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Thoughts on authors having to out themselves to justify their work
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
Agreed on all points. I haven't seen the movie, but yeah.
no subject
Maybe someday someone will write a good queer historical novel about them that doesn't suck.