he's a dick who deserved to get yelled at, who knows, but he wasn't the biggest issue with The Danish Girl.) But finding the people making the choices, and getting access to them, that's another problem. So often it seems like people fall for an easy target.
(Aside: like the Dr. Mae Jemison quote: "It's important not only for a little black girl growing up to know, yeah, you can become an astronaut because here's Mae Jemison, but it's important for older white males who sometimes make decisions on those careers of those little black girls.")
I'm trying to follow my own Take a Goddamn Breath Challenge form January more. I found that writing out long posts and then using the words to fight monsters on 4thewords instead of posting them helps. I know how much I like the emotional high of being in a pile on, and really don't want to be that person. Sometimes what you can do is not do more harm?
But that too risks going to far back into "if you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget," territory, which leaves fans actually dealing with problematic shit and being marginalised with the community out on their own. Which is also less than ideal.
I haven't found a balance, and I feel like the whole latest round of racism in fandom discussion has really highlighted how much I haven't found a balance.
Not really a lot of solutions in this very long comment, sorry.
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Thank you, that's cool! (I generally try and keep my game dev and fannish identities separate, but it seems fairly safe to acknowledge it in the bottom of an old comment thread :))
And yeah I struggle with the same line between 'joining pile-ons because everyone else is" and "doing nothing".
Is Naomi Novik my peer? Is her fandom pseude?
Exactly! I mean
And like...one down-side of them being so popular and visible as a writer of controversial explicit fic is that they encounter a lot of antis. Being popular makes it harder for them to be run out of fandom, and would make it easier for them to send their friends to attack people if they wanted (which they don't) but it doesn't make being sent nasty messages not hurt. Seeing their experience has made me happier about being a MNF.
At the same time, being a BNF does come with power that people have used badly, and being a successful author even more. So...yeah.